Works and Writers Selected, Per Chapter

Chapter One: Argue

The most desperately earnest thing, Arthur Conan Doyle; They must be destroyed, Maurice Maeterlinck; The most sincere war, G. K. Chesterton; The moral energy of nations, Henri Bergson; I do not hold my tongue easily, George Bernard Shaw; Mere wordmonger to shame, Christabel Pankhurst; The god of force, John Galsworthy; I am a professional observer, Arnold Bennett; The children of Attila, Romain Rolland; Are we barbarians?, Gerhart Hauptmann; The man who does his fighting with his mouth, Jerome K. Jerome; All normal Americans, Booth Tarkington.

Chapter Two: Moralize

The big guns at work, Joseph Conrad; The abyss of our past delusion, Henry James; The unfurling of the future, Thomas Hardy; Let loose these evil powers, Gilbert Murray; The will to power, Thomas Mann; Wordsworth’s Valley in War-Time, Mrs. Humphrey Ward; Men whispered together, H. G. Wells; Scientific Barbarism, Havelock Ellis; Keep our mouths shut, W. B. Yeats.

Chapter Three: Witness

A calamity unheard of in human annals, Edith Wharton; I shall stay, Mildred Aldrich; Its purpose is death, Richard Harding Davis; Stench of the battlefield, Frances Wilson Huard; The swathe of stillness, Henry Beston; Little household gods shiver and blink, Edith Wharton; The Gothas, Mildred Aldrich; It is no pleasure to tell what I saw, Richard Harding Davis; The War Capital of Serbia, John Reed; That sepia waste, Winston Churchill.

Chapter Four: Lie

Babies on bayonets, Arnold J. Toynbee; Hymn of Hate, Ernest Lissauer; Mother is the name of the gun, Arthur Conan Doyle; The master spirit of hell, W. D. Howells; Vandal guns of dull intent, Edmond Rostand; These terrific symbols, Rudyard Kipling; Few wished themselves elsewhere, John Buchan; Nearer than any other woman, Mrs. Humphrey Ward; The world has a right to know, Richard Harding Davis; Old men don’t go, H. G. Wells.

Chapter Five: Pity

All that this war has annihilated, May Sinclair; A bit of metal turned them for home, Enid Bagnold; The very flower of the human race, Henry James; With the wounded I was at home, Hugh Walpole; The Boche bread is bad, Henry Beston; The Return of the Soldier, Rebecca West; On Leave, H. M. Tomlinson; Andiamo a casa, G. M. Trevelyan; What manner of man, John Dos Passos; Smashed in some complicated manner, H. G. Wells.

Chapter Six: Protest

This war is trivial, Bertrand Russell; The last great carouse, G. F. Nicolai; Courage there is no room for, Jane Addams; This unspeakably inhuman outrage, W. E. B. Du Bois; A war made deliberately by intellectuals, Randolph Bourne; Women who dared, Emily G. Balch; The bitterness of gall, Scott Nearing; Crime against the individual, Reinhold Niebuhr; This saturnalia of massacre, E. D. Morel.

Chapter Seven: Mourn

And the bullet won, Richard Harding Davis; He loved his youth, John Buchan; Demons of the whirlwind, George Santayana; All four lie buried on the Western Front, Gilbert Murray; Eyes lit with risk, Jean Cocteau; Drop drop drop of blood, Henry Beston; Of all the days in my life the most terrible, Harry Lauder; He wanted me to write, Katherine Mansfield; A girl in a pinafore, H. G. Wells; Tears are difficult for a man to shed, Paul Claudel; I lay on that brown mound, Harry Lauder; And I will murder some German, H. G. Wells.

Chapter Eight: Entertain

Lips under sod, Florence L. Barclay; Thoughts rode him like a nightmare, John Buchan; I brag of bear and beaver, Robert W. Service; Settling down to his dastardly work, William Le Queux; Far too young to assist, Charles Amory Beach; To die is easier, Edgar A. Guest; That dumb, backwoods, pie-faced stenographer, Dorothy Canfield Fisher; The azure gaze of Miss Hinda Warlick, Edith Wharton; My God, lady!, Mildred Aldrich; Nobody’s Land, Ring Lardner.

Epilogue: Guide

The pilgrimage, Mildred Aldrich; Turn right at cemetery gate, American Battle Monuments Commission; Peasants go there to dig, Henry Williamson; Visit to the Battlefield, Michelin & Cie.; Cemeteries become unremarkable, Stephen Graham; Back to the Somme, John Masefield; Whose credulous hearts the maggots were now eating, C. E. Montague; The most tragic and dreadful thing that has ever happened to mankind, H. G. Wells.