E-text prepared by Stephen Schulze
and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team
Author of "Over the Pass," etc.
1914
TO THE READER
This story of war grew out of my experience in many wars. I havebeen under fire without fighting; known the comradeship of armswithout bearing arms, and the hardships and the humors of the marchwith only an observer's incentive. A singular career, begun bychance, was pursued to the ends of the earth in the study of thegreatest drama which the earth stages. Whether watching a smallforce of white regulars disciplining a primitive people, or thecomplex tactics of huge army against huge army; whether watchingwar in the large or in the small, I have found the same basic humanqualities in the white heat of conflict working out the sameillusions, heroisms, tragedies, and comedies.
The fellowship of campaigning made the cause of the force that Iaccompanied mine for the time being. Thus, one who settles in thetown of A absorbs its local feeling of rivalry against the town ofB in athletic games or character of citizenship. To A, B is neverquite sportsmanlike; B is provincial and bigoted and generallyinferior. But settle in B and your prejudices reverse their favorfrom A to B.
Yet in the midst of battle, with the detachment of anon-combatant marvelling at the irony of two lines of men engagedin an effort at mutual extermination, I have caught myself thinkingwith the other side. I knew why my side was busy at killing. Whywas the other? For the same reasons as ours.
I was seeing humanity against humanity. A man killed was a mankilled, courage was courage, sacrifice was sacrifice, romance wasromance, a heart-broken mother was a heart-broken mother, a villageburned was a village burned, regardless of race or nation. Everywar became a story in a certain set form: the rise of the warpassion; the conflict; victory and defeat; and then peace, injoyous relief, which the nations enjoyed before they took thetrouble to fight for it.
But such thoughts have been a familiar theme to the poet, thenovelist, the dramatist, the satirist, the dreamer, and the peacepropagandist, while the world goes on arming. In want of theirtalent, I offer experience of the monstrous object of their gibesand imagination. To me, the old war novels have the atmosphere ofsmoke powder and antiquated tactics which still survived when Iwent on my first campaign sixteen years ago. These classicmasterpieces endure through their genius; the excuse of any plodderwho chooses their theme to-day is that he deals with the materialof to-day.
Methods of light and of motive power have not changed morerapidly in the forty-odd years since the last great European warthan the soldier's weapons and his work. With all the symbols ofeconomic improvement the public is familiar, while usually itthinks of war in the old symbols for want of familiarity with thenew. My aim is to express not only war as fought to-day, soldiersof to-day under the fire of arms of to-day, but also the effects ofwar in the nth degree of modern organization and methods ona group of men and women, free in its realism from the wildimprobabilities of some latter-day novelists who have given us warsin the air or regaled us with the decimation of armies byexplosives dropped from dirigibles or their asphyxiation by noxiousgases compounded by the hero of the tale.
The Russo-Japanese and the Balkan campaigns, particular in theirnature, gave me useful impressions, but not the scene for mypurpose. The world must think o