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Updated: June 28, 2025
I have really done nothing this last month but look at my flowers, superintend the gathering of my plums, put up a few pots of confiture, mow the lawn, and listen to the guns, now and then, read the communiqués, and sigh over the disasters in the east and the deadlock at Gallipoli.
We were within the vision of the Germans, across the river, on the heights behind the forest, which outlined itself at the skyline; there were the Kaiser's troops and that forest was the Bois-le-Prêtre, the familiar incident in so many communiqués since the war began. Thanks to the canvas, it was possible for the French to move troops along this road without inviting German shells.
I shall never read these oft recurring lines in the communiqués without thinking of those three youthful figures, so full of life and the joy of life, who watched us depart that dull and cloudy morning.
He had had his indulgences in the two hours to Westbury, and had very nearly let it conquer him, more than once, and now he must not only curb all friendly words and delightful dalliance with forbidden topics, but he must feel no more passion. He made himself read the war news and try to visualize the grim reality behind the official phrasing of the communiques.
The very vagueness of the official communiques and their word- jugglings to give a rose colour to black shadows advancing rapidly over the spirit of France suggested horrible uncertainties to those who were groping in search of plain truth. But not all the severity of the censorship, with its strangle-grip upon the truth-tellers, could hide certain frightful facts.
Two other attempts were made here, on April 10 and 17, 1915. On the latter date a detachment of Tyrolese sharpshooters were trapped in the wire entanglements and annihilated. One more battle on a big scale remains to be chronicled from the far eastern sector; it may also serve to illustrate the wide divergence that not infrequently exists between official communiqués recording the same event.
He stripped to the waist, turned his shirt wrong side out, and laid it upon his knee. "'Ave a look," he said proudly. The less said about my discoveries the better for the fastidiously minded. Suffice it to say that I made my first acquaintance with members of a British Expeditionary Force which is not mentioned in official communiqués. "Trench pets," said Shorty.
With us, it is usually when we speak of mountains, as "in the Rockies," "in the Adirondacks," that under one name we merge rivers, valleys, and villages. To know the French names for the twelve official fronts may help in deciphering the communiqués.
The Germans will never come here, one feels, no matter what happens, and as you read the communiqués in La Petite Gironde and La Liberté du Sud-Ouest the war seems farther away, I feel pretty sure, than it does in front of the newspaper bill-boards in New York.
A country that is one of the Allies, and yet not at war with Germany, cannot be taken very seriously. Indeed, in England the War Office staff speak of the Italian communiqués as the "weather reports." In Naples the foreigners accuse Italy of running with the hare and the hounds. They asked what is her object in keeping on friendly terms with the bitterest enemy of the Allies.
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