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MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 
 
MORALE 
 AND ITS ENEMIES 
 
 BY 
 
 WILLIAM ERNEST HOCKING 
 Author of "Human Nature and Its Remaking," etc 
 
 NEW HAVEN 
 
 YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS 
 
 LONDON— HUMPHREY MILFORD-OXFORD UNIVERSITY 
 
 PRESS 
 MDCCCCXVIII 
 
*ft 
 
 Copyright, 191S, by 
 YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS 
 
 DEC 23 1918 
 ©CI.A511033 
 
 i 
 
TO THE YOUNG OFFICERS 
 OF THE AMERICAN EXPEDITIONARY FORCE 
 WHO AS CHIEF BUILDERS OF THE MORALE 
 OF A GREAT ARMY DO MUCH TO SHAPE 
 THAT OF THE NATION FOR YEARS TO COME 
 
PREFACE 
 
 Wab carries the minds as well as the bodies of men 
 into strange paths, and so creates an unwonted need 
 for self-understanding. At the same time, the 
 power and the leisure for self -understanding are di- 
 minished. Men, as well as nations, must choose 
 their part quickly, discern their friends and their 
 enemies, revise all plans, leap to strange tasks at 
 the call of the moment, though all the questions of 
 politics and of metaphysics are involved in the deed. 
 And while the decision reached may reveal the 
 solvency or insolvency of the soul that issues it, the 
 need to bring together the fragments of one 's mental 
 life remains, and will remain for long after the war 
 is past. 
 
 This book is an attempt to help — the soldier first, 
 and also the civilian — in this task of understanding 
 one's own mind, under the special stresses of war. 
 There must be many such attempts, from different 
 angles of experience : one can only contribute from 
 his own angle, that of the student of human nature 
 and of philosophy, aided by certain special oppor- 
 tunities which I owe to the courtesy of the Foreign 
 Offices of Great Britain and France. 
 
 The summer of 1917 I spent in Europe. On the 
 evening of the eighth of August, four of us, under 
 conduct of the British War Office, climbed out of 
 Boulogne in army motors, and made our way across 
 
 VII 
 
VIII PREFACE 
 
 the country-side of Pas de Calais, through villages 
 black as the night itself, except for a stealthy chink 
 of light here and there in the crack of a window, 
 past trains of loaded lorries, detachments of sol- 
 diers and workmen, toward the front. At one high 
 point of the road with a clearing toward the north 
 and east we saw the night sky broken by sudden 
 flares and dangling signal-lights faint in the dis- 
 tance : there was the cockpit ; there the man-power of 
 great nations was straining in mud and rain against 
 all the devices the brain of a cunning enemy could 
 bring to crush its life and spirit and endurance. 
 The will-to-live of the nations was in those tortured 
 bodies. If there were any super-men in the world 
 during the first years of the war, they were not 
 among those who went out confident in all the freight 
 of German war-lore and munitions, but among those 
 who withstood them. 
 
 During the days that followed, we were with these 
 men, in the billets, in the trenches at Croisilles, at 
 training camp, at hospital. From Kemmel Hill, we 
 followed as best we could, their deadly labors on the 
 earth and in the air, in the region of "Wipers," 
 Westhoek, and Messines. Later on, with another 
 group, we met poilus of France, 'at home,' if you 
 like, in their own war zone, in the devastated regions 
 about Chauny, in the active sectors about Soissons 
 and the Chemin des Dames. They were all men 
 without visible haloes, — for the most part tired, de- 
 termined, matter-of-fact men, unconscious of either 
 greatness or special virtue other than that of having 
 chosen, in a mortal crisis, as men must. 
 
PREFACE IX 
 
 Through these and other experiences one is put 
 on his guard against one illusion that besets the 
 reading of the mind of war, the inglorious exterior of 
 its often glorious inner life. It is not alone the case 
 that in war the pendulum of experience swings be- 
 tween wide, even wild, extremes ; but that the realism 
 and the idealism of the event jostle and seem to belie 
 one another. In the descriptive literature of the war 
 we have vivid human documents for the one and the 
 other side of the picture ; the true picture must in- 
 clude them both, and interpret them. 
 
 The idealism of war tends to concentrate about the 
 notion of " morale,' ' a highly practical and specific 
 virtue for the purposes of war. What morale means, 
 the invisible force behind war-making, became an al- 
 most tangible fact at the front; and hardly less so 
 in the regions back of the front, in the towns and vil- 
 lages, which had borne a load of suffering, anxiety, 
 and loss such as we in America know nothing about. 
 
 Morale is the practical virtue of the will to war. 
 But if we know how to build the morale of the nation 
 and the army for war purposes, we shall have a 
 spiritual asset lasting well into the times after the 
 war. The esprit de corps which war requires, and 
 helps to bring about, need not be evanescent. The 
 military virtues have traditionally stood by them- 
 selves, as distinct from the qualities needed in times 
 of peace; my belief is that this is a short-sighted 
 conception, even from the military point of view, 
 and that our new armies made on a different prin- 
 ciple will demonstrate that fact. 
 
X PREFACE 
 
 And there is a wider element in the psyche of this 
 war which must not be evanescent, and cannot be: 
 I mean the international esprit de corps which has 
 been created among the members of the Allied arms 
 including their junior associate, the discoveries of 
 people by people, brought about by the forced mental 
 excursions of war. 
 
 There have been critics of England among us, and 
 critics of France ; but no one who had fairly known 
 the England or the France that bore the brunt of 
 the war could have continued to hold these feelings 
 dominant. England is inwardly the most diverse of 
 all nations : it is not identical with any single party 
 or government; judged by the acts and opinions 
 of fragments here and there, or of Parliaments or of 
 cabinets, it is not faultless, — and I know of no nation 
 that is. But the phrases, "the heart of England," 
 or "the soul of France," are not empty phrases: it 
 is by the quality of its persistent national purposes 
 that a people is to be judged. 
 
 There are traits in the England of John Bull and 
 Tory tradition, just as there are in the America of 
 dollar- worshipping tradition, which have few lovers 
 in the world, and deserve few. But this is not 
 America; nor are these England. There is a con- 
 siderate and liberal England, an England that 
 sweareth to its own hurt and changeth not, a chival- 
 rous England, a nobly generous England, eager to 
 give in all ways more than due credit to its associates 
 and neighbors. These are the real England. Let me 
 quote here a few words from a letter that came to 
 me recently: 
 
 1 ' And before anything else, I must express to you 
 
PREFACE XI 
 
 my intense thankfulness for the wonderful support 
 and defence which your great country has offered 
 to the allied cause and to England. The last week 
 of March was very anxious; I hardly knew at the 
 time, how anxious. I don't say we might not have 
 pulled through unaided, but the certainty and rap- 
 idity of the relief were unquestionably due to you. 
 I do not ignore the universality of your motive — 
 to do right . . . but still, the greater involves the 
 less, and we do owe you a debt which you could not 
 realize, without having shared those black weeks 
 with us. What you did will never be forgotten while 
 England is a people. 
 
 "By comparison it is a minor matter, and almost 
 humorous after my writing to you last year about 
 our self denial, that my having had plenty of wheat 
 bread this last six months is due, I gather, to your 
 having denied it to yourself. The whole thing is 
 wonderful, and I should think, unprecedented in the 
 world's history." 
 
 Think of these as words on the lips of England, 
 and think of what England, her provinces, and her 
 allies, have sacrificed in this cause which from the 
 first was ours. What have we done that we should 
 not proudly have done again and again? Let it 
 stand as a unique fact, if it is such; but only as 
 beginnings are unique. Let it, together with the 
 spirit that answers it, put an end forever to the 
 superstition that nations, as corporate entities, are 
 debarred from the expressions of good-will and 
 gratitude that cement the bonds between man and 
 man. William Ernest Hocking. 
 
 New York City, November 6, 1918. 
 
NOTE OF ACKNOWLEDGMENT 
 
 Some of the substance of this book has already 
 been presented in the form of lectures to the Train- 
 ing Corps at Williams College in the winter of 1917, 
 and as the Bromley Lectures at Yale in the spring 
 of 1918. I also presented for preliminary criticism 
 by the service a set of psychological theses in The 
 Infantry Journal for April, 1918 ; in the second part 
 of this book I have profited by the comment that has 
 come to me. Three of the chapters have appeared 
 in approximately their present form: the first and 
 second in The Atlantic Monthly current, the fifteenth 
 in the Yale Review for July 1918, 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAET I— FOUNDATIONS OF MORALE 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 I. WHY MORALE COUNTS, AND HOW MUCH . . 3 
 
 II. WHAT IS A GOOD MORALE ? 14 
 
 III. THE FOUNDATIONS OF MORALE: INSTINCTS 
 
 AND FEELINGS 24 
 
 IV. THE FOUNDATIONS OF MORALE: KNOWLEDGE 
 
 AND BELIEF 33 
 
 V. REALIZING THE WAR 42 
 
 VI. ENMITY AND THE ENEMY 53 
 
 Vn. THE PURPOSES OF POTSDAM 61 
 
 VIII. THE MOTE IN OUR OWN EYE 67 
 
 IX. STATE-BLINDNESS 78 
 
 PAET II— MORALE OF THE FIGHTING 
 
 MAN 
 
 x. psychology of the soldier .... 95 
 
 xi. discipline and will .... . 118 
 
 xii. prestige: the psychology of command . 131 
 
 XIII. MORALE-BUILDING factors 142 
 
 XIV. FEAR AND ITS CONTROL 153 
 
 XV. WAR AND WOMEN 168 
 
 XVI. LONGER STRAINS OF WAR 189 
 
 XV 
 
PART I 
 FOUNDATIONS OF MORALE 
 
MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 WHY MORALE COUNTS, AND HOW MUCH 
 
 War is no doubt the least human of human relation- 
 ships. It can begin only when persuasion ends, 
 when arguments fitted to move minds are replaced 
 by the blasting-powder fitted to move rocks and 
 hills. It means that one at least of the national 
 wills concerned has deliberately set aside its hu- 
 man quality, — as only a human will can do, — and 
 has made of itself just such a material obstruction 
 or menace. Hence war seems, and is often called, 
 a contest of brute forces. Certainly, it is the ex- 
 tremest physical effort men make, every resource 
 of vast populations bent to increase the sum of 
 power at the front, where the two lines writhe like 
 wrestlers laboring for the final fall. 
 
 Yet it is seldom physical force that decides a long 
 war. For war summons skill against skill, head 
 against head, staying-power against staying-power, 
 as well as numbers and machines against machines 
 and numbers. When an engine "exerts itself" it 
 spends more power, eats more fuel, but uses no 
 nerve: when a man exerts himself, he must bend 
 his will to it. The extremer the physical effort, the 
 
 3 
 
4 MOBALE AND ITS ENEMIES 
 
 greater the strain on the inner or moral powers. 
 Hence the paradox of war: just because it calls 
 for the maximum material performance, it calls 
 out a maximum of moral resource. As long as guns 
 and bayonets have men behind them, the quality of 
 the men, the quality of their minds and wills, must 
 be counted with the power of the weapons. 
 
 And as long as men fight in nations and armies, 
 that subtle but mighty influence that passes from 
 man to man, the temper and spirit of the group, 
 must be counted with the quality of the individual 
 citizen and soldier. Every racial group, every army 
 corps, every regiment, has its own distinctive men- 
 tality with which it endows its members, and for 
 which it becomes reputed. And every commander 
 accordingly seeks to know not alone what numbers 
 are against him, but who they are. In a paper just 
 now before me I see these words : 
 
 "On one occasion prior to an attack, an intelli- 
 gence officer whose duty it was to interrogate pris- 
 oners gleefully remarked to me: 'I've had very 
 good news; the regiments in front of our new line 
 are Saxons and Bavarians.' These soldiers ad- 
 mittedly do not fight as well as the Prussians." 
 
 And in another paragraph: 
 
 "It was said of a certain foreign contingent whom 
 a Hun officer had captured that he sent them back 
 to their own line with the remark, '"We can take you 
 again at any time ; we have enough mouths to feed 
 already,' — so little did he think of their fighting 
 qualities." 
 
WHY MORALE COUNTS, AND HOW MUCH 5 
 
 The story need not be taken as history; yet it is 
 hardly too extreme. 
 
 And as we have seen in the case of our own troops, 
 every group of soldiers is an unknown quantity 
 until it has been tried out. We had no doubt that 
 American soldiers would acquit themselves well; 
 but who is there that did not follow the early re- 
 ports with a tense interest to know how well? What 
 could the great business-loving republic do toward 
 producing a fighting morale? — that was the ques- 
 tion. We were aware that mentality as well as 
 armament is a factor in warfare. 
 
 But how much does this intangible, psychological 
 factor count? Napoleon in his day reckoned it 
 high : ' ' In war, the moral is to the physical as three 
 to one." But things have changed since Napoleon's 
 day. Then there was still a personal element in the 
 encounter of battle; there was still some truth in 
 the Eoman maxim, ' ' In battle it is the eyes that are 
 first conquered." Now one may spend weeks of 
 fighting and never seen an enemy— much less seen the 
 soul driven from his eyes. Yet there are reasons 
 for believing that the moral factor is not less im- 
 portant to-day than heretofore. For consider: 
 
 1. It is still the hand-to-hand fighting, especially 
 the bayonet work, that constitutes the last argument 
 of every engagement. 
 
 ''Down the ages, from the prehistoric spearman, 
 through the times of the Macedonian phalanx, 
 
b MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 
 
 the pikeman, and the halberdier, on to the present 
 day, the spear has been the deciding factor of many 
 battles. And what is the bayonet but the spear of 
 ancient days? At the final stage, the battle of 
 to-day is as the battle of long ago : only the prelimi- 
 naries are different. And of what use the best artil- 
 lery preparation, of what avail the fire-supremacy 
 of the finest troops, if the bayonet does not follow 
 them up to make good the advantage they have 
 gained?"* 
 
 2. The quality of combat is none the less per- 
 sonal because one cannot see the opponent. The 
 human face is but an organ of expression which 
 we have to learn to read; and any physical thing 
 that can show shades of temper is capable of being 
 read like a face. Thus one learns to read firing as 
 one learns to know the calibers of shells by their 
 whine. There is desultory firing, determined firing, 
 enraged firing, nervous firing, timid firing, and 
 many another variety. In this and a hundred other 
 ways, battle always has its face, whether or not it is 
 a human face ; and experienced men feel as directly 
 when that opposing eye is conquering or being con- 
 quered. 
 
 3. Perhaps because of the longer intervals of 
 waiting and tension, the spirit of the various units 
 seems sensitive as never before to a thousand shades 
 of feeling, sensitive as a stock-market to the rise and 
 fall of confidence and good-will. Every token from 
 outside, especially the orders and their bearers, are 
 
 *Lieut. Col. Paul H. McCook, in The Infantry Journal, April, 1918, 
 page 780. 
 
WHY MORALE COUNTS, AND HOW MUCH 7 
 
 scanned, perhaps subconsciously, for the straws 
 that show what wind is blowing. If the officer's 
 stout words come from an apprehensive mind, he 
 will hardly conceal the fact ; and what is outwardly 
 accepted will leave an emptiness, like his own, in 
 the hearts of his hearers. The fighting spirit, farther 
 from pure instinct than in former days, is by so 
 much more canny, sensitive, and shrewd. 
 
 4. The strains of war on nerve and courage are 
 not less but more severe than in previous wars. To 
 take but a single indication, the prevalence of ' ' shell- 
 shock" means not that human quality has declined, 
 but that it can deliberately expose itself to more 
 inhuman and longer suffering than men have ever 
 before in large numbers been called on to endure. 
 
 5. And in one way at least these mental factors 
 are far more weighty than in Napoleon's day. For 
 behind the army lies the nation; and the whole un- 
 wieldy mass, army and nation, is much more a 
 mental unit than in any previous war, each de- 
 pendent on the courage and good-will of the other. 
 When armies were smaller, it was not so serious a 
 matter if any portion of the civil population were 
 disaffected. But now, communication is prompt; 
 and the communication of temper is far prompter 
 than the communication of fact. It is not beyond 
 credence that a strike of coal-workers in Pennsyl- 
 vania might on the next day lose a battle in Flan- 
 ders. Men in the field are able to know vastly more 
 of the fortunes of their families than ever before 
 
8 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 
 
 in war; and perhaps for this reason the minor 
 troubles and joys of civilian life loom larger on the 
 firing-line. The entire population behind the fight- 
 ers becomes a part of the fighting state of mind; 
 and all shades of depression and elation pass with 
 the speed of wireless messages from center to fight- 
 ing frontier, and back again. 
 
 In no war, I judge, has the human quality counted 
 for so much: — ; the endurance, the initiative, the 
 power of sacrifice, the loyalty, the ability to subor- 
 dinate personal interest and pride, the power of 
 taking the measure of the event, of discounting the 
 unfavorable turn, of responding to frightfulness 
 with redoubled resolution rather than with fear, 
 of appreciating the real emergency and rising in- 
 stantly to meet it. It is these qualities of mind and 
 character which in the ensemble go by the name of 
 " morale " ; and it is these qualities that hold the bal- 
 ance of power in war. 
 
 For war, completely seen, is no mere collision of 
 physical forces : it is a collision of will against will. 
 It is, after all, the mind and will of a nation — a 
 thing intangible and invisible — that assembles the 
 materials of war, the fighting forces, the ordnance, 
 the whole physical array. It is this invisible thing 
 that wages the war; it is this same invisible thing 
 that on one side or other must admit the finish and 
 so end it. As things are now, it is the element of 
 "morale" that controls the outcome. 
 
WHY MOKALE COUNTS, AND HOW MUCH 9 
 
 I say, as things are now; for it is certainly not 
 true as a rule of history that will-power is enough 
 to win a war, even when supported by high fighting 
 spirit, brains, and a good conscience. Belgium had 
 all this, and yet was bound to fall before Germany 
 had she stood alone. Her spirit worked miracles at 
 Liege, delayed by ten days the marching program 
 of the German armies, and thereby saved — perhaps 
 Paris, perhaps Europe. But the day was saved be- 
 cause the issue raised in Serbia and in Belgium drew 
 to their side material support until their forces 
 could compare with the physical advantages of the 
 enemy. Morale wins, not by itself, but by turning 
 scales: it has a value like the power of a minority 
 or of a mobile reserve. It adds to one side or the 
 other the last ounce of force which is to its oppo- 
 nent the last straw that breaks its back. 
 
 Differences in morale, however, are cumulative. 
 Psychologically, as applied to armies, there is an 
 obvious rough truth in the adage that nothing suc- 
 ceeds like success. Depression, on the other hand, 
 relaxes the grip, and so begets failure and further 
 depression ; — fear reduces control and tends to grow 
 toward panic. Where such gigantic numbers are 
 engaged it is more nearly true than ever that an 
 army which does not know itself beaten is not 
 beaten: a decisive victory in the field will probably 
 be preceded by a victory over morale. A general 
 crumbling of confidence among the vanquished will 
 usher in the debacle. 
 
10 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 
 
 I do not wish to convey the impression that the 
 advantages in morale are all on our side. Morale 
 is not identical with the morals of the case. Confi- 
 dence, determination, endurance, and discipline may- 
 exist in a perfectly bad cause: for four years all 
 these qualities were present in the Austro-German 
 command. The professional status of their armies, 
 their knowledge of their own power, their early suc- 
 cesses in carrying the fighting into the countries of 
 their victims, — all these were heavy assets, mental 
 assets, whose value has not wholly vanished. The 
 officers of the British and American armies, taken 
 in the large, are relatively new to their work: for 
 some time they must be reckoned in the amateur 
 class in comparison with the long-trained minds and 
 bodies of the enemy. And this is a circumstance 
 which makes itself felt all the way to the rank and 
 file : for ability to rely on the experience as well as 
 the sagacity of the officer is one of the prime ele- 
 ments in the morale of private soldiers. We have 
 advantages of our own; we need not belittle those 
 of the enemy. 
 
 The building-materials of morale must be taken 
 from the general qualities of the will of a people, — 
 its virility, its integrity, its spiritedness, its endur- 
 ance ; and among these qualities justice is not least 
 in weight. But given the materials, morale itself — 
 a virtue for the occasion — requires building: it can- 
 not be simply distilled from the atmosphere. 
 
 We see, then, why it is that after providing for 
 
WHY MOBALE COUNTS, AND HOW MUCH 11 
 
 the number of fighters and their equipment there 
 still remains a great question, How much fight is 
 there in each one and in the mass ? And we see that 
 there are always two ways to increase our fighting 
 strength : by increasing the number of our units, or 
 by increasing the fighting power of each unit. What- 
 ever could double the morale of a million men, — if 
 that were possible, — would add the equivalent of a 
 million such men to the force. 
 
