today apart from two ghost stories, "The Lusitania Waits" and "The Log of the Evening Star", which are still occasionally reprinted in collections of tales of the uncanny. Im Westen nichts Neues ("All Quiet on the Western Front"), Erich Maria Remarque's best-selling book about World War I, was translated into 28 languages with world sales nearly reaching 4 million in 1930. The work of fiction, and the award-winning film adaptation have had a greater influence in shaping public views of the war than the work of any historian. John Galsworthy's perspective was quite different in 1915 when he wrote Those of us who are able to look back from thirty years hence on this tornado of death — will conclude with a dreadful laugh that if it had never come, the state of the world would be very much the same. It is not the intention of these words to deny the desperate importance of this conflict now that it has been joined ... Remarque's book was partly based on Henri Barbusse's 1916 novel Under Fire. Barbusse was a French journalist who served as a stretcher-bearer on the front lines, and his book was very influential in its own right at the time. By the end of the war, it had sold almost 250,000 copies and read by servicemen of many nations. British novelist Mary Augusta Ward wrote generally pro-war novels, some at the request of United States President Theodore Roosevelt, which nevertheless raised questions about the war. These include England's Effort (1916), Towards the Goal (1917), Missing (1917), The War and Elizabeth (1917) and Fields of Victory (1919). Some pre-existing popular literary characters were placed by their authors in World War I-related adventures during or directly after the war. These include Tom Swift (Tom Swift and His Aerial Warship in 1915 and Tom Swift and His Air Scout in 1919), Sherlock Holmes (His Last Bow, 1917) and Tarzan (Tarzan the Untamed, 1920). Post-war A.P. Herbert was one of the first combatants to publish a novel about the war, The Secret Battle (1919). This was followed in subsequent years by others, including Through the Wheat (1923) by Thomas Alexander Boyd, the "Spanish Farm Trilogy"—Sixty-Four (1925), Ninety-Four (1925) and The Crime at Vanderlynden's (1926)—by Ralph Hale Mottram, Death of a Hero (1929) by Richard Aldington, The Middle Parts of Fortune (1929) by Frederic Manning, The Patriot's Progress (1930) by Henry Williamson,