Wheeler-Bennett, John. Brest-Litovsk: The Forgotten Peace, March 1918. New York: Norton, 1971.
Wills, W. David. Stephen Henry Hobhouse: A Twentieth-Century Quaker Saint. London: Friends Home Service Committee, 1972.
Wilson, Angus. The Strange Ride of Rudyard Kipling: His Life and Works. New York: Viking, 1978.
Wilson, Trevor. The Myriad Faces of War: Britain and the Great War, 1914–1918. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1986.
Winslow, Barbara. Sylvia Pankhurst: Sexual Politics and Political Activism. New York: St. Martin's, 1996.
Winter, Denis. Haig's Command: A Reassessment. London: Viking, 1991.
Winter, J[ay] M.
The Experience of World War I. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.
The Great War and the British People. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986.
Winter, Jay, and Blaine Baggett. The Great War and the Shaping of the 20th Century. New York: Penguin Studio, 1996.
Winter, Jay, Geoffrey Parker, and Mary R. Habeck, eds. The Great War and the Twentieth Century. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000.
Wolff, Leon. In Flanders Fields: The 1917 Campaign. New York: Viking, 1958.
Wrench, John Evelyn. Alfred Lord Milner: The Man of No Illusions, 1854–1925. London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1958.
Wright, Patrick. Tank: The Progress of a Monstrous War Machine. New York: Viking, 2002.
Zuckerman, Larry. The Rape of Belgium: The Untold Story of World War I. New York: New York University Press, 2004.
THESES
Kaminski, Diane Clements. The Radicalization of a Ministering Angel: A Biography of Emily Hobhouse, 1860–1926. University of Connecticut, Ph.D., 1977.
Mayhall, Laura E. Nym. "Dare to Be Free": The Women's Freedom League, 1907–1928. Stanford University, Ph.D., 1993.
Williams, Carl R. The Control of Civilian Populations in War: The Policing of Political Beliefs in Great Britain, 1914–1918. London School of Economics, M.Sc., 1999.
ARCHIVAL MATERIAL
National Archives, Kew
Charlotte Despard Papers, Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, Belfast
Charlotte Despard Papers, Women's Library, London
John French Papers, Imperial War Museum, London
David Lloyd George Papers, Parliamentary Archives, London
Alfred Milner Papers, Bodleian Library, Oxford
E. Sylvia Pankhurst Papers, Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis, Amsterdam (microfilm copies in many libraries)
Albert Edward Rochester Papers, in private hands
—transcript of Rochester's court-martial, 12 January 1917
— Rochester's unpublished letter to the Daily Mail, 31 December 1916
— "Albert Edward Rochester, 1884–1926," unpublished mss. by Tom Hickey and Brian Maddocks
— "Debts of Honour," unpublished mss. by Tom Hickey and Brian Maddocks Imperial War Museum Sound Archive interviews
— Fenner Brockway 000476/04
— Wilfrid Ernest Littleboy 000485/06
— Howard Cruttenden Marten 000383/06
— Harold Frederick Bing 000358/11
Comintern personnel files, Moscow
—William Wheeldon file: 495/198/537
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Sometimes, over the six years I worked on this book, I almost felt as if its subject matter were pursuing me, even when I thought I was far away from it. Crossing South Africa by car with a friend, we arrived after dark at the house of some people he knew who put us up for the night at a small town in the interior; only when driving away in the morning did I see they lived on Milner Street. After a day of work in London not connected with the book, I went to relax on the grass at Tavistock Square, happened to glance up—and there was a small monument to conscientious objectors. And the week I finished reading the proofs, we buried my wife's 98-year-old aunt in the small town in Maine where she lived; only at the cemetery did we learn for the first time, from a relative of his, that her long-dead husband had been gassed on the Western Front in 1918. "None of them liked to talk about it," he said.
Many people were willing to talk, however, not about their war experiences, but about my struggles to get that era onto paper. An array of friends, which over time began to seem as large as one of the First World War's smaller armies, provided essential help. To begin with, a low bow to all who read the manuscript and gave me their feedback: Harriet Barlow, Vincent Carretta, Vivian Dent, Elizabeth Farnsworth, Mary Felstiner, Peter Goldmark, Hermann Hatzfeldt, Tracy Kidder, Jeffrey Klein, Mark Kramer, Elinor Langer, Meghan Laslocky, Mike Meyer, Michael Rice, Rebecca Solnit, Francis Wilson, and Monty Worth. Some of them deserve an extra medal of valor for wading through an early draft that was some 60 percent longer than the book is now—a form of war against readers that ought to be outlawed by the Geneva Conventions.
