By ALICE MEYNELL.
[From King Albert’s Book.]
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When our now living languages are "dead," Which in the classes shall be treasured? Which will the masters teach? Kepler's, and Shakespeare's, and thy word, thy phrase, Thy grammar, thou heroic, for all days, O little Flemish speech! |
Cheerful Spirits in Trench Inferno
[Special Cable to The New York Times.]
NORTHERN FRANCE, Dec. 20, (Dispatch to The London Daily News.)—This week—a week of many significant things—has ended in the wildest whirl of weather imaginable. The rains have been terrific, blinding, tropical in their almost ceaseless roar and fury. Surely only madmen or fiends would fight in such an elemental maelstrom. We may be both, and perhaps we are, now that the whole world is topsy-turvy; for we are going savagely on at this dread business, half blind and wholly desperate. If the furious sky were to rain red-hot pitchforks the contending armies would still be undismayed and would crawl, if not fly, at one another's throats.
But there is no romance in trench fighting; it is sickening, demoralizing. Ask any soldier who has been at it for a time. He will pour a few plain truths into your shocked ear. Down at the railroad terminal today I met some of them—a queer mixture. There was a batch of German prisoners; there was a squad of wounded Belgians, and there were four lost, stolen, or strayed British soldiers from the Seventh Division—a Sergeant and three men. They were all so plastered over with dirt that it was difficult to sort out their nationality.
What struck me most was their absolute and undisguised cheerfulness. I have lively recollection of the first German prisoners I saw in the early days of the war. They were in a gray funk, which is several degrees more sheer than a blue funk. They absolutely believed that the next moment or two would be their last on this woeful earth and that they would be shot out of hand.
The young Prussians I met today said that they had been having a very thin time recently; that their food was bad, and getting worse and more scanty every day; that pneumonia and rheumatism were rife in their trenches, to say nothing of the dreaded typhoid, and that they were tremendously glad to be out of it all. They understood that they were going to England. Anyway, they hoped so fervently.