AUTHOR'S FOREWORD
(Being Extracts from Letters to his Sister)
"I am very much wondering whether you will receive 'A Diary' in four parts. It is very much founded on fact, though altered in parts. You will probably be surprised at a certain change in tone, but remember that my previous articles were written in England, while this was written on the spot.... The Diary was not my diary, though it was so very nearly what mine might have been that it is difficult to say what is fiction and what is actuality in it. With regard to the 'conversation' during the bombardment, it represents in its totality what I believe the ordinary soldier feels. He loathes the war, and the grandiloquent speeches of politicians irritate him by their failure to realize how loathesome war is. At the same time he knows he has got to go through with it, and only longs for the chance to hurry up. In the 'Diary,' again, I quite deliberately emphasized the depression of the man who thought he was being left out, and the mental effect of the clearing-up process because I thought that it would be a good thing for people to realize this side, and also partly because I felt that in previous articles I had glossed over it too much.... If I get a chance of publishing another book I shall certainly include them."
Note.—Not only "A Diary" and "Imaginary Conversations," but every paper in the present collection, with the exception of "The Wisdom," "The Potentate," and "A Passing in June," were written in France in 1916, and many of them actually in the trenches. The rough sketch for "A Passing in June" was written in France in 1915, but was completed when the author was in hospital at home.
"The Potentate" was written for the original volume of A Student in Arms, but was not published on account of its likeness in subject to Barrie's play, Der Tag, which, however, Donald had not seen or even heard of when he wrote his own.