In this book I have written about some aspects of the war which, I believe, the world must know and remember, not only as a memorial of men’s courage in tragic years, but as a warning of what will hap...

When Germany threw down her challenge to Russia and France, and England knew that her Imperial power would be one of the prizes of German victory (the common people did not think this, at first, but s...

When Germany threw down her challenge to Russia and France, and England knew that her Imperial power would be one of the prizes of German victory (the common people did not think this, at first, but s...

In 1915 the War Office at last moved in the matter of war correspondents. Lord Kitchener, prejudiced against them, was being broken down a little by the pressure of public opinion (mentioned from time...

In the very early days we lived in a small old house, called by courtesy a château, in the village of Tatinghem, near General Headquarters at St.-Omer. (Afterward we shifted our quarters from time to ...

Just at first⁠—though not for long⁠—there was a touch of hostility against us among divisional and brigade staffs, of the Regulars, but not of the New Army. They, too, suspected our motive in going to...

A young gunner officer whom we met was very civil, and stopped in front of the château of Vermelles, a big red villa with the outer walls still standing, and told us the story of its capture. “It was ...

The château of Vermelles, where that had happened, was an empty ruin, and there was no sign of the gilt furniture, or the long mirrors, or the marble Venus when I looked through the charred window-fra...

It was not long before we broke down the prejudice against us among the fighting units. The new armies were our friends from the first, and liked us to visit them in their trenches and their dugouts, ...

The Commander-in-Chief⁠—Sir John French⁠—received us when we were first attached to the British armies in the field⁠—a lifetime ago, as it seems to me now. It was a formal ceremony in the château near...

It was another commander-in-chief who received us some months after the battle of Loos, in a château near Montreuil, to which G.H.Q. had then removed. Our only knowledge of Sir Douglas Haig before tha...

I came to know General Headquarters more closely when it removed, for fresher air, to Montreuil, a fine old walled town, once within sight of the sea, which ebbed over the low-lying ground below its h...

There were shrill voices one morning outside the gate of our quarters⁠—women’s voices, excited, angry, passionate. An orderly came into the mess⁠—we were at breakfast⁠—and explained the meaning of the...

Going up to Kemmel one day I had to wait in battalion headquarters for the officer I had gone to see. He was attending a court martial. Presently he came into the wooden hut, with a flushed face. “Sor...

There were other men who could not stand shellfire. It filled them with an animal terror and took all willpower out of them. One young officer was like that man who “did not mind rifle-fire.” He, by s...

Shell-shock was the worst thing to see. There were generals who said: “There is no such thing as shell-shock. It is cowardice. I would court-martial in every case.” Doctors said: “It is difficult to d...

As war correspondents we were supposed to have honorary rank as captains, by custom and tradition⁠—but it amounted to nothing, here or there. We were civilians in khaki, with green bands round our rig...

General Haldane was friendly to the war correspondents⁠—he had been something of the kind himself in earlier days⁠—and we were welcomed at his headquarters, both when he commanded the 3rd Division and...

Gen. Sir Neville Macready was adjutant-general in the days of Sir John French, and I dined at his mess once or twice, and he came to ours on return visits. The son of Macready, the actor, he had a sub...

Scores of times, hundreds of times, during the battles of the Somme, I passed the headquarters of Gen. Sir Henry Rawlinson, commanding the Fourth Army, and several times I met the army commander there...

Of General Allenby, commanding the Third Army before he was succeeded by Gen. Sir Julian Byng and went to his triumph in Palestine, I knew very little except by hearsay. He went by the name of “The Bu...

I met many other generals who were men of ability, energy, high sense of duty, and strong personality. I found them intellectually, with few exceptions, narrowly molded to the same type, strangely lim...

As there are exceptions to every rule, so harsh criticism must be modified in favor of the generalship and organization of the Second Army⁠—of rare efficiency under the restrictions and authority of t...

By the time stationary warfare had been established on the western front in trench lines from the sea to Switzerland, the British Regular Army had withered away. That was after the retreat from Mons, ...

