"I am in the trenches, and in half an hour we go over the top. Our artillery is going at it hammer and tongs, the biggest bombardment in English history. It is just like huge express trains rushing through the air in hundreds. All of us are happy in the prospect of a clean fight after so many weary months as passive spectators of anything but warfare, except on rare occasions. If I get through all right I shall add a postscript to this. If not, mother dear, I know you will not be beaten by a Spartan mother who had no heavenly Father revealed to her to look to for comfort, but yet could say, 'Come back with victory, or not at all.' With heaps of love. * * *"
The other is suffused with the same straightforward spirit of fearlessness and faith.
"I was so glad to see your answer this morning, but am sorry I have not enough strength to write much. A good few died of wounds in this hospital through weakness, but I am leaving all doubts with God, as He holds the key of all the Unknown, and I am glad. So if I die before long, and I cannot see anything more sure, I hope to meet you all in God's good time. My wound is numb. It is in my thigh, and I have no pain. * * * I am now at the balance, to live or die. So good day, and God bless all. * * *"
There was nothing really extraordinary about these boys among their fellows. But one is struck by the frequency with which the men, after a deep emotion, touch literature in their letters. Of course the secret of true style lies in a real experience. Some of them, it is true, tell absolutely false tales, and their letters are sentimental poses. But of the letters of dying men there can be no mistake, and these boys wrote these on the threshold of the eternal mystery. They are types of a large proportion of the army of to-day, fighting, suffering, and dying as those who have looked in the face of the Invisible, and are inheriting the promise, "Be thou faithful unto death and I will give thee a crown of life." It is surely an incentive to the people at home, for honour and remembrance.
THROUGH THE JAWS OF DEATH IN A SUNKEN SUBMARINE
Told by Emile Vedel in L'Illustration, Paris
Many a novelist and some dramatists have tried to imagine the last agonies of the crew of a submarine boat that has received a mortal wound and sunk. Here is a first-hand account of the dreadful reality, told by men who actually experienced the tragedy. How these men slipped out from the very jaws of death just as they were closing on them, even they cannot fully explain; but some strange freak of the machinery made their submarine bob back to the surface after the water pouring into it had sent the vessel down 200 feet. Emile Vedel, who is writing the story of the French naval operations in the Adriatic and publishing it serially, under governmental authority in L'Illustration, obtained the facts from the signed statements of two petty officers of the boat. Translated by Arthur Benington in the New York World. Copyright, 1917, Press Publishing Company.
I—STORY OF THE PRISONERS IN BOHEMIA