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editor Georgina Morley at Pan Macmillan in London and my literary agent Georges Borchardt. My gratitude goes as well to Larry Cooper at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for catching literally hundreds of extraneous words, awkward repetitions, and other infelicities of language in his careful manuscript editing of the third book we have worked on together. I hope there will be many more. Melanie Haselden did superb detective work in British photo archives, tracking down portraits of the characters in this book as well as striking photographs of a war that all too often is presented to us in certain familiar stock images.

Others helped in many ways, among them Julian Hendy, who shared with me his copies of letters and other material about the Wheeldon family; Carl Williams, who sent me his dissertation; Nicholas Hiley, who steered me to some useful sources and thoughtfully provided several illustrations; and Guy Hartcup and Mark Goodman, who answered questions I had. My thanks also to the Lannan Foundation, from whom an extraordinarily generous grant arrived unexpectedly just as I was starting work on this book. Years ago, it was the chance to read a superb filmscript—a project still needing a bold producer—by Brian Maddocks and Tom Hickey that first made me aware of Alfred Rochester. Don Coleman, Rochester's grandson, sent me more information and a photograph.

Although it will be clear from the endnotes which authors I am most indebted to, I want to acknowledge several here in particular. Barbara Tuchman has long been a model for me as a writer; it was a pleasure to be working on a period where I could draw heavily on two of her splendid books—even though historians today tend to take a slightly different perspective on the outbreak of the war than she did. Trevor Wilson's magisterial history of Britain's experience in the war was a constant companion. Hugh and Mirabel Cecil's Imperial Marriage is a graceful, moving volume from which I drew a great deal; I hope the writers will forgive me for having a more critical view of the politics of their characters than they might. And finally, like anyone writing on British history in recent years, I was grateful I could rely on the new, comprehensively revised edition of one of the great reference tools in our language, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

Many libraries and archives sent me photocopies on request, sometimes without charge, including the National Library of Scotland, the Bodleian Library at Oxford, the University of Warwick, the Imperial War Museum, Dalhousie University, and the Swarthmore College Peace Collection. My thanks to the Reverend Gabriel O'Prey and the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland for permission to quote from Charlotte Despard's papers deposited there. I visited some of these institutions and many more, in both Britain and the United States, in researching this book, but a special word of gratitude goes to those libraries where I spent the most time, at the University of California at Berkeley and at Bates College in the summer months. And, even after several visits, I never ceased to marvel at the National Archives at Kew and its wondrous overhead conveyor belt that, from a millennium of British history and 187 kilometers of shelving, so magically fetches you almost any conceivable document in a matter of minutes. It's enough to give you the illusion that we really can understand the past.

INDEX

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Adam Hochschild's first book, Half the Way Home: A Memoir of Father and Son, was published in 1986. Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times called it "an extraordinarily moving portrait of the complexities and confusions of familial love ... firmly grounded in the specifics of a particular time and place, conjuring them up with Proustian detail and affection." It was followed by The Mirror at Midnight: A South African Journey, The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin, and Finding the Trapdoor: Essays, Portraits, Travels. King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa was a finalist for