Old Dame Nature abhors war as much as we do. When the troops left the battlefields, she covered them over with stuble, poppies and weeds… There were no trenches and certainly no shell holes… Two years have passed and now the battlefields are harvest lands once more.
A similar article about touring the old trench line can be read here.
Food writer Sam Aaron (1911 – 1996) let loose a slew of his well-researched thoughts on the matter of how well cheese and wine complement one another and provided us with a helpful list of which type of wines harmonize best with certain cheeses:
With Italian cheeses, such as Taleggio Cheese Provolone, I like a delicate red wine made near Verona called Bardolino. Frank Schoonmaker
A very moving column from the front page of the November 15, 1918 Stars and Stripes describing the joyous pandemonium that characterized the city of Paris when World War I came to a close:
And all Paris laughed the laugh of happy children after a day’s glad play. And the next day, and the next night, Paris sallied forth to romp and play again.
Click here to read about the W.W. II liberation of Paris.
In 1923, a seasoned war reporter returned to the battleground of Chateau Thierry and walk the old turf where so many had died.
The attached remembrance of sniping on the Western Front was written by Major H. Hesketh-Pritchard, D.S.O, M.C. (author of Sniping in France 1914-18) and recalls the development and changes of sharp-shooting on both sides during the war. Pritchard broke down the scouting and sniper involvement on the Western Front into four phases:
Phase I (1914 – 1915): German snipers weigh heavily on Allied soldiers (Clear German advantage)
Phase II (1915 – 1916): British sniping organized (Advantage even)
Phase III (1916 – 1918): British sniper program takes off (Slight British Advantage)
Phase IV (1918 through to the Armistice): Allied Offensive takes effect (Snipers began scouting)
This piece was penned by an anonymous expatriate, a former American soldier of the Great War who went into some detail comparing life in 1920s Paris to the life he knew in America, and he is quite funny about it. He described a Paris that Hemingway, Stein and Fitzgerald didn’t talk about.
Back in America I sincerely thought that my hometown had the worst telephone system in the world. This was a colossal error…
Click here to read about the fall of Paris…
Written during the closing weeks of the war, this Vanity Fair article was penned by a rather sly, witty scribe who was astounded to find that those areas closest to the front, yet just outside the entrances to the reserve trenches, were jam-packed with all manner of civilian tourist groups (ie. The American Woman’s Bouillon Cube Fund, The Overseas Committee of the New and Enlarged Encyclopedia, The National Mushroom Association of the United States); an exercise in creative writing? You tell us.
Despite its almost unanimous vows testified to by countless rounded phrases in trenches and billets, a good share of the A.E.F. is returning to France. It is almost chasing its own tail in the effort to get back, for it was only a few weeks ago that newspapers everywhere said that the last of the A.E.F. was home. And before the rear guard of the A.E.F. was aboard boats headed westward, the vanguard of the returning A.E.F. was pouring back into France through every port.
Written in a playful spirit, an anonymous Doughboy tells the tale of his return to the old trench lines in order to conduct tours of the A.E.F. battlefields for that morbid class of souls we know call death tourists.
A second article on trench tours of the Twenties can be read here
Second only to the part played by Canada on the battlefields of Europe is the magnificent spirit in which the dominion has dealt with the returned soldier and with the fallen soldier and his dependents. From the time the war ended to the present, Canada has led the rest of the world in looking after ex-service men.
When the men of the Dominion returned from Europe they originally got three months’ post-discharge pay at their discharge rank. On second thought this was changed early in 1919 to a war gratuity basis, as follows: For one year’s overseas service or more, four months’ pay and allowances; for three years’ service or more, six months’ pay and allowances. From these amounts deducted any sum paid out under the post-discharge system which had earlier prevailed. The men who had seen service in Canada only were not forgotten and received checks for one month’s pay and allowances for each complete year of service in the army.
This unprepossessing place is the American survivor of a great international movement, the Bauhaus of Dessau, which filled the world with tubular chairs and sectional sofas. The Bauhaus, like so many other things German, drew Hitler’s ire because it was too intellectually independent. Hitler dissolved it in 1938…Some fragments of Bauhaus fled to America. Dr Laszalo Moholy-Nagy escaped with some remnants of students’ work and saught refuge in Chicago. There, in his concrete warehouse, Moholy-Nagy’s movement has taken root.
They do the oddest things…A chair might just be a double loop of shellacked plywood. It is steamed and shaped so that it has a seat, and a back, and stands on the floor…It doesn’t look like much of a chair. It will do the job for which chairs are sold.
As early as 1920, the number of automobiles was quickly growing throughout the Western world. In this very brief article, a journalist lays out how rapidly life was changing in the United States as a result of the horseless carriage.
The village smithy is no more. In the place of that interesting relic of a bygone day, there stands a substantial concrete building marked ‘Garage’…
Attached is Martha Gellhorn’s (1908 – 1998) very disturbing eyewitness account of the Nazi concentration camp in Dachau, Poland:
Nothing about war was ever as insanely wicked as these starved and outraged naked, nameless dead. Behind one pile of dead lay the clothed healthy bodies of the German guards who had been found in this camp. They were killed at once by the prisoners when the American Army entered.
The man primarily responsible for delivering the innocent into the ovens of the death camps was Obergrupenfuehrer Albert Ganzenmüller click here to read about him…
In this 1964 article, the cherished Gospel singer Mahalia Jackson (1911 – 1972) explained for the reader the relationship she had with the Almighty and further remarked that this relationship was the exact one God required from Christians:
– you have to have a made-up mind. You don’t straddle the fence serving God; we must put our all on the alter and let God abide.
This book review of Scott Nearing’s Black America
was published on the eve of the Great Depression and it provides a very accurate account of that community.
There are in the United States today, if statistics do not lie, some twelve million Negroes. The population of the Argentine is not so large, nor that of Holland, nor that of Sweden. Eight million of these dark Americans live in the South. In Georgia alone there are more than a million colored people…How do they live – these blacks in a country controlled by whites.
Author Scott Nearing (1883 – 1983) was an American naturalist, educator and civil rights advocate.
Click here to read an article by Ralph Ellison concerning Black writers of the 1930s.
A small notice from 1947 that reported on the archdiocese of St. Louis standing up in favor of racially integrating their school system – while simultaneously threatening excommunication to all members of the flock who contested the decision.
President Truman was re-elected in 1948 by a slender margin of 52,000 votes in the circulation area of The Chicago Defender, which almost alone of all the newspapers of all kinds in that area, supported Truman. After the election it published a boastful full-page advertisement –
What is the Negro press? Primarily it is a protest press demanding the correction of injustice to colored people. ‘We are organs of protest,’ explains Thomas W. Young, publisher of the Norfolk Journal and Guide, ‘born more than a hundred years ago in righteous indignation over the institution of slavery.’
Starting in the 1940s, small articles like the one here began appearing in magazines and newspapers across the nation – snippets indicating that the American people (ie. whites) were slowly catching on to the system of racial injustice they had inherited – and wondering aloud as to the tyranny of it all:
To 13 co-eds at Uppsala College, East Orange, N.J., democracy is something more than a worn text-book theory. It is a living, though thorny, reality. Shortly before school’s end, they formed one of the nation’s first interracial, interfaith college social sororities.
Another article about segregation’s end can be read here.
