To End All Wars: How the First World War Divided Britain by Adam Hochschild

The cost of the First World War is numbing. More than nine million were killed on all fronts, 21 million wounded, disabled and disfigured. Sixty-five thousand men were still being treated for shell shock 10 years after the war ended. As Adam Hochschild chillingly puts it: “If the British dead alone were to rise up and march 24 hours a day past a given spot, four abreast, it would take them more than two and a half days.”

That roll call would not include more than 200,000 Empire troops killed, nor twice that number of French soldiers, thousands upon thousands of Germans, Russians and Austro-Hungarians, nor the 12 to 13 million who died in the massacres and civil wars for which war was an excuse or a trigger. In the near-famine conditions that persisted over much of central Europe, populations starved as a result of the ravages of battle and the naval blockade.

The centenary of the start of that war is nearly upon us and the last man to see active service has been dead for only a matter of weeks. The wheels of the publishing industry are revving up. An early one off the presses, To End All Wars is cast in the reproachful “pity of war” mould. Hochschild’s story is one of bitter waste epitomised by the stark lunar landscape of the Western Front, the charred ruins of Ypres, the mud of Passchendaele that sucked men and horses to their death.

Its intention is to show that the traditional picture of the “rush to the colours”, the jingoistic enthusiasm for war, the notion of battle joyfully embraced as “playing the game”, was not the whole picture. There was opposition, there were dissenters, doubters, critics – and proselytisers against as well as for the conflict.

John French and Douglas Haig are Hochschild’s villains. (He gives very short shrift to the current, more sympathetic revisionist school.) For him the British military leaders were criminally profligate with soldiers’ lives, conducting operations in châteaux far from the front, old-school cavalry men leaders who could not understand the industrial nature of modern warfare, purblind, arrogant and manipulative of politicians who queried their “battering-ram approach”.

His heroes and heroines, those who were courageous and tireless in railing against the war, include Charlotte Despard, a pacifist, philanthropist and anticonscription activist who was also John French’s sister; Emily Hobhouse, who had “seen war in its nakedness” in the concentration camps of the Boer War, and her brother Stephen, a conscientious objector (CO) who, along with more than 6,000 others, mouldered in prison (some were taken in handcuffs to the trenches); Sylvia Pankhurst, whose powerful newspaper the Women’s Dreadnought published Siegfried Sassoon’s disavowal of war from the front line; Keir Hardie, the leader of the Independent Labour Party, who was handed so many white feathers for supposed cowardice that he reckoned he could “make a fan”; Bertrand Russell, the philosopher; Fenner Brockway, another CO who circulated his “Walton Leader”, written on squares of loo paper, to his fellow pacifists in solitary confinement in Liverpool jail; and Alice Wheeldon, a second-hand clothes dealer who gave sanctuary to conscription dodgers and was sentenced to 10 years’ hard labour as a result of a trumped-up Ministry of Munitions terrorism sting.

The book’s title is impossible to dispute; its subtitle more questionable. The war divided families (John French and Charlotte Despard, for example, or the Pankhursts, where Emmeline and Christabel turned warrior queens) and occasionally, briefly, communities, but not the nation.

Although opposition grew as the war dragged on, attempts to organise workers’ and soldiers’ “soviets” came to nothing as crowds, singing Rule, Britannia, stormed meetings. In 1917, trade union members voted by a margin of five to one that Britain should continue to fight until victory was total.

“I knew it was my business to protest,” wrote Russell after the war, “however futile protest might be.”

* Juliet Gardiner’s most recent books are The Thirties: an Intimate History and The Blitz: the British Under Attack (HarperCollins)

To End All Wars: How the First World War Divided Britain

by Adam Hochschild

448pp, Macmillan, £20

Buy now for £18 (PLUS £1.25 p&p) from Telegraph Books