By the time stationary warfare had been established on the western front in trench lines from the sea to Switzerland, the British Regular Army had withered away. That was after the retreat from Mons, ...

The New Army was called into being by Lord Kitchener and his advisers, who adopted modern advertising methods to stir the sluggish imagination of the masses, so that every wall in London and great cit...

It was not until July of 1915 that the Commander-in-Chief announced that a part of the New Army was in France, and lifted the veil from the secret which had mystified people at home whose boys had gon...

I did not find any self-conscious patriotism among the rank and file of the New Army. The word itself meant nothing to them. Unlike the French soldier, to whom patriotism is a religion and who has the...

When the New Army first came out to learn their lessons in the trenches in the long days before open warfare, the enemy had the best of it in every way. In gunpowder and in supplies of ammunition he w...

Because the enemy was on the high ground and our men were in the low ground, many of our trenches were wet and waterlogged, even in summer, after heavy rain. In winter they were in bogs and swamps, up...

The city of Ypres was the capital of our battlefields in Flanders from the beginning to the end of the war, and the ground on which it stands, whether a new city rises there or its remnants of ruin st...

My memory goes back to a strange night in Ypres in those early days. It was Gullett, the Australian eyewitness, afterward in Palestine, who had the idea. “It would be a great adventure,” he said, as w...

The worst school of war for the sons of gentlemen was, in those early days, and for long afterward, Hooge. That was the devil’s playground and his chamber of horrors, wherein he devised merry tortures...

Here and there on the roadsides behind the lines queer sacks hung from wooden poles. They had round, red disks painted on them, and looked like the trunks of human bodies after Red Indians had been do...

Our men were not always in the trenches. As the New Army grew in numbers reliefs were more frequent than in the old days, when battalions held the line for long spells, until their souls as well as th...

One of the most curious little schools of courage inhabited by British soldiers in early days was the village of Vaux-sur-Somme, which we took over from the French, who were our next-door neighbors at...

At a place called the Pont de Nieppe, beyond Armentières⁠—a most “unhealthy” place in later years of war⁠—a bathing establishment was organized by officers who were as proud of their work as though th...

It was harvest-time in the summer of ’15, and Death was not the only reaper who went about the fields, although he was busy and did not rest even when the sun had flamed down below the belt of trees o...

For some time the War Office would not allow military bands at the front, not understanding that music was like water to parched souls. By degrees divisional generals realized the utter need of entert...

It was astonishing how loudly one laughed at tales of gruesome things, of war’s brutality⁠—I with the rest of them. I think at the bottom of it was a sense of the ironical contrast between the normal ...

On the hill at Wizerne, not far from the stately old town of St.-Omer (visited from time to time by monstrous night-birds who dropped high-explosive eggs), was a large convent. There were no nuns ther...

In those long days of trench warfare and stationary lines it was boredom that was the worst malady of the mind; a large, overwhelming boredom to thousands of men who were in exile from the normal inte...

At first, in the beginning of the war, our officers and men believed that it would have a quick ending. Our first Expeditionary Force came out to France with the cheerful shout of “Now we shan’t be lo...

In September of 1915 the Commander-in-Chief and his staff were busy with preparations for a battle, in conjunction with the French, which had ambitious objects. These have never been stated because th...

In September of 1915 the Commander-in-Chief and his staff were busy with preparations for a battle, in conjunction with the French, which had ambitious objects. These have never been stated because th...

The movements of troops and the preparations for big events revealed to every British soldier in France the “secret” of the coming battle. Casualty clearing-stations were ordered to make ready for big...

The town of Béthune was the capital of our army in the Black Country of the French coalfields. It was not much shelled in those days, though afterward⁠—years afterward⁠—it was badly damaged by long-ra...

In those villages⁠—Heuchin, Houdain, Lillers, and others⁠—on the edge of the Black Country the Scottish troops of the 15th Division were in training for the arena, practising attacks on trenches and v...

