31 percent of the men who graduated Oxford in 1913 were killed.

— On today’s Fresh Air, historian Adam Hochschild explains why WWI was different than other major conflicts: “It was different because it was the tradition in most of the major countries for upper-class young men to have military careers, and then it became those young captains and lieutenants.”

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.

Maureen Corrigan reviews a new historical narrative of WWI, To End All Wars: But, through eye-witness accounts and official correspondence, Hochschild makes a reader feel anew the shock of modern technological warfare. The much less familiar World War I story that Hochschild uncovers is that of the resisters. To his credit, Hochschild renders the pacifists’ tales no less compelling than that of the soldiers in the trenches.