 And the thing is not impossible. For the amount 
 of fight per man can vary through a far wider 
 range than the Napoleonic ratio of three to one. 
 This is true even of the minor ups and downs of the 
 daily rhythm. Ten men at their top notch of con- 
 dition might easily handle a hundred similar men 
 at their ebb of hunger, pain, and fatigue. And 
 there are other variable elements that count quite 
 as much, such as buoyancy and humor. Humor is 
 a symptom of margin: a man who has it can do 
 more than fight when he is fighting, — he can look 
 about and find a trick to spring, with the result that 
 we have sergeants who with a handful of men bring 
 in a battalion of prisoners. Or he can make the 
 passing misery dwindle in magnitude for an entire 
 company, as with the Irish corporal in the Philip- 
 pines, who, as General Shanks narrates, after a hot 
 day's marching and a loss of the trail, was sent to 
 the top of a ridge to reconnoitre. When a comrade 
 called up, "I say, Shorty, is this the last hill?" he 
 
12 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 
 
 shouted back, "Yes, the last hill it is: — the next one 
 is a mountain."* 
 
 •The following episode of the great retreat in the Fall of 1914 
 is one of a thousand instances of a trait of the British Tommy with 
 which the war has made us familiar, — he is never quite "all in" so 
 long as it is possible to find a comical angle in the situation, or 
 rather, a comical route to its underlying philosophy: 
 
 Major Tom Bridges, of the 4th Dragoon Guards, had been sent 
 into St. Quentin on Friday afternoon to see if more stragglers 
 could be found. In the square near the Mairie he found a couple of 
 hundred or more men of various detachments, who were seated on 
 the pavement in complete exhaustion and utter resignation to what 
 appeared their inability to rejoin the army which had retreated far 
 to the southward. . . . Bridges needed but a moment to see how 
 far gone they were, how utterly and hopelessly fatigued. No per- 
 emptory order, no gentle request, no clever cajolery would suffice. 
 With most of them the power to move seemed to themselves to have 
 gone with ceaseless tramping without food or sleep for the thirty- 
 six hours past. 
 
 A brilliant idea came to the big genial major. Entering a toy 
 shop he bought a toy drum and a penny whistle. He strapped the 
 little drum to his belt. 
 
 "Can you play 'The British Grenadiers'?" he asked his trumpeter. 
 
 "Sure, sir," was the reply. 
 
 In a twinkling the pair were marching round the square, the 
 high treble of the tiny toy whistle rising clear and shrill: 
 But of all the world's brave heroes 
 There's none that can compare 
 With a tow, row, roio, 
 With a tow, row, row, 
 To the British Grenadiers. 
 
 Round they came, the trumpeter, caught on the wings of the 
 Major's enthusiasm, putting his very heart and soul into every 
 inspiring note. Bridges, supplying the comic relief with the small 
 sticks in his big hands, banged away on the drum like mad. 
 
 They reached the recumbent group. They passed its tired length. 
 Now they came to the last man. Will they feel the spirit of the 
 straining notes, rich with the tradition of the grand old air ? Will 
 they catch the spirit of the big-hearted Major, who knows so well 
 just how the poor lads feel, and seeks that spot of humour in 
 Tommy's make-up that has so often proved his very salvation? 
 
 The spark has caught! Some with tears in their eyes, some with 
 a roar of laughter, jump to their feet and fall in. Stiffened limbs 
 answer to call of newly awakened wills. "With a tow, row, row, to 
 the British Grenadiers." They are singing it now, as they file in 
 long column down the street after the big form hammering the toy 
 drum, and his panting trumpeter. 
 
 "Go on, Colonel. We'll follow you to hell," sings out a brawny 
 Irishman behind, who can just hobble along on his torn feet. 
 
 Never a man of all the lot was left behind. — Frederic Coleman, 
 From Mom to Ypres, page 65. 
 
WHY MOKALE COUNTS, AND HOW MUCH 13 
 
 But beneath these minor variations are the funda- 
 mental differences in the set of the will, the long- 
 time qualities that make the tenacious and unde- 
 featable fighting man or the reverse. 
 
 The most important distinction affecting morale 
 among our people, in or out of the army, is not that 
 between the loyal and disloyal, but that between the 
 whole-hearted and the half-hearted or three-quar- 
 ters-hearted, — those who are in the war, but with 
 reservations conscious or unconscious, with insuffi- 
 cient, cloudy, dazed, or socially-fabricated motive 
 power, not enough to carry them well over the 
 threshold into the new and harsher outlook on their 
 own fortunes and personalities that war requires, 
 somewhere shrinking and unreconciled, — in brief, 
 with inadequate foundation for the lasting elements 
 of morale. It is this foundation that we have es- 
 pecial need to understand. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 WHAT IB A GOOD MOBALE? 
 
 Perhaps the simplest way of explaining the mean- 
 ing of morale is to say that what " condition" is to 
 the athlete's body, morale is to the mind. Morale 
 is condition; good morale is good condition of the 
 inner man: it is the state of will in which you can 
 get most from the machinery, deliver blows with 
 the greatest effect, take blows with the least de- 
 pression, and hold out for the longest time. It is 
 both fighting-power and staying-power and strength 
 to resist the mental infections which fear, discour- 
 agement, and fatigue bring with them, such as 
 eagerness for any kind of peace if only it gives mo- 
 mentary relief, or the irritability that sees large 
 the defects in one's own side until they seem more 
 important than the need of defeating the enemy. 
 And it is the perpetual ability to come back. 
 
 From this it follows that good morale is not the 
 same as good spirits or enthusiasm. It is anything 
 but the cheerful optimism of early morning, or the 
 tendency to be jubilant at every victory. It has 
 nothing in common with the emotionalism dwelt on 
 by psychologists of the ' ' crowd. " It is hardly to be 
 discovered in the early stages of war. Its most 
 
 14 
 
WHAT IS A GOOD MORALE? 15 
 
 searching test is found in the question, How does 
 war- weariness affect yout 
 
 No one going from America to Europe in the last 
 year could fail to notice the wide difference between 
 the mind of nations long at war and that of a nation 
 just entering. Over there, " crowd psychology" 
 had spent itself. There was little flag-waving; the 
 common purveyors of music were not everywhere 
 playing (or allowed to play) the national airs. If 
 in some Parisian cinema the Marseillaise was given, 
 nobody stood or sang. The reports of atrocities 
 roused little visible anger or even talk, — they were 
 taken for granted. In short, the simpler emotions 
 had been worn out, — or rather, had resolved them 
 selves into clear connections between knowledge and 
 action. The people had found the mental gait that 
 can be held indefinitely. Even a great advance finds 
 them on their guard against too much joy. As the 
 news from the second victory of the Marne begins 
 to come in, we find this despatch : 
 
 "Paris refrains from exultation." 
 
 And in the trenches the same is true in even 
 greater degree. All the bravado and illusion of war 
 are gone, also all the nervous revulsion ; and in their 
 places a grimly reliable resource of energy held in 
 instant, almost mechanical readiness to do what is 
 necessary. The hazards which it is useless to spec- 
 ulate about, the miseries, delays, tediums, casualties, 
 have lost their exclamatory value and have fallen 
 into the sullen routine of the day's work. Here it is 
 
16 MOKALE AND ITS ENEMIES 
 
 that morale begins to show in its more vital dimen- 
 sions. Here the substantial differences between man 
 and man, and between side and side, begin to appear 
 as they can never appear in training camp. 
 
 Fitness and readiness to act, the positive element 
 in morale, is a matter not of good and bad alone, 
 but of degree. Persistence, courage, energy, initia- 
 tive, may vary from zero upward without limit. 
 Perhaps the most important dividing line — one that 
 has already shown itself at various critical points — 
 is that between the willingness to defend and the 
 willingness to attack, between the defensive and the 
 aggressive mentality. It is the difference between 
 docility and enterprise, between a faith at second 
 hand dependent on neighbor or leader, and a faith 
 at first hand capable of assuming for itself the posi- 
 tion of leadership. 
 
 In any large group of men there is bound to be 
 a certain amount of psychological "filling," i.e., 
 minds that go on momentum and suggestion rather 
 than on conviction of their own. There are men 
 who find themselves in the army through a series 
 of events of which they have had no control, and 
 who go on because they cannot go back. In all 
 armies of the old regime much depended on this 
 principle : ' ' Get men into it anyhow, circumstances 
 will keep them there, and self-preservative impulses 
 will make them fight. ' ' There is a degree of human 
 nature in this : men can be counted on to exert them- 
 selves mightily to get out of a mortal scrape, no 
 
WHAT IS A GOOD MORALE? 17 
 
 matter what got them into it. But such spirit is 
 visibly poor stuff to make war with, liable to panic, 
 unable to replace lost leaders, wholly undemocratic 
 in principle, and the less of it we have in either army 
 or nation, the better. The morale that counts is the 
 morale that would make war of itself alone and 
 therefore tugs at the leash. 
 
 But readiness to wait, the negative element in 
 morale, is as important as readiness to act, and 
 oftentimes it is a harder virtue. Patience, espe- 
 cially under conditions of ignorance of what may be 
 brewing, is a torment for active and critical minds 
 such as this people is made of. Yet impetuosity, 
 exceeding of orders, unwillingness to retreat when 
 the general situation demands it, are signs not of 
 good morale but the reverse. They are signs that 
 one's heart cannot be kept up except by the flatter- 
 ing stimulus of always going forward, — a state of 
 mind that may cause a commanding officer serious 
 embarrassment, even to making impossible decisive 
 strokes of strategy.* 
 
 The quality of morale is not capable of being 
 tested by the methods of the psychological labora- 
 tory. There are many mental tests which can be 
 
 *During the retreat to the Marne in the Fall of 1914, it was neces- 
 sary that all parts of the line should move back together. It would 
 have played well into the German plan for any fragment of the 
 line to hold a local advantage, lose contact with units on its flank, 
 and so make an opportunity of the sort which was later used so 
 brilliantly against themselves. The feeling of British soldiers here 
 and there toward the necessity of retreat is thus described by Wil- 
 son McNair: 
 
 "How our men hated this retreating! Again and again I heard 
 from their lips angry and amazed comments upon the action of their 
 leaders. The men seemed to feel that they had a special grievance 
 
18 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 
 
 used, and are used, to distinguish the promising 
 soldier from the unpromising, but the critical ele- 
 ments of morale elude them. The difference be- 
 tween one man and another is largely a different 
 in staying-power : staying-power cannot be tested in 
 the laboratory, except in minor ways. The whole 
 outcome of a battle or of a campaign may depend 
 on what a few men will do when their "backs are 
 to the wall": but the situation of being at bay can- 
 not be reproduced in the testing-room in any serious 
 way. Still more elusive is the power men have of 
 taking fire under the influence of strong leaders: 
 any man's worth may be multiplied tenfold under 
 the magic of great leadership. But no investigation 
 of the solitary human being under the highly un- 
 inspiring environment of the testing-room could 
 detect the degree of his kindling capacity. 
 
 Yet the quality of morale is something that can 
 be instantly felt by anyone who knows its signs, 
 large and small. How does a platoon react to an 
 extra detail, or a battalion to an unexplained delay 
 in relief? How does a people respond to the hun- 
 dred exceptional demands of war time? Their 
 temper may be seen in the speed of volunteering, in 
 the way they accept the harder requirement — the 
 draft, in the taking of bonds and the payment of 
 
 against leaders who, each time they 'won a battle' ordered them to 
 run away. But with characteristic esprit de corps they blamed the 
 French commanders rather than their own. It was a French idea, 
 this retreating, they said, and it was a d — d bad idea. Their opinion 
 of the French commanders went down to zero during those days, 
 even as it was to leap up again in the great days after the battle of 
 the Marne." — Blood and Iron, page 194. 
 
WHAT IS A GOOD MOEALE? 19 
 
 extra taxes, in the result of appeals for voluntary 
 self-restraint in small comforts, in the disposition to 
 overcome internal disagreements, in the sale of 
 news, the attitude toward hindrances in the path of 
 war work, the pressure for results upon the men in 
 office, and not least in significance, the clear-headed 
 fairness of judgment toward these men, and the 
 readiness to make allowances for mistake in situa- 
 tions where no human foresight can wholly avoid 
 error. 
 
 But there are slighter signs that tell as large a 
 story. They are the signs of sentiment, or the kind 
 of response that is made to an occasion when the 
 sources of feeling are tapped. That was a shrewd 
 method of the German agents in Alsace who, to 
 test the loyalty of doubtful citizens during the early 
 months of the war, went about asking them what 
 they thought of the " glorious victories." Enthu- 
 siasm or the want of it might tell the tale that pru- 
 dent lips kept concealed. The moments of the ex- 
 pression of sentiment are the most vulnerable mo- 
 ments for any leader. They either carry or alienate 
 the people, and if the morale is at low ebb it is at 
 these points that disturbance is most likely to take 
 place, just as the unpopular actor is in most danger 
 of being hooted at the moment of his would-be- 
 affecting passage. Of the temper of Russia, we 
 are told that "The Bolshevists no longer dare to 
 arrange demonstrations of their own." In some of 
 the invaded districts, the German officers exact 
 
20 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 
 
 salutes from the men, — and also from the women:* 
 it has been reported that they exact also that 
 these salutes shall be given with deference and 
 alacrity. Why with " deference and alacrity"? Be- 
 cause these are the signs of morale. The spirit 
 speaks more in the manner of the salute than in the 
 fact; and these officers seem to believe that in com- 
 manding the manner they succeed in some violent 
 way in forcing the soul. And no doubt they suc- 
 ceed in torturing the soul in that way, because in 
 any act done under command the manner of doing it 
 is the natural refuge of freedom. Morale is seen 
 in the spirit which is put into obedience, the evident 
 free will with which one adds the touch of briskness 
 and grace to what is required of him. 
 
 In this way, even the rigidity of army life may 
 become the frame for the visible liberty of freedom- 
 loving men. However far the orders go, there is 
 always the last touch that cannot be commanded, 
 but can only be given. All the difference between 
 effective and ineffective war-making lies in the suc- 
 
 *From a proclamation of September 8, 1914, at Grivegnee, 
 Belgium : 
 
 I must insist that all civilians who move about in my district, 
 particularly those of Beyne-Hensay, Fteron, Bois de Breux, and 
 Grivegnee, show their respect to the German officers by taking off 
 their hats, or lifting their hands to their heads in military salute. 
 
 In case of doubt, every German soldier must be saluted. Any 
 one who disregards this must expect the military to make them- 
 selves respected by any means. 
 
 ( Signed ) DiECKMANN. 
 
 The same principle is implied in a verdict at Bruges reported by 
 Mr. Walter Duranty, October 21, 1918: "One English woman 
 was fined 300 marks or a week's imprisonment for 'wearing an anti- 
 German expression in the official Bureau,' the very words of the 
 condemnation notice." 
 
WHAT IS A GOOD MORALE? 21 
 
 cess of government or command in enlisting this free 
 contribution of the man to his denned duty. 
 
 But perhaps the best indication of a good morale 
 is the liberty felt by officials of all grades to tell the 
 truth, both as to the difficulties of the task ahead, 
 and as to the failures that attend its course. 
 
 When we see the high command of Germany re- 
 ferring to a Marne retreat as the taking of "new 
 positions," we can read under the ambiguous accu- 
 racy of the phrase a fear of their own public morale. 
 Statesmen of other lands have been known to mod- 
 ify what they felt to be a bitter dose; and usually 
 it has been the morale of the statesman rather than 
 that of the public which has been at fault. Prudent 
 statesmen and censors might learn much from the 
 fact that when the news of the disaster to the Brit- 
 ish fifth army on the days succeeding March 21st 
 (1918) began to roll in, recruiting both in England 
 and in Canada took a sudden upward leap. The 
 human mind, always apprehensive and trying to 
 decipher the future, doubly so in time of great con- 
 tingency such as war brings, is chiefly fearful of 
 being protected from the truth. 
 
 For the tempering of the truth is the first sign 
 of an attempt to manipulate morale from the ex- 
 terior; and whatever is recognized as having this 
 aim immediately, and by that fact, becomes suspect. 
 Any agency professing to assist morale, any occa- 
 sion gotten up for the sake of rallying a shaken 
 or sleepy morale, will partially (I do not say wholly) 
 
22 MOEALE AND ITS ENEMIES 
 
 defeat its own purpose. It establishes at once a 
 state of guard and scrutiny on the part of its in- 
 tended beneficiaries. For as a state of the will of 
 free men, morale can only be evolved by the man 
 himself, his own reaction to his own data. It has 
 been the fundamental error of Germany to suppose 
 that the soul can be controlled by scientific manage- 
 ment. 
 
 In fact, the better the morale, the more profound 
 its mystery from the utilitarian angle of judgment. 
 There is something miraculous in the power of a 
 bald and unhesitating announcement of reverse to 
 steel the temper of men attuned to making sacri- 
 fices and to meeting emergencies. No one can touch 
 the deepest moral resources of an army or nation 
 who does not know the fairly regal exaltation with 
 which it is possible for men to face an issue — if 
 they believe in it. There are times when men seem 
 to have an appetite for suffering, when — to judge 
 from their own demeanor — the best bait fortune 
 could offer them is the chance to face death or 
 to bear an inhuman load. This state of mind does 
 not exist of itself: it is morale at its best, and it 
 appears only when the occasion strikes a nerve 
 which arouses the super-earthly vistas of human 
 consciousness or subconsciousness. But it com- 
 monly appears at the summons of a leader who 
 himself welcomes the challenge of the task he sets 
 before his followers. It is the magic of King Alfred 
 in his appeal to his chiefs to do battle with the 
 
WHAT IS A GOOD MORALE ? 23 
 
 Danes, when all that he could hold out to them was 
 the prospect of his own vision, — 
 
 "This — that the sky grows darker yet 
 And the sea rises higher." 
 
 Morale, for all the greater purposes of war, is a 
 state of faith; and its logic will be the superb and 
 elusive logic of human faith. It is for this reason 
 that morale, while not identical with the righteous- 
 ness of the cause, can never reach its height unless 
 the aim of the war can be held intact in the undis- 
 sembled moral sense of the people. This is one of 
 the provisions in the deeper order of things for the 
 slow predominance of the better brands of justice. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 THE FOUNDATIONS OF MORALE, INSTINCTS AND 
 
 FEELINGS 
 
 The call to war strikes straight for the deeper 
 reservoirs of active energy, sets every nerve agog, 
 and summons up a response greater than we can 
 bring to ordinary tasks. It is charged with pre- 
 monition, and yet strangely also with reminiscence, 
 as if the fire of warriors long dead were once more 
 burning in our common and sluggish veins. How- 
 ever much the rational and kindly part of us abhors 
 war, something in us welcomes it: for nature has 
 not left us unfitted for the ardors of combat and 
 radical adventure. Whatever it brings, war always 
 brings "The Day," — the day never planned, yet 
 never dropped from subconscious hope, — the great 
 occasion to which we may give ourselves soul and 
 body, without reserve. In the universal unsettle- 
 ment all things have become possible ; half the work 
 of overcoming the dull resistance to change is done 
 for us by the event ; the world has suddenly become 
 vastly worth living in. In every heart still pos- 
 sessed of youth, war calls out a resonant and fathom- 
 less "I can." And the aged, called on to take up 
 again the work of their vigorous years, find them- 
 selves, almost beyond belief, able. 
 
 24 
 
INSTINCTS AND FEELINGS 25 
 
 All this, however sobered by second thought, 
 means that the occasion of war excites instincts 
 deep-laid in human nature. Even in common anger, 
 one may find himself trembling under the pulses of 
 an inward engine whose presence he hardly guessed: 
 the spring of the fighting-instinct has been touched. 
 But the anger of a nation called to war is no com- 
 mon anger. The fighting-instinct is coupled with 
 another, the instinct of the herd. A new and far- 
 flung fraternity is in the air : for there is the haunt- 
 ing knowledge that the herd is in motion, is attack- 
 ing or being attacked,— and if attacking, then being 
 attacked, — in any case, then, in danger. To know 
 that is enough. The neighbor is no longer the in- 
 different mortal he was yesterday : he belongs with 
 us to the tribe, the nation. "The nation"? — the 
 word has changed its meaning, and instead of call- 
 ing to mind a dullish governmental agency, source 
 of mixed good and evil and regarded accordingly, 
 it now evokes a vague but glorious image, object of 
 an unwonted, generous, protective pride. Because 
 of "her," that primitive sense of allegiance spring- 
 ing from the instinct of the herd takes the finer 
 form of what men call patriotism; and many a 
 man's superficial rationality has been taken by sur- 
 prise at the depth of its hold upon him. 
 
