World War One – Page 11 – Old Magazine Articles

A Woman in the Salvation Army
(American Legion Monthly, 1928)

This article tells the World War One story of Irene McIntyre, a Salvation Army volunteer who served at the front during the most bloody period of the war:

In her two-hundred and fifty-six days under enemy fire, Irene McIntyre was twice gassed and twice received the unusual distinction of a personal citation in Army orders. She saw more of the war at close quarters than any other American woman. One of her citations read:

‘Under fire of high explosives and gas, she established and conducted huts that were noted for their good cheer and hospitality. Her courage and devotion to her voluntary work were a splendid inspiration to the troops.’

1920s Prohibition created a criminal climate
that appealed to more women than you ever might have suspected…

Read about the Women Marines of W.W. II HERE.

A Wartime Footing for the USMC
(Sea Power Magazine, 1918)

The ranks of the United States Marine Corps began to swell in the early March of 1917, shortly after the Kaiser launched his campaign of unrestricted submarine warfare. When Congress declared war the following April, the expansion began is earnest:

The Act of Congress making naval appropriations for the present fiscal year carries a proviso increasing the Marine Corps from its permanent legal enlisted strength of seventeen thousand and four hundred to a temporary war strength of seventy-five thousand and five hundred with a proportional increase in commissioned and warrant officers and the addition of two major generals and six brigadier generals.

This article is illustrated with 12 photographs.

Click here to read about the African-American soldiers who served in France.

The Woman with the First Division
(American Legion Monthly, 1930)

Twelve years after the end of the war, former Y.M.C.A. volunteer Francis Grulick wrote this moving account of her days as a canteen worker in France. She had vivid and colorful memories of her days in the forward positions bringing some measure of comfort to the men of the U.S. Army First Division, to whom she was devoted. She was with them at Gondrecourt, Bonnvillers, Boucq, Cantigny and Soissons. She filled their canteens, served them lemonade, poured their coffee, cooked their meals and also saw to it that cigarettes were plentiful. By the time the First Division arrived in Coblenz for occupation duty, she recognized that the unit was composed almost entirely of replacements and that she was the only witness to the First Divisions earliest days in France.

Is your name Anderson?

Letter from Belleau Wood
(With the Help of God and A Few Marines, 1919)

The following letter was written by a Belleau Wood veteran of the U.S. Marine Corp’s Sixth Regiment, Private Hiram B. Pottinger. It was included the World War One memoir, With the Help of God and a Few Marines (1919) by Brigadier General A.W. Catlin, U.S.M.C. (1868-1933), who believed it rendered accurately the enlisted man’s view of the battle.

The letter is accompanied by a black and white photograph depicting what is clearly a re-staging of the Marines mad dash across the wheat fields that sit just outside the Bois de Belleau.

Click here to read about the U.S. Navy railroad artillery of W.W. I.

Remembrance Day at the Cenotaph
(American Legion Monthly, 1936)

This chill November morning the Cenotaph is surrounded by serried masses of men. Up and down Whitehall as far as one can see are thousands and thousands packed in so tightly they cannot move…Suddenly from St. James Park comes the sound of a gun. They used to say it was impossible for a British crowd to be quiet. That was before Armistice Day. For the hum of London dies at the sound of the gun…Somewhere in the distance a horse paws the ground and neighs. A flag flaps in the breeze. Never such a silence as this. A King and his people pause sixty seconds in solemn celebration for the dead. It is the Great Hush.

The American Marine in France
(Leslie’s Weekly, 1920)

Attached are a smattering of photos of the U.S. Marines as they appeared shortly after their arrival in France.

The German Atrocities that Never Were
(The Nation, 1923)

The post war period was the time when the press had to start figuring out what was true and what was false in all matters involving the reports that their assorted papers and magazines had printed during the conflict. Admiral Sims of the U.S. Navy caused a stir when he went on record announcing that a particularly odious policy observed by the Germans, widely believed to have been true, was in fact, a falsehood:

I stated…that barring the case of the hospital ship Llandovery Castle I did not know of any case where a German submarine commander had fired upon the boats of a torpedoed vessel…

George Creel and His Posters
(How We Advertised America, 1920)

This essay was written by President Wilson’s Director of the Committee on Public Information, George Creel (1876-1953). It first appeared in Creel’s post-war memoir, How we advertised America
and gives a thorough rundown of the planning and the creativity that went into the mass-production of what is today a highly-prized collectible; the American World War I poster.

Twenty years later Creel wrote an article in which he explained his belief that America cannot be censored. Click here to read it.

Click here to read about how the mass-marketing techniques of the W.W. I era was used to promote KKK membership…

Over There’ by Albert Sterner
(Sea Power Magazine, 1918)

An American sailor in white uniform stands in the center bearing the Stars and Stripes, and at his side stands Columbia, in shining armor and with a drawn sword, pointing across the sea to direct the gaze of the sailor Over There to the battlefield of the nations, where he must carry his flag to victory for the sake of the free country whose uniform he wears. In the background beneath the flag is shown the battle fleet steaming out to sea.

– so wrote the editors of Sea Power Magazine who were so moved by the W.W. I U.S. Navy recruiting poster Over There by Albert Sterner (1863 – 1946) that all they could do was describe it’s powerful lines and overall design.

