The Ely miner. [volume] (Ely, Minn.) 1895-1986, 1920-11-26


one whose name announces that it 1:
devoted to true stories, and Sub
title calls attention to the good ole
proverb that truth is stranger thar
fiction" Truth in this case makes
the concession of trying to appear as
Is not in the realm of Imagination that
one would look first for the verifi'
cation of our ancient adage that truth
is stranger than fiction. The news OF
the world as it is turned out day by
day is to a very large extent con-
cerned with the strange and unusual
thing, often paralleling fiction, often
going beyond it. The variety of the
possible combinations of circumStan-
ces is so great as to surpass the i'm
agination of the most fertile fictionist,
says the New York Times.
~ Ask any one what events chrOni-
cIeu in the newspapers are or have
been stranger than fiction, and the
first answer will probably be the war
itself. The war, certainly. No one
did and no one could have imagined or
written down such a stupendOus trag-
edy as the world has just gone
through. 1t is a case where the plain
facts have far outdistanced the fic-
tionists as we'll as the historians
looking into the future. Old Bernardo,
knowing what the German ruling class
had in mind, knew that war with
France and Russia was coming and
the world as a whole had slowly been
prepared through years for a Euro
pean clash. But no one foresaw a
conflict in which the whole world
would be involved, war which would
cost millions of lives and money run
ming into the hundreds of billions of
dollars.
What Stranger Than This?
Not only the war as thing in it.
self, but unnumbered phases and incl
dents of the war passed beyond the
imagination of the men who wrote be-
fore 1914. Americas part in it alone
forms an almost unbelievable episode.
What writer would have dared, dec
AIDE even ago, to have told of an
American army of 100000 men fight
Ing over the old battlefelds of North,
ern France and Belgium?
Wha. brilliant fictiOnist could have
pictured the results of the war? The
restoration of crushed nations of Eu-
rope, the breakup of old empires?
What revolutionary ge ius of fiction
would have fancied Russia under the
Bolsheviki for nearly three years?
Who could have given an air of real
ity to romance in 1913 dealing with
the fate of the Car of Russia or
Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany?
The true stories Of the heroic deeds
of the war, the personal experiences
and tragic incidents, are in many cases
too strange and unreal to have passed
unqTestiOned IN the pages of fiction.
A gun with a range of seventy-five
miles drops a shell into Paris church
at the moment it Is crowded for Good
Friday mass. No wonder that for
days the world would not believe that
such thing had happened! The first
use of gas by the Germans against
the British in the Ypres sector was
another fact the world could Tot bring
itself to believe without great effort.
The first air raids, the first subma-
rine attack on passenger ships and
even the announcement that the Ger
man troops were marching on France
through Belgium upset all the ordeA !
OF thinking in supposedly sane
world. A world which has lived
Tough the days since August, 1914,
will have no reason to doubt that
truth is stranger than fiction.
Outdoes Jules Verne.
For years the imaginative story of
Jules Verne on submarines, called
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the
Sea-" was a bromide among writer's
and takers who wished to mention the
ultra-fictional and the Enthusiastically
imaginative. Yet the vividness of that
story contained nothing so picturesque
and certainly nothing so true as that
epic tale of underseas suffering and
heroism brought into this port and
Philadelphia from off the Delaware
capes recently by the survivors of the
American submarine SIS.
Disabled in a practice crash dive,
the submarine was tilted by her Com
mander so that her stern stood out
of water and while cataracts swept
Erough her compartments as the
doors were opened between them, Off
GERS and men climbed to the part Of |
the ship that stood above the waves
not knowing that any part of the
vessel was above the water line. Then |
for nearly thirty hours the crew bat |
lied for life, without drinking water,
in heavy atmosl here poisoned with |
chlorine gas, and with only scraps of |
food to eat.
They ripped hole in the steel |
plates of the vessel, put a red shirt |
on q pipe and waved their signal until |
help came. Then, each disclaiming |
credit for heroism by gi~ g praise to |
some one else in the crew, they were
rescued by steamship captairs and a
heroic engineef who lahore. for hours |
to cut large hole through the sub
marines plates.
Every ship that comes into the port
brings some story, perhaps sad, per-
haps amusing, that matches Dana or
Cooper or Conrad. Truth, but like
fiction, is the story of Jacob Cohen,