War to End War

War to End War was the contemporary name for the European War, a conflict that the book presents as both the First Men’s first great failure of self-command and an occasion for a brief, genuine longing for peace. Its significance lies in the contradiction between its name and its aftermath: the fighting helped kindle a vision of world unity, but that vision remained too uncertain to end the rivalries that produced war.

The Name and Its First Referent

The European War is described as the first and least destructive of the world conflicts that displayed the First Men’s incompetence in controlling their own nature. Its causes were tangled: some motives were honourable, others disreputable, and both sides were prepared for a conflict neither had seriously intended. A difference in temperament between France and Germany combined with a more superficial rivalry between Germany and England. Stupidly brutal gestures by the German government and military command helped divide the world into opposing camps, although the account finds no difference of principle between them.

Each side believed itself to be defending civilization. In practice, both yielded at times to sheer brutality, while both also produced acts of heroism and unusual generosity. The contrast is central to the phrase’s historical force: the war did not mark a clear moral contest in which one party could claim to have ended conflict on civilization’s behalf. Even conduct that clearer minds would regard as merely sane required rare vision and self-mastery among the First Men.

The Peace That Followed

As the months of suffering continued, the warring peoples developed a genuine, passionate desire for peace and a united world. The conflict of tribes briefly gave rise to a spirit loftier than tribalism. Yet this new loyalty lacked clear guidance and the courage of conviction. The peace after the European War therefore became a defining historical moment precisely because it held two tendencies together: an awakening desire for a higher allegiance and the persistent compulsion of tribal identity.

The book contrasts that aftermath with the mood after the later Anglo-French War. After the European War, efforts toward unity coexisted with hatred, suspicion, disputes over indemnities and reparations, and the continued division of Europe into hostile camps. After the Anglo-French War, by contrast, the disaster temporarily extinguished patriotism: France and England worked with the League of Nations to reconstruct one another as well as themselves. The difference makes the first peace look less like a settlement of the forces behind war than an incomplete response to them.

A Fragile Turning Point

The account emphasizes how narrowly the course of history might have changed after the Anglo-French War. Once England had sent a peace message, a French airman, through miscalculation or a defect in his instruments, went astray and came to grief in London. The accident wrecked England and France. The narrator presents it as a small cause with immense consequences: without it, the movement toward unity might have advanced steadily, and the First Dark Age might never have occurred.

That counterfactual sharpens the irony surrounding War to End War. A desire for peace could emerge from war, but the desire was precarious: in the book’s account, it might be strengthened into a permanent policy based on mutual trust, or undone by a single accident before it acquired sufficient force. The later Anglo-French War likewise increased the desire for peace while making peace less secure. People who thought of themselves as wholehearted Europeans feared that an irrational epidemic of patriotism could seize them and draw them into another conflict. The danger was not only hostility between nations but distrust of human nature itself.

The Phrase in a Longer History of Conflict

The book places the European War within a much longer history in which peaceful ideals repeatedly fail to master economic pressure and group loyalty. Russia’s dependence on American finance helped create a contradiction between communist theory and individualist practice; German resentment and Russian hostility then contributed to the Russo-German War. Later, the European Confederacy pooled the armaments of its members and surrendered their sovereignty to a common authority, ostensibly to preserve peace. Yet the Confederacy remained insecure, broke in serious crises, and helped consolidate European unity partly through common fear of the United States.

A further conflict arose around fuel. After an oil famine, the League of Nations had established cosmopolitan control over oil and coal, a policy that endured beyond the League itself. But new fuel deposits in Antarctica lay beyond the World Fuel Control Board’s jurisdiction: the United States sought to exploit them, while China demanded that they be brought under international control. As both peoples returned to nationalism, war again seemed nearly inevitable. Across these episodes, peace-making institutions and internationalist convictions do not erase the rivalries that can reactivate conflict.

The pattern extends beyond the First Men. The account describes the First World State’s collapse after its Antarctic coal supply failed, and later recounts how the Third Men repeatedly remade societies before their efforts collapsed into chaos. These histories are not further instances of the European War; they widen the significance of its name. War to End War stands as an early, sharply ironic claim against the book’s recurring evidence that no single conflict, settlement, or civilization has permanently overcome the conditions that make renewed violence possible.