Somehow, considering that the train was carrying a suspicious and turbaned Indian prince, any number of impatient officers and soldiers, and an American woman who was carefully avoiding the war office and trying to look like a buyer crossing the Channel for hats, the whistle for starting sounded rather inadequate.  It was not martial.  It was thin, effeminate, absurd.  And so we were off, moving slowly past that line on the platform, where no one smiled; where grief and tragedy, in that one revealing moment, were written deep.  I shall never forget the faces of the women as the train crept by.

And now the train was well under way.  The car was very quiet.  The memory of those faces on the platform was too fresh.  There was a brown and weary officer across from me.  He sat very still, looking straight ahead.  Long after the train had left London, and was moving smoothly through the English fields, so green even in winter, he still sat in the same attitude.

I drew a long breath, and ordered luncheon.  I was off to the war.  I might be turned back at Folkstone.  There was more than a chance that I might not get beyond Calais, which was under military law.  But at least I had made a start.

This is a narrative of personal experience.  It makes no pretensions, except to truth.  It is pure reporting, a series of pictures, many of them disconnected, but all authentic.  It will take a hundred years to paint this war on one canvas.  A thousand observers, ten thousand, must record what they have seen.  To the reports of trained men must be added a bit here and there from these untrained observers, who without military knowledge, ignorant of the real meaning of much that they saw, have been able to grasp only a part of the human significance of the great tragedy of Europe.

I was such an observer.

My errand was primarily humane, to visit the hospitals at or near the front, and to be able to form an opinion of what supplies were needed, of conditions generally.  Rumour in America had it that the medical and surgical situation was chaotic.  Bands of earnest and well-intentioned people were working quite in the dark as to the conditions they hoped to relieve.  And over the hospital situation, as over the military, brooded the impenetrable silence that has been decreed by the Allies since the beginning of the war.  I had met everywhere in America tales from both the German and the Allies’ lines that had astounded me.  It seemed incredible that such conditions could exist in an age of surgical enlightenment; that, even in an unexpected and unprepared-for war, modern organisation and efficiency should have utterly failed.

On the steamer crossing the Atlantic, with the ship speeding on her swift and rather precarious journey windows and ports carefully closed and darkened, one heard the same hideous stories:  of tetanus in uncounted cases, of fearful infections, of no bandages—­worst of all, of no anaesthetics.