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BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION

HIS book is a news record of the Great War, since "ancient history closed at midnight of July 31, 1914." It consists of pictures, poetry and prose, made and written for The Independent during this period. Perhaps its most striking claim to distinction is its difference from the conventional history we studied in school. The history in this book was written at the time of the event and its pictures were made on the spot-photographs of the events themselves. So in this book one follows the vivid drama of the war just as The Independent has followed it week by week.

In the days of peace-now so strangely remote_ when the magazines of entertainment flooded the land with their garish girl covers and their plethora of fiction and when the sensational dailies maintained their vast circulations by featuring "sport" for the men and "love" for the women, The Independent pursued the path it had set for itself, proud in the conviction that it was exerting a vital influence on the thought and action of the times and leaving to its rivals the cultivation of 'romance rather than reality.

But the Great War has changed the situation. Now truth is stranger than fiction. Now the simple narration of war's valor and sacrifice grips the mind and heart as no imaginary tale of adventure can possibly do. If war is the greatest of all games, as Ruskin has said, because the stake is death, who would now prefer to read an article on the strategy of the Yale-Harvard football game, when the correspondents are telling us of Pershing's preparations to match his might with Hindenburg? And who cares to dally with the cooing of Phyllis and Adonis when the little tear-stained war brides are bidding their khaki-clad husbands good-by?

As nowadays the old files of The Independent and Harper's Weekly are recognized everywhere as containing the best interpretation of the times that tried men's souls from '61 to '65, so today these two magazines, now united in one, are doing again a similar public service, not only for this generation, but for those to come.

The present book, assembled and edited by my discriminating and efficient colleague, Miss Hannah White, is an attempt to preserve in permanent and convenient form the moving picture of the Great War from its beginning to January 1, 1918. It opens with a brief history of the war. The successes and failures of each year are separately summarized. A day-to-day chronology is also added which should prove of unique value for historical reference. It

concludes with a brief section of editorial comment entitled "The Kings Must Go," a prophecy by H. G. Wells on "Reconstruction After the War," an article by William H. Taft on "The Last Great War," and my editorial "The League to Enforce Peace." I would especially call attention to the editorial "Whom the Gods Would Destroy" written by Professor Franklin H. Giddings and published as the leader in the first issue of The Independent after the declaration of war. In my opinion, this is the greatest editorial, all things considered, that has appeared in The Independent during the twentyfour years that I have been connected with the magazine. Perhaps I may be pardoned for adding that my editorial was one of the primary factors in the establishment of the League to Enforce Peace, whose program, first given to the world at Independence Hall, Philadelphia, June 17, 1915, has now been accepted by most of the responsible statesmen of the world as the cornerstone of the war's aims.

Since the issues of Harper's Weekly during the Civil War are most highly prized for their illustrations we have made the main portion of this book chiefly pictorial. There is a section on "The War in the Air," "The Fight at Sea," "The Men in the Trenches," "Come Across The United States Answers the Call," "War-By the Way," "War Time Leaders," and a particularly good collection of original and reproduced cartoons. Scattered among these are a few special war articles: "Follow the Flag" by Theodore Marburg, "The First Ten Thousand" by Herbert Reed, "Sailing Past Submarines" by Harold Howland, "Courage, Mon Vieux" by Henry G. Dodge, "The Aerial Coast Patrol" by John Hays Hammond, Jr., and others. I would especially call the reader's attention to the touching episode of French heroism in the true incident narrated by Mr. Dodge in "Courage, Mon Vieux." Shall we, toɔ, see such scenes in the coming months in our beloved United States?

But this Holy War is not yet won. It is plain, therefore, that we must follow this volume with another. This we hope and expect to do. But let us pray that the third volume may deal with the happier days of the coming reconstruction, when the stricken but rejoicing people will be busied rearing their new civilization on the ashes of the old, and when, as Victor Hugo prophesied, "the only battlefield will be the market opening to commerce and the mind opening to new ideas."

HAMILTON HOLT

Editor of The Independent

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Shell holes and bayonet charge-the battle of Soyécourt, photographed by an air scout. After days of artillery fire the French soldiers are leaving their trenches in the foreground to attack. In the distance is the burning village

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IN BRIEF

Year by Year Summaries of the Great War's Progress

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THE FIRST YEAR OF THE WAR

BY WILLIS FLETCHER JOHNSON

August, 1915

EITHER party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Each looked for an easier triumph." These words of Abraham Lincoln, uttered after nearly four years of our Civil War, might with equal fitness be applied to the Great War and its belligerents at the ending of its first year. A month of declarations of war, a year of waging war, inestimable months or years of war yet to be waged, and generations of slow and incomplete recovery from the results of war: Such in epitome is the record of the past, present and future of the Great War.

