PART II AT HOME

      How the message was delivered 159

PART III RUSSIA AND THE PERSIAN FRONT

      Chapter I
      petrograd 179

      Chapter II
      waiting for work 204

      Chapter III
      some impressions of Tiflis and Armenia 219

      Chapter IV
      on the Persian front 237

      Chapter V
      the last journey 258

CONCLUSION 272

INDEX 281

PREFACE

In presenting these extracts from the diaries of my aunt, the late Miss Macnaughtan, I feel it necessary to explain how they come to be published, and the circumstances under which I have undertaken to edit them.

After Miss Macnaughtan’s death, her executors found among her papers a great number of diaries.  There were twenty-five closely written volumes, which extended over a period of as many years, and formed an almost complete record of every incident of her life during that time.

It is amazing that the journal was kept so regularly, as Miss Macnaughtan suffered from writer’s cramp, and the entries could only have been written with great difficulty.  Frequently a passage is begun in the writing of her right, and finished in that of her left hand, and I have seen her obliged to grasp her pencil in her clenched fist before she was able to indite a line.  In only one volume, however, do we find that she availed herself of the services of her secretary to dictate the entries and have them typed.

The executors found it extremely difficult to know how to deal with such a vast mass of material.  Miss Macnaughtan was a very reserved woman.{1} She lived much alone, and the diary was her only confidante.  In one of her books she says that expression is the most insistent of human needs, and that the inarticulate man or woman who finds no outlet in speech or in the affections, will often keep a little locked volume in which self can be safely revealed.  Her diary occupied just such a place in her own inner life, and for that reason one hesitates to submit its pages even to the most loving and sympathetic scrutiny.

But Miss Macnaughtan’s diary fulfilled a double purpose.  She used it largely as material for her books.  Ideas for stories, fragments of plays and novels, are sketched in on spare sheets, and the pages are full of the original theories and ideas of a woman who never allowed anyone else to do her thinking for her.  A striking sermon or book may be criticised or discussed, the pros and cons of some measure of social reform weighed in the balance; and the actual daily chronicle of her busy life, of her travels, her various experiences and adventures, makes a most interesting and fascinating tale.