Articles from 1921
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.
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.
Communist uprisings in Germany are blamed on Moscow by a practically unanimous Berlin press, and some newspapers flatly accuse the Russian official representative in Berlin, a Mr. Kopp, and his staff, of being the instigators of these disturbances, and so demand their expulsion.
Professor Albert Einstein, whose theories on space, light and infinity have made his name familiar throughout the world, thinks this small planet on which we live is suffering from narrowness in its point of view. Too much nationalism – that is Professor Einstein’s definition of the ‘disease from which mankind is suffering today.’
The deans who presided over Literary Digest made this article their lead piece, so urgent was the sensation that an onslaught of vengeful modernist women, so fleet of foot and irreverently unhampered by hanging hems and confining corsets, were approaching their New York offices as their first act in disassembling the patriarchy.
This disturbing article from 1921 reported on a series of lynchings that took place between the years 1917 through 1919 by U.S. Army personnel serving in France during the First World War. The journalist quoted witness after witness who appeared before the Senate Committee regarding the lynchings they had seen:
Altogether…I saw ten Negroes and two white men hanged at Is-Sur-Tille. Twenty-eight other members of my command also witnessed these hangings and if necessary, I can produce them.
A 1921 column that clearly pointed out all the hardships created for Germany as a result of the Versailles Treaty.
The framers of that agreement could never have envisioned that the post-war landscape they designed for Germany would be pock-marked with such a myriad of frustrations – such as the border skirmishes between Germany and Poland, inflation, famine, the Salzburg Plebiscite and such harsh reparation payments that, when combined with all the other afflictions, simply served to create the kind of Germany that made Hitler’s rise a reality.
Another article about the despondency in 1920s Germany can be read here…
This article was written by Erik Satie as a salute to six unique French composers who had been working in Montparnasse during the previous years.
To me, the New Spirit seems a return to classic form with an admixture of modern sensibility. This modern sensibility you will discover in certain ones of the Six -George Autic (1899 – 1983), Francis Poulenc (1899 – 1963), Darius Milhaud (1892 – 1974)…
To mark the 1921 anniversary of Armistice Day, the editors put the word out to all their readers that they wanted to hear from them concerning where they were and what they were doing when they first heard that la guerre was fini – they received many answers, from both veterans and civilians alike.
