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
avalanche long enough, these Belgians, and one felt as one would to see
lost children get home again or some one dragged from under the wheels.
Chapter V
Paris Again--And Bordeaux: Journal of a Flight from a London Fogs
These notes began in a London fog and ended in the south of France. I
had hoped, on reaching Calais, to work in toward the fighting along the
Yser, but, finding it impossible, decided to turn about and travel away
from the front instead of toward it--down to see Bordeaux while it was
still the temporary capital, and to see what life might be like in the
French provincial towns in war time.
It was not, so the young woman at the hotel desk in London said, what
you would call a fog, because she could still see the porter at the
street-door--yet day after day the same rain, smoky mist, and unbroken
gloom.
One breakfasted and tramped the streets by lamplight, as if there were
no such thing as sun---recalled vaguely a world in which it used to be--
woods with the leaves turning, New York on a bright autumn morning,
enchanted tropical dawns.
Through this viscous envelope--a sort of fungi thrown off by it--
newspapers kept appearing--slaughter and more slaughter, hatred, the
hunt for spies, more hysterical and shrill. One looked for fairness
almost as for the sun, and, merely by blackguarding long enough men who
could not answer back and, after all, were flinging their lives away
bravely over there in France, one ended by giving them the very
qualities they were denied.
They faded out as one picture on a stereopticon screen fades into
another--even as one read "Huns" for the thousandth time the Huns turned
into kindly burghers smoking pipes and singing songs. In the same way
the England of tradition--Shakespeare, Dickens, Meredith, jolly old
rumbling London, rides 'cross country, rows on the river--faded into
this nightmare of hate and smoky lamplight. The psychology was very
simple, but too much, it seems, for censors and even editors. And,
unfortunately, at a time like this not the light-hearted, sportsmanlike
fighting men at the front, nor sober people left behind in homes, but
newspapers are likely to be an outsider's most constant companions.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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