Carleton B. Case

“ Here, some one told me, corn once grew, but now it is sodden chalk, pasted and mixed as if by some giant mixing machine with the shattered weapons of war.
Broken trenches—the German front line—in places remain and extend a few yards, only to disappear into the rubble where the tide swept over them.
As we climb, the earth beneath my foot suddenly gives way, letting me down with a jerk to the hip, and opening up a hole through which I peer and see a dead Boche coiled up, his face—or so I suspect it was—resting upon his arm to protect it from some oncoming horror. ”

“ British infantry on that morning when they had their first sight of the unwieldy tanks clambering over trenches, hills, small forests, and houses, spitting flames as they rolled, lolloping forward like huge armored monsters of the prehistoric past.
“It gave our men quite a moral lift,” he said. “They forgot their troubles. But they soon came to see that the tanks were more than funny, for wherever they attacked the infantry had comparative immunity from machine gun fire, and it is the German machine gun fire which always has been the principal obstacle for our troops.” ”

“ But not until the grim business that brought them to France is satisfactorily finished. They want no Stockholm-made peace. They are fighting for a knock-out.
I left behind me in London a lot of dismal, gloomy, and down-hearted friends, candidates all for the Pessimists’ Club. I wish they could have hiked through the trenches with me. It is the finest cure in the world for the blues. It may thunder and pour day and night in Trenchland, and the country may be a morass for miles in every direction, but the sun of optimism and confidence is always shining in the British Army’s heart. ”

“ When you’re in a trench and a shell screeches through the heavens—you always hear it and never see it—the temptation to side-step is the last word in irresistibility. You have been provided with a steel helmet before starting out on the expedition in view of the possibility that a stray piece of German shrapnel may come your way. These helmets have saved many a gallant Tommy from sudden death. ”

“ IN THE TRAIL OF THE HUN WAR has become so much a part of the life of the French peasants that they have little fear under fire. Frenchmen over military age and Frenchwomen pursue their ordinary avocations with little concern for exploding shells. To be sure, it is something of a nuisance, but children play while their mothers work at the tub washing soldier clothing. And as the Allied armies advance, wresting a mile or two of territory from the enemy at each stroke, the peasant follows with his plow less than a mile behind the lines. War has become a part of their lives. ”

“ I know young women throughout the country who receive a letter from their husbands every day. The war has served as a school for adults. Sometimes expediency entirely disappears and it is the race which speaks, and the hidden faith, and the soul which perhaps has never thus been laid bare.
Here is a letter which has been brought to my notice. For a year it had been carried in the pocket of a territorial who wrote it as his last will and testament, and when he was killed it was sent to his widow. ”

“ Well, we eventually got back to the car and to the base.
At twelve o’clock that night the Boches started shelling the town. You can’t imagine the feeling it gives one in the pit of one’s stomach to hear the gun go off in the distance, then the horrible screech of the onrushing shell, and finally the deafening explosion that shakes the plaster down on your cot. Our chiefs were at the outposts, and none of us knew enough to get out and go to the abri, so we just lay there shivering and sweating a cold sweat through the whole bombardment. ”

“ And as to amateurs, who make up ciphers for some special purpose, it’s dollars to doughnuts that their messages will be read just as easily as though they had printed them in box-car letters.
At every headquarters of an army the intelligence department of the General Staff stands ready to play checkers with any formidable looking document that comes along in cipher, and there is mighty little matter in code that stands a ghost of a chance of getting by. ”

“ The war under the earth is a most extraordinary thing. In the main, the army you see in the war zone is not a combatant army. It is the army of supply. The real fighters you seldom set eyes on unless you go and look for them. And, generally speaking, the ghastliness of war is carried on beneath the earth’s level.
Given time, the Boche will take a lot of beating as an earth delver. At one spot on the Somme I went into a veritable underground town, where, till the British deluge overtook them, three thousand of the toughest Huns the Kaiser had put into his line lived and thrived. ”

“ Here is a rubble-heap no higher than one’s shoulders where a church has stood, and the graves have opened beneath pits of fire to make new graves for the living. Patches of red powder, washed by many rains, with a few broken bricks among them, mark the places where houses, big and small, once rested. ”

“ Experience has shown that for best results the fighting aviator should not be over twenty-six years old or under eighteen. The youth under [42] eighteen has shown himself to be bold, but he lacks judgment. Men over twenty-six are too cautious.
“The best air fighters, especially a man handling a ‘chaser,’ must be of perfect physique. He must have the coolest nerve and be of a temperament that longs for a fight. He must have a sense of absolute duty and fearlessness, the keenest sense of action and perfect sight to gain the absolute ‘feel’ of his machine. ”

“ No deserts of the world can show such unspeakable solitude.
One comes from the Somme to the freed villages as one might emerge from the desert to the first outposts [34] of human life at a township on the desert’s rim. Still there are no trees on the sky-line; they have all been cut down carefully and laid at a certain angle beside the stumps just as a platoon of soldiers might ground their arms. For the German frightfulness is a methodical affair, not aroused by the heat of battle, but coolly calculated and senseless. Of military importance it has none. ”

