A stylish woman joins a line of Italian soldiers setting off. From a watercolor by Bianchi.
signed: Bianchi
"So this is what these young soldiers had come to — here is the real thing. Drums beat, trumpets blare, the Klingelspiel jingles at the regiment's head, and with flowers in your helmet, and your wife or sweetheart shouldering your rifle as far as the station — and you should see these German women marching out with their men! — you go marching out to war. You look out of the window of various railway trains, then they lead you through a ditch into another ditch, and there, across a stretch of mud which might be your own back yard, is a clay bank, which is your enemy. And one morning at dawn you climb over your ditch and run forward until you are cut down."
Excerpt from 'In the German Trenches at La Bassée' in Antwerp to Gallipoli by Arthur Ruhl, a journalist from the neutral United States. In March, 1915 he traveled from Cologne, Germany to the front lines, arriving a few miles north of Neuve Chapelle, France, where the Battle of Neuve Chapelle had been fought a few days before, ending on March 12. Ruhl points out that experience — a mere eight months into the war — shows that it is not worth keeping a trench unless the attack has taken at least 300 yards, and that the battalion will retire to try again another day if it has not achieved that standard.
Antwerp to Gallipoli by Arthur Ruhl, pp. 137, 138, copyright © 1916 by Charles Scribner's Sons, publisher: Charles Scribner's Sons, publication date: 1916
1915-03-25, 1915, March, Ruhl, Mobilization
