World's War Events

Nineteen dispatches from the war's last two years, told by the people who were there — a destroyer officer's diary, Pershing's own report, the raid on Zeebrugge, the fighting Czecho-Slovaks — ending with the Armistice terms and the treaties that redrew the map.

Curious Facts

Everything below is in the book — each fact links straight to the page it comes from.

  1. Two blind submarines met in the deep — and one shaved the other's radio off. An American boat and a German boat both dived on sighting each other and manoeuvred sightlessly some eighty feet down. "The keel of the fleeing German had actually, by a curious chance, scraped along the top of the American vessel and carried away the wireless aerials!" Read it in the book →
  2. His ship had just been blown up beneath him, and the engineer reported all was as it should be. At Zeebrugge, Lieutenant Bonham-Carter grounded the blockship *Intrepid*, sent his crew off and fired the demolition charges from the chart-room. "Four dull bumps was all that could be heard; and immediately afterwards there arrived on deck the engineer, who had been in the engine-room during the explosion and reported that all was as it should be." Read it in the book →
  3. The German coastal batteries had names, and airmen called the tracer "flaming onions". The guns around Ostend were "each with its name known and identified: Tirpitz, Hindenburg, Deutschland, Cecilia, and the rest," ranging up to fifteen-inch naval pieces in land turrets. Overhead rose "those strings of luminous green balls, which airmen call 'flaming onions.'" Read it in the book →
  4. He handled a 320-foot cruiser "like a picket-boat" from a shed nobody should have survived. Commander Carpenter conned the *Vindictive* from her open bridge, then shifted to the flame-thrower hut on the port side while machine-guns swept the ship from both ends of the Mole. "It is marvellous that any occupant of it should have survived a minute, so riddled and shattered is it." Read it in the book →
  5. Submarine hunting was "like the proverbial skinning of a skunk". An American officer writing home from Irish waters found the war had become oddly domestic: "You meet some mild-mannered gentleman and talk about the weather, and then find later that he is a survivor from some desperate episode that makes your blood tingle." As for his own duty: "useful, but not especially pleasant or glorious." Read it in the book →
  6. Submarine duty would have been boring but for the chance of instant annihilation. Barred by the censor from describing his work, one officer summed it up anyway: "It is a very curious duty in that it would be positively monotonous, were it not for the possibility of being hurled into eternity the next minute." He added that he was in good health "and wholly free from nervous tension." Read it in the book →
  7. The Czech Legion carried Woodrow Wilson's speeches across Siberia as propaganda leaflets. Halted for hours or days at Russian stations, the Czechs mingled with the crowds while "distributing the words of President Wilson to prove the sanity of their cause and the folly of the Russian collapse." The correspondent's verdict: "President Wilson might seem a political Messiah, but the Czechs were the John the Baptists." Read it in the book →
  8. A Czech officer ran a 40,000-name card index of prisoners — and bribed the local Soviet for meat. Arriving "alone and with only a few rubles," Captain H— re-uniformed incoming Czech prisoners of war and listed the tradesmen among them: "there are forty thousand names classified by occupation and residence in those files." Supplies came at a price: "we have to pay the secret agents of the local Soviet sixty-five rubles for meat. Its market price is thirty-five." Read it in the book →
  9. The Armistice gave Germany 48 hours to confess where she had poisoned the wells. Clause Eight required the German command to reveal all mines and delayed-action fuses in evacuated territory and to help destroy them. "It also shall reveal all destructive measures that may have been taken (such as poisoning or polluting of springs and wells, &c.). All under penalty of reprisals." Read it in the book →
  10. A cry of "Arise, ye dead!" is said to have put an attack to flight. The book records the trench where the last unwounded soldier, seeing the enemy coming, "cried out as if in delirium: 'Arise, ye dead!' and the dying really rose, and succeeded, some of them, in firing once more before they fell again, and the assailants fled." It sets this beside the commoner sight of a man telling the stretcher-bearers to take his neighbour first. Read it in the book →
  11. In the refugee flood, nobody seemed to notice anybody else. Watching the retreat from Caporetto, the correspondent found each group sealed in its own world: peasants eating bread and raw red wine beside their ox cart "without so much as a glance at the motley thousands streaming by at their elbows," a soldier stripping off his wet clothes at the road's edge among the women trudging past. "The niceties of convention are quickly dulled by fatigue." Read it in the book →
  12. Greek officers loyal to Venizelos were posted in Athens as traitors to be shot on sight. Handed an order barring his army from crossing a bridge without headquarters permission, an officer called it "only the latest in the long series of humiliations we have had to put up with." Then, indicating a file at his elbow: "the only officers of the Venizelist army to be envied are those whose names are recorded here... It's the death-list from day-before-yesterday's fighting." Read it in the book →
  13. On the Soissons plateau the church steeples barely clear the ground line. The battlefield's northern table-land held "not a village... only a few large farms and scattered sugar-beet refineries," while the villages hid in the ravines. "The slender church-tower barely rises to the level of the plateau, as if to watch for the approach of an enemy" — so armies gained kilometres in a rush above and met fierce resistance below. Read it in the book →
  14. Italian soldiers watched the windows of Trieste catch the sunset ten miles away. From Monfalcone the coveted city "lay like a stone image, lifeless except for the white smoke curling gently from a single tall chimney," and each evening "the Italians saw its windows answer with flashes of dull gold the last rays of the sun setting behind Italy." Nearer stood the Castle of Duino, where the Grand Duchess of Thurn and Taxis had gathered poets and painters before the war. Read it in the book →
  15. Pershing's own secret battle map was shipped to Washington and re-erected exactly as it stood in France. The book calls it "probably the most interesting and valuable single record of America's part in the Great War" — the commander's headquarters map, set up in the National Museum "exactly as it was there." Read it in the book →
  16. Peacetime Udine was so restful that living there "would seem like being buried alive". The correspondent loved the Gothic cloisters, the loggia and the medieval gate-houses of the town the war had "galvanized into unnatural life and prosperity" as Italian headquarters. Its charm was "that of mellow old wine... something of which one wanted only little at a time." Read it in the book →
  17. Germany's navy was capped at ships of 10,000 tons — and told to wait 20 years to replace them. Beyond surrendering the fleet interned at Scapa Flow, 42 modern destroyers, 50 torpedo boats and every submarine, Germany had to break up all warships under construction. "The largest armored ship Germany will be permitted will be 10,000 tons." Read it in the book →
Rights & ReuseThe complete text of World's War Events, Vol. III (1919) is in the public domain in the United States — like all works published before 1928 — and is free to read, download, quote, teach from, and reuse. This digital edition (its transcription, restored images, and site design) is © 2026 PhotoOpAI, and any editorial commentary we add is clearly marked as ours; the underlying public-domain text carries no such restriction.