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America’s War the war sold magazines, and Ellery Sedgwick saw subscriptions rise as the Atlantic devoted more of its contents to the conflict. The increase in readers was dramatic, escalating from 7,000 in 1897 to 20,000 in 1908, and 38,000 in 1915, before skyrocketing in 1918 to 100,000.1 Part of the reason had to do with the magazine’s first-person accounts of the war, which revealed, in the words of one Atlantic critic, “those finalities which even the shadow of death cannot eclipse.”2 Readers thought that literature expressed not only the heart of their respective nations, but also the strivings of humanity . In “Literature and Cosmopolitanism” (February 1915), Sedgwick’s brother, Henry Dwight Sedgwick, wrote that though “the spirit of literature finds its home in its native place . . . every nation has need of the literature of all other nations . . . to step beyond our narrow chamber in a brave world.”3 Journalists borrowed techniques from fiction just as novelists borrowed from journalism to find words that could not be found to touch the horror of the First Battle of the Marne or the slaughter at Gallipoli, or young nurses caring for maimed soldiers, or even the starved refugees lying in Paris railway stations. The line between reportage and fiction blurred; first-person accounts of the front were sometimes narrated in the form of journals or letters. In December 1916, the Atlantic published excerpts from the journal of a Canadian officer, titled “The 27 There are other towns somewhere in France besides those from which come the horrible tales of the trenches—the trenches, those long open graves in which the men stand waiting for red and screaming death by machines. vernon kellogg, “The Belgian Wilderness,” Atlantic, March 1916 America’s War [ 243 ] Trench-Raiders.” The purposes of trench-raiding were multiple. Apart from terrorizing the enemy at night, gathering intelligence, and capturing equipment, they were designed to hone the troops as killing machines. The anonymous author of these entries took readers from “Grenade School,” across no-man’s-land at midnight, through barbed wire fences, and into a German trench ten feet deep and forty feet long, where he and his men— equipped with bayonets, brass knuckles, knives, clubs, grenades, and submarine guns—killed between forty and fifty soldiers in six minutes. This was the “first recorded instance in the war where a successful attack had been made without artillery preparation to cut the wire,” he wrote, and the survivors were cheered as though they had won “a hockey match.”4 In October 1918, the month before the war ended, the Atlantic’s lead article consisted of letters from an American lieutenant named Briggs Adams, who joined the Royal Flying Corps (rfc). Educated at Harvard, Adams trained at various camps in England and Scotland before volunteering for active service in France, where he joined the Bombing Group of the Eighteenth Squadron, rfc. Adams found it particularly fitting to make war on war: “Instead of aiming to kill, as in fighting on the ground or even in scout-fighting,” he told his parents, “we aim to destroy war manufactories, material things made to kill me. Thus we are striking at the very base of war.” He wanted his mother to know that he felt “no bitterness against the Huns as individuals. It is war that I hate, and war that I am willing to give all to end as permanently as possible: for it isn’t the men that war kills, it is the mother’s heart which it destroys, that makes it hateful to me.”5 Adams’s letters, published under the title “The American Spirit,” captured a huge audience for the magazine. Written with boyish charm, they included descriptions of throwing his plane to and fro, dropping it sideways, and crisscrossing or abandoning the controls before straightening out in a simple nose-glide.6 To risk death seemed to him “like a great final examination in college for a degree in summa vita in mortem,” which challenged the best in him and spurred him on to test “every last reserve of energy, strength, and thought.”7 Intent on becoming the best pilot in his squadron, Adams worried that he was “taking too much good out of such a rotten thing of war.”8 If he didn’t come back, he wanted his mother to know that “we can’t hope to gain such wonderful ends without paying big prices, and it is...

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