In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • To End All Wars:An Interview with Adam Hochschild
  • Donald A. Yerxa
Donald A. Yerxa:

Would you provide our readers with a brief summary of To End All Wars?

Adam Hochschild:

There have been thousands of histories of the First World War, or of one or another of its major campaigns, some of them very good indeed. But what I wanted to do was to write of this war not as a battle between the Allies and the Central Powers, but rather as a battle between those who felt the war was a noble and necessary crusade and those who felt it was absolute madness. To some extent, that battle took place within all of the major belligerent nations, but largely because Britain itself had not been attacked at the start of the war, it was far more prominent in Britain than anywhere else. So I tried to tell the story of this tension through focusing on a dozen or so British men and women, both people who were part of the war effort, such as the two top generals, a Cabinet minister, and drum-beating writers like Rudyard Kipling and John Buchan, and, on the other side, war resisters, some famous and some little-known.

I deliberately chose my cast of characters with an eye to unexpected ties among them. Field Marshal Sir John French, for example, the British commander-in-chief on the Western Front for the first sixteen months of the war, had a beloved sister, Charlotte Despard, an outspoken radical and pacifist whose speeches against the war her brother was fighting were frequently broken up by Scotland Yard or patriotic mobs. If you were a novelist and invented characters like this, readers would say, "too implausible." But, as the critic Christopher Benfey once wrote, "one advantage of writing nonfiction is that it doesn't have to be plausible; it just has to be true."1

Yerxa:

What prompted you to write the book?

Hochschild:

Like many people, I've long been fascinated by the First World War, and by the literature it gave rise to, both fiction and nonfiction, and both soon afterward and in recent years. There was an additional personal reason for my interest: an aunt of mine married someone who fought in the war, a wonderful man and very much a figure in my childhood. He was a fighter ace in the Imperial Russian Air Service. I wrote about him in my first book, Half the Way Home. But this is a war worth being obsessed by. Simon Schama called it the "original sin" of the 20th century. Not only did it lead to the deaths of some 9 million soldiers and probably an even larger number of civilians, but it ignited the Russian Revolution and all of that event's bloody consequences, and it laid the groundwork for the rise of Nazi Germany and the even more deadly war that followed.


Click for larger view
View full resolution

Field Marshal Sir John French, British commander-in-chief on the Western Front. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [reproduction number, LC-DIG-ggbain-17041].

The more I learned about the war, the more I came to admire those who had bravely spoken out against it at the time. They had as many flaws and illusions as the rest of us, but in a profound way they were right, and I wanted to tell the story of some of them.

Yerxa:

To End All Wars is structured around the accounts of a number of recurring characters whose public and private lives illustrate the central themes of the book. These include prominent critics and supporters of the war like Bertrand Russell and Rudyard Kipling, key military and political leaders like Douglas Haig and Alfred Milner, and reative unknowns who both fought and refused to fight. Of all the people who appear and reappear in the book, who were among the most compelling for you?

Hochschild:

I'm not sure how easy either of them would have been to have as a friend, but two of the war opponents in Britain who I came to admire immensely were Bertrand Russell and Keir Hardie. Russell was...

pdf

Share