The Locomotive of War

The Locomotive of War
Peter Clarke

Why the “locomotive of war”? The expression is attributed to Trotsky and refers to the way war provides an engine for social change or revolution. Peter Clarke begins by invoking it ironically, seeing the First World War as having had more progressive results than Trotsky envisioned, at least in the English-speaking world. Aside from that initial reference, however, it’s not clear how the image fits with any larger argument Clarke is making.

Instead, this is less a book with a theme than a series of historical-biographical sketches of some of the leading British and American personalities of the period: Woodrow Wilson, Winston Churchill, David Lloyd George, and John Maynard Keynes. There seems to be a point Clarke wants to make about the moralistic bent of Anglo-American policy, with later politicians taking the grand old man Gladstone as a model, but this is not very well developed. One suspects Clarke didn’t want to be seen as only writing another centenary book on the First World War, but that’s pretty much what he got.