Find old World War 1 articles here. Find information on uniforms, women, gas warfare, prisoners of war and more.
From our humor department came this submission that first appeared in a British Army Trench magazine.
‘Our Special Reporter at the Armistice Table” (The B.E.F. Times, 1918) Read More »
This article is essentially a collection of lyrics from an assortment of songs sung by the Black Doughboys who were charged with the task of loading and unloading trucks far behind the front line trenches during the First World War. It was written in 1927 to serve as a review for Singing Soldiers
All dese colored soldiers comin’ over to France
All dese soldiers an’ me
Goin’ to help de Whites make de Kaiser dance
All dese soldiers an’ me…
‘Soldier Man Blues” (Literary Digest, 1927) Read More »
Gas, even in its most virulent form, is the most rational as well as the most humane weapon ever employed on the battlefield. It is also – and this should certainly be of interest to the advocates of strict neutrality – the only weapon in the arsenal of Mars which can truly be called defensive.
‘The Pleasures of Gas Warfare” (Literary Digest, 1937) Read More »
This historic article first appeared in a 1919 issue of The Crisis and served to document the official discrimination against African-Americans who served both in the ranks and as officers in the American Army during the First World War. The article includes the communications from high-ranking American officers to the French military authorities, conveying their suggestions as to how America’s black Doughboys were to be treated.
W.E.B. Du Boise and the Documents of U.S. Army Prejudice (The Crises, 1919 Read More »
At the thirty-fifth annual Church Congress of the Protestant Episcopal Church (1919), clergy members seemed to agree that Christian leaders were needlessly complicit
Christianity has betrayed itself body and soul.
If you would like to read about the spirit of disillusion that permeated post-war literature, click here.
In the War’s Aftermath Came Spiritual Disillusion (Current Opinion Magazine, 1919) Read More »
The Paris Victory Parade celebrating the end of the 1914 – 1918 war was a long awaited and much anticipated fashion event and Mme. Parisienne was not going to miss it for all the crepe de Chin in China. This VOGUE correspondent contrasted the Paris that existed a short time earlier, the gray, deserted Paris with the Paris of the 1919 Victory Parade and notes how eager the natives were to recreate that mirthful, light-hearted Paris of 1913 that they all remembered so well. There is a great sense of joie de vivre throughout the article, but it very rapidly becomes a laundry list concerning who-wore-what-where.
Victory and Paris Fashion (Vogue Magazine, 1919) Read More »
This article is composed of a couple of paragraphs recalling the damages caused to American shipping as a result of the U-Boat menace on the East Coast of the United States during the First World War. Written at a time when the U.S. was once again having to deal with the same threat, this time by Admiral Karl Dönitz (1891 – 1980), the journalist wished that Henry J. James, the author of German Subs In Yankee Waters
be properly credited for having devised many of the more successful countermeasures.
German Submarines in American Waters (Coronet Magazine, 1941) Read More »
In this 1920 article the theologian George Burman Foster (1858 – 1918), examined the writings of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 – 1900) and surmised how that philosopher might have understood the First World War, with all of it’s scientific and industrial power.
War constitutes one of of those dangerous ‘experiments’ undertaken by the wise man to further the progress of life, to test the value of an idea, of life. Hence, war is beneficial, good in itself; and thus Nietzsche predicts without dismay or regret that Europe is not far from entering into a period of great wars when nations will fight with one another for the mastery of the world.
Click here to read about the Nazi interpretation of Nietzsche.
Nietzsche and World War One (Sewanee Review, 1920) Read More »
An illustration of the insignia patch and a brief account of the origins, deployments and war-time activities of the U.S. Army’s Twenty-Sixth Division
(a.k.a. the Yankee Division
)during World War I.
The New England National Guard: Twenty-Sixth Division (The Stars and Stripes, 1919) Read More »
Throughout much of World War I, the German-American war correspondent Karl Von Wiegand (1874 – 1961) reported on the goings-on within the Kaiser’s Army for an American new syndicate. As luck would have it, he happened to be in a front line German trench when the British Army launched their enormous attack on July 1, 1916. Here is one of his earlier dispatches from the German side:
We stood awe-stricken. Mankind, like Frankenstein, was being devoured by the monster it had created.
With the Germans on the Somme (The Cambridge Magazine, 1916) Read More »