I watched the preliminary bombardment of the Loos battlefields from a black slag heap beyond Nœux-les-Mines, and afterward went on the battleground up to the Loos redoubt, when our guns and the enemy’...

In order to distract the enemy’s attention and hold his troops away from the main battlefront, “subsidiary attacks” were made upon the German lines as far north as Bellewarde Farm, to the east of Ypre...

Let me now tell the story of the main battle of Loos as I was able to piece it together from the accounts of men in different parts of the field⁠—no man could see more than his immediate neighborhood⁠...

Farther south the front-lines of the 15th (Scottish) Division climbed over their parapets at six-thirty, and saw the open ground before them, and the dusky, paling sky above them, and broken wire in f...

While the village of Loos was crowded with hunters of men, wounded, dead, batches of panic-stricken prisoners, women, doctors, Highlanders and Lowlanders “fey” with the intoxication of blood, London s...

To onlookers there were some of the signs of victory on that day of September 25th⁠—of victory and its price. I met great numbers of the lightly wounded men, mostly “Jocks,” and they were in exalted s...

To a field behind the railway station near the grimy village of Choques, on the edge of this Black Country of France, the prisoners were brought; and I went among them and talked with some of them, on...

During the battle, for several days I went with other men to various points of view, trying to see something of the human conflict from slag heaps and rising ground, but could only see the swirl and f...

In a despatch by Sir John French, dated October 15, 1915, and issued by the War Office on November 1st of that year, the Commander-in-Chief stated that: “In view of the great length of line along whic...

Meanwhile, at 6 p.m. on the evening of the first day of battle, the Guards arrived at Nœux-les-Mines. As I saw them march up, splendid in their height and strength and glory of youth, I looked out for...

The winter of 1915 was, I think, the worst of all. There was a settled hopelessness in it which was heavy in the hearts of men⁠—ours and the enemy’s. In 1914 there was the first battle of Ypres, when ...

The winter of 1915 was, I think, the worst of all. There was a settled hopelessness in it which was heavy in the hearts of men⁠—ours and the enemy’s. In 1914 there was the first battle of Ypres, when ...

The autumn of 1915 was wet in Flanders and Artois, where our men settled down⁠—knee-deep where the trenches were worst⁠—for the winter campaign. On rainy days, as I remember, a high wind hurtled over ...

The men remained in the trenches, and suffered horribly. I have told about lice and rats and mineshafts there. Another misery came to torture soldiers in the line, and it was called “trench-foot.” Man...

The Hohenzollern redoubt, near Fosse 8, captured by the 9th Scottish Division in the battle of Loos, could not be held then under concentrated gunfire from German batteries, and the Scots, and the Gua...

I heard no carols in the trenches on Christmas Eve in 1915, but afterward, when I sat with a pint of water in each of my top-boots, among a company of men who were wet to the knees and slathered with ...

There was more than half a gale blowing on the eve of the new year, and the wind came howling with a savage violence across the rain-swept fields, so that the first day of a fateful year had a stormy ...

The Canadians who were in the Ypres salient in January, 1916, and for a long time afterward, had a grim way of fighting. The enemy never knew what they might do next. When they were most quiet they we...

The Canadians were not the only men to go out raiding. It became part of the routine of war, that quick killing in the night, for English and Scottish and Irish and Welsh troops, and some had luck wit...

It was always astonishing, though afterward familiar in those battlefields of Flanders, to find oneself in the midst of so many nationalities and races and breeds of men belonging to that British fami...

Early in the morning of February 23rd there was a clear sky with a glint of sun in it, and airplanes were aloft as though it would be a good flying-day. But before midday the sky darkened and snow beg...

For some days in that February of 1916 the war correspondents in the Château of Tilques, from which they made their expeditions to the line, were snowed up like the army round them. Not even the motor...

The world⁠—our side of it⁠—held its breath and felt its own heartbeat when, in February of that year ’15, the armies of the German Crown Prince launched their offensive against the French at Verdun. I...

