Book Review: Exploring a war's clashing ideals

The Vancouver Sun: Exploring a war's clashing ideals

In 1914, at the onset of the Great War, the explorer Ernest Shackleton set off for Antarctica. He was out of reach of the rest of the world, trapped in the ice after his ship had sunk, for nearly two years. When he finally made it to a whaling station, his first question was: "When was the war over?" He was told: "The war is not over. Millions are being killed. Europe is mad. The world is mad."

A world gone mad is the way many saw the conflict that wreaked unbelievable carnage across Europe, resulting in the deaths of more than eight million soldiers and almost twice that number of civilians.

Nearly a century has passed since the First World War began, but the images of the time remain with us: Flanders Field with its rows of red poppies between the crosses, the horrors of trench warfare and poison gas, the destruction at the battle of the Somme and Gallipoli.

The war continues to fascinate us, and American historian Adam Hochschild, who combines history and narrative in a readable and interesting fashion, re-examines the conflict as a "clashing set of dreams," counterpoints of loyalty and rebellion. From the British point of view, he shows the enthusiasm for a war that everyone thought would be over in a few months, juxtaposed with the growing number of antiwar protesters, many of whom suffered in prison as a result of their opposition.

Hochschild introduces an eclectic cast of characters and traces their lives through the war years: military commanders and politicians, labour organizers and journalists, suffragettes and novelists.

Keir Hardie was a Scottish socialist and labour organizer who became a member of Parliament and an outspoken pacifist; Emily Hobhouse was a welfare worker who had been outraged at the British treatment of women and children in the Boer War, and continued her outrage through the next war; her cousin, Stephen Hobhouse, was a prominent Quaker and conscientious objector who was jailed for his beliefs; Charlotte Despard was a pacifist whose brother, John French, was a top military commander; Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughter Sylvia were both women's rights advocates, although the mother was pro-war while Sylvia opposed the conflict.

For their opposition to the war, more than 6,000 dissenters spent time in jail. A rule of silence was imposed on conscientious objectors, but they learned to communicate in unusual ways. One dissenter, Fenner Brockway, editor of the Labour Leader, produced a clandestine newspaper in prison on 40 squares of brown toilet paper -the subscription price was extra sheets of toilet paper from each prisoner's supply.

In the days before radio and television, the written word became a powerful tool for both the pro-war camp and the opposition. As John Buchan, author of The Thirty-Nine Steps, put it: "So far as Britain is concerned, the war could not have been fought for one month without its newspapers." The tabloid John Bull called the conscientious objector "a fungus growth, a human toadstool that should be uprooted without further delay."

Newspapers were mobilized for the war effort -and they were rewarded after the war, when 12 knighthoods and six peerages were bestowed on correspondents, editors or owners. And not just newspapers: prominent authors were called up to do their patriotic duty. H.G. Wells, Thomas Hardy and Arthur Conan Doyle fed the propaganda machine.

On the dissenting side, Bertrand Russell opposed the war from the onset, and was jailed for six months for his antiwar writing. In 1916, he wrote to U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, appealing to him to start peace talks, and toured Britain to drum up support for a negotiated peace.

Opponents usually emerged from the left end of political spectrum, but not always. In 1917, aristocratic landowner Lord Lansdowne, former viceroy of India and secretary for war, who also lost a son in the war, published an open letter in the Daily Telegraph, calling for a negotiated peace. Though he believed Britain would be victorious, he wrote that "war will spell ruin for the civilized world" and correctly predicted the next war would be worse.

What was amazing about the conflict was the scale of death, and the toll it took on the young men of the world. By 1916, the death toll surpassed the entire decade and a half of the Napoleonic Wars. More than 35 per cent of all German men between 19 and 22 were killed in the four years; one half of all Frenchmen 20 to 32 were killed in the conflict.

It was a war that crossed class lines -unlike modern wars where working class and poor young people enlist, the Great War attracted men of the upper classes in great numbers. For example, of the men who graduated from Oxford in 1913, 31 per cent were killed. Even the son of British Prime Minister Herbert Asquith died on the battlefield, as did the son of Rudyard Kipling, the pro-war poet.

Out of the carnage, social reform resulted. Women got the vote in 1918, albeit with some conditions at first. Activist Emmeline Pankhurst persuaded the government to let women work in the munition factories, to take the place of the men at the front, and pushed for equal wages.

Hochschild has a flair for turning history into deeply moving human drama, as he did in Bury the Chains, about the anti-slavery abolitionists and King Leopold's Ghost, which described the colonial horrors of the Belgian Congo. To End All Wars is a gripping narrative, but is also profoundly sad. So much death, so many young men in cemeteries across Europe, soldiers from as far away as Senegal, Jamaica and Australia fighting in a complicated conflict that solved nothing.

As he writes: "Part of what draws us to this war, then, is the way it forever shattered the self-assured, sunlit Europe of hussars and dragoons in plumed helmets and emperors waving from open, horse-drawn carriages."

Hochschild's book is an original account of the conflict that continues to fascinate us.

Cheryl Purdey is a local freelance reviewer.

To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918

Adam Hochschild Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Boston 450 pp; $34.95