«In the following pages the ego is thickly spread. Their publication is the result of persuasion from many sources that, before returning to the war zone, I should put into connected form my personal experiences as correspondent during the first year of the War of Nations. A few of these adventures were mentioned in news letters from the Continent, where I limited myself so far as possible to descriptions of armies at war and peoples in time of stress; but the greater part of them were merely jotted down from time to time for my own benefit in "The Log of a Noncombatant.»