Excerpt from In Hell Shut in at the Outbreak of the Great War, 1914

The next Sunday afternoon, just as I had finished this preliminary walk of one hundred miles or so and was resting on a high cliff overlooking the harbor of Belfast, the killing began. The Crown Prince was assassinated at Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia.

Another week leisurely roaming through the lake districts of England and a third around Snowdon, in the north of \vales, made me satisfied to take the train for London and, in a few days, cross over to Paris.

When, on the night of Monday, July 27th, the war fever stirred the city and crowds paraded the streets and passed close under my windows, then I was only interested, not con cerned. Even the next day, when Austria declared war against Servia, I looked upon the matter merely as a local disturbance. No falling barometer in the atmosphere of European peace bothered me. However, on Wednesday, July 29th, the day I left Paris by train for. Geneva, I find I made a brief note in my diary of the fact that troops were on guard at nearly all the railroad bridges and tunnels. This ordinary guard duty, which every soldier has to perform, was, I thought, being applied to the localities mentioned merely as a matter of form, an object lesson. How little I realized the true meaning and value of the precautionary measures being taken, which I noticed from the car window. A stick of dynamite fired under the pier of a railroad bridge or in a dirt tunnel would have de layed mobilization seriously. But nothing of this nature entered my thoughts and soon the whole matter passed out of my mind, out of my mind so completely that when the German lad told me of the French mobilization I did not con nect it with the presence of the troops along the lines of the railroads. Unknown to me for days after, but as a matter of fact, that Saturday afternoon, about half past three, while I was high up the side of the valley, looking across at the dazzling mass of snow on Mt. Blanc, Germany declared war against Russia and against France.

About the Publisher

Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com

This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.