The division of the enormous battle fronts into innumerable little news-tight compartments, so to speak, understood in their entirety only by the commanders in chief at the centers of the telegraph and telephone network far behind the front, makes it impossible for a correspondent to see very far beyond his own nose. Even were he permitted to understand the general plan of his own army he could scarcely know, while still at the front, the general plan of the enemy. A well-informed observer working comfortably at his desk in one of the capitals, with the news of the world at his disposal, with experts on every subject within easy calling distance, and with every sort of map and reference book, is much better able to write a story of the war--such a story as this, for instance--than any correspondent actually at the front, however fortunately situated. There have been many such "correspondents at home" and reporters returning from first-hand glimpses of this and that, have often for the first time understood the significance of such details when they were seen through the broad perspective and leisurely analysis of such long-distance observers. The nourishing flavor of such a little book as Fritz Kreisler's "Four Weeks in the Trenches"--scarcely more than a magazine article, with no sensational adventures and no attempt at rhetorical effect, and of several little collections of published letters--reveals at once the correspondent's other disability. People feel that this man really was _there_--this is what one real man with a gun in his hand did feel, and not what some civilian, sitting safely out of range, imagines crowds of men might have felt. Its very incompleteness, things left out because of sensibilities so stunned that events made no mark as they whirled by, is often more impressive than the conventional war correspondent's cocksureness and windy eloquence. There are scores of men like this gifted violinist--playwriters, painters, journalists, men trained to see things in various ways--drawn in by universal service and now buried in the mass, but destined some day to emerge to normal life. From them the story of the individual, of the fighting itself, must come long after the war is over. It will come piecemeal, from diaries now stuck away in the soldiers' pockets, from memories that will only begin to act when peace has given weary brains a chance to work again, from men now tired and dirty and horror-stunned and scarcely able to remember their own names. PART I--INDIRECT CAUSES OF THE WAR POLITICAL AND DIPLOMATIC HISTORY OF EUROPE FROM 1866 TO 1914 WITH A CHAPTER ON THE HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT OF JAPAN