To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918
By: Adam Hochschild / Narrated By: Arthur Morey
Length: 16 hrs and 26 mins
AWESOME! Soooo awesome I barely noticed Arthur Morey
It’s like this, see: I’ve had to return audiobooks cuz they were narrated by Arthur Morey. Steven Pinker? Brilliant thinker, amazing writer! But when you’ve got Arthur Morey narrating? >Snooooooze< Plus, the dude narrated The Mathews Men—a stirring account of a community’s contribution to the Merchant Mariners during WWII—and he was all OVER the place with highly suspect, comical, and sometimes even mildly offensive accents whenst doing dialogue. PLUS, >Snooooooooze<
So even tho’ I was aaaaalllll jazzed up to be doing To End All Wars for Veterans Day 2020, I was kinda all skittish about Morey as the person to be guiding me through 16+ hours of history of and prior to WWI. FORTunately, I can honestly say that, yup, the dude is kinda here and there when it came to tossing in an accent or two whilst doing a person’s words, but he rather kept himself to simple narration rather than his usual vocal gyrations.
And the writing by Adam Hochschild is sooooo truly wonderful that the man could NOT ruin what was an amazing experience. It’s supposedly what it took to call for peace during WWI, but actually the history starts faaaaaar earlier than that, so that the listener knows truly what it was like to be British at the time. Theirs was an empire that thrilled to its white superiority and its colonialism. It was avaricious in its greed and thought nothing of subjecting the Boers to concentration camps in a war that it provoked and started itself, all so it could be the dominating country and proud owner of South African mineral rights, ie gold. That the British felt themselves to be above the native Blacks pretty much went without saying; it wasn’t anything they weren’t alREAdy doing in India and elsewhere.
Famous people of the day are brought to vivid life, and this audiobook had me doing what all good history books have me doing: I was hitting Wikipedia even as I was utterly enthralled and captivated by the stories. I HAD to know who Charlotte Despard was, even more so than the stellar background Hochschild gives us throughout. A true pacifist and champion for reform, I wanted to see it in black and white that she was sister to Sir John French, the man who led charges in WWI, a militant and cad extraordinaire. I wanted to learn about the Pankhurst women, those women led by mother Emmeline, who championed reform and socialism but who later went on to become a verrrrrry vocal advocate for the war, later pretty much disowning her daughter Sylvia who stayed true to human causes and who sought to alleviate the suffering of the masses (And nothing says Suffering Masses like world war!). I TOTALLY wanted to learn more about the suffragette movement, and I found it fascinating how bold, loud, and tenacious they were, rappelling down lines and shouting, cramming themselves into freight boxes as surprises when opened, endeavoring hunger strikes and getting tube fed, getting bruised and inflicting bruises upon others, and even planting bombs.
I knew about Rudyard Kipling being a staunch imperialist, but I had nooooo idea how very hateful and intolerant he could be. Yes, he brought some nifty kids’ stories (Stories he composed for his children, and later John went on to fight and be killed rather immediately, to dad’s sadness but pride), but boy was he a toad, or what (No offense to toads)? There are sooooo many people I learned about, but it’s all given to us in immediate, rather luminous, writing.
Not to mention stark and brutal writing when it came to the battles. Juxtaposed are the words of the generals, how glorious and dashing it was to see lines of brave men mowed down by machine gunfire, or shredded by shrapnel, with the words of the soldiers who survived or witnessed such a thing. It was NOT glorious; it was senseless carnage, but there was such a disconnect between Cavalry-loving lance-wielding generals and the men thrown into the slaughter, it’s a painful listen. I hit Amazon to see if there were any photos included and yup—it’s pretty horrific the one that’s shown to be the battle at Passchendaele which cost over 260,000 British lives and wounded. In the text, Hochschild gets pretty graphic with what the men suffered, drowning and dying in mud and muck, and as a matter of fact, his writing is pretty unsparing throughout. Be prepared.
Lemme put it this way to sum it all up. I always start to re-listen to an audiobook before I start to review it, kinda just to get an inkling for what I was feeling as I embarked on the new journey. But this time?
Well, I had to stop myself at 6+ hours of re-listening…
It’s just that danged good!!!
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