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Title: A Soldier's Sketches Under Fire

Author: Harold Harvey

Release Date: June 14, 2005 [EBook #16056]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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A SOLDIER'S SKETCHES UNDER FIRE

[Illustration: PRIVATE HAROLD HARVEY. _Frontispiece_]

A SOLDIER'S SKETCHES UNDER FIRE

By HAROLD HARVEY

[Illustration: SLM & Co. MDCCXCIV]

LONDON

SAMPSON LOW, MARSTON & CO., LTD.

FORENOTE

A title such as "A Soldier's Sketches Under Fire" indicates at once the
nature, scope and limitations of this unpretentious volume of annotated
drawings to which it has been given.

Faked pictures of the war are plentiful. Sketches taken on the spot they
depict, sometimes by a hand that had momentarily laid down a rifle to
take them, and always by a draughtsman who drew in overt or covert peril
of his life, gain in verisimilitude what they must lose in elaboration
or embellishment; are the richer in their realism by reason of the
absence of the imaginary and the meretricious.

All that Mr. Harold Harvey drew he saw; but he saw much that he could
not draw. All sorts of exploits of which pictures that brilliantly
misrepresent them are easily concoctable were for him impossible
subjects for illustration. As he puts it himself, very modestly:

"There were many happenings--repulsions of sudden attacks,
temporary retirements, charges, and things of that sort that would
have made capital subjects, but of which my notebook holds no
'pictured presentment,' because I was taking part in them."

He also remarks:

"Sketched in circumstances that certainly had their own
disadvantages as well as their special advantages, I present these
drawings only for what they are."

Just because they are what they are they are of enduring interest and
permanent value. They have the vividness of the