 This tribal sense, identical in both soldier and 
 civilian, makes the permanent background of feel- 
 ing much the same in both, though the active kill- 
 ing deed, and the physical fighting rage that go 
 
26 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 
 
 with it, come to the soldier only. When the civilian 
 says "We must fight on," the full stretch of his 
 thought reaches the soldier and means, "You must 
 kill on." And when the soldier says, "We are at- 
 tacking to-morrow," his thought sweeps into its 
 dim borders the homes and workshops of a nation 
 and means, "America is attacking to-morrow." 
 
 All the experiences of war are governed by this 
 curious and immense extension of personality. 
 Hence the durable pugnacity of war is seldom ex- 
 plosive like that of common anger : it has a sterner 
 and weightier as well as a longer task; its set is 
 deeper and its breathing more deliberate. Even our 
 instincts are aware that war is a relation not be- 
 tween persons but between States. They are little 
 confused by the fact — sometimes, as in Tolstoi's 
 case, disturbing to reflection — that the men engaged 
 in killing one another are not personal foes. The 
 fighting-instinct understands that it is in the service 
 of the social instinct. And not uncommonly the 
 feeling of crowd-loyalty, together with the equally 
 instinctive love of adventure, quite submerge the 
 sense of hostility or resentment. 
 
 However, a sound and lasting morale cannot exist 
 unless both soldier and citizen feel that the action 
 of the enemy touches them individually, no matter 
 through how many intermediate links. "Tell that 
 to the marines" is the legend of Mr. Flagg's well- 
 known poster, showing a contemporary knight an- 
 grily shedding his coat at a tale of violence or de- 
 
INSTINCTS AND FEELINGS 27 
 
 pravity across several thousand miles of land and 
 sea. Learned men sometimes argue whether States 
 are subject to the same moral rules that affect per- 
 sons : yet as a matter of plain psychology, nothing 
 is more evident than that the war-spirit in any na- 
 tion depends on regarding the deeds of the enemy 
 State as threatening, inhuman, treacherous, arro- 
 gant, or otherwise intolerable, in just the same way 
 that personal deeds may be : they must touch in the 
 same way the same springs of resentment in each 
 of the millions of bodies of the people. Polite diplo- 
 matic crimes, however menacing, seldom stir public 
 wrath until they are embodied in some personal 
 outrage that can stand as their concrete symbol. 
 The psychological laws of morale are therefore first 
 of all the laws of personal pugnacity. 
 
 Pugnacity is one of two or three ways of meeting 
 an obstacle. The easiest way is to give up, go 
 around, or retreat; pugnacity is a way of added 
 effort. It can only exist where there are reserves 
 of energy to be called on: a completely exhausted 
 person is incapable of wrath. In fact, pugnacity is 
 probably developed by nature originally as a sort of 
 moble reserve for coming to the aid of other instincts 
 when in difficulty. It may take a very mild form, 
 as in the extra effort one puts into opening a stub- 
 born door. There is a tell-tale warmth, in some 
 persons what we might call a "threshold of pro- 
 fanity," which marks the fact that the reserves are 
 
28 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 
 
 beginning to arrive. Or, as one of the two typical 
 passions of human nature, it may rise to the level 
 of transport. But throughout the gamut we can 
 see that it means new energy put behind the purpose 
 in hand; that the bodily disturbance is intended to 
 fit the organism for strong and sustained exertion. 
 
 In human beings, pugnacity always personifies 
 its object, even to the point of apostrophizing the 
 unruly door. This reaction is not always scientific; 
 and experience, in the case of inanimate things, 
 gradually substitutes a more inquiring mind, while 
 retaining the pugnacity in the form of mettle or 
 spirit. But where the obstacle is personal, there 
 remains a place for indignation. That is, where 
 all the means of persuasion have failed, and the de- 
 liberate bad will is a fact in the world which we 
 must face and meet. The change from normal to 
 hostile relations is usually slow, reluctant, and the 
 result of a cumulation of events ; for it is not simply 
 a change of behavior, but a change of the entire 
 system of assumptions, ideas, and hopes under 
 which relations are carried on. We hope against 
 hope for a time; we launch an ultimatum; then we 
 cast the die, the word of breach is uttered, and 
 "what worlds away." 
 
 In such cases we can see that pugnacity, first of 
 all, must be certain of itself, certain both of its 
 facts and of its cause. There is no surer way to 
 deflate an angry man than to show a material flaw 
 in his premises. And, second, pugnacity always 
 
INSTINCTS AND FEELINGS 29 
 
 requires a moral motive, though its occasion is ma- 
 terial. It lights not on the property that is taken, 
 but on the theft in the taking. It always adopts 
 the language "You ought.' ' 
 
 Beasts and children will fight for what they want 
 simply because they want it, without compunction 
 on the score of ' ' right. ' ' Mature men seldom achieve 
 this sublime inconsiderateness. The most unblush- 
 ing robber in face of his victim feels a pressure to 
 make it appear that his rights have somehow been 
 invaded, by society if not by the individual: the 
 wolf tries the lamb and finds him guilty. 
 
 Reflective and experienced culprits, it is true, 
 weary in time of the burdensome hypocrisy and 
 throw off the mask. But it is clear that the leaders 
 of Germany could have won the nation to war 
 neither in 1870 nor now without a plausible show 
 that their war was a war of defense. And as the 
 facts gradually oust the now well-rooted falsehood, 
 the will to war of the Central Powers weakens, and 
 would weaken faster but for the dread that the 
 wrath of the world may indeed make their fight now 
 one for national existence. 
 
 Thus indignation in mature human beings always 
 assumes the garb of moral indignation; and this 
 implies that the normal exercise of the fighting- 
 instinct is in the interest of justice, and against 
 a being capable of seeing moral distinctions. Stupid- 
 ity itself would not provoke impatience except for 
 
30 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 
 
 the assumption that humanity — and animals — ought 
 not to be stupid, and that they know it. 
 
 And it should be added that as a form of passion, 
 anger is frequently a highly self-forgetful and gen- 
 erous experience. As a radical state of will, it abol- 
 ishes petty considerations, ceases the effort to save 
 remnants of amenity and advantage, casts prudence 
 to the winds and makes a clean sweep. It frequently 
 assumes great risks and much exertion which a pru- 
 dent neutrality or compromise could avoid. As be- 
 tween the man who has a capacity for wrath, and a 
 man incapable of any radical passion, few would 
 hesitate to choose the former. 
 
 But anger is noble only in the noble; and as a 
 personal explosion it always bears the trace of the 
 failure it signalizes. The serving of ultimata is not 
 good building material for social life. And the same 
 must be said of the pugnacious attitude toward 
 other nations : it is in each case a last resort and a 
 confession of "mortal mind," at some time in the 
 past if not at the moment. Yet if the failure exists 
 it is far more honorable to confess it, and fight — 
 if it is justice one is fighting for — than to maintain 
 a guilty amiability. And when in the event of war 
 pugnacity is combined with the social feelings and 
 their instinctive loyalties, it may acquire an almost 
 religious dignity. 
 
 For, in the first place, the sense of certainty 
 necessary to pugnacity is confirmed by social au- 
 
INSTINCTS AND FEELINGS 31 
 
 thority and suggestion. The man who fights his 
 own personal battles assumes a great burden of 
 assurance: but he who fights in company with his 
 community may read his own conviction in the eyes 
 of his neighbors on every hand. His critical faculty 
 is disarmed by the momentum of common consent; 
 he begins to believe in his cause with an apostolic 
 fervor. 
 
 And as to the moral ingredient necessary to the 
 fighting spirit in responsible men, any cause which 
 one serves in common with others will have the be- 
 ginning of a moral sanction just because it is a 
 common cause. The genuine devotion one gives to 
 the community, the loyalty, the labor and the sacri- 
 fice, lend their color to the cause itself. Psychologi- 
 cally, it is easy for us mortals to invert the true 
 order of dependence and believe a cause good be- 
 cause we unselfishly sacrifice for it, rather than 
 sacrifice for it because we have found it good. The 
 herd-impulse tends of itself, automatically, to sanc- 
 tion and sustain the fighting-impulse. 
 
 And in fact, the elevation of spirit that comes of 
 yielding to the social instinct is not unreal. Whether 
 for good cause or ill, war demands courage and a 
 proffering of the ultimate sacrifice. It develops a 
 brotherhood in the ranks and a compactness in the 
 national life which are substantial gains. It may 
 lead many a mind into a new breadth and generosity 
 of aim. The discovery of the smallness of private 
 concerns, and the vitality of that public interest 
 
32 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 
 
 that had seemed so theoretical, — more than this, 
 the actual sense of malaise and lostness if one is 
 not palpably in the harness of the common task r — 
 all this amounts to a revaluing of existence and 
 perhaps the opening of a new chapter in personal 
 development. 
 
 More than once I have heard it said among our- 
 selves that any cause which men are willing to die 
 for deserves respect. It would be truer to the 
 psychology of the case to say that any willingness 
 to die for a cause deserves respect; but no respect 
 is due to the willingness to let this virtue excuse 
 the failure to examine the cause. One who is con- 
 scious of making a moral investment in his coun- 
 try's cause, and has filled his ears with the authori- 
 tative identifications of patriotism with duty and 
 religion, has no doubt a powerful invitation to neg- 
 lect or slight the inquiry into the outlying issues 
 whose character gives the sign of plus or minus to 
 the whole affair. But just this appearance of suffi- 
 cient sanction which the emotions and virtues of 
 herd-feeling cast over all war-making is the chief 
 mischief of crowd-psychology. When pugnacity is 
 combined with patriotism it may, as we have said, 
 acquire almost religious dignity; but whether or 
 not it does acquire that dignity depends on some- 
 thing beyond the limit of feeling or instinct. And 
 without this something beyond, feeling and instinct 
 are not a fit foundation for a lasting morale: the 
 false appearance of worth is the worst enemy of 
 real worth. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE FOUNDATIONS OF MORALE, — KNOWLEDGE AND 
 
 BELIEF 
 
 One who has yielded himself to the impulse of the 
 crowd, at a game, or a rally, or in the tide of war- 
 feeling, may shortly come to realize that he has be- 
 come less of a thinker, that he has surrendered some- 
 thing of his mind as well as of his will to the keep- 
 ing of the mass. He imitates more than usual, is 
 more credulous, and (as if subconsciously aware of 
 a certain weakness of root) more anxiously on the 
 lookout for leaders to follow. At the same time, he 
 is inclined to be fickle in passing from one to the 
 other because the accustomed ground of judgment 
 is lacking. Under the influence of crowd-feeling, 
 one can be suspicious without being discriminating, 
 panicky without being progressive, dogmatic with- 
 out being convinced. In short, the new development 
 of one's social nature has been purchased at some 
 cost : one may have surrendered too much. 
 
 Is it not obvious that a morale dependent pri- 
 marily upon the instinctive impulses of pugnacity 
 and national feeling must lack something vital, if 
 only for this reason, — that in the order of nature, 
 these impulses themselves depend upon something 
 else? They are only called into existence by their 
 
 33 
 
34 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 
 
 appropriate "stimulus," — i.e., some condition or 
 fact in the world which arouses indignation and the 
 defensive concentration of herd-feeling. Thus feel- 
 ing normally results from what we know or believe ; 
 if belief, as sometimes happens, is generated by the 
 feeling, the natural order is inverted. 
 
 It would be needless to dwell on this point, were 
 it not so easy to ignore it in practice, and were it 
 not for the fact that much current psychology in 
 effect denies it. 
 
 There are still officers in army and navy — not 
 as many as formerly — who believe exclusively in 
 the morale that works its way into every body 
 of recruits through discipline and the sway of 
 esprit de corps. "They know that they're here to 
 can the Kaiser, and that's all they need to know," 
 said one such officer to me very recently. "After 
 a man has been here two months, the worst punish- 
 ment you can give him is to tell him he can't go to 
 France right away. The soldier is a man of action ; 
 and the less thinking he does, the better. ' ' There is 
 an amount of practical wisdom in this ; for the hu- 
 man mind has a large capacity for adopting beliefs 
 that fit the trend of its habits and feelings, and this 
 trend is powerfully moulded by the unanimous direc- 
 tion of an army's purpose. There is an all but 
 irresistible orthodoxy within a body committed to 
 a war. And the current (pragmatic) psychology 
 referred to, making the intelligence a mere instru- 
 
KNOWLEDGE AND BELIEF 35 
 
 ment of the will, would seem to sanction the maxim, 
 "First decide, and then think accordingly." 
 
 But there are two remarks to be made about this 
 view. First, that in the actual creation of morale 
 within an army corps much thinking is included, 
 and nothing is accomplished without the consent 
 of such thoughts as a man already has. Training 
 does wonders in making morale, when nothing in 
 the mind opposes it. Second, that the morale which 
 is sufficient for purposes of training is not neces- 
 sarily sufficient for the strains of the field. 
 - The intrinsic weakness of "affective morale," as 
 psychologists call it, is that it puts both sides on the 
 same mental and moral footing: it either justifies 
 our opponents as well as ourselves, or it makes both 
 sides the creatures of irrational emotion. 
 
 This fact is well illustrated in a book on the psy- 
 chology of war that has had some vogue in the 
 army : and the point is so important that I ask leave 
 to quote from it at some length. Major Eltinge is 
 regarding the army from the angle of crowd psy- 
 chology, holding that "an army is a crowd with a 
 common training and therefore easier to move than 
 any other crowd to unanimous action." He says: 
 
 "When it is proposed to imbue the mind of a 
 crowd with ideas and beliefs — with modern social 
 theories for instance — the leaders have recourse to 
 different expedients. The principal of them are 
 three in number and clearly defined, affirmation, 
 repetition and contagion. Their action is some- 
 
36 MOBALE AND ITS ENEMIES 
 
 what slow, but their effects once produced are very 
 lasting. 
 
 "Affirmation pure and simple, kept free of all 
 reasoning and all proof, is one of the surest means 
 of making an idea enter the minds of crowds. . . . 
 When an affirmation has been repeated sufficiently 
 and there is unanimity in this repetition . . . what 
 is called a current of opinion is formed and the 
 powerful mechanism of contagion intervenes. . . . 
 Eeason is incapable of transforming man's opin- 
 ions." 
 
 So far we see Major Eltinge accepting the tend- 
 ency of the crowd-feeling to take control of the 
 mind and form its opinions, as a principle for shap- 
 ing army morale. Now see the application to the 
 public in general and the central issues of the war : 
 
 "There has been a perfect flood of articles justi- 
 fying the course of one or other of the contestants 
 in the present great European war. Those articles 
 did not come from the ignorant or those of weak 
 judgment who without reason were led away by 
 their emotions. They came from college professors, 
 men of letters, scientists, representing the best in- 
 telligence, education and reasoning power of the 
 world. Yet each, his views colored by his emotions, 
 reasons to the end that clearly justifies his own side. 
 
 ' ' The German people individually and as a whole 
 believe that they are fighting desperately in defense 
 of their liberties, — their very homes even. The 
 Allies feel just as strongly that the Germans wan- 
 tonly attacked them. The best minds of both sides 
 are submerged by emotion. . . . 
 
 "When the war is over, writers and historians, 
 writing quietly in their studies uninfluenced by the 
 emotion of the conflict, will point out reasons that 
 
KNOWLEDGE AND BELIEF 37 
 
 never existed. They will point out aggression, 
 vanity, pride, desire for self-aggrandizement or 
 hope of political reward as the motive for acts that 
 were prompted solely by patriotic fear for the coun- 
 try," etc. 
 
 A book could hardly go farther toward reduc- 
 ing the enemy's cause and our own to the same 
 moral status, thus destroying the morale of both 
 army and people at its roots. Naturally, the writer 
 had no such intention. He was simply misled by the 
 glamor of a " crowd psychology'' which has had 
 many true things to say about human nature; but 
 which is so far from giving the whole truth that it 
 leaves wholly out of view the central nerve of all 
 earnest and long-range action, — conviction, the rea- 
 soned belief of thinking men. 
 
 Crowds are capable of doing reasonless things 
 upon impulse and of adopting creeds without re- 
 flection. But an army is not a crowd ; still less is a 
 nation a crowd. A mob or crowd is an unorganized 
 group of people governed by less than the average 
 individual intelligence of its members. Armies and 
 nations are groups of people so organized that they 
 are controlled by an intelligence higher than the 
 average. The instincts that lend, and must lend, 
 their immense motive-power to the great purposes 
 of war are the servants, not the masters, of that in- 
 telligence. 
 
 Man has, perhaps, but slight claim to be called 
 
38 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 
 
 "the reasoning animal": he is, let us say, nine- 
 tenths impulse and one-tenth reason or reflection, 
 but this one-tenth has the advantage of being 
 cumulative. A thought to-day and another thought 
 to-morrow: a doubt here, a query there, an idea 
 struck out by this event or by that conversation, 
 build themselves together and become the control- 
 ling structure of our lives. The impressions I get 
 from reading to-day's paper vanish, or seem to 
 vanish. I cannot recall what I read yesterday. But 
 that reading either confirmed or weakened the be- 
 liefs that keep my purposes pointed in their course. 
 The helm does not need to keep always moving. A 
 deflection once made alters the course of the ship 
 till the end of the voyage. 
 
 Feeling taken by itself is an unreliable support of 
 action, and is incapable of direct control either from 
 outside or from inside. Anyone who has tried to 
 train his feelings into the groove of what he is sup- 
 posed to feel, or thinks he ought to feel, on the occa- 
 sion let us say of a wedding, his own wedding, or a 
 catastrophe, or even a death, will corroborate the 
 statement. The slight feeling of shame with which 
 one listens to an orator who is visibly aiming his 
 appeal to feeling shows the same thing. Feeling is 
 essentially free, individual, and transitory ; its func- 
 tion is to make the connection between what I know 
 and what I do. The connection is the important 
 thing, and if it can be made without feeling it may 
 be none the worse. The only justified appeal to 
 
KNOWLEDGE AND BELIEF 39 
 
 free and intelligent beings is by way of what they 
 think. What one himself feels as he tells his story 
 or makes his argument will carry itself across with- 
 out any separate exertion. 
 
 The point is observed in practice by all instinctive 
 leaders of men. If they have a state of will to pro- 
 duce, they do not "assert and repeat" the conclusion 
 they wish drawn: they state the facts which are 
 their own premises, and let their hearers draw their 
 own conclusions. They allow knowledge to do its 
 natural work on the will. One of the most remark- 
 able changes in morale that has taken place within 
 our own borders is that in the lower East Side of 
 New York, which between Fall of 1917 and Summer 
 of 1918 practically discarded its non-patriotic inter- 
 national socialism for a very genuine national loy- 
 alty. The man who had more to do with that change 
 than any other person was asked to explain it. He 
 said, "When the Kaiser put over the treaty of 
 Brest-Litovsk he automatically wiped socialism out 
 of the East Side. Our work was simply to let in 
 the light. ' ' In the army, there has been a high per- 
 centage of desertion from units containing moun- 
 taineers of east Tennessee, northern Alabama, and 
 Georgia ; armed squadrons of the Eleventh Cavalry 
 stationed at Fort Oglethorpe have been detailed to 
 round them up. This condition has gone hand in 
 hand with the isolation and ignorance of these 
 mountain people; and the cavalrymen have found 
 on various occasions that a campaign of enlighten- 
 
40 MOKALE AND ITS ENEMIES 
 
 ment has been more effective in bringing deserters 
 back to the colors than the armed man-hunt. 
 
 "The trips of the cavalrymen after hiding men, 
 many of them wearing the uniform of Uncle Sam, 
 have been of the nature of educational tours among 
 people whose attitude of opposition to the war and 
 to the Government was based on ignorance and 
 lies." 
 
