* One Liverpool agitator used to gather a sidewalk crowd by shouting, "I've been robbed! I've been robbed!" Once people surrounded him, he would explain that the robbers were the capitalists.
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* Russia figured in wild rumors that swept Germany as well. In the war's first week, it was reported that 25 French automobiles were stealthily transporting 80 million gold francs across Germany to Russia. Hundreds of towns set up roadblocks, and a total of 28 people, who were thought to look suspicious or who failed to stop quickly enough, were killed by trigger-happy guards.
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* One of Haig's generals, the hot-tempered Edmund Allenby, equally a stickler in such matters, once let loose a tirade at a soldier he found wearing an incorrect uniform in a trench, only to discover, when there was no reply, that he had been berating a dead man.
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* When a visitor goes to this spot today, or to many others referred to in Western Front memoirs as hills, valleys, or ridges, the slope is anything but steep, and sometimes barely perceptible. It is a reminder that the survivors were describing how the scene looked to them when peering cautiously out of a trench, or when pressed flat to the ground of no man's land to avoid bullets. If the position you were attacking had even the slightest bit of altitude, you could be trapped in a devastating field of fire.
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* On his antiwar speaking tour of Wales some six months earlier, Bertrand Russell wrote to a lover about "all the working-men who are hungry for intellectual food.... I am amazed at the number of them at my meetings who have read my 'Problems of Philosophy.'"
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* "I wore the Grand Officer of the Legion of Honour and the Star and Necklace of the Bath, and my medals," wrote General Wilson in his diary. "...And altogether I was a fine figure of a man! I created quite a sensation at the Foreign Office dinner and the reception afterwards.... Lunched with the Grand Duchess.... Lovely palace overlooking the Neva."
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* In recent decades alone, it has inspired Pat Barker's novel The Eye in the Door, two plays, two nonfiction books, a BBC television drama, and a volume of poems.