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The following autobiography of childhood experiences and emotions was written by a young man of twenty-three while in one of the U. S. Training Camps, on the eve of his departure for the battlefields of France. This memoir was compiled as a gift to an intimate friend (in case the writer failed to return from the war) and as such is a very personal description of his early life, in so far as it offered itself to him for recording.
It was the intention of the writer to continue his story up to the time of his entrance into the Army, thus leaving a rather complete history, but circumstances decreed otherwise. The arrival of a long-expected order to embark for the “fighting front” interrupted the task and the history was regretfully left in its present unfinished condition. Later, on becoming located in one of the foreign camps, there were three or four attempts made to pick up the broken threads of the narrative, but all such efforts proved useless, the “spell” had been permanently broken.
The probable cause for this inability to continue lay in the difference in the feeling between an emotional contemplation of a rapidly approaching crisis in one's affairs and the arrival of that crisis into the immediate present, resulting in two distinct and widely separated types of unconscious reactions.
While working on this biography the young man was under the greatest possible emotional stress and mental excitement—an intense and active fear of what the immediate future might have in store for him and of the unknown conditions to be faced in the trenches (a fear of being afraid). In view of these facts the production is of unusual interest being motivated, as it was, by the unconscious and emotional forces of memory. He very well expressed it by remarking that “It really wrote itself.” (Automatic writing?)