From the New York Times, October 16, 1917, 11.
David W. Griffith, an American motion picture producer, who has been in France for seven months, taking scenes of real warfare at the front, returned yesterday to an Atlantic port, accompanied by the sisters Dorothy and Lillian Gish, who took part in the realistic drama [Hearts of the World] that will be produced in this country.
“Thanks to the assistance of the British officers,” Mr. Griffith said, “we caught actual scenes in the first line trenches and the surrounding panorama which was often a view forty miles long and ten to fifteen miles deep. By the aid of the new French lenses, with their fourteen-inch depths, one is able to show a charge along a two or three miles front and also to picture the grim work in the mudholes called trenches close enough to depict men actually wounded at their work, while others are tossing hand grenades over the ridge at the enemy’s lines fifty yards away.
“There were number of Americans fighting in the Canadian ranks and in the French Army. On one occasion near Ypres a shell burst close beside one of our big cameras and knocked it to pieces. Another shell which fell a little distance away killed eleven men who were mending a hole in the road.”
With regard to life in the trenches, Mr. Griffith said: “The soldiers do not get used to it. They bear it because there is no other place to go. When a barrage is moving slowly across a field you have to watch and see it is coming your way. If you lose your head and become nervous it means that you run into the curtain of fire and are killed instantly.”
The Misses Gish said that they were not nearly so affected by the artillery fire at the front as they were in London during the six air raids which occurred in one week. The hotel where they were staying was struck three times, but not badly damaged.