The British army took no part in that battle of Verdun, but rendered great service to France at that time. By February of 1915 we had taken over a new line of front, extending from our positions round...

It was then, in that February of ’15, that the city of Arras passed for defense into British hands and became from that time on one of our strongholds on the edge of the battlefields so that it will b...

While we hung on the news from Verdun⁠—it seemed as though the fate of the world were in Fort Douaumont⁠—our own lists of death grew longer. In the casualty clearing station by Poperinghe more mangled...

At the beginning of March there was a little affair⁠—costing a lot of lives⁠—in the neighborhood of St.-Eloi, up in the Ypres salient. It was a struggle for a dirty hillock called the Bluff, which had...

Going up to the line by Ypres, or Armentières, or Loos, I noticed in those early months of 1916 an increasing power of artillery on our side of the lines and a growing intensity of gunfire on both sid...

In that winter of discontent there was one great body of splendid men whose spirits had sunk to zero, seeing no hope ahead of them in that warfare of trenches and barbed wire. The cavalry believed the...

The winter of 1915⁠–⁠16 passed with its misery, and spring came again to France and Flanders with its promise of life, fulfilled in the beauty of wild flowers and the green of leaves where the earth w...

The winter of discontent had passed. Summer had come with a wealth of beauty in the fields of France this side the belt of blasted earth. The grass was a tapestry of flowers, and tits and warblers and...

During the battles of the Somme in 1916, and afterward in periods of progress and retreat over the abominable fields, the city of Amiens was the capital of the British army. When the battles began in ...

During the battles of the Somme in 1916, and afterward in periods of progress and retreat over the abominable fields, the city of Amiens was the capital of the British army. When the battles began in ...

The Street of the Three Pebbles⁠—la rue des Trois Cailloux⁠—which goes up from the station through the heart of Amiens, was the crowded highway. Here were the best shops⁠—the hairdresser, at the left-...

That was in the last phase of the war, but the Street of the Three Pebbles had been tramped up and down for two years before then by the British armies on the Somme, with the French on their right. I ...

I saw a scene with a French poilu one day in the Street of the Three Pebbles, during those battles of the Somme, when the French troops were fighting on our right from Maricourt southward toward Roye....

Into a small estaminet at the end of the rue des Trois Cailloux, beyond the Hôtel de Ville, came one day during the battles of the Somme two poilus, grizzled, heavy men, deeply bronzed, with white dus...

Australians slouched up the Street of the Three Pebbles with a grim look under their wide-brimmed hats, having come down from Pozières, where it was always hell in the days of the Somme fighting. I li...

I was billeted for a time with other war correspondents in an old house in the rue Amiral Courbet, on the way to the river Somme from the Street of the Three Pebbles, and with a view of the spire of t...

In the Street of the Three Pebbles there was a small estaminet into which I went one morning for a cup of coffee, while I read an Amiens news-sheet made up mostly of extracts translated from the leadi...

Some of our officers stationed in Amiens, and billeted in private houses, became very friendly with the families who received them. Young girls of good middle class, the daughters of shopkeepers and s...

It was my habit to go out at night for a walk through Amiens before going to bed, and generally turned river-ward, for even on moonless nights there was always a luminance over the water and one could...

The night in Amiens was dark and sinister when rain fell heavily out of a moonless sky. Hardly a torch-lamp flashed out except where a solitary woman scurried down the wet streets to lonely rooms. The...

The quickest way to the cathedral is down a turning on the right-hand side of the Street of the Three Pebbles. Charlie’s bar was on the left-hand side of the street, always crowded after six o’clock b...

Coming away from the cathedral through a side-street going into the rue des Trois Cailloux, I used to pass the Palais de Justice⁠—a big, grim building, with a long flight of steps leading up to its do...

The prettiest view of Amiens was from the banks of the Somme outside the city, on the east side, and there was a charming walk along the towpath, past market-gardens going down to the river on the opp...