 And the same principle holds in the dealing of 
 statesmen with the morale of entire peoples. Those 
 who feel the immediate pressure of the emer- 
 gency are frequently impatient with the demand 
 for information about the causes of the war, and for 
 authoritative statements of war aims. After a dis- 
 cussion of certain questions of nationality, one of 
 our diplomatic corps abroad said to me, "That is 
 all very interesting; but the main thing now is to 
 get on with the war. And the main thing for our 
 people to realize is that so far we are not winning ; 
 we have not yet struck the winning gait." At the 
 some moment, Great Britain was issuing statements 
 of her aims, and creating a "War Aims Committee" 
 to carry the discussion through the island. There 
 is in fact no way to "get on with the war" except 
 by keeping the thoughts of the people together. 
 There is no such thing, either in army or civilian 
 world, as being too clear about the mental setting 
 of the war ; there is no such thing except for difficul- 
 ties of expression, as repeating the tale too often. 
 A lover who replies to his lady's question, "I have 
 
KNOWLEDGE AND BELIEF 41 
 
 told you once ; is that not enough ? ' ' may be logically 
 defensible, but he is psychologically far astray ; and 
 a people at war is in somewhat her position who is 
 giving all she has. The more profoundly the feel- 
 ings and the will are involved, the more insatiable 
 and just is the appetite for knowledge. 
 
 There is a time for thought, as I am sometimes 
 reminded by friends in the army, and a time for 
 action; the day of deliberation is past. My answer 
 is: the time for thought is whenever the questions 
 arise. For us as a nation, the major deliberations 
 are indeed past. But the enemies of a sound morale 
 arise all along the line, as the first flush of war-en- 
 thusiasm gives way to the long pull. In the suc- 
 ceeding chapters, I shall deal with some of these 
 more prevalent impediments to morale in knowledge 
 and belief, namely: 
 
 1. A failure to realize the war itself; 
 
 2. The inherent fickleness of the feeling of enmity; 
 
 3. The awkward consciousness of our own imper- 
 fect political righteousness ; 
 
 4. The vague and unclear image of the ' ' State, ' ' — 
 that invisible entity in whose behalf so much is 
 sacrificed, — and the consequent paling of patriotism. 
 
 We shall speak first of the difficulty, not wholly 
 surmountable, of realizing the fact of war as it is. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 ON REALIZING THE WAR 
 
 For four years and more there has been about our 
 ears the fact of war, a complex and mighty fact like 
 a distant and rising storm. Yet for the greater 
 number of us, and for the greater part of our waking 
 day, it remains true that we only imperfectly believe 
 war is really taking place. 
 
 At a distance from the actual scene of war, the 
 existence of war is discredited by nine-tenths of the 
 impressions of the day's work. Where everything 
 invites us to believe in the usual, the unusual can 
 acquire but momentary and purely mental recogni- 
 tion. The unwelcome knowledge has to make its 
 way against the momentum of a lifetime 's purposes. 
 We say that there is a war: but the thing that comes 
 to our minds is not war — as it is. 
 
 It is not merely habit, but the habitual and in- 
 stinctive belief in our personal good-fortune that is 
 at stake. We are mentally prepared for whatever 
 carries our fortunes forward: we are mentally set 
 against whatever threatens to put them backward. 
 The most fortunate are thus the most incredulous 
 of misfortune: and one of the most insidious dan- 
 gers of wealth is the prepossession that no other 
 estate is normal or possible for me. Wealth is es- 
 
 42 
 
ON REALIZING THE WAR 43 
 
 pecially prone to take to heart that Psalm which 
 reads "A thousand shall fall at thy side and ten 
 thousand at thy right hand; but it shall not come 
 nigh thee. ' ' And America, as a whole, has the habit 
 of prosperity. 
 
 Thus it comes about that beside the great physical 
 effort of mobilization there goes another effort, — 
 that of mental mobilization. And the second is as 
 momentous as the first for the maximum effective 
 morale. 
 
 For the difference between a languid and a vigor- 
 ous morale is just the difference between knowing 
 a thing and realizing it. And "realizing" means 
 seeing its dimensions and its bearings, what it 
 means for the future as well as for the present, for 
 my own action as well as for that of others. 
 
 The prodigious labor of waking the country was 
 a matter of getting the country to realize what was 
 taking place. Our prophets of preparedness spoke 
 to a largely unrealizing world. They spoke with 
 emphasis enough; but emphasis does not produce 
 belief. Sweat and tears on the part of prophets 
 have never produced belief. The world has its taci- 
 turn classifications for nervous and excited minds, 
 as prophets have always found; and unfortunately 
 there are ten unstable and irresponsible prophets 
 for every true one. Until our prophets are better 
 psychologists, their work will be largely in vain. 
 And even now when the truth is upon us, and we 
 desire to realize it, it is not within a simple act of 
 
44 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 
 
 our wills to do so. There is something elusive about 
 that state of mind we call "realization" or belief. 
 
 Whatever ' ' brings the war home to us " naturally 
 moves us nearer to sensing its reality. Seeing, they 
 say, is believing: the official pictures help; and the 
 various concrete visible facts of soldierdom, and 
 the mighty labors of a nation bestirring itself begin 
 to win the day in our imaginations. Yet imagina- 
 tion itself has to confess defeat : it scans the scenes 
 for the thud of war ; and with the fall of the curtain 
 a sense of disappointment steals over us — the heart 
 of the thing has been missed. We read the letters 
 and the books, we hear the speakers, and much is 
 made actual and vivid ; but one thing we fail to grasp 
 — the war. 
 
 Would anything give us the reality, anything 
 short of being over there and being in it 1 ? Would 
 even that give us the realization of the fact? It 
 may be of some use to give the answer, some use in 
 appeasing that self -accusing restlessness, clamorous 
 to be on the spot. It may help us to turn that good 
 energy into more useful channels. 
 
 Let me speak from my own observation at the 
 British and French fronts and say that being over 
 there and in the heart of the war-drama does not 
 dissipate the haunting feeling of unreality. Of all 
 the denizens of the war-zone, the practised war- 
 correspondent probably sees the most; yet he does 
 not escape this constitutional incredulity. He wins 
 
ON REALIZING THE WAR 45 
 
 his stories from a landscape in which the unprac- 
 tised witness sees confused movements, hears much 
 noise near and remote, perceives sudden trees of 
 smoke and dust sprouting full-grown from the hill- 
 side and dissolving, notes thin lines of men appear- 
 ing out of nowhere and dropping out of sight, — all in 
 a frame of hills and clouds and woods and streams 
 that stand patient and often serene while little man 
 does his mightiest in the midst of them, destroy- 
 ing chiefly his own work and kind. The observer 
 searches for words that will stab awake his own 
 spirit and that of his reader, and fails to find them. 
 
 But realization has something to do with action. 
 The observer cannot realize ; only he who takes part 
 can understand what it means. The private soldier 
 then, — but do you think that he escapes incredulity T 
 I can assure you that he does not. I do not know 
 whether he is more beset by it than others ; but he, 
 too, sleeps and wakes and thinks he is still in an 
 evil dream, that these things cannot be real. In 
 the case of this war at least, seeing is not believing ; 
 or perhaps we should put it this way: that the war 
 cannot be seen. 
 
 The war cannot be seen. The private soldier sees 
 what no one else can see. He is there at the white- 
 hot edge where history is being beaten into its new 
 shape. He knows the event, the stream of events, 
 not as one who explores it, but as one who plunges 
 into it and feels the tug of the current in his own 
 body. Perhaps for this very reason he feels more 
 
46 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 
 
 keenly the imprisonment of his mind, his ignorance 
 of the wider bearings of his own movements. * The 
 actor is at a disadvantage in judging the play; the 
 soldier is at a similar disadvantage in judging the 
 battle. In handing his will over to the control of his 
 commanders, he has necessarily resigned also much 
 of the knowledge required to guide that will. He 
 has a vague confidence, sometimes a pathetic confi- 
 dence, that what he fails to see and know someone 
 sees and knows — his company commander probably, 
 or at any rate the general staff, the war council, the 
 high officers of the State. And even this confidence 
 sometimes deserts him. 
 
 For he has had reason to know the distance be- 
 tween the human official mentality and omniscience ; 
 and more than this, he knows that much of the truth 
 of history lies buried with the memories of men who 
 fell in carrying it out. Of many a critical action the 
 true history will never be known. And as for the 
 mysteries that regulate the attack or retreat or 
 transfer, the inexplicable delays that beset reliefs, 
 supplies, furloughs, his mind has long since ceased 
 to beat at the bars of his speculative cage : a fatal- 
 ism is likely to supervene which is not the fatalism 
 of a divine foredestiny, but that of a mind caught 
 in the mesh of a very human necessity and reduced 
 to the simplicity of doing the next thing with what 
 power one has.> The private soldier knows that he 
 does not see the war. 
 
 And the same must be said of the higher officers, 
 
ON REALIZING THE WAR 47 
 
 so far as they fail to see what the private soldier 
 sees. Step into the headquarters of the Sixth French 
 Army where General Mestre is conducting the op- 
 erations along the Aisne back of the Chemin des 
 Dames. Around the walls hang great maps ; show- 
 ing the dispositions of the German divisions and 
 smaller units in much detail. From the room radi- 
 ate hundreds of wires. In the immediate neighbor- 
 hood an immense group of officers are occupied in 
 collecting data of all kinds, with receiving reports 
 and transmitting orders. Here in the midst is the 
 directing mind, quiet, courteous, taking time to do 
 the honors with the French formality which is so 
 much a second nature that it becomes an element 
 of simple grace. It is evident that the General sees 
 much that was concealed from the private soldier: 
 it is equally evident that just what the private sol- 
 dier most intimately sees must drop out of the Gen- 
 eral's direct knowledge. He must deal with regi- 
 ments, brigades, divisions, armies, as units. He 
 knows that the private soldier is here; but the war 
 must come before him as a schematic totality. The* 
 detail must be largely lost ; to the mind of a general 
 the war becomes generalized. 
 
 Mr. H. G. Wells reports a conversation with JofTre 
 while Joffre was still in active service, in which that 
 great soldier remarked to him about the "strange- 
 ness of it all. ' ' This sense of strangeness is simply 
 the confession which one meets everywhere, of a 
 partial grasp of the event. The war, so far as it 
 
48 MOKALE AND ITS ENEMIES 
 
 is visible at all, is the sum of a million separate 
 visions that never find themselves together in one 
 mind, — each one living vicariously on the imagina- 
 tion of the rest. 
 
 At times some one of these many angles brings 
 home so poignantly the bearings of a pen stroke at 
 Potsdam that one involuntarily exclaims, "This is 
 the war." At a base-hospital, perhaps, where part 
 of the crop of war is garnered; or in the running 
 cemeteries interspersed with patches of rusted 
 barbed wire along the road from Bapaume to Al- 
 bert ; or in the Red Cross trains that pull their heavy 
 burdens into Charing Cross with such clumsy ten- 
 derness as railway trains can show, while the crowd 
 stands silent, ready with its mute gifts of flowers. 
 Here at Chauny one might have followed the wake 
 of a retreating army, destroying for terror's sake 
 what it could not use ; at Champier a violated ceme- 
 tery, at Roye a ruined church, tell the same tale. Or 
 here, at Erith, a thousand women stand all day 
 stamping rivets into the cartridge belts of machine 
 guns. Or in the streets of Paris, other thousands of 
 black-robed women hold their heads high and proud. 
 Or even farther away from the scene of warfare, in 
 some quiet country spot, a thinker's eye straining 
 into the future sees the passing of old social orders, 
 the loss of the France or the England of yesterday : 
 and for a moment one may seem to catch through his 
 eyes a glimpse of the war as it is. 
 
ON EEALIZING THE WAE 49 
 
 But in truth, the war is not a thing that can be 
 seen; it must be thought. And if physical vision 
 hinders or preoccupies the free flight of thought it 
 may be the very thing that prevents the realization 
 of the war. "War can be realized only through what 
 is at once a concrete thing and an incentive of 
 thought, a representative of something greater than 
 itself, in short, through a symbol. The most vivid 
 and complete sense of it may come through expe- 
 riences which are no direct part of the doings of 
 war, but which stand as symbols into which all our 
 fragmentary impressions can be poured and fused. 
 
 Let me picture one such experience. After a day's 
 delay for reasons not vouchsafed to the public, the 
 Channel boat from Havre to Southampton receives 
 from the Admiralty the word to sail. Late at night, 
 with a moon low in the West and a sea running high, 
 it drops out of the harbor; and when the lights of 
 the city have faded and only the great fitful gleam 
 of the Point of France marks the land we have left, 
 one becomes suddenly aware that the haze above the 
 water on the starboard side is assuming shape, and 
 the steamer's rail glides under a huge silent bulk 
 from which one slim line of light looks down on us. 
 Three such sentries we pass, tangible signs of the 
 sleepless vigilance of England, ominous, silent, de- 
 termined, as if emerging secretly from the world's 
 subconscious integrity of purpose. They also are 
 vulnerable, those great vessels, as much at the 
 mercy of the terror that walketh in darkness as our- 
 
50 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 
 
 selves, yet throwing their resolute protection over 
 us. This is war : in its grimness, its mystery, and its 
 faith, — a stream of the weak giving itself to defend 
 the weak, making itself for the time the passing 
 body of the eternal certainty that rides over all the 
 lurid contingencies of the conflict. 
 
 The attitude of mind of audiences following film- 
 pictures of the war is not without its significance. 
 I have noticed what things seemed to rouse spon- 
 taneous interest. It was not always the supposed 
 climax of the film picture, the views of going over 
 the top that cost the official photographer so much; 
 nor the assault, which in the picture may have 
 seemed strangely casual and quiet. But the sight 
 of the boys debarking, the long columns, the end- 
 lessly renewed columns, — symbol of inexhaustible 
 human resources; — the sight of their escorts of 
 honor, symbol of the union of peoples; — the sight 
 of their form, the instant synchronous swing of the 
 quick time, symbol of their spirit and condition; — 
 and chief of all, the sight of Old Glory moving up 
 the line, going forward into action, proud, proud 
 Old Glory, — symbol of everything on earth we are 
 eager to serve: this alone was irresistible. It is 
 through the symbol that the mind best gropes its way 
 to realization. 
 
 But there is no final escape from the recurrent 
 onset of incredulity — nor should there be. For at 
 the center of this feeling is the true judgment (quite 
 
ON REALIZING THE WAR 51 
 
 possibly a subconscious judgment) that this war is 
 essentially an anachronism, a method of solving in- 
 ternational problems now wholly out of date. It 
 is too far out of accord with our political temper to 
 be wholly real. The choice of it was possible only 
 to minds living in a self-made haze, attitudinizing 
 in mediaeval armor before the glass of their own 
 conceit, and prizing as advanced what is only the 
 echo of forgotten folly. It is a state of mind sup- 
 ported by a false science and a materially pragmatic 
 philosophy, a perverse interpretation of history and 
 a morbid dramatization of dead ideals of rulership 
 and empire, blind to the fact that new methods are 
 already born and that the solution of public dilem- 
 mas already in germ exists. America, slow to be- 
 lieve and slow to act was slow largely through the 
 irrepressible health of its own outlook, the good 
 will that assumed not with its intellect alone but 
 with its whole being that the age of war is gone. 
 The incredulity of the average citizen, the incre- 
 dulity of the boys in the trenches, is so far an honest 
 incredulity: this war is a bad dream, a dream of 
 minds bound in evil. Temporarily it is in their 
 power to drag all Christendom into the vortex of 
 their own delirium, but only until the common pain 
 can bring about a common awakening. 
 
 So far, we must suffer whatever disadvantage 
 to morale comes of making war more or less 
 awkwardly, theoretically, dutifully, reluctantly, de- 
 void of the zest of Roman legionaries who adored 
 
52 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 
 
 both the goal and the method. This handicap, such 
 as it is, we can accept, with pride and with complete 
 confidence that it is compensated elsewhere. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 ENMITY AND THE ENEMY 
 
 Instinct will come to the aid of a brief, intense 
 angry effort; but it will do little or nothing to sus- 
 tain a steady fighting temper over a long time. 
 Animals can fight, some of them can conduct bat- 
 tles ; but only mankind can carry on feuds and wars. 
 War-making requires the moral persistence which 
 only the reasoning biped can supply, not merely 
 because of the complex and scientific character of 
 its operations, but because there is something in- 
 wardly elusive about the hostile sentiment itself. 
 
 It is as though fighting engendered a subtle drug 
 which in the course of time produced numbness to 
 the original issue. We find peoples, like individuals, 
 forgetting justice and flagging in the will to war 
 because nature refuses to support antipathy at its 
 original vigor, becomes inhospitable to the simple 
 fact or relationship of enmity. Just as something 
 instinctive and unmoral mixes in with the zest of 
 fighting as fighting grows warm, so something 
 equally unmoral mixes in with the wish to stop fight- 
 ing, as the fighting drags through the seasons. 
 
 It is well to understand, as far as we can, the 
 causes of this strange treachery of the hostile feel- 
 ings, mother of many a treacherous peace. 
 
 53 
 
54 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 
 
 It is not hard to see some at least of the reasons 
 why enmity tends to undermine its own founda- 
 tions. In the first place, of all sentiments, it re- 
 quires the highest degree of inner tension. Two 
 opposite attitudes are combined in it, the effort to 
 bring the hated object forward into clear conscious- 
 ness, and the effort to expel it from consciousness, 
 because it is hated. The hater is thus in a state of 
 partial self-checkage : he becomes a divided and rela- 
 tively unhappy object, preoccupied with what he 
 wants to expel from the universe. If everybody 
 loves a lover, as they say, there is an equally natu- 
 ral tendency to hate the chronic hater and avoid 
 him. 
 
 As if to escape this result, healthy constitutions 
 do not absorb hate into the system, but throw it off 
 when it has done its destined work — that of bringing 
 about a settled course of action, which has no need 
 to goad itself on by ruminating over the original 
 incentives. And because the state of enmity, like 
 other negative feelings, is depressing (though like 
 pain it may be highly stimulating to immediate 
 action), there is a certain haste to get rid of it, even 
 before it has worked out its natural result. Its 
 sojourn in the system is like that of a disease which 
 gradually summons out the forces of immunity and 
 rejection. 
 
 And further, there is a subconscious logic that 
 often works against it. The enemy, in the course of 
 our dealing with him, seldom fails to command some 
 
ENMITY AND THE ENEMY 55 
 
 kind of respect, if only because he is our enemy and 
 engages our powers and our wits. And if he has a 
 fighter's honor, out of this respect may grow a 
 genuine sympathy (well portrayed in Galsworthy's 
 drama, "Strife") such as appears in our regard for 
 the veterans and leaders of the Confederacy. When 
 this happens, enmity has generated its own anti- 
 dote and the spirit of warfare dies a natural death. 
 
 By its methods of conducting the present war, 
 Germany has removed all danger that our fighting 
 spirit will die out from this last-named cause. But 
 the primary tendency of enmity to benumb itself 
 remains; and besides this, no sentiment is so ill- 
 managed, when we consider its public expressions 
 and the efforts of public men to arouse and sus- 
 tain it. 
 
 The slowness of our original response to the Eu- 
 ropean situation was due in part to such psycho- 
 logical errors on the part of our reporters and 
 awakeners. They failed to allow for the fact that 
 a mental constitution, naturally inhospitable to 
 active enmity, will incline to place the alleged male- 
 factor in the same class with other distant news- 
 paper culprits or with stage-villains, semi-mythical, 
 about whom nothing need be done. Belief has its 
 momentum ; and we had been favorably disposed to 
 Germany and the Germans. Besides, we lacked, as 
 a people, the historical background, the sense of the 
 deep-rooted antagonisms, the trains of gunpowder 
 laid in the highways of European history, which 
 
56 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 
 
 could have given the original acts of war verisimili- 
 tude. In brief we lacked the " motivation, ' ' we 
 were not supplied with the motivation, and hence we 
 could not believe the criminal as black as he was 
 painted: men's eyes have to get used to this kind 
 of darkness also. The portrait of the designing, 
 unscrupulous, spy-setting, world-claiming, treaty- 
 wrecking, humanity-spurning Germany seemed a 
 partisan caricature. No doubt we were helped in 
 this feeling by our own experience with party poli- 
 tics and by our knowledge that the facts about Ger- 
 many came chiefly via the British censor. There 
 must be, we thought, another side : no modern nation 
 could give itself to a policy quite so evil, so cynical, 
 so quixotically pretentious. 
 
 While this incredulity lasted, the inflooding 
 stories of atrocities were received with a divided 
 mind. With the rising flood of wrath against the 
 perpetrators was mingled a feeling of resentment 
 toward those who reported them. Later circum- 
 stantial accounts of the treatment of Belgium roused 
 a widespread flame of hot fury (and I confess that 
 to this day in my own feelings the rape of Belgium 
 outranks all the long list of Germany's crimes) ; 
 but even then, uncertainty about the proportions 
 of the fact stood between us and complete belief: 
 both sides had not been heard ; the enemy remained 
 somewhat less than a full-fledged reality. 
 
