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.
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