To End All Wars A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914–1918 Adam Hochschild Table of Contents Title Page Table of Contents Copyright Dedication Contents MAPS INTRODUCTION: CLASH OF DREAMS I Dramatis Personae BROTHER AND SISTER A MAN OF NO ILLUSIONS A CLERGYMAN'S DAUGHTER HOLY WARRIORS BOY MINER ON THE EVE II 1914 A STRANGE LIGHT AS SWIMMERS INTO CLEANNESS LEAPING THE GOD OF RIGHT WILL WATCH THE FIGHT III 1915 10 THIS ISN'T WAR 11 IN THE THICK OF IT 12 NOT THIS TIDE IV 1916 13 WE REGRET NOTHING 14 GOD, GOD, WHERE'S THE REST OF THE BOYS? 15 CASTING AWAY ARMS V 1917 16 BETWEEN THE LION'S JAWS 17 THE WORLD IS MY COUNTRY 18 DROWNING ON LAND 19 PLEASE DON'T DIE VI 1918 20 BACKS TO THE WALL 21 THERE ARE MORE DEAD THAN LIVING NOW VII EXEUNT OMNES 22 THE DEVIL'S OWN HAND 23 AN IMAGINARY CEMETERY SOURCE NOTES BIBLIOGRAPHY ACKNOWLEDGMENTS INDEX ABOUT THE AUTHOR PHOTO CREDITS Footnotes HOUGHTON MIFFLIN HARCOURT BOSTON NEW YORK 2011 Copyright © 2011 by Adam Hochschild All rights reserved For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003 www.hmhbooks.com Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hochschild, Adam To end all wars : a story of loyalty and rebellion, 1914–1918 / Adam Hochschild p cm Includes bibliographical references and index ISBN 978-0-618-75828-9 World War, 1914–1918—Great Britain World War, 1914–1918— Social aspects—Great Britain Soldiers—Great Britain—Biography Conscientious objectors—Great Britain—Biography Loyalty— Case studies World War, 1914–1918—Psychological aspects World War, 1914–1918—Moral and ethical aspects Militarism—Great Britain—History—20th century Pacifism—Great Britain—History—20th century I Title D546.H63 2011 940.3'41—dc22 2010025836 Book design by Melissa Lotfy Maps by Mapping Specialists, Ltd Printed in the United States of America DOC 10 Photo credits appear on [>] For Tom Engelhardt, analyst of empire, emperor among editors Contents List of Maps [>] Introduction: Clash of Dreams [>] Part I DRAMATIS PERSONAE Brother and Sister [>] A Man of No Illusions [>] A Clergyman's Daughter [>] Holy Warriors [>] Boy Miner [>] On the Eve [>] Part II 1914 A Strange Light [>] As Swimmers into Cleanness Leaping [>] The God of Right Will Watch the Fight [>] Part III 1915 10 This Isn't War [>] 11 In the Thick of It [>] 12 Not This Tide [>] Part IV 1916 13 We Regret Nothing [>] 14 God, God, Where's the Rest of the Boys? [>] 15 Casting Away Arms [>] Part V 1917 16 Between the Lion's Jaws [>] 17 The World Is My Country [>] 18 Drowning on Land [>] 19 Please Don't Die [>] Part VI 1918 20 Backs to the Wall [>] 21 There Are More Dead Than Living Now [>] Part VII EXEUNT OMNES 22 The Devil's Own Hand [>] 23 An Imaginary Cemetery [>] Source Notes [>] Bibliography [>] Acknowledgments [>] Index [>] About the Author [>] MAPS Rival Blocs at the Outbreak of War facing page [>] The Path to War [>] The Western Front, August—September 1914 [>] The Eastern Front and the Balkans, 1915 [>] The Western Front, 1915–1916 [>] The German Offensive, 1918 [>] The War's Toll on the British Empire [>] INTRODUCTION: CLASH OF DREAMS AN EARLY AUTUMN BITE is in the air as a gold-tinged late afternoon falls over the rolling countryside of northern France Where the land dips between gentle rises, it is already in shadow Dotting the fields are machine-packed rolls, high as a person's head, of the year's final hay crop Massive tractors pull boxcar-sized cartloads of potatoes, or corn chopped up for cattle feed Up a low hill, a grove of trees screens the evidence of another kind of harvest, reaped on this spot nearly a century ago Each gravestone in the small cemetery has a name, rank, and serial number; 162 have crosses, and one has a Star of David When known, a man's age is engraved on the stone as well: 19, 22, 23, 26, 34, 21, 20 Ten of the graves simply say, "A Soldier of the Great War, Known unto God." Almost all the dead are from Britain's Devonshire Regiment, the date on their gravestones July 1, 1916, the first day of the Battle of the Somme Most were casualties of a single German machine gun several hundred yards from this spot, and were buried here in a section of the front-line trench they had climbed out of that morning Captain Duncan Martin, 30, a company commander and an artist in