True Stories of the Great War, Volume 2 (of 6) Tales of Adventure--Heroic Deeds--Exploits Told by the Soldiers, Officers, Nurses, Diplomats, Eye Witnesses — Story, Setting & Ideas

This volume assembles 144 episodes told by twenty-four distinct narrators, ranging from a German submarine officer to a French mother keeping a wartime journal. The editor, Francis Trevelyan Miller, has drawn from published memoirs and dispatches, arranging them not by chronology but by the speaker's role—aviator, diplomat, spy, nurse. The result is a mosaic of voices that often contradict one another in tone and perspective, yet share a common urgency to record what they witnessed.

The excerpts reveal a deliberate editorial hand: each story is prefaced with a credit line naming the original publisher, signaling that these are curated reprints rather than commissioned pieces. This framing invites readers to consider how the same war could produce both the methodical destruction of Tsingtau's guns and the intimate grief of a mother's diary.

Diction Across Ranks and Roles

The language in these narratives shifts markedly with the narrator's station. Kapitanleutnant Hellmuth Von Mücke, recounting the Emden's exploits, writes with the clipped precision of a naval officer: 'The white flag was the signal.' In contrast, the French mother Madame Edouard Drumont, translated by Grace E. Bevir, uses a more personal, reflective register. The American war correspondent Stanley Washburn adopts a reporter's neutral tone, while the anonymous 'Anzac' sapper writes with the colloquial directness of a soldier in the field. These stylistic differences are not smoothed over; they are preserved, allowing the reader to hear the war through distinctly different ears.

The Texture of Technical Detail

Several accounts dwell on the material specifics of warfare with an almost archaeological eye. The description of Tsingtau's forts lists calibers and origins of guns—'two twenty-four-centimeter guns and three fifteen-centimeter guns'—and notes that some had been captured from the French in 1871 or from Chinese forts in 1900. This attention to hardware extends to the destruction: breech-blocks wound with nitro-glycerine, dynamite packed to the muzzle edge. The narrator does not simply report that the guns were destroyed; he describes how the explosions left 'twisted steel and splintered plates,' concrete reduced to 'shale.' Such detail grounds the narrative in physical reality.

Silence and Selection: What Is Not Said

The editorial structure itself makes a statement. By grouping stories under headings like 'The Notebook of an Attaché' or 'Last Words of a Soldier and Dramatist,' Miller signals that these are fragments, not complete histories. The gaps between narratives are as telling as the content. For instance, the account of Tsingtau's fall comes from an American correspondent, Jefferson Jones, not a German or Japanese participant. The French mother's journal appears without commentary on her political views. The reader is left to infer connections, to weigh the credibility of each voice, and to notice which perspectives are absent—such as those of ordinary German soldiers or Ottoman troops.

Recurring Motifs: Destruction and Preservation

Across different narrators, a pattern emerges: the deliberate destruction of matériel to deny it to the enemy. At Tsingtau, the garrison not only dynamited guns but also burned postage stamps and opened tins of food, leaving them untouched. The same impulse appears in other accounts, though the excerpts here focus on the Far East. This motif of controlled ruin—making something useless rather than letting it be captured—recurs as a quiet theme. It contrasts with the volume's own project of preservation: collecting stories so they are not lost. The act of writing becomes a counterweight to the physical erasure described within the narratives.

Readers approaching this collection should attend to the provenance of each story: the original publisher, the narrator's role, and the date of composition. The volume does not attempt a unified argument about the war; instead, it offers a set of lenses, each ground by a different hand. Comparing the tone of a diplomat's dispatch with a sapper's memoir reveals how genre shapes testimony. This is not a book to be read straight through, but one to be sampled, its voices allowed to clash and echo.