Published a few months after the war began, this German short story was written about a particular front line rifle company and the contempt that they shared for one of their officers. It's a good read. The "Napoleon" who plays the Monday-morning-quarterback in these columns was created by the tireless researcher Walter Noble Burns (1872 – 1932); his version of Bonaparte explains what went wrong on the Western Front and how he would have beat the Kaiser - but not before he dishes out liberal amounts of defamation for the senior commands on both sides of No Man's Land.
"The war's stupendous blunders and stupendous, useless tragedies made me turn over in my sarcophagus beneath the dome of the Invalides. I can not conceive how military men of even mediocre intelligence could have permitted the Allied Army to waste its time by idly lobbing over shells during a three-years' insanity of deadlocked trench warfare."
Click here to read an article about life in a W.W. I German listening post...
Illustrated with as many as twelve pictures, this article from Architectural Record There were many benevolent organizations that volunteered to go abroad and cheer up the American military personnel serving in W.W. I Europe; groups such as the Jewish Welfare Board, the Knights of Columbus, the War Camp Community Service and the Salvation Army - to name just a few, but the Y.M.C.A. (Young Men's Christian Association) was the only one among them that irked the Doughboys. In this 1919 exposé former STARS and STRIPES reporter Alexander Woollcott (1887 - 1943) levels numerous charges against the Y, believing that they had misrepresented their intentions when they asked the War Department to grant them passage. Woolcott maintains that their primary mission was proselytizing rather than relief work.
Click here to read another article about the YMCA.
From Amazon: My Hut: A Memoir of a YMCA Volunteer in World War One
While Western Europe was all ablaze during the Spring of 1915, many Americans were tapping their toes to a catchy tune titled, "I Didn't Raise my Boy to be a Soldier" (by Alfred Bryan and Al Piantadosi). This really irked the editors at THE SPECTATOR who let their fingers trip across the typewriter keyboard at a tremendous speed spewing-out all sorts of unflattering adjectives; they even went so far as to rewrite a few verses.
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