A SOLDIER’S DIARY _NEW NOVELS_ LOVE’S PILGRIM J. D. BERESFORD NONE-GO-BY MRS. ALFRED SIDGWICK PIPPIN ARCHIBALD MARSHALL THE JORDANS SARAH GERTRUDE MILLIN LIFE E. WINGFIELD-STRATFORD ROWENA BARNES CONAL O’RIORDAN [Illustration: Collins’ Geographical Establishment, Glasgow.] A SOLDIER’S DIARY _by_ RALPH SCOTT [Illustration] LONDON: 48 PALL MALL W. COLLINS SONS & CO. LTD. GLASGOW MELBOURNE AUCKLAND Copyright 1923. _Manufactured in Great Britain_ TO THE P.B.I. PREFACE BY MAJOR-GENERAL SIR FREDERICK MAURICE Lord Robert Cecil has said that he is amazed at the false picture of war given by the history books, and that he trusts that the historians of the future will give us a better picture of what war really is than have historians of the past. I doubt if they will. They are concerned with the statesmen who direct and the generals who control, rather than with the soldier who fights, they have neither time nor space to concern themselves with the things that mattered to the men in the ranks. We can only get the things that matter, the misery, suffering, and endurance, the filth, the horror, the desolation, which are a part and the greater part even of the most triumphant progress in modern war, from the men who have experienced them. The reason for the publication of this diary is given by the author in his entry for October 6. “The only way to stop war is to tell these facts in the school history books and cut out the rot about the gallant charges, the victorious returns, and the blushing damsels who scatter roses under the conquering heroes’ feet. Every soldier knows that the re-writing of the history books would stop war more effectively than the most elaborately covenanted league which tired politico-legal minds can conceive.” Again, in the last entry of all, written after the author has been watching the Swedish Royal Troops changing guard at the Palace: “Is there no one with the courage to tell them that war is not like this, that there will come a day without music, and no admiring eyes, but when ‘the lice are in their hair and the scabs are on their tongue’? Surely our years of sacrifice were vain if the most highly educated people in Europe remain in ignorance of the real nature of war and are open scoffers at the League of Nations.”