My Year of the Great War

When an attack or an artillery bombardment is on and you go to as high ground as possible for a bird’s-eye view of battle, all you see is the explosion of the shells; never anyt...

Of course, we had rubber boots, electric torches, and wore British warms, those short, thick coats which accrue a modicum of mud for you to carry besides what you are carrying o...

That battery hidden from aerial observation in the thick forest kept up its slow firing at intervals. It was “bothering” one of the German trenches. Fiendish the consistent regu...

To bomb soon became as common a verb with the army as to bayonet. “We bombed them out” meant a section of trench taken. As you know, a trench is dug and built with sandbags in z...

The other circumstance was the presence of a soldier in the vestibule who said: “_Votre laisser-passer, monsieur, s’il vous plaît!_” If you had a _laisser-passer_, he was most p...

Let either side start a bombardment and the other responds. There is a you-hit-me-and-I’ll-hit-you character to siege warfare. Gun-fire provokes gun-fire. Neither adversary stay...

And the Germans had to go back to the edge of the woods, where they, too, began digging and building their new line. So the enemies were fixed again behind their walls of earth,...

“It may be all right for war correspondents, but it is a devil of a poor place for a newspaper man,” as one editor said. Yet it is the only place where you can really know anyth...

Now our breastworks took a turn and we were approaching closer to the German breastworks. Both lines remained where they had “dug in” after the counter-attacks which had followe...

The Germans were still determined to take the town which they had showered with four million dollars’ worth of shells. It would be big news--the fall of Ypres as a prelude to th...

Shooting out of a grove, a valley made a channel for sound that brought to our ears the thunder of guns, the firing so rapid that it was like the roll of some cyclopean snare-dr...

When Corey and I took a walk away from a railway station where I had to make a train connection, I saw a German reservist of forty-five, who was helping with one hand to thresh...

Once I was being hoisted up a cliff in a basket, when the rope on the creaking windlass above slipped a few inches. Well, it is like that, or like taking a false step on the edg...

After I began to read history for myself and to think as I read, I found that when British and Americans had met, the generals on either side were solicitous about having superi...

As we left the battery we started forward, and suddenly out of the dusk came a sharp call. A young corporal confronted us. Who were we and what business had we prowling about on...

The courageous, the responsible, those with homes and property at stake, those with an inborn sense of real patriotism which means loyalty to locality and to their neighbours, a...

“If this is carried away and then that is, why, then, we have--” as one had often heard officers say on board our own ships. But that was hypothesis. Here was demonstration, whi...

The Germans affected to look down on the French; yet there was something about the Frenchman which the Germans had to respect-- something not won by war. I heard admiration for...

It was a hundred years, one repeats, since the British had fought a first-class naval war. Nelson did his part so well that he did not leave any fighting to be done by his succe...

Thus the talk ran on in the quiet of evening, till we heard a concussion and a quarter of a mile away, behind a screen of trees, a pillar of smoke rose to the height of two or t...

The German army planned destruction with all the regularity that it billeted troops, or requisitioned supplies, or laid war indemnities. It did not destroy by shells exclusively...

L---- took a sliver off his coat and offered it to us as a souvenir. He did not know that he had said “Pretty!” or R---- that he had said “A black business!” several times that...

Smith, of the army, leads a bomb-throwing party from traverse to traverse; Smith, of the navy, turns one lever at the right second. Army gunners are improving their practice day...

A battle! It was a battle because the reporters could get some account of it and the fighting in Alsace was hidden under the cloud of secrecy. A superficial survey was enough to...

After dark, in a drizzling rain, we came to what seemed to be a town, for our automobile lamps spread their radiant streams over wet pavements. But these were the only lights. T...

Out of the station came a score of German soldiers returning from the trenches, on their way to barracks to regain strength so that they could bear the ordeal of standing in icy...

If an aviator has leave for two or three days in summer he starts in the late afternoon, flashing over that streak of Channel in half an hour and may be at home for dinner witho...

What would the world be without French civilisation? To think of France dead was to think of cells in your own brain that had gone lifeless; of something irreparably extinguishe...

This seems to have little to do with the navy, but it has much, indeed, as a part of an unfathomable, complicated business of guards within guards, intelligence battling with in...

Germany and her Kaiser believed that she had a mission and the right to more room. Wherever there was an opportunity she appeared with his aggressive paternalism to get ground f...

In “The Last Shot,” which appeared only a few months before the Great War began, drawing from my experience in many wars, I attempted to describe the character of a conflict bet...

More than two million Englishmen went to the recruiting depots, though no invader had set foot on their soil, and offered to serve in France or wherever they were needed over se...