a certain set form: the rise of the war passion; the conflict;
victory and defeat; and then peace, in joyous relief, which the nations
enjoyed before they took the trouble to fight for it.

But such thoughts have been a familiar theme to the poet, the novelist,
the dramatist, the satirist, the dreamer, and the peace propagandist,
while the world goes on arming. In want of their talent, I offer
experience of the monstrous object of their gibes and imagination. To
me, the old war novels have the atmosphere of smoke powder and
antiquated tactics which still survived when I went on my first campaign
sixteen years ago. These classic masterpieces endure through their
genius; the excuse of any plodder who chooses their theme to-day is that
he deals with the material of to-day.

Methods of light and of motive power have not changed more rapidly in
the forty-odd years since the last great European war than the soldier's
weapons and his work. With all the symbols of economic improvement the
public is familiar, while usually it thinks of war in the old symbols
for want of familiarity with the new. My aim is to express not only war
as fought to-day, soldiers of to-day under the fire of arms of to-day,
but also the effects of war in the _n_th degree of modern organization
and methods on a group of men and women, free in its realism from the
wild improbabilities of some latter-day novelists who have given us
wars in the air or regaled us with the decimation of armies by
explosives dropped from dirigibles or their asphyxiation by noxious
gases compounded by the hero of the tale.

The Russo-Japanese and the Balkan campaigns, particular in their nature,
gave me useful impressions, but not the scene for my purpose. The world
must think of those wars comparatively as second-rate and only partially
illustrative, when its fearful curiosity and more fearful apprehension
centre on the possibility of the clash of arms between the enormous
forces of two first-class European land-powers, with their supreme
training and precision in arms. What would such a war mean in reality to
the soldiers engaged? What the play of human elements? What form the new
symbols? Therefore have I laid my scene in a small section of a European
frontier, and the time the present.

Identify your combatants, some friends insist. Make the Italians fight
the Austrians or the French fight the Germans. As a spectator of wars,
under the spell of the growing cosmopolitanism