Cirrus@Austlit

Dedication: To Australia.

'These sketches were not originally written for publication in the form of a book; and there has been little opportunity of revising them with that object. The idea of collection and publication came late, after they (most of them) had appeared in the daily press or in some other journal; and it came rather by suggetion from friends than on the writer's initiative. The collection is ... a series of impressions ... I wrote about the things that impressed me most ... there was also the motive of conveying to a small circle of friends some notion of what I saw ... No intensity of the struggle on the Somme will ever eclipse the intense pathos of that ill-starred adventure on the ridges of Anzac ... These sketches were written hurriedly and in the midst of a good deal of distraction. There has been no time to attend to considerations of style or arrangement of the matter within the limits of single articles....' (from 'Note by the Author', Somme, December, 1917.)