He knew that beyond the
mountains that encircled his home there was a world that would be new to
him. He kept the little volume--now with broken-back and
worn--constantly with him, and he wrote in it while in camp, on
shipboard and in the trenches in France. It was in his pocket while he
fought the German machine gun battalion in the Forest of Argonne.
The book with its records was intended for no eyes but his own. Yet
painstaking, using ink, he had headed the volume: "A History of places
where I have been."
As a whole, the volume would be unintelligible to a reader, for while it
records the things he wished to remember of his camp-life, the trip
through England, his stay in France, and tells in order the "places he
had been," it is made up of swift-moving notes that enter into no
explanatory details. But to him the notations could--even in the evening
of his life--revive the chain of incidents in memory. His handling of
his diary is typical of his mind and his methods.
To him details are essential, but when they are done carefully and
thoroughly their functions are performed and thereafter they are
uninteresting. They are but the steps that must be taken to walk a given
distance. His mind instead dwells upon the object of the walk.
When he left his home at Pall Mall he reported to the local recruiting
station at Jamestown, the county seat.
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