Lord Northcliffe's War Book: With Chapters on America at War

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George H. Doran Company, 1917 - 271 pages
 

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Page 129 - Is it financial, in view of the coming war loan? Is it dynastic? Or, is it intended to influence doubting neutrals? From the evidence of German deserters it is known that the attack was originally intended to take place a month or two hence, when the ground was dry. Premature spring caused the Germans to accelerate their plans. There were two final delays owing to bad weather, and then came the colossal onslaught of February 21. The Germans made a good many of the mistakes we made at Gallipoli.
Page 130 - Their avions were not idle, and, if confirmation were needed, it was given by deserters, who, surmising the horrors that were to come, crept out of the trenches at night, lay down by the edge of the Meuse till the morning, and then gave themselves up, together with information that has since proved to be accurate. Things went wrong with the Germans in other ways. A Zeppelin that was to have blown up important railway junctions on the French line of communications was brought down at Revigny, and...
Page 223 - The men in the dug-outs talk of a good many subjects, but there is one on which they are all agreed. That is the land question. They are not going back as labourers, or as tenants, but as owners. Lots of them have used their eyes and learned much about small farming here.
Page 135 - The tall towers of Verdun still stand. Close by us is a hidden French battery, and it is pretty to see the promptitude with which it sends its screaming shells back to the Germans within a few seconds of the dispatch of a missive from the Huns. One speedily grows accustomed to the sound and the scene, and can follow the position of the villages about which the Germans endeavour to mislead the world by wireless every morning.
Page 129 - They announced that something large was pending by closing the Swiss frontier. The French, who were not ready, were also warned by their own astute Intelligence Department. Their avions were not idle, and, if confirmation were needed, it was given by deserters, who, surmising the horrors that were to come, crept out of the trenches at night, lay down by the edge of the Meuse till the morning, and then gave themselves up, together with information that has since 1 This telegram (and the others) was,...
Page 135 - Verdun, from where I saw it, might be Perth, and the Meuse the Tay. Small groups of firs darken some of the hills, giving a natural resemblance to Scotland. The town is being made into a second Ypres by the Germans. Yet, as it stands out in the sunlight, it is difficult to realize that it is a place whose people have all gone, save a few of the faithful who live below ground.
Page 134 - ... pneumatic tyre advertisements on the village walls, the kilometre stone with its ten kilometres to Verdun, a village cure peacefully strolling along the village street, just as though it were March 1914 and his congregation had not been sent away from the war zone, while their houses were filled with a swarming army of men in pale blue. Such a wonderful blue, this new French invisible cloth ! A squadron of cavalry in the new blue and their steel helmets passes at the moment, and gives the impression...
Page 133 - Verdun might have been arrangel for the benefit of interested spectators, were it not that the whole zone for miles around the great scene is as tightly closed to the outer world as a lodge of Freemasons. Furnished with every possible kind of pass, accompanied by a member of the French Headquarters Staff in a military car driven by a chauffeur whose steel helmet marked him as a soldier, I was nevertheless held up by intractable gendarmes. My colleague, the chief of...
Page 133 - That the attack would certainly prove more costly to them than to the French the German Staff must have known. That the sufferings of the wounded lying out through the long nights of icy wind in the No-Man's Land between the lines would be great did not probably disturb the Crown Prince. It is one of the most gruesome facts in the history of the War that the French, peering through the moonlight at what they thought to be stealthily crawling Germans, found them to be wounded men frozen to death....
Page 111 - Scotch folk who, while generous in the giving of ambulances, are not accustomed to waste anything in war or at any other time. To-day, almost before the reek and fume of battle are over, almost before our own and the enemy dead are all buried, the Salvage Corps appears on the bloody and shell-churned scene to collect and pile unused cartridge and machine-gun belts, unexploded bombs, old shell cases, damaged rifles, haversacks, steel helmets, and even old rags, which go to the base, and are sold at...

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