Wood County reporter. [volume] (Grand Rapids [i.e. Wisconsin Rapids], Wis.) 1857-1923, 1914-12-03
BY IRWIN S. CosB,
Special War Correspondent of the Sat
urday Evening Post.


New York-Iryin Cobb war CORE
spondent and humorist, has brought
back with him from the battlefelds OF
Belgium and northern France the
chief impression that it is hopeless
for any man to attempt to describe the
war. The English language cannot do
1t, he says. nor any other language,
and it is interesting to hear Cobb,
who is one Of the best reporters who
ever covered a story, tell why this war
cannot be written.
I'VE have used up all our adjectives
on flve-aIarm fires, gang-murders, Slo-
cum disasters, political conventions"
Cobb said to a reporter of the New
York Evening Post. we haven't got
anything left for such a war, and it
seems pltifully inadequate to fall back
on the stock phrases. It's too big to
comprehend You start out in the
morning with the best intentions of
grasping the facts of events and writ
ing a bully story, and you come home
in the evening dazed and brow-beaten.
There never tas been anything like it.
Here you get a Gettysburg for break
fast. a Charlottesville for lunch,
Waterloo for supper, and, to make
good measure, they throw in a Sedan
around tea-time
1T is simply impossible, for in
stance, to tell how a hundred thou
sand men died. You can't write it,
and the people who read it couldn't
realize the horror of 1t. They would
be too staggered, too amazed by the
proportions of the statement. What
you can do, though, is to pick out the
story of how one man died, and tell
that making him typical of the hun
dred thousand or the million or what
ever the figures may be. AS for cas-
ualties, I'm convinced they have been
much greater than any of the COM
batants has admitted. l should not
attempt to guess them, because it
would be absurd to hazard a venture
in figures so large. You could only
approximate it by hundreds of thou
sands
The Track of an Army.
"One thing that impressed me was
the way in which you become habitu-
ated to the terrible side Of war. The
first time I saw Germans enter a cap
4ured town, I thrilled all over; the
first time I saw a dead soldier I felt
that l could write a whole story
around that one fact. But after little
time I found that the most distressing
scenes of ruin, death and desolation
made very little concrete impression
upon me. AS a matter of fact, one
dead man Is 8 great deal more dis
tressing than several hundred or a
thousand. and the most appalling
scenes I witnessed were not those on
the battlefelds. but in the base hos
pitfalls where poor chaps were dying
out of sound of the guns.
Anyhow, the worst thing about 8
battlefield isn't how it looks, but how
it smells-the awful stencil of I'M
buried bodies. of stale gunpowder
fumes. of human sweat, of rotting
corn, of damp, ruined houses. That
is the way ii affected me: Yet it is re
markable how efficiently nature works
to cover up the traces of war. Visit
the same scene q few weeks later, and
you'll find grass growing in the ruts
made by the cannon, new foliage
burgeoning on trees that were stripped
bare, and most Of the disagreeabIe
traces of death removed. It takes very
little time for nature to obliterate the
track Of an army.
Even so, however. am convinced
that the after-enects of this war will