“ When the country and the empire are in danger, all private sorrows must be put aside! The Crown Prince has no time to grieve or to think of the void and bereavement which he will feel on his victorious return to Munich. He lives for and with his army, and is like a father to each and all of his soldiers. He devotes all his power of mind, all his physical strength, all his time, to the one great object which dominates all else in the minds of the whole German army. ”

“ They come from the first-line trenches, which are three or four kilometers away, and are carrying a "gravely wounded" man to an underground hospital, which is some quarter of an hour away. They also had not foreseen this vicious sun that scorches one's head; they are wearing their helmets and cloaks, and they feel the weight of them as much as that of the precious load which they take such pains to carry steadily; more, they drag along, on each foot, a thick shell of sticky mud which gives them feet like elephants, and the sweat runs in big drops over their fine, tired faces. ”

“ Instinctively I thought of what Kipling had said to me in London:
"Somewhere over there," he had said, "the thing will suddenly grip your throat and your heart; it will take hold of you as nothing in your life has ever done or ever will." And I know that I never shall forget those lines of quiet, patient, middle-aged men marching to the sound of the guns, leaving at their backs the countless graves that hold the youth of France, the men who had known the Marne, the Yser, Champagne, who had known death for nearly two years, night and day, almost constantly. ”

“ It is as if the gaiety of these soldiers, in spite of the gloomy weather, had communicated itself to the ruined surroundings. And how full of splendid health and spirits they seem! I see no more on any faces that somewhat startled, haggard expression, common at the beginning of the war. The outdoor life, combined with good food, has bronzed the cheeks of these men whom the shrapnel has spared, but their principal support and stay is their complete confidence, their conviction that they have already gained the upper hand and are marching to victory. ”

“ The British were fighting hard for the castle and having a bad time under its fire. A tank came to help them and advanced under the swish of bullets to the German emplacements, lurching up the piled bags over the heaped-up earth and squatting on the top like a grotesque creature playing the old game of "I'm king of the castle. Get down, you dirty rascals."
The "dirty rascals," who were German soldiers, unshaven and uncovered in the wet mud, did not like the look of their visitors, who were firing with great ferocity. ”

“ But a hundred miles east of Paris there begins a new world. The graves, the shell-cursed villages, remain, but this is no longer the France of the Marne fighting and of the war of two years ago. At Vitry-le-François you pass almost without warning into the region which is the back of the front of to-day, the base of all the line of fire from Rheims to the Meuse, and suddenly along the road appear the canvas guideposts which bear the terse warning, "Verdun." ”

“ The first notice that the ship was finally arriving came with the roar of salutes from French patrol boats in the outer harbor. Then the British troopships hastily shifted their anchorage to allow the boat with its all-important cargo to dock at the principal wharf. There a huge American flag was flung to the breeze from the topmost part of the landing stage, while on the dock itself a brilliant, colorful assembly awaited, cheering so that their welcome must have been heard far out over the waters as the boat slowly nosed her way between the whistle-shrieking and gun-barking craft in between. ”

“ Next moment every man is hurriedly pulling his gas helmet over his head, while Lieutenant Waddell beats a frenzied tocsin upon the instrument provided for the purpose—to wit, an empty eighteen-pounder shell, which, suspended from a bayonet stuck into the parados (or back wall) of the trench, makes a most efficient alarm-gong. The sound is repeated all along the trench, and in two minutes every man is in his place, cowled like a member of the Holy Inquisition, glaring through an eye-piece of mica, and firing madly into the approaching wall of vapour. ”

“ It would be an easy business to wipe out that working-party, over there by the barbed wire, with a machine-gun. It would be child's play to shell the road behind the enemy's trenches, crowded as it must be with ration-wagons and water-carts, into a blood-stained wilderness. But so long as each side confines itself to purely defensive and recuperative work, there is little or no interference. That slave of duty, Zacchæus, keeps on pegging away; and occasionally, if a hostile patrol shows itself too boldly, there is a little exuberance from a machine-gun ”

“ Unmistakably, too, you feel that this is the business of war; you are in a factory, a machine shop; if the product is death and destruction, it is no less a matter of machinery, not of romance, of glamour. The back of the front is a place of work and of rest for more work, but of parade, of the brilliant, of the fascinating there is just nothing. ”

“ It had been here as it had been in Belgium—the soldiers were intoxicated with savagery and the lust of destruction. In such an army there may be a thousand scoundrels amongst a hundred thousand decent men; but scoundrels create new scoundrels, drink begets coarseness, and coarseness begets violence. Old men are mocked and tortured, women outraged without mercy, and innocent little children are made to suffer without pity. Men have to pay for their hate and their defiance, even though honest and justifiable, with military retribution, merely because one of them has been impudent. ”

“ Soon the old Serbia of King Milas was completely in the hands of the Germans, while the Bulgarians drove out the population of Serbian Macedonia.
As a consequence the only refuge left was Novi Bazar. Into this narrow space poured an endless tide of refugees. Gaunt, hollow-eyed men, women and children dragged themselves wearily for hundreds of kilometers, bound they knew not whither. Always behind them they heard the inexorable thunder of the guns, warning them to press on and on. Thousands fell by the wayside, succumbing to cold and hunger. ”

