ROUND ABOUT
BAR-LE-DUC

TO

CAROL

FOR WHOSE EYES

THIS BOOK WAS WRITTEN

[Pg vii]

TO CAROL

Dear, you asked me to write for you the story ofmy work and adventures in France, and through allthe agonising hours of incubation and parturition youhave given me your unfailing sympathy, encouragementand help. You have even chastened me (it was adevastating hour!) for my—and, I believe, for thebook's—good, and when we discovered that the originalform—that of intimate personal letters written directlyto you—did not suit the subject matter, you acquiescedgenerously in a change, the need for which I, at least,shall ever deplore.

And now that the last words have been written andFinis lies upon the page, I know how short it all fallsof my ideal and how unworthy it is of your high hopeof me. And yet I dare to offer it to you, knowingthat what is good in it is yours, deep delver that youare for the gold that lies—somewhere—in every humanheart.

Twenty months in the war zone ought, one wouldimagine, to have provided me with countless hair-breadthescapes, thrills, and perhaps even shockerswith which to regale you, but the adventures are allthose of other people, an occasional flight to a cellar ina raid being all we could claim of danger. And so,[Pg viii]instead of being a book about English women in France,it is mainly a book about French women in their owncountry, and therein lies its chief, if not its only claimto merit.

Humanness was the quality which above all othersyou asked for, and if it possesses that I shall know ithas not been written in vain.

Susanne R. Day.   

London,
January 1918.

[Pg ix]