84 
House & Garden 
“H ovv many people who talk and write 
about war would have the courage to face a 
minute, fractional part of the reality under¬ 
lying war’s inherited romance?” 
This sentence from a Collier war article 
indicates more or less exactly Collier’s aim 
in covering the Great War. 
Not that we design to concoct gratuitous 
horror, or destroy belief that this war con¬ 
tains the heroism, thrills and eye-filling pan¬ 
oply which poets would make us think are 
the salient facts of all war. 
Collier’s has simply aimed to tell its readers 
what war really is. 
Any observer, of course, can fill pages with 
bombardments, charges, retreats, estimates 
of losses and gains. But here, as always, it 
takes the man who is at once keen visioned, 
of wide experience and understanding and an 
artist to create that sense of physical contact 
with this amazing thing oversea for which 
we have felt Collier readers were eager. 
Therefore we have constantly given them 
such things as Gelett Burgess’s vivid picture 
‘‘How Fear Came to Paris”; Perceval Gib¬ 
bon’s “The Gate of Germany”; Frederick 
Palmer’s “The Greatest of Battles”; Wads¬ 
worth Camp’s “The Dark Frame of War”; 
Arthur Ruhl’s “Up to the Front,” “Ru¬ 
mania Learns What War Is,” “Russia’s War 
Prisoners,” “Cannon Fodder.” 
Take Ruhl’s work as an example of war 
reporting that realizes the Collier ideal. 
Consider “Russia’s War Prisoners,” that pic¬ 
ture of the blue-gray tide flowing toward 
Siberia; the figures that stand forth from the 
throng — the Bukowina schoolmaster, the 
Luxembourg Jew, the counts and peasants; 
the piles of letters and telegrams following 
the prisoners hither and yon. Consider the 
impression of the author’s whole experience 
which, by very restraint, he succeeds in 
printing on your memory as of something 
you have encountered. 
Or “Cannon Fodder,” a flashlight on the 
meaning of war as seen in a Budapest hos¬ 
pital. Or that thought-impelling picture of 
the interchange of Austrian and Russian 
wounded outside of Stockholm on a Mav 
morning. 
This, we repeat, is the Collier ideal in war 
reporting—timeliness, combined with the 
ability to see things as they are, clear think¬ 
ing and art in writing—which gives the result 
some of the qualities of literature. 
Collier’s feels that bv giving Americans the 
actual touch of war, its sounds, its smells, 
telling how it acts, how soldiers die—war 
with all its heroism but stripped of glamour— 
it is helping teach Americans not craveniv to 
shrink from war but rather to think more 
deeply and, out of awakened national con¬ 
sciousness, to consider why wars happen and 
how the things that make them happen can 
be changed. 
This is another way in which Collier’s earns 
the right to its title “The National Weekly.” 