 Our portrait makers had exceeded the rate at 
 which our belief could grow, without supplying the 
 
ENMITY AND THE ENEMY 57 
 
 background that could have speeded it. They also 
 frequently committed the error of giving their con- 
 clusions instead of their premises, their denuncia- 
 tions and epithets instead of the facts on which they 
 were based. And occasionally they committed, and 
 still commit, the error of de-humanizing the enemy. 
 It is seldom wise to call the enemy the names he fully 
 deserves ; it is never wise to make him out less than 
 human. For anger, as we saw, runs in the opposite 
 direction : it personifies and attributes conscience to 
 even inanimate things. If we de-humanize the foe 
 we remove him from the reach of instinctive in- 
 dignation. Let me illustrate: 
 
 Not long ago I listened to a stirring address by a 
 French lieutenant in the course of which he de- 
 scribed the conduct of a Prussian officer taken pris- 
 oner in the second battle of Ypres, the battle which 
 has the distinction of witnessing the inaugural use in 
 human warfare of poison gas. The first victims 
 of this German invention were being taken back, 
 contorted with agony, to the dressing stations, where 
 war-seasoned surgeons stood appalled and help- 
 less: seldom even in this war has there been such 
 a scene of anguish and despair. The Prussian offi- 
 cer, far from showing a sign of human concern, 
 burst into derisive laughter. He laughed! and he 
 muttered something to the effect that the British 
 would soon learn what they were up against. Our 
 speaker made his comment by quoting an after- 
 dinner speech of Governor-General von Bissing at 
 
58 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 
 
 a Brussels banquet in which that officer referred 
 with indignant surprise to the continued insub- 
 ordination of the Belgian populace: " These Bel- 
 gians, ' ' he said, ' ' are to me a psychological enigma. ' ' 
 "Une enigme psychologique!", exclaimed the lieu- 
 tenant, "it is Von Bissing and his like that are the 
 psychological puzzle to us. What we are engaged 
 in is not a war between nations : it is a war between 
 species, — une guerre des especes." 
 
 The story spoke for itself : the comment weakened 
 it. For to place the enemy in a different species is 
 to diminish his responsibility; whereas it is pre- 
 cisely his responsibility that sustains the condemna- 
 tion. 
 
 During the latter part of August, 1917, four of 
 us were being conducted through the devastated 
 region about Noyon, Chauny, Roye, and Ham, by 
 M. le Capitaine Jaubert. There were the murdered 
 orchards, the choked and denied wells, the desolate 
 acres of rubbish that a few weeks past were living 
 cities, — everywhere ghastly, jagged spindles of wall 
 rising like mutely weeping ghosts from formless 
 heaps of dust, the bones of vanished architecture, — 
 the whole wide stretch of mother earth made into a 
 Babylonish desert, not by time but by human de- 
 sign and toil. I waited during the long day to hear 
 the justified anathema from the captain's lips. His 
 sole comment was, "You see, gentlemen, there was 
 no valid military excuse for this." He had said all 
 that could be put into words; and he was right in 
 
ENMITY AND THE ENEMY 59 
 
 leaving the rest to our own silent reaction. "What 
 is not expressed is not over-expressed, nor yet under- 
 expressed: it turns inward, and feeds the perma- 
 nent resolve. 
 
 Among the fighters, it is striking that so little 
 time, comparatively, is spent in swapping atrocity- 
 stories and in inventing fit epithets. They have a 
 more effective way of expressing their judgment. 
 What carries our boys over the top with a vengeance 
 is not a warmed-up hate, and certainly not rum, but 
 the sufficient knowledge of happenings within their 
 own ken, set in the frame of their understanding of 
 the purposes of Potsdam. 
 
 It is this frame that is the important thing. That 
 is the soul of the enemy. The significance of every 
 act of atrocity lies in the fact that it is the fruit of a 
 policy : it is a symptom, and a symbol, of the thing 
 to be destroyed. This the soldier understands, and 
 comes to understand more deeply with experience. 
 
 If the reason for war lay in the personal inferi- 
 ority of the enemy, it would be a blow to morale to 
 find specimens of him, say among the prisoners, 
 very much the same as ourselves. When one sees 
 in the individual enemy an unquestionable fellow- 
 being, the impulse to treat him as such comes to the 
 front, and commonly drags with it the skeptical 
 query, "Why have I been trying to kill this fellow! 
 What is this monstrous madness of war that sets 
 at one another's throats so many millions of beings 
 meant by nature to be co-operators if not friends t ' ' 
 
60 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 
 
 One forgets that if Lucifer had not been a fellow- 
 angel there could have been no such thing as a war 
 in heaven. It is only on beings like ourselves (within 
 limits) that war can be made — the whole question 
 of war hangs not on what the opponent is, but on 
 what he has chosen. 
 
 What makes humanity is the power of the human 
 being to commit himself to an idea or principle and 
 to stand for it, so that the conflict of the principles 
 becomes a conflict of the men who stand for them. 
 My enemy is the man who is standing for what I 
 am bound to regard as a bad principle ; standing for 
 it, not in theory alone, but in trying to build it into 
 the structure of human behavior generally. And to 
 keep that false idea from getting a hold in the world, 
 to exclude that bad principle means, on account of 
 his choice, to exclude him. This much we shall 
 always have in common with all human beings, the 
 law of life, to stand or fall by the validity of our 
 choices. If I make a sufficiently vital error I may 
 have a chance in another life, but not in this: and 
 the same holds good for him. The object of warfare 
 is not to exclude individual souls from the universe : 
 it is to keep their false choices from polluting the 
 stream of history from which our descendants — and 
 theirs — must draw their life. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 THE PUEPOSES OF POTSDAM 
 
 It is not our object to discuss the issues of the war : 
 our work is to deal with the psychology of war- 
 making. But having spoken of the purposes of Pots- 
 dam as the chief element in the object of our pres- 
 ent hostility, I can hardly acquit myself of sketching 
 what those purposes are, especially since a certain 
 light is thrown on them by the psychology of the 
 peoples at war. 
 
 There are people, like the English, who seem to 
 be chary of committing themselves to denned pur- 
 poses of any sort, afraid to desperation of becoming 
 limited or doctrinaire by tying up to a particular 
 principle or theory. Nevertheless they speak with 
 no uncertain voice against the policies they reject, 
 and so indirectly acknowledge allegiance to what 
 we might call a vague public creed, none the less 
 positive and real because they decline the trouble 
 and risk of defining it. They pursue, if you like, a 
 political vision which has at least this in common 
 with the visio beatified of the mystics, that it is hard 
 to put into words. Yet it helps to guide the decision 
 of particular cases, and so gradually builds up a 
 body of precedent, the common law of the British 
 State in its dealings with other States. It has the 
 
 61 
 
62 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 
 
 advantages and the disadvantages of its unwritten 
 constitution. It forms no exception to the rule that 
 history is made up of the commitments of men and 
 nations to congenial ideas, commitments more or 
 less experimental and competitive. 
 
 The German people are far more inclined to com- 
 mit themselves to a theory, and are less likely to be 
 saved by the vaguer inner monitors (all more or 
 less intuitive; such as, humor, taste, virtue, etc.) 
 from the excesses of the intellect. This trait is due 
 in part to their history. As late comers upon the 
 scene of European culture, they have made head- 
 way largely by skill in intelligent, patient analysis 
 of what was already present, and by unflinching 
 courage in applying their analysis in their own way. 
 Confidence in the sufficiency of "science" to find 
 the sure path to everything belonging to a nation's 
 life, both material and spiritual, and unreserved 
 commitment to the guiding ideas thus scientifically 
 found, has become a national characteristic. 
 
 Largely because of this German trait, this war is 
 almost an ideal case of warfare. For the unreser- 
 vedness of commitment so characteristic of their 
 personal behavior is equally so of their foreign 
 policy. The principle of that policy is not unknown 
 or new in the world ; new only is the absence of com- 
 punction with which it has been followed in all its 
 consequences, and the vividness with which its 
 nature has thus become evident to all (other) eyes. 
 To see it in this extreme form is to reject it in 
 
THE PURPOSES OF POTSDAM 63 
 
 toto. The Prussian has thus made himself the ex- 
 perimental subject for all mankind; and this war 
 becomes with full right the cause celebre of modern 
 history. 
 
 What, then, is this principle? Its name is Real- 
 politik, the very plausible principle that States must 
 be guided by "real" rather than imaginary goods 
 and considerations. Its nature, however, appears 
 when we understand that the "real" goods are the 
 solid substances of economic advantage and prestige, 
 as opposed to the purely imaginary or ideal prop- 
 erties of honesty and good- will; and that the "real" 
 considerations, the things that count in the world, 
 are the accomplished facts, as opposed to the fanci- 
 ful and quickly forgotten interest in the methods by 
 which facts are brought about. Realpolitik is an 
 easy and quite natural generalization from human 
 history, when read with a cynical eye. And the pur- 
 poses of Potsdam are simply the resolute embodi- 
 ment of Realpolitik in international affairs. It is 
 this — and not any principle of the internal organi- 
 zation of States, whether autocratic or democratic 
 — that we have to meet and overthrow. It is the 
 principle — paradoxical enough, when we look closely 
 — that just in the great affairs of inter-state rela- 
 tions, principles do not count. 
 
 And quite consistently, this implies that for all 
 Germans the changing of the facts of the world 
 nearer to the interests of the German State is the 
 one real and valid end which justifies, nay, makes a 
 
64 MOEALE AND ITS ENEMIES 
 
 duty of, every means which will work toward it : and 
 that inasmuch as it can hardly be expected that 
 other nations will accept this end, they may as well 
 be treated as enemies, without compunction or argu- 
 ment, when the day comes to assert the German will. 
 It is a part of the principle that in the long run 
 force is what must command the outcome : and that 
 a sufficiently powerful State can quite well afford to 
 make its nest in the midst of a world of cowed and 
 indignant enemies, certain that it controls the fear 
 if not the respect of the rest of mankind. 
 
 During the period of the Belgian deportations, in 
 the winter 1916-1917, I had a long conversation on 
 the subject with a conspicuous representative of 
 Germanism in this country, since deceased. I ex- 
 pressed my belief that quite apart from the ques- 
 tion whether Germany had the power to do as she 
 liked with the Belgians, she could ill afford to defy 
 the common judgment of neutral nations. He re- 
 plied (and I think I recall his exact words), "We 
 have about come to the conclusion that the opinion 
 of neutral nations is not worth considering." 
 
 I still doubt whether he, or the German Govern- 
 ment, had weighed the cost of attracting the atten- 
 tion of the world to its worst qualities. Every 
 nation, like every person, has its defects : for which, 
 under ordinary circumstances, it needs, and re- 
 ceives, the indulgence of neighborly good-will. To 
 break these usual relations deliberately not alone 
 dares to dispense with this indulgence: but, since 
 
THE PURPOSES OF POTSDAM 65 
 
 enmity is selective, such an act invites the foe and 
 all history to judge the offending people and state 
 by its evil sides primarily. Nothing human is so 
 good that it can brave out this verdict in cold 
 blood. The opinion of posterity, never before so 
 consciously defied as by the Germanic powers in the 
 making and the conduct of this war, is still greater 
 than the greatest political force. 
 
 Frederick the Great boasted that he could always 
 find some pedant to justify what he had done. He 
 was quite right in thinking that he could always 
 find some one to try it. But history has a long, 
 shrewd look at the works of men, and Frederick 
 and his boast are to-day on no pedestal outside of 
 Germany, and probably not within. For the chief 
 danger in defying "neutral" opinion, is that it is 
 the opinion of one's own soul, as it becomes clear. 
 The contempt of history's judgment is the wholly 
 futile and pitiful pose of despising one's own con- 
 science. The deeds of Germany have condemned 
 Germans of these and later times to an unmeasured 
 moral suffering, which will be none the less real for 
 all the Tendenzschriften of their more obsequious 
 scholarship. 
 
 Internationalism had been on a precarious foot- 
 ing prior to this war : it was never known whether a 
 public crime in one part of the world would or would 
 not concern remoter parts. The theory of interven- 
 tion was closely restricted. Germany nourished the 
 
66 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 
 
 ideal of unconcern, the localization of interest, the 
 non-existence of a genuine international moral sub- 
 stance. She built her plans on the weakness of a 
 world conscience. We hesitated long: at last we 
 cast the die which meant that the world's business 
 is our business now and henceforth: we acknowl- 
 edged ourselves co-responsible with others for the 
 peace and order and justice of the planet. We re- 
 fused any longer to ask the murderer's question, 
 Am I my brother's keeper? With that decision, the 
 cause of Germany was lost; for with that decision 
 the world-community became a fact. This earth 
 has consciously started up the long path of a mutual 
 effort for a universal justice. 
 
 This is the aim of the war : this is the frame within 
 which all the special acts of our enemy can be placed 
 and understood. The striking arm of the American 
 soldier or of the American nation cannot be nerved 
 for its long task by any less conception of its mean- 
 ing. It is a cause whose motive has no need to feed 
 on personal hatred; for it cannot be broken or dis- 
 turbed by any discoveries of personal worth in its 
 avowed foes. H Strike for your altars and your 
 fires" was the ancient motive of tribal battles. Now 
 it is "Strike for the altar of a new-born human hope, 
 — the common guardianship of a common right." 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 THE MOTE IN OUR OWN EYE 
 
 When the issue of a fight is simply "which of us two 
 is the better man" it has the advantage of provok- 
 ing no inner haltings. If the issue of war is simply 
 Greek versus Persian, it has the same clean-cutness : 
 everything you want to defeat is on one side, every- 
 thing you want to have win is on the other. That is 
 one good reason why those who are doing the fight- 
 ing find a simple sign for the whole practical issue : 
 it is Ourselves versus the Kaiser. There are no 
 shades of virtue or vice to be measured : there is no 
 problem of apportioning the guilt in the origin of 
 the contest, two-thirds to one side, one-third to the 
 other. The Kaiser is a concrete fact, and for pres- 
 ent purposes all of a piece : his one salient attribute 
 is that he is our enemy and must be beaten. 
 
 But the moment an issue is stated in general 
 terms, as Law versus Realpolitik, or Autocracy ver- 
 sus Democracy, the line of cleavage refuses to local- 
 ize itself strictly and exclusively in ''No Man's 
 Land." There are remnants of Realpolitik, and of 
 the autocratic principle, in our own public life : the 
 beam may be this time in the enemy 's eye, but there 
 is a good-sized mote in our own. A sense of imper- 
 fect rectitude on the point in question may steal in 
 
 67 
 
68 MOBALE AND ITS ENEMIES 
 
 and confuse or hamper the good-will to strike. 
 "First," one is prone to reflect, all subconsciously 
 perhaps, — "First, we should clean our own house; 
 and then, being above reproach, we can go whole- 
 heartedly for the enemy." 
 
 The enemy, furthermore, is not slow to take ad- 
 vantage of these subcurrents which subtly lame the 
 strength of the fighting arm. Fighting for democ- 
 racy, are we: then what of the monarchs and em- 
 perors on our side? Has any enthusastic applause 
 for the great phrase of President Wilson come from 
 Japan? Or if the emphasis of our principle is put 
 on the liberties of small nations, we shall be ques- 
 tioned about the status of Ireland and of Greece 
 within the coalition. One may find good answers to 
 all these questions ; but meantime the question itself 
 has done its work; it has deducted something from 
 the complete conviction behind the blow. No doubt 
 a thinking army and nation are better for fighting 
 purposes than a non-thinking army and nation ; but 
 the risks to morale of stating the issues in terms of 
 principles, instead of in terms of peoples, is very 
 actual. There is no escape from the inner reaction 
 of the principles against ourselves. 
 
 I am speaking for the moment as though we had 
 a choice whether to state our own war issue as a 
 matter of principle or not. Issues undergo a gradual 
 change of character as wars wear on, and it is con- 
 ceivably possible to yield to the psychological drift 
 toward primeval simplicity, until the war become 
 
THE MOTE IN OUR OWN EYE 69 
 
 to our minds a straggle between races. One of the 
 reproaches held against American critics of Ger- 
 many in the early months of the war by German 
 sympathizers in America was that these critics tried 
 to make the war appear a moral issue. ' ' This is not 
 a moral question : it is an inevitable conflict between 
 expanding races. We do not blame Eussia that it 
 grows and wishes to expand southward ; neither are 
 we Germans to blame that we grow and need to ex- 
 pand eastward. This clash of nations due to the 
 natural forces of expansion is one of the great 
 tragedies of history; but there is nothing for it 
 except to fight it out. It is the struggle for sur- 
 vival, not a question of right and wrong." So I 
 have been personally assured; so we have all been 
 assured. And so we might conceivably regard the 
 present alignment as the inevitable clash between 
 expanding Germany and the rest of the world threat- 
 ened by her ambitions. ' ' Has not Germany as good 
 a formal right to an empire as Great Britain ?" 
 I asked of an Englishman who had just said, 
 "If it were not for the Empire, I would not care to 
 be an Englishman." " Certainly, " he replied, "I 
 have never doubted her formal right to an Empire. 
 But we do not propose that she shall have one. . . . 
 She is not fit to have one. " If he had stopped before 
 the last sentence, he would have left the issue one 
 of undebatable and wholly primitive simplicity, Ger- 
 many 's I-will versus Britain's Thou-shalt-not. 
 But so to state the case is evidently at once to 
 
70 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 
 
 justify the whole method of Realpolitik, and to play 
 false to all the genuine purposes of Great Britain 
 and of ourselves. And the only alternative is to 
 hold to the original view that beneath all 
 clashes of will there are clashes of principle; 
 that the way forward is to insist, against 
 whatever difficulty, that the thought and conscience 
 of the race shall gradually penetrate all conflicts 
 until we find their meaning in terms of ideas. To 
 do otherwise is to give up the tendency of social 
 evolution toward a more thoughtful, lawful, and 
 consistent world ; it is to accept the defeat of a moral 
 control of history at the hand of the cruder and 
 simpler fact. It is to give Germany the right. For 
 how much of German life and culture can be under- 
 stood as an expression of weariness of spiritual 
 evolution I In her adoption of skepticism and agnos- 
 ticism, reason has turned upon its own work to limit 
 the scope of reason's conquests; in her espousal of 
 Realpolitik, law has turned upon the growth of law 
 and has said, thus far, and no farther ; in the moral 
 cynicism which underlies all this, and which thinks 
 itself the more enlightened view of things, spiritual 
 ambition has turned against its own natural free- 
 dom and has made itself a slave to material interest 
 and hard fact. 
 
 I do not doubt that much of this suicidal hostility 
 of the spirit to the spiritual element is due to the 
 thinness and abstraction of much of the prevalent 
 talk about principles. Abstract idealism is a poor 
 
THE MOTE IN OUR OWN EYE 71 
 
 solution of the problems that confront "real" states- 
 manship; and there are brands of Christianity 
 known to everyone that would drive any able-headed 
 man to Realpolitik for a breath of vital air. What- 
 ever the principles at stake in this war, the answer 
 to Realpolitik is not to be found in a reaction to the 
 older formulae from which Realpolitik is itself a 
 reaction. 
 
 But the adequate principles must be found, will be 
 found, are being found. And this means that we 
 accept the consequences, — whatever critical light 
 these principles throw upon our own social order. 
 And we accept also the task of dealing with the 
 apparent argument that accompanies this criticism, 
 that being imperfect ourselves we ought to go easy 
 in the fighting. The task should not be a hard one. 
 
 The premise of the argument is that we ought to 
 fight only what we ourselves are free from, — or, in 
 effect, that only saints and angels have any right 
 to fight. This is a natural misreading of the senti- 
 ment that has permeated the Christian world, "Let 
 him that is without sin among you cast the first 
 stone. ' ' There is a vein of pacifism in this misread- 
 ing that needs not so much to be rebuked as to be 
 explained. 
 
 The point is, I take it, that issues not raised by 
 ourselves have to be met as they arise, and where 
 they arise. If it is we ourselves who are raising 
 issues, it is desirable to make sure that one's own 
 
72 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 
 
 house is clean before attacking the condition of one's 
 neighbor's house. If history makes the issue for 
 us, we have to decide where we stand on that; and 
 then, if we are honest, accept the consequences for 
 ourselves. "We should have every reason to feel 
 shame and hesitancy in war if having taken up the 
 cry of the rights of small nations we rode over any 
 such rights without compunction, or harbored any 
 personal profits from old wrongs. Even so, I am 
 not sure that we would be justified in letting the 
 call for protection pass by without response, on the 
 ground that we have sins of our own we want to 
 hold to for a while longer. 
 
