Antwerp to Gallipoli: A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind ThemRuhl, Arthur
History
Antwerp to Gallipoli: A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them
Ruhl, Arthur
World War, 1914-1918 -- Personal narratives
ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI
A Year of the War on Many Fronts--and Behind Them
by Arthur Ruhl
with Illustrations from Photographs
Contents
Chapters
I. "The Germans Are Coming!"
II. Paris at Bay
III. After the Marne
IV. The Fall of Antwerp I
V. Paris Again-and Bordeaux: Journal of a Flight from a London Fog
VI. "The Great Days"
VII. Two German Prison Camps
VIII. In the German Trenches at La Bassée
IX. The Road to Constantinople: Rumania and Bulgaria
X. The Adventure of the Fifty Hostages
XI. With the Turks at the Dardanelles
XII. Soghan-Dere and the Flier of Ak-Bash
XIII. A War Correspondents' Village
XIV. Cannon Fodder
XV. East of Lemberg: Through Austria-Hungary to the Galician Front
XVI. In the Dust of the Russian Retreat
Chapter I
The Germans Are Coming!
The Germans had already entered Brussels, their scouts were reported on
the outskirts of Ghent; a little farther now, over behind the horizon
wind-mills, and we might at any moment come on them.
For more than a fortnight we had been hurrying eastward, hearing,
through cable despatches and wireless, the far-off thunder of that vast
gray tide rumbling down to France. The first news had come drifting in,
four thousand miles away, to the little Wisconsin lake where I was
fishing. A strange herd of us, all drawn in one way or another by the
war, had caught the first American ship, the old St. Paul, and, with
decks crowded with trunks and mail-bags from half a dozen ships, steamed
eastward on the all but empty ocean. There were reservists hurrying to
the colors, correspondents, men going to rescue wives and sisters. Some
were hit through their pocketbooks, some through their imaginations--
like the young women hoping to be Red Cross nurses, or to help in some
way, they weren't sure how.
One had a steamer chair next mine--a pale, Broadway tomboy sort of girl
in a boyish sailor suit, who looked as if she needed sleep. Without
exactly being on the stage, she yet appeared to live on the fringe of
it, and combined the slangy freedoms of a chorus girl with a certain
quick wisdom and hard sense. It was she who discovered a steerage
passenger, on the Liverpool dock, who had lost his wife and was bringing
his four little children back to Ireland from Chicago, and, while the
other cabin passengers fumed over their luggage, took up a collection
for him then and there.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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