Axidava

Japs

Costin Nițu

God was not happy.

The Beginning Of Trench Warfare

Anonymous

On the next morning, at daybreak, we quitted the trench again in order to rest for two days. We went across the fields and took up quarters at Cerney-en-Dormois. We lodged in one of the abandoned houses in the center of the village. Our field kitchen had not yet arrived, so we were obliged to find our own food.

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The War Prophecies

Stephen Leacock

Startling Prophecy in Paris. All Paris is wildly excited over the extraordinary prophecy of Madame Cleo de Clichy that the war will be over in four weeks.

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War In The Twentieth Century

Edwin D. Mead

It is a great mistake to think, as many are apt to do when some terrible war overwhelms some part of the world, that war is on the increase among men and that we are probably on the eve of a portentous new era of it.

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Soldiers Shooting Their Own Officers

Anonymous

It was dark already, and we halted once more. The ground around us was strewn with dead. In the middle of the road were some French batteries and munition wagons, with the horses still attached; but horses and men were dead.

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The Glory Of Peace

Charles Sumner

The art of war is yet held even among Christians to be an honorable pursuit. It shall be for another age to appreciate the more exalted character of the art of benevolence which, in blessed contrast with the misery, the degradation, the wickedness of war, shall shine resplendent in the true grandeur of peace.

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When Chenal Sings The Marseillaise

Wythe Williams

I went to the Opéra Comique one day to hear Marthe Chenal sing the “Marseillaise.” For several weeks previous I had heard a story going the rounds of what is left of Paris life to the effect that if one wanted a regular old-fashioned thrill he really should go to the Opéra Comique on a day when Mlle. Chenal closed the performance by singing the French national hymn. I was told there would be difficulty in securing a seat.

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A Vision Of War

Robert G. Ingersoll

The past rises before me like a dream. Again we are in the great struggle for national life.

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German Military Spies

Anonymous

The German system of military espionage can best be studied by an analysis of the working of the system in France from the year 1870 onwards. So far as the outside world is concerned, the military invasion of France by Germany began at the end of July 1870, but in reality the invasion began in the latter half of 1867, when Stieber, chief of the German secret police, began the placing of his fixed posts throughout the country. No less than 30,000 spies were placed in the departments of Northern and Eastern France, and the feats of this army made possible the work accomplished by Von Moltke.

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D’Artagnan And The Soul Of France

Wythe Williams

I met d’Artagnan in a forest of Lorraine. Perhaps Athos, Porthos and Aramis were there too, somewhere in the shadows. I saw only d’Artagnan and talked with him as long as it takes to tell the story. I had forgotten how he looked to Dumas père, but I knew him at once by his bearing and his spirit. His swashbuckling manners are just as arrogantly gay now in the forest of Lorraine and in the trenches of the Vosges as they were long ago in old Paris and on the highroad. He swaggers just as buoyantly with the “poilus” of the Republic as with the musketeers of the Cardinal.

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What The Vandals Leave

Herbert Riley Howe

The war was over, and he was back in his native city that had been retaken from the Vandals. He was walking rapidly through a dimly lit quarter. A woman touched his arm and accosted him in fuddled accents.

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In Pursuit

Anonymous

After a short rest we were commanded to search the burning houses for wounded men. We did not find many of them, for most of the severely wounded soldiers who had not been able to seek safety unaided had been miserably burnt to death, and one could only judge by the buttons and weapons of the poor wretches for what “fatherland” they had suffered their terrible death by fire. With many it was even impossible to find out the nationality they belonged to; a little heap of ashes, a ruined house were all that was left of whole families, whole streets of families.

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Captain Philo Norton McGiffin

Richard Harding Davis

In the Chinese-Japanese War the battle of the Yalu was the first battle fought between warships of modern make, and, except on paper, neither the men who made them nor the men who fought them knew what the ships could do, or what they might not do.

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Joffre

Wythe Williams

“Give the French a leader and they can do anything.” Before the war and since I have heard this thought more than any other expressed in cafés, homes and political assemblies.

