Book Description

Excerpt from A Journal of Impressions in Belgium, 1915 But when you had made fast each day with its note, your impressions were safe, far safer than if you had tried to record them in their flux as they came. How ever far behind I might be with my Journal, it was kept. It is not written up, or round and about the original notes in my day-book, it is simply written out. Each day of the seventeen had its own quality and was soaked in its own atmosphere; each had its own unique and incorruptible memory, and the slight lapse of time, so far from dulling or blurring that memory, crystal lized it and made it sharp and clean. And in writing out I have been careful never to go behind or beyond the day, never to add anything, but to leave each mo ment as it was. I have set down the day's imperfect or absurd impression, in all its imperfection or absurd ity, and the day's crude emotion in all its crudity, rather than taint its reality with the discreet reflections that came after. I make no apology for my many errors - where they were discoverable I have corrected them in a foot note; to this day I do not know how wildly wrong I may have been about kilometres and the points of the compass, and the positions of batteries and the move ments of armies; but there were other things of which I was dead sure and this record has at least the value of a human document. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.