I hope that this forecast is a true one. If this sketch book is worthy to outlast the days of the war, and to be kept for remembrance on the shelves of those who have lived through it, it will have done its bit. For will it not be a standing reminder of the _ingloriousness_ of war, its preposterous absurdity, and of its futility as a means of settling the affairs of nations? When the ardent Jingo of the day after to-morrow rattles the sabre, let there be somewhere handy a copy of "Fragments from France" that can be opened in front of him, at any page, just to remind him of what war is really like as it is fought in "civilised" times. Captain Bairnsfather has become a household word--or perhaps one should say a trench-hold word. Who is ever the worse for a laugh? Certainly not the soldier in trench or dug-out or shell-swept billet. Rather may it be said that the Bairnsfather laughter has acted in thousands of cases as an antidote to the bane of depression. It is the good fortune of the British Army to possess such an antidote, and the ill-fortune of the other belligerents that they do not possess its equivalent. [Illustration: CAPTAIN BRUCE BAIRNSFATHER This picture was taken at the Front, less than a quarter of a mile from the German trenches. Captain Bairnsfather has come "straight off the mud," and is wearing a fur coat, a Balaclava helmet, and gum boots. Immediately behind him is a hole made by a "Jack Johnson" shell.] A Scots officer, writing in the _Edinburgh Evening News_, hits the true sentiment towards Bairnsfather of the Army in France when he writes: "To us out here the 'Fragments' are the very quintessence of life. We sit moping over a smoky charcoal fire in a dug-out. Suddenly someone, more wide-awake than others remembers the 'Fragments.' Out it comes, and we laugh uproariously over each picture. For are these not the very things we are witnessing every day, incidents full of tragic humour? The fed-up spirit you see on the faces of Bairnsfather's pictures is a sham--a mask beneath which there lies something that is essentially British." [Illustration]