For more pairs of eyes on the manuscript I'm deeply indebted to four historians of the war who generously helped this newcomer to terrain they know so well. The first of them I met next to the information desk at the British National Archives when he overheard a question I asked, and it soon became clear he knew far more than the man behind the counter. He turned out to be Julian Putkowski, and subsequently sent me a transatlantic torrent of useful references. Vigilant to the last, he gently pointed out that the lancers on the cover of this book's American edition are not British. (They're French.) Careful readings of this book by him and by Cyril Pearce in England, Peter Stansky in the United States, and Jo Vellacott in Canada—each of whom has studied this period far longer than I have—saved me from many errors. They are not responsible for any mistakes that have nonetheless subsequently crept in, or for my point of view.
As always, my wife, Arlie, was my dearest comrade-in-arms, in this book as she has been in life itself. She was with me through ups and downs, getting to know these characters as if they were members of our family, gently critiquing that endless early draft, tramping through trenches, museums, and an underground tunnel when we visited the battlefields in France, all the while writing a wise and trenchant new book of her own.
Great editors are rarer than great writers, and Tom Engelhardt, who has worked on four of my books now, is the best of them all. He has the uncanny ability to climb inside a writer's skull and see what you're trying to do better than you can, and to know exactly which notes you should strike to make the chord you've been imagining. It is all the more amazing to me that he manages to do this while simultaneously writing much of, and running, a remarkable one-man website, which keeps a close eye on the imperial dreams and delusions of our own time, www.tomdispatch.com.
At Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Bruce Nichols and Andrea Schulz read the manuscript and gave me useful comments, as did my longtime editor Georgina Morley at Pan Macmillan in London and my literary agent Georges Borchardt. My gratitude goes as well to Larry Cooper at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for catching literally hundreds of extraneous words, awkward repetitions, and other infelicities of language in his careful manuscript editing of the third book we have worked on together. I hope there will be many more. Melanie Haselden did superb detective work in British photo archives, tracking down portraits of the characters in this book as well as striking photographs of a war that all too often is presented to us in certain familiar stock images.
Others helped in many ways, among them Julian Hendy, who shared with me his copies of letters and other material about the Wheeldon family; Carl Williams, who sent me his dissertation; Nicholas Hiley, who steered me to some useful sources and thoughtfully provided several illustrations; and Guy Hartcup and Mark Goodman, who answered questions I had. My thanks also to the Lannan Foundation, from whom an extraordinarily generous grant arrived unexpectedly just as I was starting work on this book. Years ago, it was the chance to read a superb filmscript—a project still needing a bold producer—by Brian Maddocks and Tom Hickey that first made me aware of Alfred Rochester. Don Coleman, Rochester's grandson, sent me more information and a photograph
.
Although it will be clear from the endnotes which authors I am most indebted to, I want to acknowledge several here in particular. Barbara Tuchman has long been a model for me as a writer; it was a pleasure to be working on a period where I could draw heavily on two of her splendid books—even though historians today tend to take a slightly different perspective on the outbreak of the war than she did. Trevor Wilson's magisterial history of Britain's experience in the war was a constant companion. Hugh and Mirabel Cecil's Imperial Marriage is a graceful, moving volume from which I drew a great deal; I hope the writers will forgive me for having a more critical view of the politics of their characters than they might. And finally, like anyone writing on British history in recent years, I was grateful I could rely on the new, comprehensively revised edition of one of the great reference tools in our language, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
Many libraries and archives sent me photocopies on request, sometimes without charge, including the National Library of Scotland, the Bodleian Library at Oxford, the University of Warwick, the Imperial War Museum, Dalhousie University, and the Swarthmore College Peace Collection. My thanks to the Reverend Gabriel O'Prey and the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland for permission to quote from Charlotte Despard's papers deposited there. I visited some of these institutions and many more, in both Britain and the United States, in researching this book, but a special word of gratitude goes to those libraries where I spent the most time, at the University of California at Berkeley and at Bates College in the summer months. And, even after several visits, I never ceased to marvel at the National Archives at Kew and its wondrous overhead conveyor belt that, from a millennium of British history and 187 kilometers of shelving, so magically fetches you almost any conceivable document in a matter of minutes. It's enough to give you the illusion that we really can understand the past.
INDEX
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: Twentieth-century 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/akg-images. 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]
book with friends
To End All Wars Page 51