“ And yet here in France, among people of their own color and race, of paved streets and taxicabs, among the old men and women of the villages, among the poilus coming and going in a steady stream to and from the front, the marine is learning new things every day. ”

“ ONE of the strangest of the many personal romances which the war has brought is the tale of a man who, dismissed from the British Army by court martial, redeemed himself through service with that most heterogeneous of organizations, the French Foreign Legion. His name was John F. Elkington, and he had held an honored post for more than thirty years. Then, just as his regiment, in the closing months of 1914, was going into the fighting on the Western front, he was cashiered for an unrevealed error and deprived of the opportunity to serve his country. ”

“ Many men sew coins touching one another in such a way as to make a shield over the heart.
“Every man has his own particular star,” a Lyons farm hand said to Apollinaire, “but he must know it. A gold coin is the only means to put you in communication with your star, so that its protecting virtue can be exercised. I have a piece of gold and so am easy in my mind I shall never be touched.” ”

“ It is possible to fool the Unseen Powers, to pull wool over their eyes. To dream of an auto-bus has become a token of death, attested by the experience of at least four front-line regiments. And yet a sergeant succeeded in saving the life of a man who had dreamed of an auto-bus by the use of a clever ruse—or lie, if you prefer. ”

“ Even the British Tommy, though he enjoys no such income as the Americans and colonials, is nevertheless quite likely to have a bit of private income from the folks “back in Blighty” to supplement the meager pay he draws. The portionless French maid sees in these prosperous young men who have come to fight for her country not only the saviors of the nation, but a possibility of emancipation from the dot system that has broken down in these times. ”

“ But if there is little or nothing to be seen of the human agents that direct the devastating machines of war during a battle, the scene of the field after the fight has been waged discloses all the horror that has not been visible to the eye of an observer. ”

“ The morning after, François V—— was killed five or six miles from the front lines by a German shell. It appears that the superstition is that the death is always of this nature, as Apollinaire quotes a captain of a mixed tirailleur and zouave regiment as saying:
“It is not so much the death that follows, as death no longer is a dread to anyone, but it has been noticed that it is always a useless form of death. A shell splinter in the trenches or, at best, in the rear, which has nothing heroic about it, if there is anything in this war which is not heroic.” ”

“ From somewhere behind us a howitzer is throwing shells over our heads, shells that come on and pass with the rush of a train pitching itself recklessly out of control. We listen to the clamor as it goes on—a couple of miles or so—separating itself from the ill assortment of snarling and smashing and breaking and grunting that rises from the battlefield. ”

“ Fight well and hard against every enemy without and within, and those of your blood who come after you will look up proudly in that light of freedom and say, “The sire that went before me lit a lamp in those heroic days when Britain warred for right.” ”

“ Star shells sent up at intervals give a blinding light and the whole country-side is as light as day for a short time, then suddenly dark. It is this quick change that makes it hard to adjust our vision. ”

“ To these rubble-heaps, which were once villages, the inhabitants will come back one day, and they will scarcely know the north from the south. Indeed, if it were not for the fact that each rubble-heap bears a board whereon the name of the village is written, in order to preserve the site, they would never find their way there at all, for the earth they knew has become a strange country. Woods are mere patches of brown stumps knee-high—stumps which, with nature’s life restricted, are trying to break into leaf again at odd spots on the trunks where leaves never grew before. ”

“ It will take the cream of the American youth between the ages of eighteen and twenty-six to man America’s thousands of airplanes, and the double cream of youth to qualify as chasers in the Republic’s new aerial army. ”

“ Brave words from a brave man—a man who has proved his bravery and worth in what surely were as heartrending circumstances as ever any man had to face. My first sight of the Man Who Has Made Good was as he descended the stairs, painfully and with the aid of two sticks, into the hall of his lovely old home by the river at Pangbourne. ”

“ A battalion of men would be charred like burned sticks if this touched them for a second. There was another hissing noise, and there rolled very sluggishly over the field a thick, oily vapor, almost invisible as it mixed with the air, and carrying instant death to any man who should take a gulp of it. ”

“ You will go far before you will find a cleaner-faced aggregation of young men than the British Army in the field.
Should you have any doubt as to what the physical appearance of the men tells you, and ask an officer how Tommy is standing the strain of the war, he declares enthusiastically, “The men are simply splendid!” ”

“ With passionate earnestness Lauder cried: ‘Boys, think of that man who lit the lamp, for you are his successors, only in a much nobler and grander way. You are not lighting for a few hours the darkness of passing night. You are lighting an avenue of lights that will make it safe for the generations of all time. ”

“ GERMAN FALCON KILLED IN AIR-DUEL THE old days when armies ceased fighting to watch their two champions in single combat have come back again. It was on the Western front, and the engagement that resulted in the death of Immelman the Falcon, Germany’s most distinguished Ace, was in very truth a duel—no chance meeting of men determined to slay one another, but a formally arranged encounter, following a regular challenge, and fought by prearrangement and without interference. ”