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Above: Charlotte Despard, suffragette, prison veteran, pacifist, communist, IRA supporter. Right: Her brother, "dearer to me than anyone else," Field Marshal Sir John French, cavalryman, commander in chief on the Western Front, viceroy of Ireland.

Horsemen en route to Kimberley, South Africa,

for Britain's last great cavalry charge, 1900.

Rudyard Kipling, staunch patriot in his country's wars.

Above: Alfred, Lord Milner, the "man of no illusions." Below: His great love, Lady

Violet Cecil (left); his nemesis, antiwar campaigner Emily Hobhouse (right).

The Pankhurst family, bitterly split by the war: Christabel (left), Sylvia addressing a public meeting (opposite), and their mother, Emmeline, under arrest (below).

Socialist leader (and Sylvia's secret lover) Keir Hardie speaks

against the coming war, Trafalgar Square, 1914.

Above: Royal cousins before the storm: Tsar Nicholas II (left) and Kaiser

Wilhelm II (right) on Wilhelm's yacht. Below: King George V and

Queen Mary in Delhi as Emperor and Empress of India.

Basil Thomson, Scotland

Yard spycatcher

Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig

John Buchan: novelist, officer,

chief propagandist

Bertrand Russell: resisting the

"red blast of hate"

Friends who met similar fates: John Kipling (left), George Cecil.

The tight Royal Navy blockade cut off food and fertilizer

imports to Germany, hastening hundreds of thousands of

deaths. A woman faints in a Berlin food line.

III. 1915

10. THIS ISN'T WAR

SIR JOHN FRENCH still believed that some of his most "valuable" officers in France and Flanders were "county men of position and influence, accustomed to hunting, polo and field sports." But for others, the metaphor of war as sport was no longer convincing. At the beginning of 1915, if you were a British officerp eering into no man's land, what met your gaze resembled the cratered surface of the moon more than any fox-hunting meadow or polo field. The only horses in sight were dead ones. Even to safely look out of your trench you had to use a special set of binoculars whose lenses could be raised above the sandbag parapet like twin periscopes. Between you and the German front-line trench, which might be anywhere from 50 to several hundred yards away, was a desolate landscape filled with rusted tangles of barbed wire, mercilessly pitted and gouged by hundreds of shell bursts. Now, in winter, it would usually be covered with snow, and the rainwater that collected in shell craters would be frozen. On warmer days, your trench would thaw into a muddy morass. Better-off soldiers begged their families to send them rubber waders. Otherwise, you stood in the cold slime day after day until your feet swelled, went numb, and began to burn painfully as if touched by fire. This was the dreaded "trench foot," which sent men crawling or being carried to the rear by the thousands.

If you turned to face the back of your trench, you would see a protective wall almost as high as the parapet, because exploding shells were as likely to drop behind you as in front. At intervals along the back of the trench, you could see the beginning of a communication trench that snaked its way to the rear, so that troops moving to or from the front line would have some protection from bullets and shrapnel. If you looked to either side, you would not see far, for soldiers were already learning to build narrow trenches with right-angle turns every ten yards or so. These zigzags better contained the blast of a direct hit from an artillery or mortar round, while also preventing any German raiding party from taking control of a long stretch of trench with one well-placed machine gun. If you looked down, you might see the entrance to one of many dugouts carved into the side of the trench and reinforced with planks and beams. These underground spaces for crude sleeping quarters, command posts, or emergency first aid would be the size of a small room at best,