| The Political Crises in Post-War Germany (Current Opinion Magazine, 1919) The CURRENT OPINION foreign correspondent filed this short dispatch about the pandemonium unfolding in post-World War I Germany:
"The great fact to the outside world is that a German parliament has actually precipitated a crisis. It threw out the Scheidemann cabinet. It presided over the birth of a Bauer one. It was the German parliament which dictated to the government regarding its composition, instead of meekly obeying the government, as had been the custom..." Rampant Inflation in Post-War Germany (Click Magazine, 1944)Author and radio commentator Emil Ludwig (1881 – 1948) recalled the economic catastrophe that devastated post-World War I Germany as a result of their inflated currency:
"Inflation in Germany really started on the first day of the war in 1914 when the government voted a credit of five billion marks. This was not a loan...I saw the mark, the German monetary unit corresponding to the British shilling or the American quarter, tumble down and down until you paid as much for a loaf of bread as you would have paid for a limousine before inflation started." The World After W.W. I (The Bookman, 1929)The book review of Winston Churchill's 1929 tome, THE AFTERMATH : "All too frequently Mr. Churchill passes lightly over the story he alone can tell and repeats the stories that other men have told."...[Yet] no one who wants to understand the world he lives in can afford to miss 'The Aftermath'. Would that all contemporary statesmen were one-tenth as willing as Mr. Churchill to tell what they know."
Read the thoughts of one W.W. I veteran who regrets having gone to war... How Canada's Veterans are Fairing (American Legion Weekly, 1921)"Second only to the part played by Canada on the battlefields of Europe is the magnificent spirit in which the dominion has dealt with the returned soldier and with the fallen soldier and his dependents. From the time the war ended to the present, Canada has led the rest of the world in looking after ex-service men."
"When the men of the Dominion returned from Europe they originally got three months' post-discharge pay at their discharge rank. On second thought this was changed early in 1919 to a war gratuity basis, as follows: For one year's overseas service or more, four months' pay and allowances; for three years' service or more, six months' pay and allowances. From these amounts deducted any sum paid out under the post-discharge system which had earlier prevailed. The men who had seen service in Canada only were not forgotten and received checks for one month's pay and allowances for each complete year of service in the army." Thanks, America: A French Expression of Gratitude
(American Legion Monthly, 1936)Almost twenty years after the First World War reached it's bloody conclusion, Americans collectively wondered as they began to think about all the empty chairs assembled around so many family dinner tables, "Do the French care at all that we sacrificed so much? Do they still remember that we were there?" In response to this question, an American veteran who remained in France, submitted the attached article to THE AMERICAN LEGION MONTHLY and answered those questions with a resounding "Yes": "...I can assure you that the real France, the France of a thousand and one villages in which we were billeted; the France of Lorraine peasants, of Picardy craftsmen, of Burgundy winegrowers - remembers, with gratitude, the A.E.F. and its contribution to the Allied victory." The article is accompanied by eight photographs of assembled Frenchmen decorating American grave sites.
Click here to read an article by a grateful Frenchman who was full of praise for the bold and forward-thinking manner in which America entered the First World War. A Veteran Against War (Rob Wagner's Script Magazine, 1938)The writer who penned the attached article was named Paul Gerard Smith (1894 – 1968); he has a big long list of credits on IMBD and a bunch of other Hollywood sites. For those who remember him and his long body of work, he was a funny man and a clever screenwriter, but the fellow who wrote this piece was the sullen Paul Gerard Smith that few ever got to know. Smith was a World War I veteran who got a belly-full of war and was mighty sore about how he had been fooled into going in the first place. In this article he expresses his bitterness for having served in the First World War and cautions the young men of his day to make their decisions wisely before marching off to war. | 
