Recently Made Military Governor of Belgium to Succeed Field Marshal von der Goltz.
But it remained for a naval Lieutenant, whose name is not given, to describe, in a letter to a friend, one of the most remarkable incidents of the war, an incident which might have occurred in the imagination of Jules Verne or of H.G. Wells in his youth. He wrote:
The Defender having sunk an enemy, lowered a whaler to pick up her swimming survivors; before the whaler got back an enemy's cruiser came up and chased the Defender, and thus she abandoned her whaler. Imagine their feelings--alone in an open boat without food, twenty-five miles from the nearest land, and that land the enemy's fortress, with nothing but fog and foes around them. Suddenly a swirl alongside and up, if you please, pops his Britannic Majesty's submarine E-4, opens his conning tower, takes them all on board, shuts up again, dives, and brings them home, 250 miles!
In his introduction to the book St. John Adcock calls the private letters of the soldiers "the most potent of recruiting literature." Undoubtedly this is true of some of them. The casual, almost flippant, records of splendid heroism, the reflection of a spirit of gay courage, the description of the most picturesque and romantic aspects of battle--these tend, certainly, to fill the mind of the stay-at-home readers with a desire for participation in this great adventure.
But, on the other hand, such passages as "The dead were piled up in the trenches about ten deep, and there were trenches seven miles long," and "Our Maxim gun officer tried to fix his gun up during their murderous fire, but he got half his face blown away," are not likely to make fighting seem a pleasant occupation. It is true that the dead referred to in the first of these passages are the enemy's dead; still, there is a wholesale quality about those seven-mile trenches filled with dead ten deep that is not a recruiting allurement.
Nor is this letter, vivid in its realism, likely to make those not already warlike eager to enlist. It was sent to his parents at Ilfracombe by Private William Burgess of the Royal Field Artillery:
We left our landing place for the front on the Tuesday and got there on Saturday night. The Germans had just reached Liége then, and we got into action on the Sunday morning. The first thing we did was to blow up a bridge to stop the Germans from crossing. Then we came into action behind a lot of houses attached to the main street. We were there about ten minutes when the houses started to fall around us. The poor people were buried alive. I saw poor children getting knocked down by bursting shells.