"I am not a great or important personage, but this will be the diary of an ordinary person's life in war time. Though I may never live to read it again, perhaps it may not prove altogether uninteresting as a record of my life - or rather the life of a girl in her youth, upon whom life has shone very brightly, who has had every opportunity of education, interest, travel and pleasure and excitement, and who at the beginning of this war found herself...