Tales of War |
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aëroplanes Anglo-Saxon barber barrage battery Behagnies Big-Admiral Boche boys British bullets bursting Captain Kidd chalk Charlie Chaplin Cologne Cathedral coming Daleswood damned dark dawn desert desolation Dick Cheeser dream earth Eliphaz Griggs Ezekiel Pim faded farms Flanders France furrows garden gazed German Ginchy gone gorilla grew grey grow guns hear heard High Seas Fleet hills hour huge Hunger John Plowman Kaiser looked Kiel Canal knew Lane Lord Man's Land miles and miles mirage mist mourning never night nightmare officer once orchards passed perhaps phantom Picardy platoon commander ploughing Potsdam Pozières Professor remember road ruins Scheherazade Schnitzelhaaser seemed seen Sergeant Cane shells shelter Sir Munion slopes smiling soldier Spring squirrel stand Surbiton swede talk tell thermite things thought Tok Emmas told trench tyranny village walk War Lord wind window wonderful woods young youth
Popular passages
Page 47 - Even when all its romance has been sifted from an age (as the centuries sift) and set apart from the trivial, and when all has been stored by the poets; even then what has any of them more romantic than these adventurers in the evening air, coming home in the twilight with the black shells bursting below ? The infantry look up with the same vague wonder with which children look at dragon flies; sometimes they do not look at all, for all that comes in France has its part with the wonder of a terrible...
Page 45 - Retreat," when this knightly stranger, a British aeroplane, dipped and went homeward over the infantry. That beautiful evening call, and the golden cloud-bank towering, and that adventurer coming home in the cold, happening all together, revealed in a flash the fact (which hours of thinking sometimes will not bring) that we live in such a period of romance as the troubadours would have envied. He came, that British airman, over the border, sheer over No Man's Land and the heads of the enemy and the...
Page 8 - ... they didn't waste time quarrelling, time being scarce, and they said what was to be done ? There was chalk where they were, low down in the trench, a little brown clay on the top of it. There was a great block of it loose near a shelter. They said they would carve with their knives on the big bowlder of chalk all that they knew about Daleswood. They would write where it was and just what it was like, and they would write something of all those little things that pass with a generation. They reckoned...
Page 81 - ... far as a clump of beech trees and fluttered back again on his wonderful quiet wings. Pairing pigeons were home. Very young rabbits stole out to gaze at the calm still world. They came out as the stars come. At one time they were not there, and then you saw them, but you did not see them come. Towering clouds to the west built palaces, cities and mountains ; bastions of rose and precipices of gold ; giants went home over them draped in mauve by steep rose-pink ravines into emerald-green empires....
Page 3 - ... right, thick as starlings. "The bullets were snapping over thick to keep them down while the Boche went on, on the right : machine guns, of course. The barrage was screaming well over and dropping far back, and their wire was still all right just in front of them, when they put up a head to look.
Page 87 - The firelight flickered, and the lamp shone on, and the children played on the floor, and the man was smoking out of a china pipe; he was strong and able and young, one of the wealth-winners of Germany. "Have you seen?
Page 86 - Kaiser looked ; and saw a window shining and a neat room in the cottage : there was nothing dreadful there ; thank the good German God for that ; it was all right, after all. The Kaiser had had a fright, but it was all right ; there was only a woman with a baby sitting before the fire, and two small children and a man.
Page 8 - Fred wouldn't go, and so on with the rest. Well, they didn't waste time quarrelling, time being scarce, and they said what was to be done ? There was chalk where they were, low down in the trench, a little brown clay on the top of it. There was a great block of it loose near a shelter. They said they would carve with their knives on the big bowlder of chalk all that they knew about Daleswood.
Page 4 - Dales wood for one long generation. "The youngest full-grown man they had left behind was fifty, and some one had heard that he had died since the war. There was no one else in Daleswood but women and children, and boys up to seventeen. "The bombing had stopped on their right ; everything was quieter...
Page 1 - Very lucky they was, the Daleswood men. They'd lost no more than five killed and a good sprinkling of wounded. But all the wounded was back again with the platoon. This was up to March when the big offensive started. "It came very sudden. No bombardment to speak of. Just a burst of Tok Emmas...