There was a big hospital in Amiens, close to the railway station, organized by New Zealand doctors and nurses. I went there one day in the autumn of 1914, when the army of von Kluck had passed through...

The life of Amiens ended for a while, and the city was deserted by all its people, after the night of March 30, 1918, which will be remembered forever to the age-long history of Amiens as its night of...

It was a pitiful adventure to go through Amiens in the days of its desolation, and we who had known its people so well hated its loneliness. All abandoned towns have a tragic aspect⁠—I often think of ...

I suppose it was three months later when I saw the first crowds coming back to their homes in Amiens. The tide had turned and the enemy was in hard retreat. Amiens was safe again! They had never had a...

All that had gone before was but a preparation for what now was to come. Until July 1 of 1916 the British armies were only getting ready for the big battles which were being planned for them by someth...

All that had gone before was but a preparation for what now was to come. Until July 1 of 1916 the British armies were only getting ready for the big battles which were being planned for them by someth...

The British armies as a whole were not gloomy at the approach of that new phase of war which they called “The Great Push,” as though it were to be a glorified football-match. It is difficult, perhaps ...

In the month of May a new type of manhood was filling the old roads behind the front. I saw them first in the little old town of St.-Pol, where always there was a coming and going of French and Englis...

Boulogne was a port through which all our youth passed between England and the long, straight road which led to No Man’s Land. The seven-day-leave men were coming back by every tide, and all other lea...

On the 1st of July, 1916, began those prodigious battles which only lulled down at times during two and a half years more, when our British armies fought with desperate sacrificial valor beyond all pr...

I remember, as though it were yesterday in vividness and a hundred years ago in time, the bombardment which preceded the battles of the Somme. With a group of officers I stood on the high ground above...

There was the illusion of victory on that first day of the Somme battles, on the right of the line by Fricourt, and it was not until a day or two later that certain awful rumors I had heard from wound...

On the left, where the 8th and 10th Corps were directing operations, the assault had been delivered by the 4th, 29th, 36th, 49th, 32nd, 8th, and 56th Divisions. The positions in front of them were Gom...

I have told how, before “The Big Push,” as we called the beginning of these battles, little towns of tents were built under the sign of the Red Cross. For a time they were inhabited only by medical of...

The failure on the left hardly balanced by the partial success on the right caused a sudden pause in the operations, camouflaged by small attacks on minor positions around and above Fricourt and Mamet...

People who read my war despatches will remember my first descriptions of the tanks and those of other correspondents. They caused a sensation, a sense of excitement, laughter which shook the nation be...

One branch of our military machine developed with astonishing rapidity and skill during those Somme battles. The young gentlemen of the Air Force went “all out” for victory, and were reckless in audac...

I am not strong enough in the science of psychology to understand the origin of laughter and to get into touch with the mainsprings of gaiety. The sharp contrast between normal ethics and an abnormali...

The struggle of men from one low ridge to another low ridge in a territory forty miles wide by more than twenty miles deep, during five months of fighting, was enormous in its intensity and prolongati...

It was a colonel of the North Staffordshires who revealed to me the astounding belief that he was “immune” from shellfire, and I met other men afterward with the same conviction. He had just come out ...

In queer psychology there was a strange mingling of the pitiful and comic⁠—among a division (the 35th) known as the Bantams. They were all volunteers, having been rejected by the ordinary recruiting-o...

During these battles I saw thousands of German prisoners, and studied their types and physiognomy, and, by permission of Intelligence officers, spoke with many of them in their barbed-wire cages or on...

The struggle for the Pozières ridge and High Wood lasted from the beginning of August until the middle of September⁠—six weeks of fighting as desperate as any in the history of the world until that ti...

The goal of our desire seemed attained when at last we reached Bapaume after these terrific battles in which all our divisions, numbering nearly a million men, took part, with not much difference in c...

I have described what happened on our side of the lines, our fearful losses, the stream of wounded that came back day by day, the “Butchers’ Shops,” the agony in men’s souls, the shell-shock cases, th...

