My Second Year of the War

For the moment these "hows" were not firing and the gunners were in a little circumscribed world of their own, dissociated from the movement around them as they busily dug pits...

This game being played along the whole front has, of course, been likened to chess, with guns and men as pieces. I had in mind the dummy actors and dummy scenery with which stag...

At the front we had a sort of reverence for Grandmother, the first of the fifteen-inch howitzers to arrive as the belated answer of "prepared England" who "forced the war" on "u...

You might think that you had seen ruins until you saw those of Guillemont after it was taken. They were the granulation of bricks and mortar and earth mixed by the blasts of she...

At intervals men in civilian clothes, soft hats, gaiters over everyday trousers, golf suits, hunting suits, appeared at the hotel or were seen stalking about captured German tre...

One of the most famous tanks was Crème de Menthe. She had a good press agent and also made good. She seemed to like sugar. At least, her glorious exploit was in a sugar factory,...

A taste, just a taste, of action the cavalry was to have, owing to the success of the attack of July 14th, which manifestly took the Germans by surprise between High and Delvill...

All this may seem rambling, but to a spectator of war indulging in a little philosophy it goes to the kernel of the meaning of victory to the French and to my own happiness in s...

This was an obvious question. The trouble on July 1st had been, as we know, that the Germans hiding in their dugouts had rushed forth as soon as the British curtain of fire lift...

Difficult as it now becomes to keep any sequence in the operations when, at best, chronology ceases to be illuminative of phases, it is well here to explain that the attack of J...

The architect, tall, well built, smiling and fair-haired, with an intellectual face, sat opposite the little dealer in precious stones who had traveled the world around in his o...

They had not even begun shelling their old first line, which they ought to have known was now in British possession and which they must have had registered, as a matter of cours...

Gathering of the clans from Australia, New Zealand and Canada--England sends Sir Douglas Haig men but not an army--Methods of converting men into an army--The trench raid a Cana...

It seemed that all the guns in the world must be firing as you listened from a distance, although when you came into the area where the guns were in tiers behind the cover of a...

It was a pity, perhaps, that the Irish who assisted in the taking of Ginchy, which completed the needful mastery of the Ridge for British purposes, could not have taken part in...

Even if it did "do us in," why, we were only two or three men. All this protection was less perhaps to insure safety than to insure security of observation for these eyes of the...

From start to finish of that great day it had been quickness that counted; quickness to realize opportunities; alertness of individual action in "mopping up" after the village w...

Submerging a simple farming hamlet in this kind of a tempest was only part of the plan of the gunners, who cut a pattern of fire elsewhere in keeping with the patterns of the Ge...

How America fails to realize the war--Difficulties of realization--Uncle Sam is sound at heart--In London again--A Chief of Staff who has risen from the ranks--Sir William Rober...

The goal--the goal! Ten men out of a hundred reached it in a few cases and when they arrived they sent up rocket signals to say that they were there! there! there! Two or three...

His favorite expression was "the spirit that quickeneth"; the spirit of effort, of discipline, of the fellowship of cohesion of organization--spreading out from the personality...

A colonel when the war began, in the sifting by Father Joffre to find real leaders by the criterion of success General Nivelle had risen to command an army. Wherever he was in c...