There was also a human cost in a larger sense, in that I think the [first world] war remade the world for the worse in every conceivable way: it ignited the Russian revolution, it laid the ground for Nazism and it made World War II almost certain. It’s pretty hard to imagine the Second World War without the First.
— On today’s Fresh Air Historian Adam Hochschild traces the patriotic fervor that catapulted Great Britain into war during the summer of 1914 — as well as the small-but-determined British pacifist movement — in his historical narrative To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918.
