It became public administration, one of the social sciences. Government was no longer largely a hobby for the more earnest, non-fox-hunting members of the aristocracy. They rose to this challenge brilliantly, cajoling newspaper owners, cultivating friendly journalists, subsidizing “patriotic” writers, speakers, and film-makers, prohibiting or sabotaging antiwar meetings and publications, and harassing or, when necessary, imprisoning critics. The first total war imposed unprecedented burdens on the population and therefore required unprecedented lying and coercion on the part of governments to preempt or suppress dissent. As John Buchan, the British Empire’s tireless propagandist-in-chief, put it: “So far as Britain is concerned, the war could not have been fought for one month without its newspapers.” The same was true of Germany and France. The technology of mass persuasion (otherwise known as propaganda or indoctrination) was first introduced not by the totalitarian regimes of the interwar period but by the democracies during World War I.

War would no longer be noble sport it was professionalized.Īnd so, more subtly but no less fatefully, was government. I have never felt so well, or so happy, or enjoyed anything so much.” Such upper-class twits were killed off even more rapidly than the plowboys and factory workers who followed them into the maw of the new industrial killing machines. Barbed wire, trench warfare, the machine gun, the tank, poison gas, artillery barrages, and aerial bombardment all meant that war would no longer evoke enthusiastic reactions like that of one characteristically brainless young aristocrat in the first weeks of the war: “It is all the best fun.

The technology of mass destruction was perhaps the most obvious respect. Like few other episodes –- the fall of Rome, the Black Death, the Protestant Reformation, the French Revolution –- it really did leave a different world in its wake. Words like “watershed” or “turning point” are easy to deploy but hard to justify –- except in the case of World War I. Adam Hochschild’s vivid and poignant To End All Wars does not add any new crimes or follies to the already crowded annals of the First World War, but it is a welcome addition to the literature all the same. The historiography of the twentieth century’s two global wars is, accordingly, extremely rich. History, observed Gibbon, is a record of the crimes and follies of humankind. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 448 pages, $28. To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1919 by Adam Hochschild.

“To End All Wars” embodies its themes –- the decline of the aristocracy, the rise of propaganda, the transformation of war-making, the heroism of resistance –- so skillfully in a dozen or so major characters and another dozen minor ones that this history of the First World War reads like a lively group biography.

Hochschild to end all wars