General William Tecumseh Sherman said it best during the American Civil War:  “War is hell” – for soldiers as well as for civilians.  As a pioneer and practitioner of total war, Sherman knew better than most what warfare had become by the middle of the nineteenth century, how it had become a devastating, all-consuming affair that aimed not only at armies, but also at societies and economies in order to undermine a country’s will to fight.  Indeed, this is the central story of warfare during the past two hundred years, from Napoleon’s massive armies tearing through Europe and Sherman’s march through Georgia to the fire bombings of World War II and the threat of nuclear annihilation.

In War Is Hell, Daniel Long tracks the rise of total war across two centuries of bloody warfare and pays special attention to the impact on civilians as they become more deeply enmeshed in armed conflict and as war becomes ever more lethal.  Total war rose from roots in ancient times but gained speed as the world industrialized at the beginning of the nineteenth century.  It is the story of Napoleon and Sherman, the Indian Wars on the American Plains, the Rape of Belgium in World War I and the Rape of Nanking in 1937, and the bombings of Japanese and German cities during World War II.  In the years since 1945, large-scale war has declined, but the small wars that have proliferated in its place have enmeshed civilians just as thoroughly, just as devastatingly.  Vietnam, Cambodia, the Iran-Iraq War, Bosnia and Kosovo, Rwanda, and Ukraine remind us that warfare remains total, the human cost high.

War Is Hell is essential reading for understanding the past as well as a present.