The Great War of 1914-1918 did not have to last four years. By early 1916, after eighteen months of unprecedented slaughter, the belligerent nations of Europe stood at a crossroads. Their armies were bleeding, their economies collapsing, their populations exhausted. A negotiated peace remained possible, indeed, necessary for their very survival. Yet the men who held Europe's fate in their hands chose to keep digging the grave. O JESUS, MAKE IT STOP examines the pivotal year when the Great War might have ended, and why it did not. Drawing on diplomatic archives, military histories, and private writings, this book traces the failed peace initiatives, from Woodrow Wilson's moral diplomacy to the doomed House-Grey Memorandum and Germany's miscalculated overtures, revealing how leaders who sleepwalked into war proved incapable of finding the exit. But this is no tale of inevitable tragedy. The leaders of 1916--Woodrow Wilson, Lloyd George, Bethmann Hollweg, Raymond Poincare, Kaiser Wilhelm II, Czar Nicholas II, and others--inherited dire circumstances yet retained the agency to choose differently. They did not. At every critical juncture during 1914, 1916, and 1918, men lacking courage or imagination failed to understand why they went to war, how to curtail it, or what to do with its ending. This book argues that they bear responsibility. The consequences shaped a century. Instead of compromise, the war ground on through Verdun and the Somme, through American entry and Russian revolution, to an armistice that sowed the seeds of fascism, a second world war, and decades of upheaval. None of this was foreordained. Different choices would have yielded a different and better twentieth century.