New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915: April-September, 1915Various
History
New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915: April-September, 1915
Various
World War, 1914-1918
Look, Love! I lay my wistful hands in thine
A little while before you seek the dark,
Untraversed ways of War and its Reward,
I cannot bear to lift my gaze and mark
The gloried light of hopeful, high emprise
That, like a bird already poised for flight,
Has waked within your eyes.
For me no proud illusions point the road,
No fancied flowers strew the paths of strife:
War only wears a horrid, hydra face,
Mocking at strength and courage, youth and life.
If you were going forth to cross your sword
In fair and open, man-to-man affray,
One might be even reconciled and say,
"This is not murder; only passion bent
On pouring out its poison"--one could pray
That the day's end might see the madness done
And saner souls rise with the morrow's sun.
But this incarnate hell that yawns before
Your bright, brave soul keyed to the fighter's clench--
This purgatory that men call the "trench"--
This modern "Black Hole" of a modern war!
Yea, Love! yet naught I say can save you, so
I lay my heart in yours and let you go.
Stories of French Courage
By Edwin L. Shuman
[From THE NEW YORK TIMES, April, 1915.]
There has just appeared in Paris a book called "La Guerre Vue d'Une
Ambulance," which brings the war closer to the eye and heart than
anything else I have read. It is written by Abbé Felix Klein, Chaplain
of the American Ambulance Hospital at Neuilly, a suburb of Paris, and
has the added merit of describing the noble work which American money
and American Red Cross nurses are doing there for the French wounded.
The abbé, by the way, has twice visited the United States in recent
years, has many warm friends here, and has written several enthusiastic
books about the "Land of the Strenuous Life."
When the war broke out this large-hearted priest and busy author dropped
all his literary and other plans to minister to the wounded soldiers
brought to the war hospital established by Americans in the fine new
building of the Lycée Pasteur, which was to have received its first
medical students a few weeks later. There were 250 beds at first, and
later 500, with more than a hundred American automobiles carrying the
wounded to it, often direct from the front.
Through all these months Abbé Klein has labored day and night among
these sufferers, cheering some to recovery, easing the dying moments of
others with spiritual solace, and, hardest of all, breaking the news of
bereavement to parents.
From day to day, through those terrible weeks of fighting on the Aisne
and the Marne, with Paris itself in danger, the good abbé wrote brief
records of his hopes and fears regarding his wounded friends, and set
down in living words the more heroic or touching phases of their simple
stories. Let me translate a few of them for the reader.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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