Instead Of A Preface

The horrible and incomprehensible hates and brutalities of the
European War! Unspeakable atrocities! Men blood-lusting like a lot
of tigers!

Horrible they are indeed. But my experiences in the war zone
render them no longer incomprehensible. For, while over there, in
my own blood I felt the same raging beasts. Over there, in my own
soul I knew the shattering of my most cherished principles.

It is not an unique experience. Whoever has been drawn into the
center of the conflict has found himself swept by passions of
whose presence and power he had never dreamed.

For example: I was a pacifist bred in the bone. Yet, caught in Paris
at the outbreak of the war, my convictions underwent a rapid
crumbling before the rising tide of French national feeling. The
American Legion exercised a growing fascination over me. A little
longer, and I might have been marching out to the music of the
Marseillaise, dedicated to the killing of the Germans. Two weeks
later I fell under the spell of the self-same Germans. That long gray
column swinging on through Liege so mesmerized me that my
natural revulsion against slaughter was changed to actual
admiration.