Re: War to end (all) war(s)

["J. King" jking@xxxxxxxx]

A quick lookup in the OED (cd version, which makes searching so much easier) brings:
d. war to end war(s): a war which is intended to make subsequent wars
impossible; usu. spec. the war of 1914_18.

[1914 H. G. Wells (title) The war that will end war.]
1921 G. B. Shaw Back to Methuselah iv. 187 There was a war called the War
to End War. In the war which followed it about ten years later, none of the
soldiers were killed; but seven of the capital cities of Europe were wiped
out of existence.
1932 P. Quennell Let. to Mrs. V. Woolf (1933) 17 He can recall barely five
or six summers; then the War to End Wars and so good-bye.
1949 E. Benn Happier Days vi. 71 If_war debts between nations had been
wiped off the slate, and reparations in money never attempted, the _war to
end war' might have achieved its high purpose.
1953 Earl Winterton Orders of Day xxiv. 345 The Government of that day and
the then leaders of opinion in general had assured us and the nation at
large that it was _a war to end war'.
1967 W. Lippman in W. Safire New Lang. Politics (1968) 480/2 Each of the
wars to end wars has set the stage for the next war.
1978 E. Malpass Wind brings up Rain ix. 99 Now_the War To End War was over.

Once upon a time (actually at 02:58 AM 12/9/98 -0500), Eric Van
Tassel sent out the following message:

>On 7-12-98, Catlyn  wrote (in part)
>
>> ... the date -- December 7, which, in 1941, was the day this
>> country, attacked by the Japanese, became active participants in "the
>> War to end all Wars." ...
>
>I hope I don't seem unkind to Catlyn (I don't mean to be) if, as a
>professional nitpicker, I point out (a) that the phrase in quotes is
>misquoted and (b) that it was coined to apply to a different war.
>
>I don't own a reference book (surely there must *be* such a book?) that
>identifies the origin or earliest appearance of proverbial or commonplace
>phrases, so I can't say who first described World War I (then known as
>simply "the World War" or "the Great War") as "the war to end war."
>
>I decided that the phrase was proverbial or commonplace when, after being
>unable to find it at all in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, I found it
>in Bartlett only in the following passage whose context clearly implies
>that long before 1922 the phrase was already in widespread use:
>
> "The freedom of Europe," "The war to end war," "The overthrow of militarism,"
> "The cause of civilization" -- most people believe so little now in anything or
> anyone that they would find it hard to understand the simplicity and intensity
> of faith with which these phrases were once taken among our troops, or the
> certitude felt by hundreds of thousands of men who are now dead that if they
> were killed their monument would be a new Europe not soured or soiled with
> the hates and creeds of the old.
>    -- Charles Edward Montague (1867-1928), _Disenchantment_[1922], Chap. 13
>
>The reason why this (extremely frequent) misquotation matters is that "the
>X to end *all* Xs" (whatever it may have meant when it was new) has become
>a cliche', meaning little more than that X is the biggest or most momentous
>example of its kind (the first parallel that pops into my magpie mind is
>Stan Kenton's early composition "Concerto to End All Concertos"). But in
>"the war to end war" the preposition "to" implied purpose or objective:
>according to this conceit, the war was being waged to ensure that there
>would *never* be another war.
>
>Cheers
>Eric Van Tassel


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