Alan Seeger: He Did Not Fail That Rendezvous
(The Art World, 1917)

Although the U.S. President Woodrow Wilson asked Americans to be neutral in thought and deed on all matters concerning the war in Europe [before to April, 1917], the sympathies of the American people firmly stood with the French and their allies. Whether they served as soldiers or non-combatants, the American public was proud of those young Americans who expressed their outrage by volunteering to serve among the French or British armies. Numbered in that group was the Poet Alan Seeger (1888 – 1916), who fought with the French Foreign Legion and was killed on the Somme. The following poem was written by Grace D. Vanamee (1867 – 1946) in response to Seeger’s very popular poem I Have a Rendezvous with Death (North American Review, October, 1916).

Gas Attack Horrors
(NY Times, 1915)

French novelist Pierre Loti (né Julien Viaud: 1850 – 1923) filed this dispatch from a forward aid station in the the French sector where he witnessed the suffering of the earliest gas attack casualties:

A place of horror which one would think Dante had imagined. The air is heavy, stifling; two or three little night lamps, which look as if they were afraid of giving too much light, hardly pierce the hot, smoky darkness which smells of fever and sweat. Busy people are whispering anxiously. But you hear, more than all, agonized gasping. These gaspings escape from a number of little beds drawn up close together on which are distinguished human forms, above all, chests, chests that are heaving too strongly, too rapidly, and that raise the sheets as if the hour of the death rattle had already come.

Click here to read about the new rules for warfare that were written as a result of the First World War – none of them pertain to poison gas.

Reprimand from the Trenches
(Cambridge Magazine, 1916)

This letter was clipped from a German newspaper and subsequently appeared in a British magazine some months later; it was written in response to a letter from a 13 year-old German girl who wrote to her brother at the front. She encouraged him in his sad, murderous work in her letter that was positively dripping with an affected air of trench-swagger. Outraged that his school-age sister should make such a vulgar suggestion, the soldier’s response was admirable and seemed much like the prose of Erich Maria Remarque.

Under-Nourished German Children
(Magazine Advertisement, 1922-3)

Attached is a sad advertisement that ran on the pages of THE NATION for a number of years following the end of the war. Posted by a German charity, the ad pictures -what we can assume to be- a starving German child from one of the more impoverished regions of Saxony or Thuringia. All told, the photo and the accompanying text clearly illustrate the economic hardships that plagued post-World War I Germany.

Click here to read an article about the German veterans of W.W. I.

Good and Bad Writing About World War I
(Vanity Fair, 1915)

A small column from a 1915 issue of Vanity Fair in which the correspondent praised the virtues of Howard Copeland (an American psychologist and ambulance volunteer working in Frabce), Gertrude Aldrich (author of an Atlantic Magazine essay titled, Little House on the Marne), Cardinal Mercier (author of the Great Belgian Pastoral) and W.F. Bailey (authored a paper concerning the war in Northeastern Europe). These writers are preferred to the usually celebrated ink-slingers like Hellaire Belloc, Rudyard Kipling, Anatole France, and Arnold Bennett who are all compared to amateur recruiting sergeants in support of the War.

This image file is poorly scanned: we recommend that you print it for greater legibility.

The War-Poetry of the Soldier-Poets
(The English Review, 1921)

Soldier poets are the true historians of the war. Unlike the host of professional versifiers who sat up day and night on Parnassus, pouring out their patriotic zeal in allegorical rhymes of battles and batteries with more than Aesopian facility, the soldier poets have given to life and literature a genuine interpretation of warfare stripped bare of artificialty

Over 15,000 Suicides in 1928 Germany
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1931)

A short notice compiled from figures collected at the end of 1928 showed that Germany was the all-time global-champion when it came to suicide:

In that year 16,036 persons in Germany committed suicide. This is an average of 44 a day or 39 for each 100,000 persons in the country…

The Pessimism That Followed W.W. I
(Atlantic Monthly, 1923)

A few years after the Great War reached it’s bloody conclusion, literary critic Helen McAfee discovered that a careful reading of the prominent authors and poets writing between 1918 and 1923 revealed that each of them shared a newfound sense of malaise – a despairing, pessimistic voice that was not found in their pre-war predecessors.

Certainly the most striking dramatization of this depth of confusion and bitterness is Mr. Eliot’s The Waste Land. As if by flashes of lightening it reveals the wreck of the storm… The poem is written in the Expressionist manner – a manner peculiarly adapted to the present temper… It is mood more than idea that gives the poem its unity. And the mood is black. It is bitter as gall; not only with a personal bitterness, but also with the bitterness of a man facing a world devastated by a war for a peace without ideals.

If you would like to read another 1920s article about the disillusioned post-war spirit, click here.

Censoring Letters and Looking for Spies
(Stars and Stripes, 1919)

Buried on page eight of a post-war issue of The Stars & Stripes was this column reporting on the wartime activities of the AEF censors in France – men assigned to not simply censor all outgoing mail from Europe, but to also chemically test each one for traces of invisible ink.

Click here to read an article the post office censorship duing the Second World War.