A remarkable recounting of the closely interconnected world of leaders and peace activists during the First World War. Well worth reading. ( )

Read this book and, if nothing else, you will come away with an deep, burning hatred for Rudyard Kipling. ( )

Excellent narrative of the how World War I impacted the psyche of England. Hochschild paints a tragic picture of what pro and anti war sentiments did to towns, friends,and families. If you want to understand why all of Great Britain comes to a standstill every year on the eleventh hour, of the eleventh day, of the eleventh month-- read this book! ( )

The outbreak of the First World War in August 1914 was greeted in Great Britain with a massive show of unity. Men of fighting age rushed to enlist, while organizations and factions set aside their differences in order to face their new common enemy. Yet such support was not universal. As widespread as the demonstration of support for the war was, a committed handful stood in stubborn defiance against the conflict. Adam Hochschild's book details their often lonely struggle against the backdrop of the war they so passionately opposed. In it, he attempts to provide an understanding of the choices they made, showing why they refused to subordinate their conscience to the war effort and the prices they paid for their stance.

The people Hochschild focuses on are a select group, men and women who are bound by family and personal ties to the British elite. He starts by charting the origin of the opposition of some of them to war by detailing their opposition to an earlier conflict, the Boer War. The fighting there led people like Charlotte Despard, Emily Hobhouse, and the Pankhursts to campaign against the British war effort. For them, opposing the war was just one of many causes they undertook, as the activists Hochschild highlights were often at the forefront of radical reform in Edwardian Britain. Yet the outbreak of the war against Germany created deep divisions among their ranks, even to the point of tearing apart families such as the Pankhursts. Their stand provoked considerable public derision, and most of them were subjected to surveillance and obstruction by the authorities. Yet Hochschild sees their fight as all the more noble for its futility, ultimately granting them the larger moral victory despite the hopelessness of their cause.

All of this Hochschild describes in an engrossing narrative that conveys well the drama and tragedy of his subject. He is especially good at detailing the relationships between his characters, such as that between Despard and her brother John French, the first commander of the British Expeditionary Force. If there is a villain in his account it is Douglas Haig, whose obstinacy Hochschild savages for fueling the bloodshed. Yet for all of its strengths Hochschild's book suffers from a lack of focus. Often his subjects disappear for pages as he describes the more familiar tale of the overall course of the war; while this can illustrate what excited the passions of its opponents, the considerable amount of space the author devotes to it distracts more often than it enhances his story. While the strengths of Hochschild's narrative outweigh this deficiency, it does limit his achievement with this book, which offers an interesting look at an aspect of the First World War often ignored by other chroniclers. ( )

Great one-volume history of WW1. It was good enough to give me both far more knowledge of the war as well as a knowledge that I know next to nothing about the war. It also has that flaw that one-volume histories of massive events can have, of the analysis not being as well done as the research. ( )