by Richard van Pelt, WWI Correspondent

The letter to the editor in the Capital Journal’s Monday edition from A. Davis Fleet, in which he took issue with an earlier editorial, touched the editor’s nerve and prompted the following rebuttal:

Mr. A. Davis Fleet criticizes the Capital Journal’s editorial in Monday’s issue, in which the action of English war ships in stopping a Dutch vessel was discussed, in what Mr. Fleet calls “a very swashbuckling manner.” Mr. Fleet misses the whole meat of the matter. The Journal did not say a word about the “right of search” one way or the other. It in fact spoke of the very thing which Mr. Fleet points out as being the cause of the war of 1812, or a thing that involves the same principle. It called attention to the assertion that the British ships not only stopped the vessels and searched them but rifled the international mails and helped themselves to mail sent from one neutral country to another on a neutral vessel. Here is one thing the Journal commented on, and it is of a piece with the taking of neutral persons from neutral vessels. It may be “swashbuckling” to call attention to this and to warn England that she is trading on dangerous ground, but call it what you please and the fact is still patent that neither England nor any other country will be allowed to swipe Uncle Sam’s mails under any pretense whatever.

The trauma of war is a condition those who have not endured combat can little understand and a condition those who have endured are reluctant or unwilling to express. The ultimate power of the state is that it can compel its citizens to engage in combat with the certain knowledge they may not emerge alive. Weakness under fire is not acceptable. Physical wounds have been distinguished from mental wounds throughout history; one was acceptable, the other a sign of cowardice. The truth is that though the war in the trenches ended in 1918, there were those for whom the shelling and the terrors of trench warfare never ended, even a half century later.

The lead editorial, “Light On Battle Psycholodgy,” has the paper suggesting that the terrors of modern warfare is one to which the combatant becomes inured:

A question frequently heard nowadays from people who have been reading one of the more detailed accounts of the battles taking place in France or Austria is: “How can human beings endure without going mad the sights and the almost more dreadful sounds, the constant expectation day and night for weeks of violent death, the agonies of equally prolonged hardships that mark these colossal struggles?”

The inquiry is natural enough, as is the implied disbelief of those who make it that they could not themselves long stand such frightful strains. And not all the soldiers on either side do stand them, for there have been not a few references in the dispatches to men thus driven insane, while a considerable number of letters from those newly at the front have been printed that showed the writers then shaking in the grasp of just such horror as we at home thing we would feel if there. The subsequent experience of the great majority, however, is presumably that recounted by a Russian soldier in one of the Petrograd papers.

He says that the roar of battle no longer troubles him any more than did the incessant city sounds with which he was familiar; that he is so wonted to the spectacle of fields strewn with dead and dying that it now excites in him no strong emotion; that the dangers which fill all his hours have no more effect on him than the petty perils of ordinary life. He can even see not a little to admire in the ebb and flow of battle, and all his standards of what men should and should not do have, for the time being, at least, been changed.

This is not evidence of an acquired callousness, or even of war’s brutalizing influence; it is simply an illustration of the fact, known to every psychologist, that to any stimulus continuously or frequently applied human nerves soon cease to react, or react only weakly. Every doctor develops, and to be of any use must develop, a like modification of sympathy as regards the sufferings of his patients, and the nurse who faints at her first operation soon views them with a composure superficially much like indifference. The Russian soldier shrewdly notes, too, that he now views as commonplace deeds that formerly would have stirred him deeply as noble or heroic. He has come to expect such things from everybody, instead of seeking them as exceptional and exciting.

The British author, Pat Barker, won the 1995 Booker Prize for her World War I novel, The Ghost Road, the third in her Regeneration Trilogy which describes the emotional and psychological effects of this senseless and savage war. For readers interested in the war as set out in fiction, Barker’s trilogy combines “poetic intensity with gritty realism, blending biting humor with tragic drama, moving toward a denouement as inevitable as it is devastating.”

The major issue in midterm elections of 1914 was prohibition. The following article in the Statesman addressed the benefits of going dry:

BUSINESS IN DRY TOWNS IS MUCH BETTER
Oregon Committee Gives Report on Cities
MERCHANTS TO VOTE DRY

The Committee of One Hundred, composed entirely of prominent Oregon men and women, has made a careful investigation of every dry town in Oregon.

The result has shown that business is far better in every dry town as a whole; that collections and morals are unquestionably better; that civic improvement has been much increased; that building generally is much greater and that sentiment is now overwhelming in favor of a dry town.

****

In the whole Willamette Valley there was hardly noticeable any wet sentiment of great weight. Merchants and residents declared the hop argument had failed because it was realized that 98 per cent of Oregon hops were sold outside Oregon, and Oregon wet or Oregon dry could not affect the Oregon hop crop at all.

The headlines reported the German assault on Antwerp while reporting that conditions remained unchanged in a battle now more than a month old:

REIGN OF TERROR IN ANTWERP
Great Guns Batter Forts While Bombs Drop Constantly From the Sky
VILLAGES FOR MILES AROUND ARE BURNED
Pitiful Scenes As Terror-Stricken People Flee From Wrecked Homes

OFFICIAL REPORT SHOWS NO CHANGES
Claim French Have Regained All the Positions Taken by Germans

CONDITIONS STILL UNCHANGED IN THE MONTH-OLD BATTLE
Germans Attempt Flanking Movement Which Is Stopped by Aviators
1,640,000 GERMANS ON THE FIRING LINE
No Longer Known As Battle of the Aisne but Termed “The Great Battle”

GERMANS SHELLING CITY OF ANTWERP — POPULACE FLEEING
Demand City’s Surrender, Warning Noncombatants to Leave
BEGAN SHELLING CITY ON TWO HOURS’ NOTICE
Populace Fleeing to Dutch Frontier—Roads Littered with “Plunder”

REFUGEES CONDITION IS PITIFUL
Roads to Holland Filled with Families Driven From Their Homes
HOPE TAKES WINGS BUT HUNGER STAYS
Mothers Seek Children Who Frightened Beyond Tears Toddle Along in Silence

BIG BATTLE RAGING NEAR THE VISTULA
Russian Retreat Was to Lure Austrians From Their Entrenchments