The attached W.W. I letter is a reflection on the effects of war upon character written by a British officer on the western front to his wife.
"You need not fear for a 'disgraceful peace' coming from fatigue on the part of the fighting men. It is the resolution of the talking men you will need to look to."
No truer words... A colored scan of the widely distributed seventy-word letter that Britain's King George V wrote to all members of the American military who had stepped on British soil. The letter is dated April, 1918 and was made to appear as though it was from the King's private stationery; the Windsor Castle letterhead is engraved in scarlet while the cursive body of the letter (in dark gray ink) is beautifully printed below in the conventional manner. It would seem that the California Doughboy who received this particular letter was not impressed; he simply turned it over and addressed a letter to his parents. A ghastly story from a 1914 front is told in this letter written by British trooper S. Cargill as he recalled a skirmish between German Lancers and British cavalry. This World War I letter makes for a wonderful read and it gives such a vivid picture of what the war must have been like once both sides had resigned themselves to trench warfare. The letter was dated October 8, 1914 and the British officer who composed it makes clear his sense that no war had ever been fought in this queer manner before. An interesting letter written during the opening weeks of the war by a Canadian officer stationed with a British Guard regiment. The letter is filled with earnest enthusiasm: "We are all one in aim, in spirit and in that indefinable quality of loyal co-operation which holds together the British Army fighting against enormous odds in France, as it binds together the British Empire by bonds not less strong because they are invisible." A letter written by the celebrated playwright George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1957) to an Austrian friend that appeared in the "Munichener Neueste Nachrichten" as well as the "Frankfurter Zeitung" in April, 1915: "At that time scarcely one of the leading newspapers took heed of my insistence that this war was an imperialistic war and popular only in so far as all wars are for a time popular."
Click here to read Shaw on the Titanic disaster...
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