Читать книгу The Desert Column - Ion Idriess - Страница 7

The “Desert Column” is more than my diary. It is myself, I began the diary as we crowded the decks off Gallipoli and watched the first shells crash into Turkish soil. Gradually it grew to be a mania: I would whip out the little book and note, immediately, anything exciting that was happening. As the years dragged on, my haversack became full of little note-books. These memories in tabloid form are my sole souvenirs of the War, except of course stray bits of shrapnel, bomb, and high explosive splinters which nearly every soldier collected.

The diary was a very young soldier’s idea. He thought that if he survived shot and shell and sickness, he would like, when he came to be an old man, to be able to read exactly what his feelings were when “things were happening.” Have a private picture show all his own, as it were, to refresh his memory.

Hence, all that has been written in this diary records my thoughts and feelings at that very moment.

Naturally they were many in nearly four years of active war and eventually necessitated the throwing away of my iron rations to find room in the haversack for the little notebooks. What the “Heads” would have said had they found out, goodness only knows.

Despite the fact that brevity had to be a watchword when I wrote, fully twenty thousand words have been cut from the diary in order that it may appear in book for at a reasonable price to the public.

I never thought the diary would appear in book form. But a proud sister, in whose care they were, forwarded the little notebooks to the publishers with the ultimatum that they must be published.

So, here marches again the Desert Column.

ION L. IDRIESS.

The Desert Column