11th November, 1918

There is Peace. To this city, flags hanging flaccid in the November damps, a few bells rung out of time (for lack of ringers), some cheering from recruits of the Essex, Norfolk, and Suffolk regiments, who now will never be called upon to feel a wound or crawl down a ditch of Flanders’ mud, and the explosion of certain bombs, which can be spared, proclaim that there is Peace.

I am thankful that I began to keep this diary, imperfect and full of mistakes and misjudgments as without doubt it is, and have been able to continue it through the weary years, with scarcely a day missed up to the present hour. At any rate it is a record of what an average not unobservant man, whose lot it has been to endure those years, thought and experienced in the course of them, and therefore perhaps of some value, at any rate, for future time.

It is true that I have not been in the actual fighting, though I have known what it is to have the great shells exploding round me, and what is worse round my women folk, and on more than one occasion. Also I have passed many perils on the seas. But if I were a younger man and had been called to take my place in the trenches, an opportunity that I could wish had come to me, it is probably that my outlook would have been more limited, as I should only have known what was passing within my immediate ken. Again it had not been my lot to stand at the front of high affairs, but then those who did probably have kept no record of all that happened about them or the struggle. I was in Canada and that during its continuance I have travelled round the Empire and come in touch with the most of its leaders, also from time to time with some importance at home. I trust too that my work for the Empire, although at present it is in suspense, will bear fruit, direct or indirect. So perhaps on the whole I have no cause to complain of my occasions.

And - - there is the diary of the four-and-a-half years, and as I write the guns or maroons are firing and I hear the cheers of Victory!