 We must accept the logic of what we do abroad 
 as applied to what we do at home. But the demand 
 that we attend to what we have to remedy at home 
 first, must sometimes be recognized for what it is, 
 a hurdle deliberately thrown into the path of the 
 runner. It is natural that the principles applied in 
 small groups work their way outward; tyranny in 
 private life will tend to follow the individual into 
 his public relations, and conversely, liberality at 
 home will have a tendency to carry itself over into 
 business and political practice. But it is also a natu- 
 ral law that public principles work their vjay in- 
 ward; and the State, in some ways behind the pri- 
 vate standard of morals, is in other ways in the lead. 
 Liberality in politics did in fact precede by some 
 centuries the regime of equality in the family: the 
 issue was first raised in the public life. And so it is 
 
THE MOTE IN OUR OWN EYE 73 
 
 with the issue which German thoroughness has made 
 so clear in the international order : the very clarity 
 and vigor with which we rise to it will carry many 
 an internal reform past the obstacle on which it has 
 been hanging, simply because we see that the prin- 
 ciple is the same, and we are willing to follow it 
 where it leads. We shall take these things up in 
 their order; but the war must be settled now. 
 
 Meantime, we may freely acknowledge that the 
 principle of Realpolitik is not peculiar to Germany. 
 It has shown its head more or less mixed and dis- 
 guised in the practises of all nations. It would not 
 be hard to mention spots in our own public life 
 which are condemned by what we now profess before 
 the world ; and with some of these spots we may and 
 must deal even now. 
 
 The President has justly called our attention to 
 lynching as an example of what we are warring 
 against. Where people think the law remiss or 
 slow, there is a natural anti-law feeling and an im- 
 pulse to revert to fact. It is a method which clearly 
 does nothing to make law more adequate to its task ; 
 it is Realpolitik. 
 
 Perhaps the best example of Kaiserism at home is 
 the spirit of what is known as profiteering. Its 
 theory is, when you see a chance for yourself, take 
 it; and the wider interest be damned. The social 
 world is not yet a place of complete justice in the 
 distributing of wealth; there are accidental heap- 
 
74 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 
 
 ings here and there; the race is sometimes to the 
 strong, and sometimes merely to the fortunately 
 placed; instead of blaming the man who seizes the 
 chance that knocks at his door, people are likely to 
 regard him as a fool who fails to do so. Sympathy 
 for the slow is not vivid; and in the speed of liv- 
 ing, men judge much by results and seldom scruti- 
 nize methods very closely. "Everybody does it; 
 and if I don't look out for myself, nobody will look 
 out for me"; this is a philosophy which men can 
 easily get from a shrewd reading of the times, — the 
 times preceding to-day. "If the Government will 
 let me alone for a year, I don't care what it does 
 next; I will have mine by that time," said one such 
 philosopher. Such men do nothing to make the lack- 
 ing social justice grow; they fail to realize that 
 this irresponsible self-seeking, the whole worth of 
 whose gains is made by the good-will of the ex- 
 ploited community, has suddenly become out of 
 date. And why? Because the community, because 
 labor, has been quick to see that it is nothing but 
 Prussianism in the economic sphere; and they will 
 fight against the one only as they at the same time 
 fight against the other. 
 
 And it will be well for the foresight of labor if it 
 sees the case so clearly that it will cut from its own 
 program the tendency to fight profiteering by profit- 
 eering of its own, thus tying its own hands in the 
 fight for a better order of justice by its eagerness 
 not to be backward in getting "its own." 
 
THE MOTE IN OUR OWN EYE 75 
 
 Because this issue will not be postponed, but must 
 be met and is being met from day to day while the 
 war is being fought, profiteering, whether on the part 
 of labor or capital, must be recognized as the great- 
 est single menace to our fighting strength at home, 
 the greatest single source of flagging morale. Wher- 
 ever it is present it sicklies the faith of the knowing 
 ones that any sound act can come from a social body 
 thus inwardly diseased. "We are willing to work 
 and to fight to the end to defeat Prussianism; but 
 we are not willing to give an ounce of our labor nor 
 a drop of our blood to enrich private individuals ' ' : 
 thus labor has stated its judgment time and again on 
 the floor of Commons, and elsewhere. And the 
 farther-sighted men of affairs have seen that by the 
 very nature of the war-issue, the profiteer is play- 
 ing the traitor not alone to the public interest, but 
 to the cause of business itself, in the public judg- 
 ment. For the public is alert to the point that it 
 cannot and need not continue to sanction in busi- 
 ness that spirit of ignoring the interests of others 
 which is being banished from international affairs 
 on the fields of France. 
 
 Not only this, but never in the history of business 
 has there been such an impulse to sacrifice for the 
 common cause on the part of men of power and 
 wealth. The profiteering that exists is local; the 
 leaping forward to give is general, as if welcoming 
 the opening of a new era. The external logic has 
 worked its way inward; and the great fact of so- 
 
76 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 
 
 ciety to-day is that men generally can believe in 
 possibilities of which they had formerly given up 
 hope. Nothing could go farther to confirm the 
 morale of the nation than to fix attention on the con- 
 spicuous examples of the new spirit rather than 
 on the examples of private greed which can always 
 be found. For the new spirit can be confirmed only 
 by being recognized and built upon.* 
 
 Lynching and profiteering, then, have felt the 
 repercussion of the public campaign against Prus- 
 sianism. But we may say with equal truth that we 
 
 *A good example of it may be seen in the action of the National 
 Federation of Millers in giving up by voluntary agreement of prac- 
 tically the entire trade the enormous profits being wafted into 
 their hands by the abnormal course of events quite without their 
 deliberate manipulation. The milling business has been rated as 
 third in volume in the United States; and its output has been, under 
 existing conditions, not less important in winning the war than 
 that of the steel, coal, and copper industries. They were producing 
 on a rapidly and automatically rising market when Mr. Hoover 
 was appointed administrator; and at once their National Federa- 
 tion authorized a committee to offer their co-operation. It was a 
 moment in which only immediate and voluntary action would have 
 met the emergency of the coming winter; and the administration 
 invited and accepted plans for voluntary co-operation proposed 
 by the millers' committee. These plans, limiting profits to 25 
 cents per barrel, have been steadily and loyally administered by 
 a joint committee on which are serving a number of the most 
 prominent millers of the country who, to do their work more effect- 
 ively, have not alone given up active connection with their own 
 mills, but have disposed of their stock. This has been done by 
 Mr. Bell of the Washburn-Crosby Mills, Mr. Eckhart of Chicago, 
 Mr. Mennel of Toledo, and others. 
 
 Steel interests, brass interests, copper, and lead interests have 
 made concessions to the situation ; and it may fairly be said of 
 them that they have taken less profit than they might have done, 
 though under present conditions this is only to say, in many cases, 
 that they have allowed enormous profits to be reduced to the dimen- 
 sions of only huge profits. But the action of the millers, which 
 went far to tide over the distress of the past winter in Europe, is an 
 act of genuine sacrifice, and the sort of act which will go far to 
 destroy at home what we oppose abroad. 
 
THE MOTE IN OUR OWN EYE 77 
 
 are fighting cynicism, or selfishness, or materialism, 
 and at once, the inner corollaries of our under- 
 taking widen without measure. In a way, all evil 
 is akin, and there is little logical excuse for singling 
 out one evil amongst many as the particular cousin 
 of the enemy's idea that we must eliminate from our- 
 selves. There is none of them that we can defend; 
 and there is none of them that does not ally us more 
 or less directly with the enemy. 
 
 But this only reveals the truism that in a world 
 guilty in many ways a perfect morale is unobtain- 
 able; that in proportion to our thoughtfulness the 
 blow aimed in one direction will bring to conscious- 
 ness the necessity of blows aimed in various other 
 quarters, with a certain tendency to confusion of 
 purpose. This confusion must remain until we see 
 the necessity of history which singles out for us the 
 point upon which our energy must be directed. We 
 learn in time the error of faltering in the pursuit of 
 the present business because there are other wars 
 to fight. And we learn the wisdom of accepting the 
 priority of the political issue; for what men adopt 
 in their political life they build into the common 
 moral substratum for all their living. 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 STATE-BLINDNESS 
 
 Theee is an old tale of a man in the East who had 
 given up nearly everything in the service of his 
 god, and whose devotion earned him an early death. 
 In his last hours this man found this his deity, who 
 had hitherto seemed as real to him as any living 
 man, suddenly withdrew into obscurity until he 
 could no longer be distinguished from the phantoms 
 of his imagination. ''My God," he exclaimed, as the 
 scenes of his pain-filled and seemingly futile life- 
 time crowded his dying mind, "my God, why hast 
 thou forsaken me?" 
 
 This species of doubt is not confined to the re- 
 ligious. It is particularly at home on the battlefield, 
 where men are led to the shambles by a very similar 
 devotion to an equally invisible and elusive being, — 
 the State. All the realistic reporters of the sol- 
 dier's mind, men like McGill and Barbusse, echo the 
 horrible sense of emptiness, disillusion, deserted- 
 ness, futility, that supervenes as the question presses 
 home unanswered, "What is it that I am serving?" 
 
 And not on the battlefield alone, but wherever men 
 and women are asked to make large sacrifice "for 
 the nation," they are subject to a checking of im- 
 pulsive patriotism, because that being has a way of 
 
 78 
 
STATE-BLINDNESS 79 
 
 escaping the grip of our minds, even more, perhaps, 
 than that other being, the enemy, whom we oppose. 
 In the present war, I judge this the most serious of 
 the insidious leaks in national morale. 
 
 For it may be taken, I believe, as a peculiarity of 
 this war that there are arrayed under the banners of 
 various national States thousands who question the 
 right of national States to exist, together with other 
 thousands to whom the words "France," "Eng- 
 land," etc., are but names for aggregates of indi- 
 viduals, words standing for nothing unitary and 
 real. They find themselves strangely offering their 
 lives for "France," for "America," — and yet with- 
 out any adequate interest in these masses of indi- 
 vidual Frenchmen or Americans : confronted with a 
 random group of them, the "cash value" of these 
 national names, they would see little reason why 
 they should die for their welfare. 
 
 What imagination presents as the object of all 
 these sacrifices is something over and above the sum 
 of the persons in the State — a glorified being, as we 
 said : yet, in cold blood, is this symbolic figure any- 
 thing more than an emotional projection of the 
 group-instinct, easily capable of being too super- 
 stitiously regarded, even of becoming an obstacle in 
 the path of a wider spirit of humanity? These are 
 intellectual considerations, no doubt, which the war 
 spirit has shown itself strong enough to sweep 
 away ; but just because men come to realize that they 
 have been affected by feeling, by ' ' patriotism, ' ' they 
 
80 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 
 
 are vulnerable to the attack of these questions when 
 they return, as they inevitably do. 
 
 Prior to the war, M. Gustave Herve, speaking as 
 he thought for French socialism, said: 
 
 "We are anti-patriot internationalists, and have 
 in no degree a love for the mother country. Hence 
 we do not know what national honor is. The politi- 
 cal superiority of the French Government over the 
 German is so slight . . . that it is a matter of indif- 
 ference to us whether we are French or German. 
 We have thus decided to answer an order of mobili- 
 zation by a general strike, of reservists at first, and 
 then finally by insurrection. As for the defense of 
 our mother country, we will give neither one drop of 
 blood nor one square centimeter of our skin."* 
 
 We take it as greatly to the honor of M. Herve 
 and of French socialism generally that this view of 
 things was promptly discarded at the call of war. 
 But the practical repudiation has not yet been fol- 
 lowed by the repudiation of the principle. And 
 while such views have not gathered so vigorous a 
 following in America it is not so clear a$ it might be 
 that we have a substantial answer to them. Some 
 years prior to the war, Mr. H. G. Wells made a 
 rapid tour of this country, publishing his impres- 
 sions in a volume called "The Future in America." 
 One of his striking comments was that as a people 
 we are ' ' State-blind. " As a matter of fact our poli- 
 tical upbringing has done much to make us so. 
 
 We are, in the first place, individualists by con- 
 viction. We regard the State as an agency existing 
 
 •Quoted by Sir Martin Conway. "The Crowd in Peace and in War." 
 
STATE-BLINDNESS 81 
 
 not for its own sake, but to serve us. It derives 
 all its powers from the consent of the governed. It 
 is there, like other agencies, to do certain specific 
 things because we want them done: it has no in- 
 trinsic rights of its own, not to speak of divine 
 right. 
 
 And in the second place, we have a feeling that 
 "the State governs best that governs least." We 
 do not want to be reminded of the State at every 
 turn by omnipresent officers, soldiers, ceremonies. 
 We want to treat it like a good digestion, — and for- 
 get it. 
 
 On the whole we are in a state of mind such that 
 if any one says to us that a workman in one country 
 has more in common with a workman in another 
 country than he has with his own employer merely 
 as fellow-citizen of the State, we are quite prepared 
 to believe it. After all, what have we in common, 
 merely as fellow-citizens? Various respectable so- 
 cial theories are afloat among us, and not a little in- 
 fluential, to the effect that the economic tie, the com- 
 munity of interest represented by the common craft 
 or industry or profession, is the fundamental social 
 cohesive; and that the political bond is quite sec- 
 ondary, having only a relative, changing, and per- 
 haps vanishing importance. 
 
 If I say, then, that our patriotism, fervent as it is, 
 is yet essentially impulsive and a degree sentimental, 
 I believe I speak sober truth. We are profoundly 
 loyal to something; but we very dimly understand 
 
82 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 
 
 what we are loyal to, and are perhaps more than a 
 little dubious about it in the bottom of our hearts. 
 Mr. Wells was not far wrong in saying that we are 
 State-blind. 
 
 In a war in which one fights for "the rights of 
 small nations everywhere" (among other objects), 
 this uncertainty about what the State is constitutes 
 a serious weak spot in our moral armor. In more 
 than one sense, "patriotism is not enough" ; it needs 
 a justification. It is evident that neither systems of 
 police nor administrative arrangements — if this is 
 all — are worth the loss of a man. The economic 
 common-interest — if this is the chief meaning of po- 
 litical society — can justify no sacrifice but that of 
 money. 
 
 But these are not the substance of the State. 
 The economic cement has never yet of itself effected 
 a living social union; it is of a kind that crumbles 
 when it is dry. If it seems to unite men, it is be- 
 cause it is mixed with something else ; and it is this 
 of which we should like to catch a glimpse, though 
 like all other great and permanent things it tends 
 to retreat into subconsciousness, and is at a dis- 
 advantage for being shown and recognized. Let me 
 make the attempt, nevertheless, to conjure up in a 
 few words what seems to me most tangible in the 
 entity which we call the State. 
 
 1. We can readily unravel the entire mass of 
 groupings called society into two fairly distinct 
 
STATE-BLINDNESS 83 
 
 kinds : the private life on one side having its center 
 in the family and branching ont into friendly, fra- 
 ternal, and "social" groupings in the narrower 
 sense; and then the public life, impersonal and en- 
 terprising, having its center in the trade or pro- 
 fessional activity, in which one is valued for his 
 yield and not primarily for his personal quality. A 
 man's day usually dips into both these spheres and 
 alternates between them; he has his local root, or 
 home, and he has his roving, venturesome, specula- 
 tive career, and each of these serves the other, — 
 neither one alone can claim to possess the real self 
 of the man. 
 
 We should perhaps place the State at once as a 
 part of the public rather than of the private life 
 of a man : and yet the State, which once had a form 
 resembling the family, still has something in com- 
 mon with it. The modern State, at least, cares 
 more about the individual man than does the eco- 
 nomic order ; its laws and courts aim to provide that 
 no wrong shall be done to him ; and its charities that 
 no ultimate misfortune shall deprive him of the 
 plain necessities of living. The State thus encour- 
 ages the venturesome and experimental side of life 
 by ensuring that the personal interest shall not be 
 wholly lost in it. 
 
 If anything is more amazing than the intricacy 
 of the entanglement of every man's life with that 
 of others in a modern community, it is the slight 
 awareness we have of that mesh of mutual depend- 
 
84 MOKALE AND ITS ENEMIES 
 
 encies: each one simply " attends to his own busi- 
 ness." The infinitely complex pattern of matted 
 twigs and grasses at the water's edge is formed by 
 the simple obedience of each strand to the play of 
 the current. But in the case of the human network, 
 this economy of consciousness is possible only be- 
 cause one agency is set apart to know the result of 
 the weaving from moment to moment, and to guide 
 it in its effect on the individual strands. What we 
 call laws are no stable principles of nature: they 
 are experimental adjustments made by a mind 
 which has a care both for the value of the whole and 
 for the interest of every dot in the pattern, and with 
 the ceaseless vigilance and continuity of thought of 
 an inventor, follows experiment with experiment 
 forever. 
 
 Thus the State, when it is what it should be, acts 
 as a sort of over-parent, — not in spite of our in- 
 dividualism, but because of it. The ' ' rights ' ' which 
 are to be ' ' secured to us " are not mere generalities 
 that are completely provided for by police action in 
 warding off injuries: they are positive interests 
 which can be achieved only by the inventive effort 
 of a thinking agent. The individual does not be- 
 come strong as the State becomes weak, but the 
 reverse: it is only the strong State that can gen- 
 erate strong individuals. 
 
 For the State is not a mere protector of the day's 
 work: it everywhere raises the level of the day's 
 work. It does this in part by providing what Bage- 
 
STATE-BLINDNESS 85 
 
 hot called "a calculable future," so that there is no 
 theoretical limit to the duration of the enterprises 
 that can be begun with a fair knowledge of what 
 they can continue to count on, — whether the build- 
 ing of pyramids and cathedrals, the cutting of ca- 
 nals, or the making of railway systems. And it 
 does this still more by securing a cumulative past, so 
 that nothing of import to the common life is lost, 
 and each new life owns all that has come to light of 
 scientific lore, of skill, of device, of wit and beauty 
 and insight, and of the personal treasury of the 
 tribe. Without his history man is without his 
 measures, his standards, and his own proper stat- 
 ure ; and without the State he is without his history. 
 
 2. But granted that the State does these things 
 for its citizens, as things are now, why need they 
 be done by the State? Men have to go through a 
 dismal apprenticeship of external control in order 
 to realize all the conditions of their existence and 
 to value them: every casting must have its case, 
 but once the metal is set, the shell is cracked off and 
 thrown away. Are we not now coming to a maturity 
 of social mind in which the expensive and faulty 
 method of State-control can be discarded for some- 
 thing growing Up more directly out of the heart 
 of industry and of society? 
 
 The question is searching, and should bring to 
 light a less obvious element in the being and work 
 of the State, the continuous creation of "society." 
 
 As things are now, every mind of us — by aid of 
 
86 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 
 
 the morning paper — acts as a small center of con- 
 templation and judgment of all that goes on in the 
 large world of many interests. It seems to us that 
 in that morning survey of the universe the State 
 has no necessary part, except that it is one of the 
 actors on the stage, one among many. Without it 
 we should still have a world, a set of common in- 
 terests, — and a morning paper. But in Russia to- 
 day we are not sure of the morning paper ; and not 
 the least oppressive element in the chaos that has 
 settled down on that unfortunate people is the limit 
 of the power of vision, the fluctuating border of the 
 sphere within which any concrete proposition is 
 true or valid. Russia is the most eloquent answer 
 to political pluralism. 
 
 The point is, that without the State there are no 
 common interests to be watched, any more than a 
 means of watching them. The most central blunder 
 of the State-blind mentality, — a blunder made easy 
 by the good working of the modern State itself, — 
 is the supposition that common interests exist of 
 themselves, whereas they have both to be devised by 
 deliberate inventive acts and promoted by positive 
 deeds. One of the leading economists of this land, 
 Professor Carver, has named "the existence of un- 
 satisfied wants and the consequent antagonism of 
 interests ' ' as the fundamental social fact. This fact 
 exists in its full perfection among beasts in a jungle 
 with a carcass between them; in the abstract they 
 have a common interest, namely, to divide the car- 
 
STATE-BLINDNESS 87 
 
 cass and limit their appetite that both beasts may 
 survive. But the essential conditions which would 
 make that outcome possible are lacking, — a mind 
 to propose the idea and a will to administer it. This 
 common interest, and all common interests, must 
 be enacted. The fundamental social fact is the 
 enactor; and that being, in developed societies, is 
 the State. 
 
