Those who said No

The Economist: Those who said No

Conscientious objection and patriotism in Britain

Charlotte Despard on the anti-war pathTo End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918. By Adam Hochschild. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 480 pages; $28. Published in Britain as “To End All Wars: How the First World War Divided Britain”. Macmillan; £20.

THE first world war, or the Great War as it was known to contemporaries, still exerts an unyielding grip on the consciousness of western Europeans, especially the British and the French. Schools organise regular trips to the battlefields and cemeteries of northern France and Flanders; the poems of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon are studied by every generation of English-literature students; nearly all the participating nations (with the exception of Germany) commemorate their military sacrifice on the anniversary of Armistice Day, November 11th 1918, when the guns on the Western Front fell silent.

The sheer scale of the slaughter of the first truly industrial war has become, if anything, more shocking with the passing of time. After nearly a decade of war in Afghanistan, Britain has lost fewer than 370 of its service people; on the first day of the Battle of the Somme in July 1916, 57,500 British soldiers were killed or wounded. Above all, 1914-18 has come to symbolise the futility of war. It was a conflict that seems to us to have been fought for no great principle and whose bitter fruit was the even more destructive 1939-45 war.

For these reasons among others, there continues to be a steady stream of books about the Great War. Adam Hochschild, an American popular historian with strong pacifist leanings, has found what appears to be a new angle: the divisions within British society over the war. His book is about those who passionately opposed the war, often at great personal cost.

It starts well enough with an account of the extraordinary relationship between Charlotte Despard, a fiery upper-class radical who organised protests against the fighting, and her brother, Sir John French, Britain’s most senior commander in the opening stages of the war. We also meet Emily Hobhouse, a rector’s daughter who first rose to prominence by exposing the vileness of Britain’s Boer war concentration camps. She is followed by Sylvia Pankhurst, the middle daughter of Emmeline (a suffragette campaigner like her daughter but who fervently backed the war), and by Keir Hardie, Sylvia’s much older lover and a pacifist Labour Party leader. A philosopher, Bertrand Russell, makes several appearances. Mr Hochschild celebrates the courage of other, humbler, conscientious objectors (as they were known) whose numbers reached about 20,000 after conscription was introduced in early 1916.

But there is a difficulty. To suggest, as the book’s British subtitle does, that Britain was “divided” over whether to fight is an exaggeration. There were principled critics of the war when hostilities broke out and more were recruited as the death toll mounted and people became aware of the horrors in France. But even George Lansbury, a pacifist journalist and future Labour Party leader, who had argued that it was madness for Europe’s workers to be killing each other on behalf of the ruling classes, confessed to feeling carried along by the “sense of danger and service”. As the carnage continued and nearly every community and family in Britain experienced loss, the dominant emotion on the home front was less fury at the human waste or the callous incompetence of the generals, but more a gritty stoicism and quiet pride in the bravery of the young men who fought.

The author is too honest not to recognise this. Consequently, the anti-war movement, such as it was, rather fades from centre stage as he concentrates on telling with verve and controlled anger the story of the war. Mr Hochschild gives little space to the revisionism of the past 30 years which advances the view that the war was not quite as futile as it later came to be seen (could Britain and France really ignore treaty obligations in the face of German aggression?) and that the commanders, at least in the latter stages, were not all bumbling dunderheads.

Mr Hochschild writes well and shines a light on some brave and worthy people who left a legacy of principled protest to future generations of activists. Beyond this, his book, though very readable, does not add greatly to our understanding of the cataclysmic event that set the first half of the 20th century on its disastrous course.