Two well-known sisters split so bitterly over the war that they ended up publishing newspapers that attacked each other. These critics were sometimes intimately connected to their enemy hawks: one of Britain's most prominent women pacifist campaigners had a brother who was commander in chief on the Western Front. Thrown in jail for their opposition to the war were Britain's leading investigative journalist, a future winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, and an editor who, behind bars, published a newspaper for his fellow inmates on toilet paper. He focuses on the long-ignored moral drama of the war's critics, alongside its generals and heroes. In a riveting, suspenseful narrative with haunting echoes for our own time, Adam Hochschild brings it to life as never before. In using his review of “To End All Wars” - a compassionate study of pacifism during World War I - to condemn Woodrow Wilson and America’s entry into that war, Christopher Hitchens diminishes the importance of Adam Hochschild’s work in order to repeat a fantasy of the school of “what might have been” history.World War I stands as one of history's most senseless spasms of carnage, defying rational explanation. The writer, a former senior analyst for the C.I.A., is an adjunct assistant professor of history at the University of Alabama.

STEPHEN IRVING MAX SCHWAB Northport, Ala. Distinguished military historians like Correlli Barnett have argued that the French were still on the battlefield in the summer of 1917 only because they knew that Americans would soon join the fight. Without the Yanks’ arrival, it’s conceivable that Germany would have won the war. He commits a far more egregious misstep by suggesting that it would have been better for 20th-century history had Wilson not intervened by dispatching General Pershing’s “fresh and plucky troops” to France, arguing that “the incensed and traumatized French would never have been able to impose terms of humiliation on Germany.” This is “what if” history at its worst. Christopher Hitchens, reviewing Adam Hochschild’s “To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918” (May 15), describes the phrase attributed to Woodrow Wilson - “the war to end all wars” - as “fatuous” and “an object of satire and contempt even as it was being uttered.” Only Hitchens, the quintessential cynic, is incapable of seeing Wilson as the uncompromising idealist he was.

To end all wars by adam hochschild