The name (that “bloodbath”) and the news of battle could not be hidden from the people of Germany, who had already been chilled with horror by the losses at Verdun, nor from the soldiers of reserve re...

All through July and August the enemy’s troops fought with wonderful and stubborn courage, defending every bit of broken woodland, every heap of bricks that was once a village, every line of trenches ...

By September 25th, when the British troops made another attack, the morale of the German troops was reaching its lowest ebb. Except on their right, at Beaumont Hamel and Beaucourt, they were far beyon...

During the two years that followed the battles of the Somme I recorded in my daily despatches, republished in book form (The Struggle in Flanders and The Way to Victory), the narrative of that continu...

During the two years that followed the battles of the Somme I recorded in my daily despatches, republished in book form (The Struggle in Flanders and The Way to Victory), the narrative of that continu...

During the German retreat to their Hindenburg line we saw the full ruthlessness of war as never before on the western front, in the laying waste of a beautiful countryside, not by rational fighting, b...

Sir Douglas Haig was not misled into the error of following up the German retreat, across that devastated country, with masses of men. He sent forward outposts to keep in touch with the German reargua...

The battles of the Third Army beyond Arras petered out and on June 7th there was the battle of Messines and Wytschaete when the Second Army revealed its mastery of organization and detail. It was the ...

The battle of Flanders began round Ypres on July 31st, with a greater intensity of artillery on our side than had ever been seen before in this war in spite of the Somme and Messines, when on big days...

During the four and a half months of that fighting the war correspondents were billeted in the old town of Cassel, where, perched on a hill which looks over a wide stretch of Flanders, through our gla...

At the end of those battles happened that surprising, audacious adventure in the Cambrai salient organized by the Third Army under General Byng, when on November 20, 1917, squadrons of tanks broke thr...

In the autumn of 1917 the Italian disaster of Caporetto had happened, and Sir Herbert Plumer, with his chief of staff, Sir John Harington, and many staff-officers of the Second Army, had, as I have to...

Ludendorff’s great offensive had failed and had turned to ruin. Some of the twenty-six fresh divisions under Rupprecht of Bavaria were put into the melting-pot to save the Crown Prince. The British ar...

After the armistice I went with our troops to the Rhine, and entered Cologne with them. That was the most fantastic adventure of all in four and a half years of strange and terrible adventures. To me ...

In this book I have written in a blunt way some episodes of the war as I observed them, and gained firsthand knowledge of them in their daily traffic. I have not painted the picture blacker than it wa...

In this book I have written in a blunt way some episodes of the war as I observed them, and gained firsthand knowledge of them in their daily traffic. I have not painted the picture blacker than it wa...

The people of all countries were deeply involved in the general blood-guiltiness of Europe. They made no passionate appeal in the name of Christ or in the name of humanity for the cessation of the sla...

The character of European peoples failed in common sense and in Christian charity. It did not fail in courage to endure great agonies, to suffer death largely, to be obedient to the old tradition of p...

What of England?⁠ ⁠… Looking back at the immense effort of the British people in the war, our high sum of sacrifice in blood and treasure, and the patient courage of our fighting-men, the world must, ...

The condition and psychology of their own country as they read about it in the Paris Daily Mail, which was first to come into their billets, filled some of these young men with distress and disgust, s...

The entire aspect of the war was changed by the Russian Revolution, followed by the collapse of the Russian armies and the Peace of Brest-Litovsk, when for the first time the world heard the strange w...

The men came home in a queer mood, startling to those who had not watched them “out there,” and to those who welcomed peace with flags. Even before their homecoming, which was delayed week after week,...

Out of such talk revolution is born, and revolution will not be averted by pretending that such words are not being spoken and that such thoughts are not seething among our working-classes. It will on...

The nation, so far, has not found a remedy for the evil that has overtaken us. Rather in a kind of madness that is not without a strange splendor, like a ship that goes down with drums beating and ban...