If some uncomplex minded and even moderately articulate man or woman, living in some small, ordinary respectable London house and going about his or her work in the customary way, had been prompted by chance upon June 29th, 1914, to begin to keep on that date a day-by-day diary of his or her ordinary life, the effects of huge historic events, as revealed by the every-day incidents to be noted in the streets, to be heard in his neighbours' houses as well as among his fellow workers, to be read in the penny or half-penny newspapers, would have resulted--if the record had been kept faithfully and without any self-conscious sense of audience--between 1914 and 1918 in the gradual compiling of a human document of immense historical value.

Compared with it, the diaries of Defoe and Pepys would pale and be flavourless.

But it must have been begun in June, 1914, and have been written with the casualness of that commonplace realism which is the most convincing realism of all.

It is true that the expression of the uncomplex mind is infrequently articulate, but the record which would bring home the clearest truth would be the one unpremeditatedly depicting the effect produced upon the wholly unprepared and undramatic personality by the monstrous drama, as the Second Deluge rose for its apparent overwhelming, carrying upon its flood old civilisations broken from anchor and half submerged as they tossed on the rising and raging waves.

Such a priceless treasure as this might have been the quite unliterary and unromantic diary of any--say, Mr.James Simpson of any house number in any respectable side street in Regents Park, or St.Johns Wood or Hampstead.