Long, Daniel E. War is Hell

The Rise of Total War from Napoleon to the Present

General William Tecumseh Sherman summed it up most aptly during the American Civil War: "War is hell"for soldiers and civilians alike. As a pioneer and practitioner of total war, Sherman knew better than most what warfare had evolved into by the mid-19th century: a devastating, all-consuming enterprise that no longer targeted armies alone, but also aimed at societies and economies in order to break a nation's will to fight. Indeed, this is the central narrative of warfare over the past two hundred yearsfrom Napoleons massive armies sweeping across Europe and Shermans March through Georgia, to the area bombing campaigns of the Second World War and the threat of nuclear annihilation. In *War Is Hell*, Daniel Long traces the rise of total war across two centuries of bloody conflict, paying particular attention to its impact on the civilian populationthose people drawn ever deeper into armed conflicts as war itself assumes an increasingly lethal form. While the roots of total war reach back to antiquity, it only gained massive momentum with the industrialization of the world in the early 19th century. It is the story of Napoleon and Sherman, of the Indian Wars on the American prairies, of the "Rape of Belgium" in the First World War and the Nanjing Massacre of 1937, as well as of the bombing raids on Japanese and German cities during the Second World War. In the years since 1945, the number of large-scale wars has indeed declined; yet the "small wars" that have taken their placeand have since proliferatedentangle the civilian population no less deeply and no less devastatingly in the unfolding conflict. Vietnam, Cambodia, the Iran-Iraq War, Bosnia and Kosovo, Rwanda, and Ukraine serve as a warning to us: warfare remains "total"and the human toll remains high.