civilian life, had made a clay model of the battlefield across which the British planned to attack He predicted to his fellow officers the exact place at which he and his men would come under fire from the nearby German machine gun as they emerged onto an exposed hillside He, too, is buried here, one of some 21,000 British soldiers killed or fatally wounded on the day of greatest bloodshed in the history of their country's military, before or since On a stone plaque next to the graves are the words this regiment's survivors carved on a wooden sign when they buried their dead: THE DEVONSHIRES HELD THIS TRENCH THE DEVONSHIRES HOLD IT STILL The comments in the cemetery's visitors' book are almost all from England: Bournemouth, London, Hampshire, Devon "Paid our respects to of our townsfolk." "Sleep on, boys." "Lest we forget." "Thanks, lads." "Gt Uncle thanks, rest in peace." Why does it bring a lump to the throat to see words like sleep, rest, sacrifice, when my reason for being here is the belief that this war was needless folly and madness? Only one visitor strikes a different note: "Never again." On a few pages the ink of the names and remarks has been smeared by raindrops—or was it tears? The bodies of soldiers of the British Empire lie in 400 cemeteries in the Somme battlefield region alone, a rough crescent of territory less than 20 miles long, but graves are not the only mark the war has made on the land Here and there, a patch of ground gouged by thousands of shell craters has been left alone; decades of erosion have softened the scarring, but what was once a flat field now looks like rugged, grassed-over sand dunes On the fields that have been smoothed out again, like those surrounding the Devonshires' cemetery, some of the tractors have armor plating beneath the driver's seat, because harvesting machinery cannot distinguish between potatoes, sugar beets, and live ABOUT THE AUTHOR Adam Hochschild's first book, Half the Way Home: A Memoir of Father and Son, was published in 1986 Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times called it "an extraordinarily moving portrait of the complexities and confusions of familial love firmly grounded in the specifics of a particular time and place, conjuring them up with Proustian detail and affection." It was followed by The Mirror at Midnight: A South African Journey, The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin, and Finding the Trapdoor: Essays, Portraits, Travels King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa was a finalist for the 1998 National Book Critics Circle Award His Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves was a finalist for the 2005 National Book Award and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the PEN USA Literary Award For the body of his work he has received a Lannan Literary Award and the Theodore Roosevelt—Woodrow Wilson Award of the American Historical Association His books have been translated into thirteen languages In addition to his books, Hochschild has written for The New Yorker, Harper's, the New York Review of Books, Granta, the New York Times Magazine, the Atlantic, and many other newspapers and magazines He was a cofounder of Mother Jones magazine and is a teacher of narrative writing at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley He and his wife, sociologist and author Arlie Russell Hochschild, have two sons and two granddaughters PHOTO CREDITS Charlotte Despard: © Press Association Images Field Marshal Sir John French: © Rue des Archives/Mary Evans Picture Library Horsemen en route to Kimberley: Twentiethcentury lithograph by John Charlton, after a sketch by G D Giles © the Stapleton Collection/Bridgeman Art Library Rudyard Kipling: © Bettmann/Corbis Alfred, Lord Milner: © Hulton Archive/Getty Images Lady Violet Cecil: Courtesy of Hugh Hardinge and the Hardinge family Emily Hobhouse: Photograph from an original half-plate negative by H Walter Barnett, c 1902, © National Portrait Gallery, London Christabel Pankhurst: © Mary Evans Picture Library Emmeline Pankhurst: © ullstein bild/akg-images Sylvia Pankhurst: © Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis Keir Hardie: © Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis Tsar Nicholas II and Kaiser