To End All Wars (Adam Hochschild 2011)
World War I cast a long shadow over the 20th century but for many of us it has almost disappeared behind the shadow of the next cataclysm, which began scarcely twenty years later, as the very last of those who still remember the second European war take their final leave
Looking back, it can be difficult to understand the era: it is hard enough to comprehend, when one sees commanders, camped comfortably far behind the lines, order their troops to storm from filthy trenches into murderous machine-gun fire, promising nothing but almost certain immediate death, and then repeat such orders again and again, not hour after hour or day after day, but month after month and year after year, learning nothing quickly enough to avoid apocalyptic suffering and slaughter; harder still to fathom the wild enthusiasm that greeted the outbreak of war in 2014; and quite inconceivable that the survivors of that time promptly sent their children into a new maelstrom
The period between the two European wars of the twentieth century therefore deserves continued attention, for the fact, that the second war so quickly followed the first, one of the most striking failures in documented human history. But the period between the wars, being itself a product of the first war, cannot be understood without understanding the first war
Adam Hochschild, author of the excellent King Leopold's Ghost, has here undertaken a history of the war years in Britain, with some attention to the war resisters. The text appears to be thoroughly researched; and it is well-written enough to be a page-turning read
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