Tilly Hill's World War I scrapbook

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Left page:

Newspaper clipping pasted vertically in the upper left of a photograph of soldiers wearing gas masks

The word comes that the enemy is using gas.

Newspaper clipping below that on the left side of the page:

LORD READING AND FRANCE'S

HEROISM.

A Reader's telegraph from New York on Sunday

says -- Addressing a mass meeting in Madison

Square Garden this evening in honour of

France, Lord Reading said that they met there

to make a plain and open confession of their

admiration for the heroism and endurance of all

classes of Frenchmen and Frenchwomen, and

of their faith in the ultimate result. To-day,

he declared France and Great Britain stand

closer together than ever, and America has knit

the bonds between them still more firmly by

the moral and material support which she brings

as freely to ensure the ultimate victory of the

cause of freedom. The ultimate victory of

the struggle for liberty over despotism became

assured when this great nation, on whose soil

we now stand, ranged herself with the Allies.

Newspaper clipping in top center of page:

The Spirit of France

July 14th is the French National Féte

Day. France has suffered much since

the Féte of 1914; but she has kept

a good heart, and, in so doing, has helped

to sustain the spirit of the Alliance. Her

strength is as the strength of ten because

of the spiritual exaltation to which she has

risen in the crisis of her late M. Maurice

Barrès, in a paper read before the British

Royal Academy on Wednesday, showed

that this exaltation is often displayed

individually as well as nationally. He

read at length the wonderful account given

by Lieutenant Pericard of his experience

in the Bois-brûlé in April, 1915, when it

seemed to him that the dead in the trench

which he was defending, with a remaining

handful of men, rose up and aided them.

"I felt as though I had grown immeasurably,

that I had a giant's body, a bounding strength,

and in extraordinary lucidity of vision and

thought which allowed me to give orders, fire at

the enemy, and at the same time to parry his

bombs. Twice we ran out of grenades, and

twice we found them at our feet, whole sacks

full, mingled with sandbags. The whole day

we had stood upon them without seeing them.

At last the Germans died. That whole night and

for several following days the religious emotion

that had seized me when I called upon the dead

governed me completely."

M. Barrès believes that the transfiguration

of French soldiers, of which this incident

is an example, is in agreement with the

whole tradition of France from the

Crusades to Jeanne d'Arc and from

Jeanne d'Arc to the Revolution. The

soldiers of France, he says, fight

religiously - for ideas, for beliefs, for

aspirations. The women of France are

not less sublime. Peasant women receiving

the news of their husbands' and their

sons' death on the battlefield with the

cry "Vive la France," and Madame de

Castelnau, who, praying at the altar for

her three sons in battle, and seeing the

hands of the priest tremble, understands

and asks simply "Which 1" - are all animated

by the same spirit, the spirit of

faith and of victory. This is a literary

man's analysis, but friends of France who

here watched with sympathetic eyes the

manner in which she has borne the ordeal

of the past two years will not say that M.

Barrè's words are extravagant.

Newspaper clipping at upper right of page of a photograph of a woman's head and shoulders

NURSE CAVELL

handwritten:

Shot by the Germans

Oct 11th 1915

Newspaper clipping below that, center of right side, of a photograph of a bearded man in a hat and dark suit

MARTYRED DUNKIRK.

The Rev. W. J. Drought, who has continued

his work at Dunkirk in spite of

the havoc wrought by the German guns

and bombs. The buildings near his

parsonage are all destroyed, but the

church has escaped.

Handwritten, at bottom of page:

"The sunlight shall not easily seem fair

To you again

Knowing the hand which once amid your hair

Did stray so maddeningly

Now listlessly

Is beaten into mire by the summer rain."

From the Love of an unknown solider 6 III.Ig

Right page:

Newspaper clipping which takes up the entire page, oriented vertically, of soldiers in a trench, shooting and climbing over, while a dead soldier lies at the bottom

The brave legends of the knights of old are not more thrilling than this spectacle of shrapnel-helmeted French chasseurs hurling lumps of rock on the heads of the advancing enemy. The photograph was taken only a few days ago in a trench won from the Germans.