But the essentials of the story are all true, and its value as a lasting influence for good is in no way impaired by the necessary fictions as to places and identities.

It was my privilege to see the dramatic incidents of the story of “The Deserter” as they unfolded during the time included in Mr. Davis’s story.  The setting was in the huge room—­chamber, living-room, workroom, clubroom, and sometimes dining-room that we occupied in the Olympos Palace Hotel in Salonika.  William G. Shepherd, of the United Press, James H. Hare, the veteran war photographer, and I were the original occupants of this room, which owed its vast dimensions to the fact that it formerly had been the dining-room of the hotel, later the headquarters of the Austrian Club, and finally, under the stressful conditions of an overcrowded city, a bedroom.  Mr. Davis joined us here in November of 1915, and for some days shared the room until he could secure another in the same hotel.

The city was seething with huge activities.  We lived from day to day, not knowing what moment some disaster might result as a consequence of an incongruous military and political situation, in which German and Austrian consular officials walked the streets side by side with French and British officers.  Men who had lived through many strange situations declared that this motley of tongues and nationalities and conflicting interests to be found in Salonika during those last weeks of 1915 was without a parallel in their experiences.

Into this atmosphere occasionally came the little human dramas that were a welcome novelty beside the big drama that dominated the picture, and it was thus that the drama of the young soldier who wished to desert came into our lives as a gripping, human document.

To Mr. Davis the drama was more than a “news” story; it was something big and fundamental, involving a young man’s whole future, and as such it revealed to his quick instinct for dramatic situations the theme for a big story.

No sooner had “Hamlin” left our room, reclad in his dirty uniform and headed for certain punishment back at his camp, than Mr. Davis proclaimed his intention to write the story.

“The best war story I ever knew!” he exclaimed.

Of course the young soldier did not see it as a drama in real life, and he certainly did not comprehend that he might be playing a part in what would be a tragedy in his own life.  To him the incident had no dramatic possibilities.  He was merely a young man who had been racked by exposure and suffering to a point where he longed to escape a continuance of such hardship, and the easiest way out of it seemed by way of deserting.

He was “fed up” on discomfort and dirt and cold, and harassed by the effects of an ill-healed wound received in Flanders some months before, and he wanted to go home.

The story, as Mr. Davis tells it in the following pages, is complete as it stands.  So far as he knew up to the time of his death, there was no sequel.  He died thinking of “Hamlin” as a potential deserter who had been shamed out of his purpose to desert and who had left, ungrateful and bitter with resentment at his fellow Americans, who had persuaded him to go back to camp, “take his medicine,” and “see it through.”