Military Books

CHAPTER I DOWNING STREET AND THE MAN ON THE SPOT The failure of British administration in South Africa during the nineteenth century forms a blemish upon the record of the Victorian era that is at first sight difficult to understand. If success could be won in Canada, Australia and New Zealand, in India and in Egypt, why failure in South Africa? For failure it was. A century of wars, missionary effort,... more...

I. THE ISONZO FRONT1My first impressions of the Italian war centre upon Udine. So far I had had only a visit to Soissons on an exceptionally quiet day and the sound of a Zeppelin one night in Essex for all my experience of actual warfare. But my bedroom at the British mission in Udine roused perhaps extravagant expectations. There were holes in the plaster ceiling and wall, betraying splintered laths,... more...

WHAT IS IMPERIALISM? [Tuesday, May 8th, 1900] The present age has rewritten the annals of the world, and set its own impress on the traditions of humanity. In no period has the burden of the past weighed so heavily upon the present, or the interpretation of its speculative import troubled the heart so profoundly, so intimately, so monotonously. How remote we stand from the times when Raleigh could sit... more...

CHAPTER I. SOURCES OF THE DELTA. Official records in the archives of the War Department at Washington will preserve for future posterity the record of Battery D, of the 311th United States Field Artillery. In those records there is written deep and indelibly the date of May 30th, 1919, as the date of Battery D's official demobilization. The history of Battery D, therefore, can be definitely... more...

CHAPTER I ATTACK ON BELGIUM The first great campaign on the western battle grounds in the European War began on August 4, 1914. On this epoch-making day the German army began its invasion of Belgium—with the conquest of France as its ultimate goal. Six mighty armies stood ready for the great invasion. Their estimated total was 1,200,000 men. Supreme over all was the Emperor as War Lord, but... more...

INTRODUCTORY REMARKS. The conflict known in America as the French and Indian War, and in Europe as the Seven Years' War, originated in disputes between the French and English colonists, in the New World, concerning territorial limits. For a century the colonies of the two nations had been gradually expanding and increasing in importance. The English, more than a million in number, occupied the... more...

I.MILITARY PRISONERS. The cases of bad treatment of prisoners in Germany have been made known very widely. No one, I imagine, can wish to defend bad treatment of prisoners anywhere (even of criminal prisoners), and such a horrible state of things as that of Wittenberg during the typhus epidemic is a disgrace to human nature. But Mr. Lithgow Osborne says: “My whole impression of the camp authorities... more...

I OFF TO THE FRONT "It is my Royal and Imperial Command that you concentrate your energies, for the immediate present upon one single purpose, and that is that you address all your skill and all the valor of my soldiers to exterminate first the treacherous English and walk over General French's contemptible little army." While this Imperial Command of the Kaiser was being written, Atkins,... more...

CHAPTER I. L'ENVOI. The history of the Gatling Gun Detachment, Fifth Army Corps, is to a certain extent the history of the Santiago campaign. The detachment was organized on the spur of the moment, to utilize material which would otherwise have been useless, and was with the Fifth Corps in all the campaign. It participated in all the fighting of that campaign, except the fight at La Guasimas, and... more...

LIFE AND MATTER AT WAR "Comprendre et ne pas s'indigner": this has been said to be the last word of philosophy. I believe none of it; and, had I to choose, I should much prefer, when in presence of crime, to give my indignation rein and not to understand. Happily, the choice has not to be made. On the contrary, there are forms of anger which, by a thorough comprehension of their objects,... more...