 3. The State so far appears as a servant, but a 
 necessary servant, of the most vital of our practical 
 interests. It creates the world, not alone the world 
 in which we wish to think but also the world in which 
 we wish to act. Having a natural immortality, as 
 we individuals have not, it confers a durability 
 upon our deeds that otherwise they would lack; it 
 cannot make our souls immortal, but it can approach 
 another kind of immortality which to not a few 
 minds has seemed more desirable, an immortality 
 of work, and in rare cases of one's name and mem- 
 ory. To speak within wholly literal bounds, the 
 State lends its longest dimension to the work of 
 every honest worker ; and if we cannot say that this 
 work can, by any earthly agency, be made eternal, it 
 may at least be saved from being merely local and 
 passing. Apart from the State, human experience 
 would be a perpetual recurrence of ancient mistakes ; 
 with the State, even the errors and failures of men 
 contribute to the total advance, since they make those 
 failures evident to those that follow. What signifi- 
 cance and value our individual thoughts and per- 
 
88 MOKALE AND ITS ENEMIES 
 
 formances have is thus largely conferred on them 
 by their political framework. 
 
 It is not too much to say that apart from the 
 State, life is not worth living for such as we have 
 come to be under its guardianship ; though the man 
 compelled to live in a State that has corrupted the 
 sources of its own just functioning may be worse off 
 than apart from the State. 
 
 4. Creating the common interests, the State cre- 
 ates the conditions that make sacrifice significant. 
 
 The highest happiness of man is found in what he 
 can do and give, not in what he can get ; and in this 
 sense there is a need for power which is the most 
 honorable thing in us, power for our fellows rather 
 than over them. So deep is this instinct for doing 
 for others, that what to an outsider may seem a sacri- 
 fice on the part of parent or friend may to the agent 
 seem the one activity that makes life worth living. 
 Sacrifice, as men call it, is normally an exercise of 
 power, and felt as such; and only when it has this 
 character is it significant and valuable. Whatever 
 makes sacrifice thus powerful gives human life its 
 highest meaning. 
 
 It is evident that there are situations when sacri- 
 fice is mere folly and waste. "Altruism" has no in- 
 herent merit; giving of one's labor and blood to 
 enrich the greedy has no virtue ; the subjective cru- 
 sades of a Don Quixote may claim the laughter, 
 hardly the respect of men. The gift of the silver 
 service by Father Bienvenu to Jean Valjean came 
 
STATE-BLINDNESS 89 
 
 very near being such a foolish sacrifice ; it failed of 
 this, and saved the soul tottering in the balance. 
 The deepest problem of social life is that of dis- 
 criminating between the wise and powerful sacrifice 
 and the sacrifice that is weak and futile. Men are 
 ready to be martyrs in the one case ; they are ready 
 for the extreme of self-assertion in the other. This 
 is the dilemma of labor to-day. It is the dilemma of 
 the realists on the battlefield, the Barbusses, the 
 McGills, who see the ruin and the waste and see 
 not that it is for anything that gives it the charac- 
 ter of human dignity and achievement. 
 
 What makes the difference ? My answer is : The 
 reality of the common interest, in some cases already 
 present, in some cases to be created by the act of sac- 
 rifice itself. The foolish act of altruism is the act 
 that throws one 's life into a chasm, or deprives one- 
 self of a good to appease an infinite hunger which is 
 neither filled by it nor capable of valuing it. The 
 nursing of vipers, the casting of pearls before swine, 
 have become proverbial of the unintelligent self- 
 alienation which is but indirect suicide and the re- 
 jection of life. If there is class war, personal war, 
 national war, all sacrifice of one side for the other, 
 all non-resistance which merely makes way for the 
 arrogant will, is the folly which becomes equivalent 
 to treason. The significant sacrifice is the creative 
 sacrifice, the sacrifice that wakens the enemy's con- 
 science and rebuilds broken communications. But 
 such sacrifice cannot occur at random; it cannot be 
 
90 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 
 
 made by any tour de force of will without regard 
 to circumstance or setting. 
 
 It must be evident whither this argument leads. 
 It is the presence of the State which, for the great 
 mass of us, makes the difference between the sacri- 
 fic which is folly and the sacrifice which is wisdom. 
 If there were no State, the giving away of my goods 
 to one who demanded them would be an act of fling- 
 ing crumbs to fill an infinite maw, or of trying to 
 lift the seas with a dipper. It would be the meaning- 
 less and wicked form of self-sacrifice unless, indeed, 
 by that act I could create an attachment between my- 
 self and the receiver which would mark the begin- 
 ning of a stable understanding between us, a rela- 
 tion of "polity"; and such a relationship would be 
 an incipient community or State. If there were no 
 State, it would be my duty, as I valued my own hap- 
 piness, to lose no chance to bring such community to 
 pass; if there were no State, it would be a man's 
 first business to begin one. 
 
 Once established, the State provides the moral 
 framework within which acts of sacrifice, all labors 
 and offerings for the common good, may become sig- 
 nificant; because every man's share in the growing 
 common good acts as a pledge that he will stand by, 
 at least to understand, if not to respond to, what 
 is done for him. Nothing is radiated off into empty 
 space. There are, or should be, no social chasms 
 which cannot be crossed by the creative impulse of 
 good- will ; no feuds, no quarrels, no class wars, which 
 
STATE-BLINDNESS 91 
 
 cannot be wiped out. Democracy, as a principle of 
 State-structure, is the express denial that any such 
 impassable chasms or irreducible clashes of interest, 
 exist. 
 
 We are still far from the pure democracy ; we are 
 still far from the perfect State. We are still in a 
 world in which those who choose to look passively 
 on the defects, the selfishness of the existing order, 
 can find much to support their contempt. It is still 
 possible to read much that happens — if one enjoys 
 the sense of his own superiority in so reading it — 
 as dupery, the leading of lambs to the slaughter by 
 the crafty of this world. One can see the "leaders" 
 of men as "prodders-from-behind," driving the 
 masses on as cannon-fodder, that their endless greed 
 may be temporarily appeased. If it is a man's rul- 
 ing passion to be saved from dupery, he may indeed 
 escape ; but more than likely he will become the dupe 
 of his own distrust. 
 
 It is not the part of a man to live on the dif- 
 ference between himself and the villains he can 
 discover or surmise ; it is the part of a man to live 
 on the kernel of soundness and honesty that is at 
 the heart of things, that will outlive all shams and 
 frauds and corruptions, and to give himself to that, 
 as to God. The State we have been talking about 
 exists, but it exists in germ; and that germ is in 
 peril. Better men than we have seen the vision and 
 have bled for it; there is but one way in which the 
 
92 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 
 
 faith of those who have gone before and the hope 
 of those who come after can be brought to earth. 
 And that way, however perilous, is possible; the 
 beginnings are made ; its security lies in the quarter 
 whither the allied armies are driving. It is the thing 
 worth living for, and if need be, worth dying for. 
 
PART II 
 MORALE OF THE FIGHT ING MAN 
 
CHAPTER X 
 
 PSYCHOLOGY OP THE SOLDIER 
 
 Ant one — and certainly the soldier — might reason- 
 ably resent the suggestion that there is something 
 peculiar about his psychology. Soldiers of to-day 
 are not a separate caste with distinct talents and 
 specialized moral development ; they are not chosen 
 like gladiators for their native muscle and pugna- 
 city; they are not bred like fighting-cocks for their 
 irritability and gameness. They are plain men, en- 
 gaged in a special and temporary task ; they intend, 
 most of them, to become plain citizens once more 
 when that task is done. 
 
 In ancient and in feudal times, it was considered 
 not that the soldier, but that most of the rest of 
 society, was a little peculiar. City life, trade life, 
 farm life, were supposed to sap the warlike temper 
 and produce an unspirited human variety. The 
 former contempt for the merchant was due not only 
 to the idea that he was given over to an unmanly 
 sort of competition, that he liked too well the rule 
 of the civil order whereby everything must be got 
 by wit and nothing by courage, that he too willingly 
 forgot how far the security of that very rule de- 
 pends on men of another fiber: it was due also, I 
 presume, to sad experience in various attempts to 
 
 95 
 
96 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 
 
 turn him, in an emergency, into a warrior. For in 
 the earlier stages of the division of labor, a very 
 real division of mental quality took place with it, 
 and these mental grooves between occupational 
 groups tended to deepen. Agricultural populations 
 became an easy prey to the wilder tribes about 
 them; wealthy cities had to buy their protection 
 from sounder-spirited professional fighters. Even 
 to-day, the phrase "a nation of shop-keepers" has 
 just enough sting in it to make the eagle and the 
 lion squirm. 
 
 But we have learned how to be specialists with- 
 out sacrificing too much of what is called "all- 
 around development." Occupation still leaves its 
 heavy mental mark ; but the disappearance of hered- 
 itary trades, the liberal mingling and cross-classing 
 of men on all lines of interest outside of their work, 
 and the immense growth of new arts of recreation go 
 far to erase it, until seemingly only enough is left 
 of the visible trade-mark of carpenter, teacher, 
 grocer, lawyer, teamster, artist, parson, for the cari- 
 caturist — and Sherlock Holmes — to work upon. In 
 free modern States, every man is in essentials a 
 complete man: the soldierly qualities are in him, 
 and can be turned to account when occasion de- 
 mands. So, from the ranks of labor and trade, 
 from students, clerks, and professional men, we 
 recruit an army that we are ready to set against the 
 most pretentious military machine the world has 
 yet seen assembled. This army contains men of 
 
PSYCHOLOGY OF THE SOLDIER 97 
 
 every variety of taste and temper, who will by no 
 means cease to be themselves because for the time 
 they are soldiers. What is the point, then, in speak- 
 ing of the psychology of the soldier? 
 
 It is this. That a man's mental self cannot be 
 separated from his daily habits, from the environ- 
 ment he lives in, from the kind of difficulties he is 
 coping with, from the plans, ambitions, and ideas 
 he is occupied with. In all these ways, the mind of 
 the soldier is marked off from the mind of the same 
 man in civil life. Soldiering is a life having its own 
 special strains, and its own standards. It not only 
 brings different muscles into action ; it tests charac- 
 ter in new places. It is a profession in itself: one 
 in which an amateur can indeed win his spurs, but 
 only by dint of such "trying" as he may not have 
 known he was capable of. Indeed, a large part of 
 the demand which this new environment imposes 
 upon the recruit is that he learns what it means to 
 "try," until the slack and sag of an indulgent ex- 
 istence are taken out of him. Further, the army is 
 a world of peculiar structure : the conditions of suc- 
 cess and the meaning of success are not the same 
 as elsewhere ; consequently it is not always the same 
 men who come to the top. In all these ways, it re- 
 quires and tends to produce a mentality of its own. 
 
 The immediate change of garb and of code of 
 manners is prophetic of the inward transformation 
 which — more or less instinctively — we expect to fol- 
 
98 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 
 
 low. Society takes a new look at every man when 
 he has stepped into uniform. It knows that he is 
 making a fundamental start once more from the 
 beginning; and that few of his habits or ideas will 
 be unaffected. It has, indeed, learned to avoid the 
 waste involved in assuming that prior talents and 
 training count for nothing; and that all must begin 
 again at zero. But all talents are to undergo a new 
 test and rating on the basis of the special demands 
 of the service. Many a man who has been pegging 
 away at a task not quite suited to him, never gaining 
 headway enough to leap the hurdle just ahead, finds 
 himself now dealing with a technique he can readily 
 master and with a margin. This margin fits him 
 for a step on the ladder; and with responsibility, 
 latent and unsuspected powers of command are 
 brought to the surface. Thus, in the army, many a 
 man is born again. And many another is converted 
 in another sense, by having to face at last the kind 
 of task he has habitually shrunk from, and learning 
 the age-old human lessons of labor and obedience. 
 There is thus a re-sifting of human material in 
 the army ; and the truths men discover about them- 
 selves, welcome or unwelcome, leave their lasting 
 marks in consciousness. The occasional reversal 
 of social position that occurs — exploited in various 
 popular war-plays, as if it were a step in the direc- 
 tion of more essential justice — is but an external 
 symptom of this new growth within, which comes 
 alike to nearly every man in the service. 
 
PSYCHOLOGY OF THE SOLDIER 99 
 
 The basic part of this mental change — seldom the 
 most conscious part — is simply what is symbolized 
 by the uniform itself, the new relation which the 
 soldier holds to the rest of society, and which he 
 will feel most quickly in its altered attitude toward 
 him. It is finely sketched by Barrie in a play which 
 represents a father coming with difficulty to recog- 
 nize that his son has suddenly supplanted him as 
 the head of the family, by virtue of the fact that he 
 is now its defender. As one such father said to me, 
 "I look upon my sons now with a sort of awe, for I 
 know that they have been meeting things which it 
 will never be my lot to meet." The ferment that 
 works more or less subconsciously in every soldier's 
 mind, and brings other changes of personality in its 
 train is this : that society in its hard hour has found 
 in him what it needed. A foundation of conscious 
 worth or validity is laid in him, which is distinct in 
 its quality from that of other social successes, more 
 primitive and more inalienable. 
 
 I do not say that this sense of import in the sol- 
 dier's consciousness is always good: it may become 
 a sense of importance and special privilege and be 
 his damnation. It is natural that the distinguishing 
 character of the soldier's psychology should be its 
 distinguishing malady, when it goes wrong, gen- 
 erating the braggart, the libertine, the military 
 loafer, the claim-all, or the swashbuckler. 
 
 And I do not say that the new strains of army 
 existence necessarily "show what men really are" 
 
100 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 
 
 or ''give their true measure." Not uncommonly a 
 man knows very well that in becoming a soldier 
 he is leaving behind him his best chances of show- 
 ing what is in him. The "real man," presumably, 
 is found in the work his talents fit him to do : where- 
 as much that is in men, the army makes no pretence 
 to measure or to use. There is a good deal of un- 
 fairness, and even of mental treason to social wel- 
 fare, in the instinctive assumption that the men 
 who can rough-it with distinguished efficiency, your 
 Crusoes, your admirable Crichtons, real men as they 
 are, are the only real men, while the rest are but 
 shams or parasites. 
 
 Yet there is this degree of justice in the case : that 
 war, like every direct encounter with natural ob- 
 stacles, calls not so much for special talents as for 
 the common denominators of human nature, the 
 qualities which every man is supposed to have be- 
 cause they form the basis of all the rest. The ele- 
 mental grit, the will to power, must be there at the 
 foundation of character if anything good is to come 
 out of us. Art, poetry, philosophy transform — 
 but do not omit, this essential virility : in music — if 
 it is good music, in wit — if it works, we feel the ul- 
 timate tang; we surmise the force that mind could 
 bring to bear against the original challenges of phys- 
 ical nature. Thus the musician or poet who becomes 
 the soldier gives evidence not alone of the vitality 
 of his body but also of the vitality of his art. The 
 pride of the soldier is pride not merely in his fight- 
 
PSYCHOLOGY OF THE SOLDIER 101 
 
 ing powers, but in the integrity of all his work. 
 And society is right, in principle, in citing the vigor 
 of its fighting men as pertinent evidence in disproof 
 of the accusation of decadence: in honoring them 
 it takes a just pride in its own soundness. 
 
 I believe, therefore, that the popular feeling for 
 the man in arms is rationally justified ; it is no mere 
 matter of " crowd psychology." And this feeling, 
 which like all others has to learn its own due balance 
 by experience, is an integral part of the soldier's 
 basic self-confidence : so far as he fills the character 
 of a soldier, he deserves it, — it belongs to him. 
 
 Except when he is mixing with the populace, how- 
 ever, and sensitive to their admiration (or neglect, 
 as the case may be), the soldier's consciousness is 
 little occupied with his social worth or other merits. 
 It is occupied with a highly prosaic round of duties. 
 War is an eruption of extraordinary evil somewhere 
 in the world, and the character of its origin marks 
 all the measures devised to wage it. Long before 
 he reaches the trenches, the soldier has occasion to 
 know that his task is one of exigency and stress. 
 Permanence, abundance, grace, and beauty are not 
 the leading traits of barracks life. The merely art- 
 ful side of civilian manners disappears as by magic. 
 "The relations between man and man," as Paul 
 Lintier says, " become primitively direct. One's first 
 preoccupation is to make oneself respected." The 
 immediate contest with nature, digging, scrubbing, 
 
102 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 
 
 cleaning, lugging, fills the hours not given to mili- 
 tary formations, increasingly as one approaches the 
 front. Masefield has said that his composite picture 
 of war is that of a man begrimed and mud-sodden, 
 carrying a heavy load. And one wonders whether 
 the psychological variation of the soldier is not 
 really in the direction of the drudge rather than in 
 that of the traditional hero. 
 
 In his very spontaneous "Reactions of a Rookie," 
 Mr. Walter Agard offers some rather savage reflec- 
 tions upon a letter from the front in which a college 
 lad wrote as follows : 
 
 "I'm thankful for what this war is doing for me. 
 It has grown hair on my chest, taught me to obey 
 disagreeable orders graciously, and wiped away the 
 damn superficial attitude of college." 
 
 Mr. Agard had reached the state of mind in which 
 the civilization he had left behind him was glowing 
 in alluring colors. He could feel little sympathy 
 with a man to whom behavior ' ' essentially common- 
 place, obvious, and unrefined" could bring a re- 
 freshing smack of sincerity and strength. The best 
 things in literature, science, philosophy, he realized, 
 are not superficial matters; they are not "veneer": 
 they are life itself. To be forced to leave them is 
 not a good, but a calamity: to find oneself improv- 
 ing under the change, — bah ! — what an ass one must 
 have been before! 
 
 It stands to reason that there is nothing intrinsi- 
 cally desirable in crudity and dirt. What the world 
 
PSYCHOLOGY OF THE SOLDIER 103 
 
 has been laboring these thousands of years to secure 
 in the way of life 's amenities is certainly better than 
 the ' ' state of nature ' ' left behind, — far better there- 
 fore than what the soldier has to return to. It re- 
 mains true that while the things are better, the peo- 
 ple who enjoy them are not necessarily made better 
 by the things: there is always a chance for moral 
 loss or malproportion in the way society treats its 
 advantages. There is no absurdity in the idea that 
 a man who thoroughly appreciates the good things 
 of peace should find in the situation of the soldier 
 something of his character that he had previously 
 missed. 
 
 One of the most genuine soldiers it has been my 
 privilege to know, Capt. Norman Hall, now of the 
 Lafayette Flying Squadron, came to Plattsburgh 
 as just such a rookie, after serving for a year or 
 more in the Flanders fighting with " Kitchener's 
 Mob." He wanted to compare the American with 
 the British system of training. At that time the 
 impulse to get back into the trenches was strong 
 upon him ; and it was not for any particular blood- 
 thirsty streak in his disposition, nor for any love 
 of trench conditions. Hall, too, was a college man, 
 though I doubt whether he suffered much from the 
 i ' damn superficial attitude ' ' : he knew what civiliza- 
 tion was worth. But in that impulse of his to get 
 back, there was, beside other things, a human in- 
 terest. ' ' Over there, ' ' he said, ' ' you see men as they 
 are; something comes out in them that one hardly 
 
104 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 
 
 finds anywhere else."* Even in these days when 
 war has become so much a matter of engineering 
 and infernal toil, the fancy that it may develop ad- 
 mirable qualities in men is not a myth. 
 
 It is, however, a part of the psychology of the 
 soldier that these qualities should be more visible 
 to everybody else than to himself. The words " en- 
 durance," "courage," and the rest of the names of 
 the traditional military virtues, do not at once call 
 up to his mind anything of which he is especially 
 conscious. For as a matter of fact a virtue is not 
 something separate from the outer situation: it is 
 simply the habit of meeting that situation well, and 
 it will be the difficulty of the situation that the man 
 will be most conscious of. So to the soldier, the 
 tedium he suffers from time to time seems sim- 
 ply tedium ; so pain is pain, and fatigue is fatigue, — 
 bits of dismal experience to be met and lived through 
 as best one may. It does not at once occur to him 
 that the act of living through these things well is 
 the " heroism," etc., that sounded so attractive in 
 the auditorium. 
 
 Hence if we are to describe the mind of the soldier 
 in terms he is likely to recognize, it would be well 
 to begin — as the realist does — by mentioning the 
 things he has to contend with, — the physical grind 
 and danger, the loss of personal freedom and distinc- 
 
 *This is his De Profundis from the trenches: "I felt actually 
 happy, for I was witnessing splendid, heroic things. It was an 
 experience which gave one a new and unshakable faith in his fel- 
 lows." "With Kitchener's Mob," page 167. 
 