Between July 28 and August 28, 1914, no fewer than fourteen individual wars, "all parts of one stupendous whole," were declared or recognized to exist; and half a dozen more at later dates. They were: Austria-Hungary against Serbia, against Russia, against Japan, and against Belgium; Germany against Russia, against France, and against Belgium; Great Britain against Germany, and against Austria-Hungary; Montenegro against Austria-Hungary, and against Germany; Serbia against Germany;

France against AustriaHungary; and Japan against Germany. Later acts of war involved Turkey as an ally of Germany and Austria-Hungary, and Portugal and Italy on the side of the Allies.

The grand plan of campaign was Germany's. That was to fight her three great foes separately and crush them in succession. She was herself ready "to the last shoe-button," while not one of her adversaries was even measurably prepared for war. She therefore aimed to strike first at the least unprepared, and planned to leave the most unready to be dealt with last. Therefore she tore up her treaty with Belgium as a "scrap of paper" and violated the neutrality and integrity of that country in order to launch her first tremendous blow at France on an undefended frontier. Thus she hoped to dictate peace at Paris and to eliminate France from the problem before Russia, unready and slow-mov

THE WAR BY SEA

Submarine Exploits September 2--British cruisers "Cressy," "La Hogue," "Aboukir" sunk in North Sea by German submarine "U-9," Captain Otto Weddigen in command

October 10-Russian cruiser "Pallada" sunk in Baltic by German submarine

October 16--British cruiser "Hawke" sunk in North Sea by "U-9" December 14 British submarine "B-11" dove under five lines of mines at Dardanelles and sank Turkish cruiser "Messoudiyeh" January 1-British battleship "Formidable" sunk in English Channel January 30-Three merchantmen sunk in Irish Sea by German submarine February 18 German war zone around British Isles in effect. Germany threatens to sink all enemy merchantmen in this area. 225 vessels sunk to date March 28-British

liner "Falaba" sunk in St. George's Channel. One American citizen lost May 1-American tanker "Gulflight" sunk off Scilly Islands. Three deaths. Germany promises indemnification liner May 7-British "Lusitania" sunk west of Queenstown by German submarine. 1152 deaths, including 114 Americans May 25- American merchantman "Nebraskan" torpedoed but sunk, off Fastnet, Ireland May 25 and 27-German submarine "U-51" sinks "Triumph" and "Majestic" at Dardanelles after voyage of four thousand miles from Wilhelmshaven

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June 17-Italian submarine sunk by Austrian submarine first such event in history

July 2--German battleship "Pommern" sunk by British submarine at Bay of Dantzig, 900 miles from British base

July 18-Italian cruiser "Giuseppe Garibaldi" sunk by Austrian submarine near Ragusa

ing, could give her serious trouble at the east. Next she would transfer her vast and victorious armies, rich with

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the spoils of France, to her eastern marches, smash Russia, crush Serbia, and dictate a second peace at Warsaw. Finally, with the Continent subdued, she would try conclusions with her most hated foe, Great Britain, which she regarded as the most unready of them all, and indeed as a power which could never be formidable on land, but would be dealt with on the sea alone.

One city spoiled that plan. Liège was the new Thermopylae. The four days' delay of the German advance, in hurling first men and then eleven-inch shells at Brialmont's domed fortresses, was brief, but it served. It gave France time to awaken to her needs and Great Britain time to respond to the call of her ally. The German tide flowed on, bearing all before it, all thru that month of August, headed straight for Paris, which the Germans expected to occupy by mid-September. The French Government fled to Bordeaux, and Paris, with the thunder of German guns heard in her streets again after forty-four years, grimly awaited siege and storm. The German van was within four days' march of the city. But the four days which would have carried them to its walls had been lost at Liège; and now a million French and British troops were massed along the Marne, under orders to die rather than to retreat.

Another decisive battle of the world, and probably the greatest in human history, began on September 6 and raged for five whole days; and at its end the German tide ebbed from its high-water mark, never to regain it. The French and British prest forward, hoping to transform repulse into hopeless rout. But they had not calculated German thoroness. As if anticipating just such operations, the Germans had already prepared behind them elaborate defensive works upon which they could fall back and to these they did fall back and there turned at bay. A vast but indecisive battle followed, on the Aisne, and then the combatants settled down to a grim rivalry in long endurance. The battle line which was drawn at the west at the end of the first six weeks of war has changed but little, merely

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The war at sunset-an Anzac sentinel, probably a veteran of Gallipoli, patrolling the outworks on the Somme front

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The war at dawn-bringing in British wounded early in the morning after a day of stiff fighting along the Somme

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