In this book I have put together the articles which I have written day by day for more than three months, since that first day of July, 1916, when hundreds of thousands of British troops rose out of the ditches held against the enemy for nearly two years of trench warfare, advanced over open country upon the most formidable system of defences ever organised by great armies, and began a series of battles as fierce and bloody as anything the old earth has seen on such a stretch of ground since the beginning of human strife.
Before July I I had an idea of writing a book about all that I had seen for nearly eighteen months, since I abandoned the hazardous game of a free lance in the war-zones of France and Belgium (to me those were the great and wonderful days) and became officially accredited as a correspondent with the British armies in the field. I had seen a good deal in the trenches and behind the lines - nearly all there was to see - of stationary warfare from Ypres to the Somme, and enough to understand with every nerve in my body not only the abomination of this doom which put fine sensitive men into dirty mudholes and sinister ruins, in exile from the comforts and beauty and decency of life, under the continual menace of death or mutilation, but also the valour of great numbers of simple souls who hated it all and yet endured it with a queer gaiety, and laughed even while they cursed its beastliness, and resigned themselves to its worst miseries like Christian martyrs with a taste for beer and the pictures of the "vie parisienne."
