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Canada in war-paint

Chapter 2: PREFACE
By Ralph W. Bell
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About This Book

A series of wartime sketches that portray life with a Canadian infantry battalion during the First World War, mixing wry character portraits and camp routine—mud, leaking canvas, tent music, mules and rations—with plain accounts of front-line experience, including fighting at Courcelette and moments of carnage. The pieces catalogue duties and roles (batmen, adjutants, scouts), encounters with aeroplanes and anti-aircraft fire, relations with local inhabitants, marches, sickness and the strain of action, shifting between anecdotal humour and sober reflection while registering a steady longing for home.

First Published in 1917

PREFACE

There is no attempt made in the little sketches which this book contains to deal historically with events of the war. It is but a small Souvenir de la guerre—a series of vignettes of things as they struck me at the time, and later. I have written of types, not of individuals, and less of action than of rest. The horror of war at its worst is fit subject for a master hand alone.

I have to thank the proprietors of The Globe for their courtesy in allowing the reproduction of “Canvas and Mud” and “Tent Music,” and of the Canadian Magazine for the reproduction of “Martha of Dranvoorde.”

Finally, I feel that I can have no greater honour than humbly to dedicate this book to the officers, N.C.O.’s and men of the First Canadian Infantry Battalion, Ontario Regiment, with whom I have spent some of the happiest, as well as some of the hardest, days of my life.

RALPH W. BELL.

    December 11th, 1916.