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Wilhelm Stieber

Anonymous

Those who label Stieber as “von” in speaking of him are about on a level with any who would choose to confer on Crippen, of unlamented memory, the title of baronet, for the two pretensions are about equal, so far as right to them is concerned.

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The Blue And The Gray

Henry Cabot Lodge

I was a boy ten years old when the troops marched away to defend Washington. I saw the troops, month after month, pour through the streets of Boston.

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The Silent Cannon

Wythe Williams

On a hill commanding a valley stretching away toward the Rhine is a dense pine forest. From its edge I looked far across the frontier of Germany.

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The Horrors Of Street Fighting

Anonymous

We left Sugny the next morning, and an hour later we crossed the Belgo-French frontier. Here, too, we had to give three cheers. The frontier there runs through a wood, and on the other side of the wood we placed the 21-cm. mortars in position.

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Bread And The Newspaper

Oliver Wendell Holmes

This is the new version of the Panem et Circenses of the Roman populace. It is our ultimatum, as that was theirs. They must have something to eat, and the circus-shows to look at. We must have something to eat, and the papers to read.

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Major-General Henry Douglas MacIver

Richard Harding Davis

Any sunny afternoon, on Fifth Avenue, or at night in the table d’hote restaurants of University Place, you may meet the soldier of fortune who of all his brothers in arms now living say is the most remarkable. You may have noticed him; a stiffly erect, distinguished-looking man, with gray hair, an imperial of the fashion of Louis Napoleon, fierce blue eyes, and across his forehead a sabre cut.

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Sister Julie, Chevalier Of The Legion Of Honor

Wythe Williams

A little round apple dumpling sort of woman in nun’s costume was bobbing a curtsy to me from the doorway. In excited French she begged me to be seated. For I was “Monsieur l’Américain” who had come to visit Gerbéviller, the little community nestling in the foothills of the Vosges, that has suffered quite as much from Germans as any city, even those in Belgium. It was her “grand pleasure” that I should come to visit her.

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With The Honors Of War

Wythe Williams

It was just dawn when I got off a train at Gerbéviller, the little “Martyr City” that hides its desolation as it hid its existence in the foothills of the Vosges.

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The Community Masque As A Substitute For War

Robert Benchley

With War and Licker removed from the list of “What’s Going on This Week,” how will mankind spend the long summer evenings? Some advocate another war. Others recommend a piece of yeast in a glass of grape-juice. The effect is said to be equally devastating.

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The Forced March

Hornell Hart

Intermittently, when the snow ceased falling for a moment, Wojak could see the regiments ahead, black against the white fields, crawling interminably over the hilltop under the dull sky. Wojak was a burly, bearded fellow. These winter days pleased him. He liked the tingle that came with marching in the cold air. He liked the dull, rhythmic “scruff” of the hundreds of feet as the regiment swung along, welded by its months of marching into a living unity.

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The Man Of The Marne And The Yser

Wythe Williams

It was a drippy day—a day when winter overcoats were uncomfortable but necessary to protect against a wind that swept over the plateau of Artois. A party of newspapermen were beginning a war-corresponding de luxe program arranged by the French war office. The Paris-Boulogne express had been commanded to stop at Amiens, where limousines were waiting in charge of an officer of the Great General Staff.

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Frenchman Meets That Strange Being, Tommy Atkins

F. B. Ogilvie

The thousands of English soldiers now on French soil are, to Frenchmen, strange, exotic creatures, the study of which is full of delightful surprises. Recently a French journalist traveled to the trenches, interviewed several specimens of the genus Tommy Atkins, and published the results in a Paris newspaper.

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Under The Croix Rouge

Wythe Williams

I never expected to drive a motor ambulance, with badly wounded men, down the Champs Elysées. But I did. I have done many things since the war began that I never expected to do;—but somehow that magnificent Champs Elysées—and ambulances—and groans of wounded seemed a combination entirely outside my wildest imaginations.

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