The Bourbon news. [volume] (Paris, Ky.) 1895-19??, 1914-12-22
HOPELESS FOR ANY MAN To ATTEMPT
TO DESCRIBE THE WAR, SAYS COBB
Is Too Big to Be Reported in Words and the Writer Is Simply
Overwhelmed by the immensely of tMost Appalling Scenes
Not Those of the Battefeds, But Of the Base Hospitals
Mo Picturesqueness in the Struggle
BY IRWIN S. COBB,
Special War Correspondent OF the Sat
urday Evening Post.

Special War Correspondent Of the Sat
urday Evening Post.
New York-Irvin Cobb, war CORE
spondent and humorist, has brought
back with him from the battlefields 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
it, he says, nor any other language,
and it is interesting to hear Cobb,
who is one of the best reporters who
ever covered story, tell why this war
cannot be written.
I'VE have used up all our adjectives
on five-alarm fires, gang-murders, Slo-
cum disasters, political conventions,
Cobb said to reporter OF the New
York Evening Post 1--WE haven't got
anything left for such war, and it
seems pitifully inadequate to tall 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 has been anything like it.
Here you get Gettysburg for break
fast, a Charlottesville for lunch,
Waterloo for supper, and, to make a
good measure, they throw in Sedan
around tea-time.
1T is simply impossible, for in
stance, to tell how hundred thou
sand men died. You can't write it,
and the people who read it couldn't
realize the horror of it. 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. should not
attempt to guess them, because it
would be absurd to. hazard venture
in figures SO large. You could only
approximate it by hundreds of thou
sands.
The Track of an Army.
Zone 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 cap
tured town, 1 thrilled all over; the
first time l saw dead soldier l felt
that | could write a whole story
around that one fact But after little
time found that the most distressing
scenes of ruin. death and desOlatiOn
made very little concrete impression
upon me. AS matter of fact, one
dead man is a great deal more dis
tressing than several hundred or a
thousand, and the most appalling
scenes | witnessed were not those on
the battlefields, but in the base hos
pitfalls where poor chaps were dying
out Of sound of the guns.
Anyhow, the worst thing about a
battlefield isn't how it looks, but how
it sInells-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 it affected me: Yet it is re-
markable how efficiently nature works
to cover up the traces of war. Visit
the same scene 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 disagreeable
traces of death removed. 1t takes very
little time for nature to obliterate the
track of an army.
Even so, however, I am convinced
that the after-effects of this war will
be incalculable. I should not care to
try to estimate the time it will take
the winner to recover from it; SO years
is a moderate guess and means COM
paratively little except in suggestive
sense. The loser, l am convinced, will
scarcely ever recover from it. Bel
GUM, it is true, is simply the wreck
of a land today, but l am inclined to
believe the Belgians will rehabilitate
themselves a great deal faster than
people think Theirs is fecund little
country; their houses are all of stone,
and even those burned as general
rule have walls and gable-ends still
standing"
Mr. Cobb dismissed the question of
atrocities.
Investigated Atrocity Stories.
'The party of newspaper correspond
ents was with made careful inves-
tigation of every atrocity story that
reached u.s." he said. "They were al
most invariably false, and in the few
cases that were true, exaggeration was
the rule. This applies to the stories
told by the Belgians of the Germans
and by the Germans of the Belgians
and French. OF course, when you take
any large body of men, whether in war
or in peace, you will find among them
a certain percentage of detectives and
degenerates. We have atrocities in
New York city, so far as that is con-
J cerned. I am convinced that there