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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 June 2025
The things which one can see and hear in the din and chaos of the world's greatest war are many, lurid, picturesque, quaint, humorous, heroic, and horrible but by themselves and without inquiry as to where they came from or to what they are leading, they are not of first consequence.
From the fighting front much detail of modern war is seen as through a microscope, and from the capitals of the nations the broad canvas of international struggle is seen as through a telescope. But having gone to scenes of this conflict and having been among its terrible mysteries, I know that from afar - in America - may be collected the most detail, because of the flood of written description, photographs and moving pictures from all sources, and that as from a mountaintop, without the prejudices of the arena itself, America may see with clearer perspective the great and changing picture.
I have seen men who had been shot to pieces in barbed wire entanglements, and I was with Lord Robert Cecil in the British Foreign Office when the news of the execution in Belgium of Miss Cavell came in, and later I dis-cussed with prominent Englishmen the effect which the execution would have upon the sympathies and opinions of the world. I cannot see that I gained anything by being present at either occasion. The spinster on a New England farm can imagine perfectly how dead men look when piled up in a gully; the New York elevator boy could estimate more correctly than Berlin or London the effect upon the opinions of the world of the execution of Miss Cavell.
Well it is that these things are chronicled and pictured; but I did not go to Europe, and especially to Russia, without a wish to do more than to chronicle and picture. Primarily I went to see what war is doing to the hearts of men and the spirit of nations. Russia, I believed, was the place where the war would work the greatest changes.
I went to Russia not to look back too much upon old Russia, but forward a little at Russia as a great potentiality. I wished that I might stand without wobbling between yesterday and tomorrow, and if my book has any reason for being, it lies in this attempt.
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