Perhaps at this point I had better tell you who "I" am who write this, and also how our little circle came to choose me for the task.

As a minor actor in these events you may set me down as a working journalist. Among other things I am one of the sub-editors of the Daily Circus. But that is not the whole of my life. I am also a novelist of sorts. And one of my reasons for sticking to journalism when I could manage at a pinch to do without it is that in this way I escape the doom of having to produce two novels a year whether I have anything to write about or not.

But that was not their idea in asking me to put into shape the mosaic of differently-colored pieces that constitutes this Case. I believe their idea was that my two capacities might supplement one another—that I might hold fast (so to speak) to the bed-rock facts with my journalistic hand while the other was left free for the less tangible elements. I don't know that I altogether agree with this distinction. I happen to have some experience of how much fiction people swallow when they take up their morning papers, and also of how much mere hurdy-gurdy-grinding they accept as "human nature" when it comes to them in the form of a novel. But that is their look-out. I told them that with their help I would do my best.

I had to have their help. Obviously I could not always be at the side of this person or that, Rooke or Esdaile or Hubbard, throughout every winding of a complicated chain of events. But I have known Esdaile for twenty years, Rooke for a dozen, and most of the others long enough to have a fairly reliable impression of them, and their accounts are quite trustworthy. If I have any doubt about this I say so.

I cannot deny that we took a good deal of responsibility when we conspired to hush up the facts of this Case. We have no more right to come between the agents of the Law and their duty than any other set of private persons. And, though many of the beaten tracks are lost in these changing days, and new precedents are making whichever way you turn, I for one don't like making new precedents, especially moral ones. I like tradition to have my homage even when I am resolved to break it. But we are dealing with a fait accompli. The Case is a Case. It became so in spite of laws and customs and institutions. First one person acted as according to the laws of his individual being he had to act, and another did the same, and then another and so on, until the phenomenon was complete.

So, as my chief business in life is precisely those human accidentals that make us all different beings destined to different acts, perhaps they have chosen their historian more or less rightly after all.

One caveat (as Mackwith would say) I must enter, however. This is with regard to my own Services in the War that is now over. Most of these services, though as a matter of fact performed in belt and khaki, might just as well have been discharged in a dressing-gown, so unadventurous for the most part were they. Thanks to a "joy-ride," I did just see War, but for the rest I went where I was told to go and did what I was told to do. It is therefore just possible that from the point of view of those who lived in the hell I only briefly visited, one or two of my values may be a little "out." The North Sea cannot be quite the same to me that it was to Esdaile and Hubbard, the air means just what it meant to Maxwell and Chummy Smith. For this I am afraid there is no help. But there is always the chance that if I have minimized, they might have stressed a little unduly. For while our Case has nothing to do with War, War is always antecedent to it, as for a generation to come it will be antecedent to everything.

So, on this understanding, we may get on with the tale.