PREFACE
BY
DICK BARON

THIS is a record of a holiday spent in the Vosges in the early autumn of 1930 by Charles Pagan and myself. It is, however, more than a mere record of continental sightseeing; indeed Pagan maintains that the series of coincidences of that holiday were too remarkable to be attributed to mere chance. And it may well be that he is right.

Certainly he is not a superstitious man, nor is he a religious one in the church-going sense. It is true that the letters C. of E. were engraved between his name and regiment on the identity disc he wore round his wrist during those far off war days when first we met, but were he pressed to make a confession of faith, the resulting rudimentary creed would, I fancy, defy classification into any of the recognized forms of dogmatic religion. A vague but none the less sincere belief that “what is to be is to be”—that one cannot escape what is coming to one—is probably the principal article of that creed; and that again is a legacy of the fatalism of the now almost forgotten war days and of this dramatic holiday in particular.

However that may be, he will have none of it that chance was the determining factor, and that but for an idle action of his he and Clare and I would never have known. “And will you maintain,” he demands, “that it was chance also that led me to take that holiday in Alsace of all places and stumble upon the one person in the whole world that it concerned?”

Put like that, it does sound convincing, and one hesitates to deny that he is right and that the apparent coincidences of that dramatic holiday were not the preordained dispositions of a higher power. Perhaps, after all, he is right, and in the words of the national poet he is fond of quoting, “There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will.”