This story of war grew out of my experience in many wars. I have been
under fire without fighting; known the comradeship of arms without
bearing arms, and the hardships and the humors of the march with only an
observer's incentive. A singular career, begun by chance, was pursued to
the ends of the earth in the study of the greatest drama which the earth
stages. Whether watching a small force of white regulars disciplining a
primitive people, or the complex tactics of huge army against huge army;
whether watching war in the large or in the small, I have found the same
basic human qualities in the white heat of conflict working out the same
illusions, heroisms, tragedies, and comedies.
The fellowship of campaigning made the cause of the force that I
accompanied mine for the time being. Thus, one who settles in the town
of A absorbs its local feeling of rivalry against the town of B in
athletic games or character of citizenship. To A, B is never quite
sportsmanlike; B is provincial and bigoted and generally inferior. But
settle in B and your prejudices reverse their favor from A to B.
Yet in the midst of battle, with the detachment of a non-combatant
marvelling at the irony of two lines of men engaged in an effort at
mutual extermination, I have caught myself thinking with the other side.
I knew why my side was busy at killing. Why was the other? For the same
reasons as ours.
I was seeing humanity against humanity. A man killed was a man killed,
courage was courage, sacrifice was sacrifice, romance was romance, a
heart-broken mother was a heart-broken mother, a village burned was a
village burned, regardless of race or nation. Every war became a story
in a certain set form: the rise of the war passion; the conflict;
victory and defeat; and then peace, in joyous relief, which the nations
enjoyed before they took the trouble to fight for it.
But such thoughts have been a familiar theme to the poet, the novelist,
the dramatist, the satirist, the dreamer, and the peace propagandist,
while the world goes on arming. In want of their talent, I offer
experience of the monstrous object of their gibes and imagination. To
me, the old war novels have the atmosphere of smoke powder and
antiquated tactics which still survived when I went on my first campaign
sixteen years ago. These classic masterpieces endure through their
genius; the excuse of any plodder who chooses their theme to-day is that
he deals with the material of to-day.
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
make the prejudice English, Italian, German, Russian, or French and
there is the temptation for reader and author to forget the story of men
as men and war as war. Even as in the long campaign in Manchuria I would
see a battle simply as an argument to the death between little fellows
in short khaki blouses and big fellows in long gray coats, so I see the
Browns and the Grays in "The Last Shot" take the field.
But, though the scene is imaginary, the characters are from life. Their
actions and their sayings are those of men whom I have studied under the
stress of danger and sudden emergency. The delightful, boyish confidence
of Eugene Aronson has been at my elbow in a charge; Feller I knew in the
tropics as an outcast who shared my rations; Dellarme's last words I
heard from a dying captain; the philosophy of Hugo Mallin is no less
familiar than the bragging of Pilzer or the transformation of Stransky,
who whistled a wedding-march as he pumped bullets at the enemy. In
Lanstron we have a type of the modern officer; in the elder Fragini a
type of the soldier of another day. Each marches in his place and plays
his part in the sort of spectacle that I have often watched. If there be
no particular hero, then I can only say, in confidence behind the
scenes, that I have found no one man, however heroic in the martial
imagination of his country, to be a particular hero in fact. Take, for
example, our trembling little Peterkin, who won the bronze cross for
courage.
As for Marta and Minna, they speak for another element--for a good half
of the world's population that does not bear arms. In a siege once I had
glimpses of women under fire and I learned that bravery is not an
exclusively masculine trait. The game of solitaire? Well, it occurred in
a house in the midst of bursting shells. But the part that Marta plays?
Is it extravaganza? Not in war. The author sees it as something very
real.