“ The guns were sounding more clearly, and suddenly there was a sense not of soldiers, but of an army. On one side of the road a column was coming toward us, a column of men who were leaving the trenches for a rest, the men who for the recent days had held the first line. Wearily but steadily they streamed by; the mud of the trenches covered their tunics; here and there a man had lost his steel helmet and wore a handkerchief about his head, probably to conceal a slight wound that but for the helmet had killed him. ”

“ It was queer enough, as I described a day or two ago when one of the British airmen flew over a motor car and engaged in a revolver duel with the German officer, but even that strange picture is less weird than when a German airplane flew low over a tank and tried to put out its "eyes" by a burst of machine gun bullets.
Imagine the scene, that muddy monster, crawling through the slime with sharp stabs of fire coming from its flanks and above an engine with wings, swooping round and about it like an angry albatross and spattering its armor with bullets. ”

“ Thirty million soldiers, each living a great human story—this is the real drama of the Great War as it is being written into the hearts and memories of the men at the front. If these soldiers could be gathered around one camp-fire, and each soldier could relate the most thrilling moment of his experience—what stories we would hear! ”

“ It was full night when our car came down the curved grades into Bar-le-Duc, halted at the corner, where soldiers performed the work of traffic policemen and steadily guided the caravan toward the road marked by a canvas sign lighted within by a single candle and bearing the one word, "Verdun." All night, too, the rumble of the passing transport filled the air and the little hotel shook with the jar of the heavy trucks, for neither by day nor by night is there a halt in the motor transport, and the sound of this grinding is never low. ”

“ Tired men, returning from ration-drawing or sap-digging, throw themselves down and fall dead asleep in a moment. Only the sentries, with their elbows on the parapet, maintain their sleepless watch. From behind the enemy's lines comes a deep boom—then another. The big guns are waking up again, and have decided to commence their day's work by speeding our empty ration-wagons upon their homeward way. Let them! So long as they refrain from practising direct hits on our front-line parapet, and disturbing our brief and hardly-earned repose, they may fire where they please. ”

“ It is almost funny in a village that is being shelled. Things simply disappear. You are standing in an archway a little back from the road—a shriek of shrapnel. The windows are broken and the tiles rush clattering into the street, while little bullets and bits of shell jump like red-hot devils from side to side of the street, ricochetting until their force is spent. ”

“ For a hundred miles there have been only women and old men, but now there are only soldiers; they fill the streets; they crowd the doorways of the houses. The fields are filled with tents, with horses, with all the impedimenta of an army. The whole countryside is a place of arms. Every branch of French service is about you—Tunisians, Turcos, cavalry, the black, the brown and the white—the men who yesterday or last week were in the first line, who rest and will return to-morrow or next day to fight again. ”

“ Now the sergeant wanted to tell his august master how gallantly the Prince had borne himself and what an example he had been to the soldiers. The letter was simply and ingenuously written and showed how deep and strong is the loyalty which binds the German Army to its supreme Chief and Emperor. The loyalty and unity between Emperor and people, between Commander and Army, form the firm and immovable rock on which the German Empire has been built up. ”

“ Ninety-two passengers of the Lusitania who formed part of that pitiful handful of maimed, dead and dying brought ashore with the survivors of the disaster that followed the attack on the vessel by a German submarine were buried with services that have no parallel in history. Under a sky in which not a single cloud floated and to the strains of hymns played by British soldiers they were laid to rest two miles behind Queenstown in a cemetery bursting with spring greenery and tucked between hills flaming with gorse. ”

“ Suddenly in the midst of a peaceful countryside, after passing a score of undisturbed villages, villages so like one another, you come to one upon which the storm has burst, and instead of snug houses, smiling faces, the air of contentment and happiness that was France, there is only a heap of ruins, houses with their roofs gone, their walls torn by shell fire, villages abandoned partially or wholly, contemporary Pompeiis, overtaken by the Vesuvius of Krupp. ”

“ There was a legend of a man of ice and of iron, a man who made victory out of human material as a man makes a wall of mortar and stone, a man to whom his material was only mortar and stone, even though it were human. This legend has perished so far as Kitchener is concerned, gone with so much that England trusted and believed two years ago, but I find myself thinking now of Pétain as we all thought of Kitchener in his great day.
If I were an officer I should not like to come to the defender of Verdun with the confession of failure. ”

“ Will the French not give up from sheer exhaustion of strength?" I do not think so, now that I have seen the faces of these hundreds of men as they marched to the trenches beyond Verdun. France may bleed to death, but I do not think that while there are men there will be an end of the sacrifice. No pen or voice can express the horror that these men, that all Frenchmen, have of this war, of all war, the weariness. They hate it; you cannot mistake this; but France marches to the frontier in the spirit that men manned the walls against the barbarians in the other days; there is no other way ”