Chapter II: Foreword

It will be seen, by the first chapter, how fortuitous though inevitable was the writing of this little book, begun before the American troops came to France; yet it happens to concern that part of the war zone wherein our men are preparing themselves for battle, and which will be quickened with their blood.

The time has scarcely come to write of the world war; indeed, it is only between wars that one can write of them, when wisdom, with accompanying imagination, looks down the great perspectives; now men’s utmost energies are concentrated upon deeds of passion performed in hope or in despair.

Oliver’s _Ordeal by Battle_ of 1915 remains the most scholarly and philosophic of the war books; Masefield’s _Gallipoli_ the most artistic. But even these, and the many, many others, give not so much a sense of inadequacy as of impossibility.

Letters from strong souls undergoing supreme emotions have emanated from the trenches or the air. We have mourned young perished singers: Rupert Brooke, Alan Seeger. But for the most part, and so it must be, war books are limited to the relation of personal deeds and sufferings, and descriptions of localities where they have taken place, colored more or less by the temperament of each—even as I, “_en passant par la Lorraine_,” wrote these pages.

EDITH COUES O’SHAUGHNESSY.

33 RUE DE L’UNIVERSITÉ, PARIS, _January 19, 1918_.