Wilhelm II: © Charlotte Zeepvat Collection/Mary Evans Picture Library King George V and Queen Mary: © Hulton Archive/Getty Images Basil Thomson: © Hulton Archive/Getty Images Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig: Photograph by Spencer Arnold © Getty Images John Buchan: © Mary Evans Picture Library Bertrand Russell: © Bettmann/Corbis John Kipling: © Special Collections Library, University of Sussex/National Trust Photo Library George Cecil: Courtesy of Hugh Hardinge and the Hardinge family Berlin food line: © ullstein bild/akgimages Early gas masks: © akg-images Practicing for cavalry charge: © Imperial War Museum, London/Q.96405 "Go! It's Your Duty": Courtesy of the Advertising Archives "The Conscientious Objector": Courtesy of the author "Destroy This Mad Brute": Courtesy of the Advertising Archives Still from The Battle of the Somme: © Imperial War Museum, London/Q.79501 Passchendaele, July 31: © Imperial War Museum, London/Q.5732 Passchendaele, September: © Imperial War Museum, London/E.711 Passchendaele, October: © Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images Stephen Hobhouse: Courtesy of the Library of the Religious Society of Friends in Britain Joseph Stones: © Press Association Images Albert Rochester: Courtesy of the author Alice Wheeldon and daughters: © Illustrated London News/Mary Evans Picture Library John S Clark: Courtesy of the author Pacifists at Dartmoor: © Popperfoto/ Getty Images Fraternizing soldiers: Courtesy of the author Footnotes * One Liverpool agitator used to gather a sidewalk crowd by shouting, "I've been robbed! I've been robbed!" Once people surrounded him, he would explain that the robbers were the capitalists [back] *** * Russia figured in wild rumors that swept Germany as well In the war's first week, it was reported that 25 French automobiles were stealthily transporting 80 million gold francs across Germany to Russia Hundreds of towns set up roadblocks, and a total of 28 people, who were thought to look suspicious or who failed to stop quickly enough, were killed by trigger-happy guards [back] *** * One of Haig's generals, the hot-tempered Edmund Allenby, equally a stickler in such matters, once let loose a tirade at a soldier he found wearing an incorrect uniform in a trench, only to discover, when there was no reply, that he had been berating a dead man [back] *** * When a visitor goes to this spot today, or to many others referred to in Western Front memoirs as hills, valleys, or ridges, the slope is anything but steep, and sometimes barely perceptible It is a reminder that the survivors were describing how the scene looked to them when peering cautiously out of a trench, or when pressed flat to the ground of no man's land to avoid bullets If the position you were attacking had even the slightest bit of altitude, you could be trapped in a devastating field of fire [back] *** * On his antiwar speaking tour of Wales some six months earlier, Bertrand Russell wrote to a lover about "all the working-men who are hungry for intellectual food I am amazed at the number of them at my meetings who have read my 'Problems of Philosophy.'" [back] *** * "I wore the Grand Officer of the Legion of Honour and the Star and Necklace of the Bath, and my medals," wrote General Wilson in his diary " And altogether I was a fine figure of a man! I created quite a sensation at the Foreign Office dinner and the reception afterwards Lunched with the Grand Duchess Lovely palace overlooking the Neva." [back] *** * In recent decades alone, it has inspired Pat Barker's novel The Eye in the Door, two plays, two nonfiction books, a BBC television drama, and a volume of poems [back] ... Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hochschild, Adam To end all wars : a story of loyalty and rebellion, 1914–1918 / Adam Hochschild p cm Includes bibliographical references and... spark, and at the age of ten she ran away from home At a nearby railway station, she later wrote, "I took a ticket to London where I intended to earn my living as a servant." Although caught after... evidence of another kind of harvest, reaped on this spot nearly a century ago Each gravestone in the small cemetery has a name, rank, and serial number; 162 have crosses, and one has a Star of David