While 'Stephen Poore' is a fictional character, he is real enough in some ways. Robert Service was himself in the Ambulance Corps, and his descriptions of 'Bohemia' of this day, and the emergence of war, bear striking similarities to the case of Alan Seeger—and, no doubt, a great many other 'war poets' of the "Great War". It has been said that every section of the trench had its own poet, and many of them, such as Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, and Robert Graves, became famous for their poetry of the war. This book, in its way, presents a striking picture of the effect of the war on Europe—though it stops short of showing just how great the effect was.

I hope you enjoyed Service's references to himself in the text, as "Sourdough Service"—but they should not be taken too seriously.

The names of two great Russian composers, Tchaikovsky and Stravinsky, were originally spelled Tschaikowsky and Stravinski in "The Philistine and the Bohemian". These composers were contemporaries of the author, and due to the difficulty of transliterating from the Russian (Cyrillic) alphabet to the Roman Alphabet, hampered by different uses of Roman letters in various European languages, it is not until fairly recently that the current spellings have taken hold—and their grip is not yet firm. A couple of other names were given incorrectly in the same poem: MallarmÉ was spelled with one L, and E. Burne-Jones (a pre-Raphaelite painter and associate of Rossetti) was given as F. B. Jones. These names are corrected in this text, as is Synge, given as Singe in the original ("L'Escargot D'Or").

Alan R. Light, Monroe, North Carolina, June 1997.

This list of books written by Robert Service is probably incomplete, possibly incorrect, but may serve as a starting point for those interested in his works.