Methods of light and of motive power have not changed more rapidly in
the forty-odd years since the last great European war than the soldier's
weapons and his work. With all the symbols of economic improvement the
public is familiar, while usually it thinks of war in the old symbols
for want of familiarity with the new. My aim is to express not only war
as fought to-day, soldiers of to-day under the fire of arms of to-day,
but also the effects of war in the _n_th degree of modern organization
and methods on a group of men and women, free in its realism from the
wild improbabilities of some latter-day novelists who have given us
wars in the air or regaled us with the decimation of armies by
explosives dropped from dirigibles or their asphyxiation by noxious
gases compounded by the hero of the tale.

The Russo-Japanese and the Balkan campaigns, particular in their nature,
gave me useful impressions, but not the scene for my purpose. The world
must think of those wars comparatively as second-rate and only partially
illustrative, when its fearful curiosity and more fearful apprehension
centre on the possibility of the clash of arms between the enormous
forces of two first-class European land-powers, with their supreme
training and precision in arms. What would such a war mean in reality to
the soldiers engaged? What the play of human elements? What form the new
symbols? Therefore have I laid my scene in a small section of a European
frontier, and the time the present.

Identify your combatants, some friends insist. Make the Italians fight
the Austrians or the French fight the Germans. As a spectator of wars,
under the spell of the growing cosmopolitanism that makes mankind more
and more akin, I could not see it in that way and be true to my
experience. My soldiers exist for my purpose only as human beings. Race
prejudices they have. Race prejudice is one of the factors of war. But