PSYCHOLOGY OF THE SOLDIER 105 
 
 tion, the inescapable consciousness of waste and 
 ruin that deepens as time wears on, and withal a 
 certain bleakness in the moral atmosphere, etc. It 
 would be a false and unrecognizable psychology that 
 should ignore these things; it would be an equally 
 false psychology that should end with them, as if the 
 mind were identical with the things it struggles 
 against. 
 
 The loss of his personal freedom is something 
 the soldier never entirely ceases to feel, and its 
 mental effects are far-reaching. In many ways, he 
 has to unlearn the initiative of civil life, and to 
 disuse the constant preoccupation of the independ- 
 ent man — the making of plans for the morrow, and 
 for the weeks and years ahead. There are few re- 
 sponsible recruits to whom this check to the habit 
 of planning one's actions does not come at first as 
 a relief mingled with bewilderment ; it adds, in any 
 case, a certain spice of adventure to existence. But 
 in a free State, responsibility is of the very nature of 
 maturity; and in a democratic army the impulses 
 toward self-management and plan-making will find 
 in a hundred ways new outlets, feeding on such 
 knowledge as the soldier can raffle together. The 
 critical humor, the incessant inquiring, speculating, 
 and discussing on the part of the democratic soldier 
 are due largely to his restless desire to feel himself 
 master of his own destiny. This desire can never 
 be wholly satisfied, even in civil life ; and its neces- 
 
106 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 
 
 sary repression in the army is but the rough side 
 of the soldier's primary virtue of obedience. But 
 meanwhile, anything that can add to his conscious- 
 ness that the war is his war, and that he is co-re- 
 sponsible for its outcome; anything that can make 
 him more of a mental sharer in its ups and downs, 
 in its geography, history, and aims; anything that 
 can give him a definite province of his own, however 
 limited, for initiative and invention, will both ma- 
 terially aid the morale of the man as a soldier, and 
 keep vigorous a quality invaluable for later civilian 
 life. 
 
 One important mental consequence of transfer- 
 ring so much of his will to his commanders is that 
 the thrust of his will is simplified and concentrated. 
 In the mere shaping of the day's work, its goings 
 and comings, its prescribed ways of turning around, 
 of getting from one place to another, its times of 
 waking up, eating, going to sleep, the labor of de- 
 cision is greatly reduced. Having but one purpose to 
 fulfill to the utmost, the whole stream of his interest 
 can be directed to that; and he experiences, per- 
 haps for the first time, the full value of having a 
 mental attitude wholly definite and free from the 
 many weighings, distractions, invitations, of ordi- 
 nary existence. So far, the soldier is likely to be- 
 come unified, categorical, direct, decisive, strong. He 
 can deal in yeses and noes, in black and white in- 
 stead of in half tones. The finality of will that 
 marks the higher command — I am speaking of the 
 
PSYCHOLOGY OF THE SOLDIER 107 
 
 armies in the field — penetrates the entire mentality 
 of the force, and lends to the will of every soldier 
 the power that comes only from the reduction of all 
 issues to one — the defeat of the enemy. 
 
 But this moral simplification, it is fair to note, is 
 accompanied by a physical complication. For the 
 soldier has everything to do, and the specialization 
 of his civil career is largely undone. There are of 
 course many specialties within the army, in the 
 several branches of the service, in the company, the 
 platoon, and even in the squad. But even so, the 
 soldier must be a versatile animal, must know how 
 to be his own bed-maker, barber, laundryman, and 
 at times his own builder and cook, though billets 
 normally relieve him of various of these functions. 
 The most ancient of all divisions of labor, that be- 
 tween the work of man and woman, is wiped out. 
 The accomplished army engineer is the nearest sur- 
 viving example of the jack-of-all-trades. In short, 
 the life of the soldier has all the complications of an 
 attempt at self-sufficiency. He must carry in his 
 pack and kit-bag all the essential elements of civil- 
 ization in portable form. The soldier, by necessity, 
 becomes man generalized. 
 
 Men who enter the army with a hearty spirit of 
 ambition, whether from love of adventure or from 
 eagerness to serve and to learn the technique of the 
 new activity, may be hardly at all conscious at first 
 either of the loss of freedom or of the rather crude 
 and primitive conditions of camp life. They come 
 
108 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 
 
 with the expectation of being ordered about; and 
 they know that some involuntary austerities are in 
 store for them. Whatever is characteristic of army 
 life has its keen interest just on that account. They 
 are usually less aware of the hierarchy of official 
 rank than of a very different hierarchy, — the supe- 
 riority of the experienced man over the new man. 
 There is, beside this new art of living a portable and 
 all-around existence, an elaborate set of abbrevia- 
 tions and signs, a new language to be learned: and 
 one is less worried by the crudeness of ways and 
 means than by his own greenness in making use 
 of them. Soldierly ambition, in fact, is an almost 
 perfect anesthetic for the minor trials incident to 
 life in camp and field: and those officers who are 
 skilled in securing a strong morale are those that 
 take a high personal pride in the technique of their 
 calling, and communicate it, in encouraging fashion, 
 to their command. 
 
 But it lies in the nature of the work of a soldier 
 that not much is said about the ideals and sentiments 
 that sustain his labor. Eeticence on such points is, 
 in fact, one of the traditional military ideals. A 
 man is supposed to have sufficient motive power 
 within him, so that all attention can be given to the 
 material business in hand. The moral atmosphere is 
 rarefied; it is meant to be rarefied, — and correspond- 
 ingly bracing. Thus arises one of the profound con- 
 trasts that mark the existence of the soldier. 
 
PSYCHOLOGY OF THE SOLDIER 109 
 
 For while his daily life is a sacrifice for an ideal 
 — without which he is simply a man in misfortune ; 
 while he is therefore more dependent than any civil- 
 ian on idealism, if he is to keep his spirit alive ; he is 
 more exposed than any other human being to the 
 insistence of the material facts, and so to a sort of 
 disillusion and fatalistic slump. The foreground 
 of his life is apparently hard-headed, realistic, sor- 
 did; the feelings and sentiments that were in evi- 
 dence during the recruiting campaign have retired 
 to the background. He finds himself summoned 
 to ' ' pack up his troubles in the old kit-bag, ' ' and if 
 he is wise he does so; but the philosophy of "smile" 
 hardly meets all his requirements : he recognizes it 
 for what it is, less a philosophy than a life-preserver. 
 He is likely to get the impression that his ideals, 
 and the people that talked of them, have somehow 
 gone back on him. 
 
 The impression is mistaken. But like every other 
 man who undertakes a man's job, the soldier must 
 go through his own struggle with this contrast be- 
 tween the foreground and the background, and must 
 find a way to keep his background alive within him- 
 self. "What is necessary is that he should be able to 
 think of himself, with his background, in a way that 
 the foreground does not banish. We shall try to 
 suggest such a way of picturing the case. 
 
 It has sometimes aided me to put things into the 
 right perspective to think of the soldier as the man 
 
110 MOBALE AND ITS ENEMIES 
 
 who lives always at the frontier. The frontier of 
 civilization is not a line that has kept moving west- 
 ward until it has passed out of existence ; civiliza- 
 tion is always in contact with its enemies, even with 
 its beginnings. The foundations of the social order 
 are not laid once for all in a remote past : as long as 
 there are spots of disorder and chaos in the world, 
 there are beginnings to be made. And here the 
 soldier is always found. 
 
 In times of peace, he is there, where great canals 
 are being dug, or where forest-reserves are being 
 warded, or where mountain roads are being built, 
 or irrigation projects carried out, or where law and 
 order have broken down. His task is to face origi- 
 nal chaos and to create the beginnings of social life. 
 And in times of war, he is still doing the same thing : 
 the soldier is the perpetual pioneer. 
 
 It is from this angle, I believe, that we can best 
 judge how much the experience of the soldier may 
 have to contribute to the mental equipment of the 
 specialized and civilized man. If, as a pioneer, he 
 takes part in the foundations of the State, he gets 
 an understanding of the efforts of those that have 
 built his society; he joins hands with them, and his 
 mind stretches the gamut from origin to finished 
 product with a new sense of mastery. His imagina- 
 tion becomes adequate and responsible in proportion 
 as he sees what it has cost to make a social order. 
 He ceases to look on the virtues of the historical 
 State-makers as strange, ancient, and inaccessible. 
 
PSYCHOLOGY OP THE SOLDIER 111 
 
 He knows what is involved in building a state, for 
 he himself is now one of the founders.* 
 
 The soldier, then, is the man permanently at the 
 frontier. But the character of the soldier only ap- 
 pears when we add the reason for his being there. 
 The reason is simply that the frontier is the place 
 where the residual perils to society are to be found. 
 The essential thing in the character of the soldier 
 thus appears: he is the man who declines to take 
 shelter from these perils at the cost of anybody else. 
 This unwillingness to be the protected person, an 
 expression of the one characteristic instinct of man- 
 hood, seems to me to be the quality from which all 
 the more particular military virtues are derived. 
 
 This state of mind, declining to be sheltered by 
 others, naturally links itself with many another mo- 
 tive, — with whatever love of adventure and what- 
 ever "desire for fear" (as Mr. Graham Wallas calls 
 it) there is in a man's make up, with the temper 
 which finds it intolerable that there is anything in 
 the universe of which mankind must be lastingly 
 afraid. It excites all the latent gaming spirit, and 
 
 •This same view of the case should give us a means of judging 
 the value of military training in times of peace. It can never be 
 a matter of educational indifference to have an active share in 
 the beginnings of the State. The attempt of a certain small part 
 of civilian society to get "back to nature" during the summer 
 months is evidence that, quite apart from the need for recreation, 
 a psychological need for the pioneering role is felt; while the mani- 
 fest absurdity of turning the entire population of the land to such 
 an existence for any period of time, is evidence that the need in 
 question is imperfectly understood or met. Naturally, having a 
 sham share in pioneering is of no educational worth. Military 
 drill without military labor becomes stale and unprofitable. But 
 some union of the two may fill an educational gap. 
 
112 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 
 
 that curious artificial instinct which civilization cre- 
 ates for the crude and raw, a symptom of the fact 
 that our advances are not all advance. All these 
 and many another strand of motive might be de- 
 tected in the psychology of the soldier, which tend to 
 cast a glamor over the rough sides of his experience 
 — at least in retrospect. 
 
 But whether or not one takes any organic satis- 
 faction in the difficulties and perils of soldiering 
 for their own sakes — and the time comes when the 
 stoutest gets sick unto death of them — the virtue 
 of the soldier is to go through with them willy nilly 
 on the general principle that if there is anything 
 that has to be stood, he can stand it. He is not 
 going to let the other fellow stand it for him. 
 
 There is an act of faith required in this state of 
 mind; because one does not know in advance what 
 he may have to go through. He has to face it in a 
 sort of blanket-clause: he commits himself to 
 "whatever is involved," on the assumption that 
 what man has done man can do again, and probably 
 more. And loyalty, which means holding to this 
 commitment when things are at their worst, in- 
 cludes the other traditional soldierly virtues, en- 
 durance, severity, courage. 
 
 For endurance means, There is nothing we can't 
 stand if we have to. Severity means, There is 
 nothing we can't do, if we have to, i. e., in the way 
 of the killing deed. And courage means, There is 
 nothing we can't face if we have to. 
 
PSYCHOLOGY OF THE SOLDIER 113 
 
 Of courage we shall have more to say in the 
 chapter on fear. But here a few words about sever- 
 ity, of all these qualities least spoken of, and yet 
 not the least necessary, nor the least difficult to 
 acquire. The deed of killing is psychologically re- 
 pellent to the majority of civilians. There is thought 
 to be a "hunting instinct" in us, but comparatively 
 few, in our day, develop it; and I venture to think 
 that there are few to whom the occasional acts of 
 minor surgery that come under the head of "heroic 
 measures" do not cause a certain moral effort. The 
 soldier has to achieve a disposition to kill, under 
 the control of the knowledge that this deed has be- 
 come his duty. To many civilians, this necessarily 
 involves a "hardening" of the soldier's fiber; and 
 some dare to use the word "brutalizing." The lat- 
 ter would be fitly dealt with by being required to 
 kill their own meat, or go without. Nothing that is 
 a necessary duty can be intrinsically brutalizing. 
 Neither is "hardening" the word, if by that is 
 meant a loss of sensitiveness. It is usual, I believe, 
 that in soldiers who have seen much fighting — and 
 just on that account — the growth of sternness in the 
 grim work of war goes with a deepening of tender- 
 ness toward the people at home. Severity, I think, 
 is the word for the normal effect of this requirement 
 on character, a trait which implies an effort against 
 one's own shrinking, one's misplaced tenderness and 
 pity, as well as against the life of the enemy: it is 
 the noble resolve to accept the disagreeable task, 
 
114 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 
 
 even the revolting task, if it is something that has 
 to be done by somebody. 
 
 There are those who profess to see in the psy- 
 chology of the soldier, so far as he differs from his 
 usual self, simply atavism, reversion toward the 
 savage type. Primitive men, it seems, killed for 
 the love of it : and in all of us, it is said, there lurks 
 this murderous lust, to which only war gives free 
 outlet. In this day of grace, it is given to few men 
 except the soldier to "see red" in the original and 
 literal sense of the phrase; and the experience, 
 delirious and fearful, leaves its mark no doubt upon 
 his memory, and his character. 
 
 But what mark does it leave? The mark of the 
 mind that went into action. In the passion of com- 
 bat, the man becomes partly mechanized, works to a 
 degree as an automaton, becomes so far insensitive 
 to pain that operations without anesthetics have 
 been performed (I have heard) on soldiers still 
 under the spell of the fighting, without causing 
 severe suffering:* He knows more or less vaguely 
 that he is as it were merely the physical agent 
 of himself, — that thought and deliberation are put 
 away in the intense concentration of the physical 
 
 # "Even the wounded refuse to abandon the struggle. As though 
 possessed by devils, they fight on until they fall senseless from loss 
 of blood. A surgeon in a front line post told me that at one mo- 
 ment anesthetics ran out, owing to the impossibility of bringing 
 forward fresh supplies through the bombardment. Arms, even legs, 
 were amputated without a groan, and even afterward the men seemed 
 hardly to have felt the shock." 
 
 Despatch from Verdun, May 24, 1916. 
 
PSYCHOLOGY OF THE SOLDIER 115 
 
 action.* It is the whole mind that gives the charac- 
 ter to any action; and it is some time before the 
 whole of that almost somnambulistic fighting mind 
 can be reassembled. That whole mind has the qual- 
 ity of the man's enduring purposes; and it would 
 be absurd to speak of these as atavistic, — quite as 
 much so to describe in these terms that moment of 
 absorption in the frenzy of battle. 
 
 I think it fair to judge that if events call us back 
 at any time in history to the rude work of dealing 
 with public crime, the event shows that there was 
 something meretricious about our prior refinement, 
 something over-protected and self-content. War is 
 the calamity that reminds us that we have come to 
 the details of our paradise too soon ; we were taking 
 our ease before we had a full right to it. Thus war 
 belongs to that mysterious side of life called ' ' earn- 
 ing," an apportionment of effort to reward whose 
 quantitative reason always escapes us, a tax which 
 no human utopia-deviser would impose as the price 
 for his enjoyments, and yet which instantly becomes 
 the debt of honor of every man whence the demand 
 is made. And perhaps we must remain capable 
 for all time of the harsh as well as of the mild in 
 our conduct. It is a poor microscope that is not 
 
 •"It has often happened in war that some stubbornness in attack 
 or defense has roused the same quality in the opposer, till the 
 honor of the armies seems pledged to the taking or holding of one 
 patch of ground perhaps not vital to the battle. It may be that in 
 war one resolute soul can bind the excited minds of multitudes in 
 a kind of bloody mesmerism; but these strange things are not stud- 
 ied as they should be." 
 
 John Masefield, Gallipoli, page 155. 
 
116 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 
 
 equipped with the coarser as well as with the finer 
 adjustment ; for in fineness itself there is an element 
 of restraint and confinement. Without an echo of 
 severity, as of a force held in distant reserve, some- 
 thing of the masculine character seems lacking, 
 whether in war or in peace. 
 
 The qualities so far mentioned have been defined 
 in negative terms, because they are the bottom qual- 
 ities which a man must fall back upon when he is 
 nearing his limit. Under ordinary circumstances, 
 however, the "decliner of shelter" wears a lighter 
 mask. Endurance is covered over by cheerfulness, 
 and cheerfulness in turn by a superficial freedom 
 in "grousing" which implies that there is nothing 
 too serious going on, and so no reason for not say- 
 ing what comes into one's head. Severity and cour- 
 age are commonly covered over in the same way — 
 according to taste — by a certain hardness or non- 
 chalence of demeanor and language, which, like 
 the callouses on a much-used hand, are assumed to 
 fit the environment. And just as the assumed cheer- 
 fulness loses its value in time, and dies a natural 
 death, so an assumed huskiness, aggressiveness, 
 bravado, or coarseness of manner give way in time 
 to a simpler, quieter, and franker dealing with things 
 as they come. 
 
 Perhaps the finest things in the temper of the 
 soldier are these later qualities that only come with 
 experience, — steadiness, absence of pretense, and 
 
PSYCHOLOGY OF THE SOLDIER 117 
 
 the firm undemonstrative readiness for whatever 
 may happen next. I know of no single name for 
 these qualities, unless it is the word "reality." In 
 it, the psychology of the soldier joins with that of 
 the man everywhere who has learned to worship the 
 god of things as they are. He has made his mental 
 detour, passed through the stage of special character 
 and contrast to the civilian mind, and has returned 
 to his natural self. It is perhaps only a few who 
 complete the circuit; but those who are genuinely 
 "first in war" are ready without another reversal 
 of character to become the "first in peace." War 
 has been their path to wholeness. 
 
 In describing "the soul of the soldier," Lieuten- 
 ant Morize of the first French Military Mission to 
 this country, said, i * To my thinking, that means for 
 you two things, — the spirit of sacrifice and the spirit 
 of discipline." The "spirit of sacrifice" may be 
 taken as another name for the qualities we have been 
 discussing. The "spirit of discipline" is a chapter 
 by itself. 
 
CHAPTER XI 
 
 DISCIPLINE AND DBILL 
 
 The mental unity of an army is no easy incident of 
 being "with one accord in one place." It is a result 
 to be purchased at a great price. To make of a 
 million men an instrument with which a commander 
 can do what he will is a modern miracle, to be un- 
 derstood only by a long history of the art of com- 
 bining the smaller groups, and of finding the simple 
 operations which can best serve as the units for all 
 the actions of that composite monster, the army. 
 To anyone who witnesses the ease and speed with 
 which a forty-acre field may blossom out into a 
 great camp of shelter tents, and with which this 
 same camp may dissolve again into the forty-acre 
 field, the process may seem a simple one ; but it has 
 had to be built up by inches, and by a hundred fit- 
 tings of one man's act into the act of his neighbor. 
 Yet this is, in fact, one of the simplest of the deeds 
 of a military unit and certainly one least liable to 
 distraction. 
 
 When one considers that the invitations to con- 
 fusion under which the serious business of an army 
 is done are no ordinary disturbances, but such as 
 take deepest hold on human instincts, he begins to 
 
 118 
 
DISCIPLINE AND DKILL 119 
 
 measure the amount of strain which discipline must 
 be able to bear without breaking. A newly acquired 
 habit must be set against the most masterful im- 
 pulses ; and must, at times, be able to take the place 
 of thought and will themselves. 
 
 In discipline there are two elements which it is 
 hard for men of American mould to accept. The one 
 is the loss of personal freedom and distinction of 
 which we have spoken. The other is the arbitrary 
 stress that is laid on doing details just so rather 
 than otherwise, when an active and inventive reason 
 suggests many an alternative and perhaps better 
 way. There is no a priori reason why a campaign 
 hat should go with one kind of bodygear and a cap 
 with another. Neither is there any reason why one 
 should turn to the right rather than to the left in 
 passing; but there is every reason for adopting 
 some rule, arbitrarily if necessary, and making it 
 uniform. Hence the pressure of the arbitrary is 
 everywhere in the early stages of army education. 
 
 It is not, indeed, nearly so pervasive as one is 
 first tempted to think. Behind the concise dicta of 
 the Infantry Drill Regulations there is a mine of 
 experience in the multitude of wrong ways of doing 
 things ; and the best drillmasters make some of this 
 wisdom apparent as they harp on the required 
 methods of execution. But it would seem to me one 
 of the most useful contributions of military training 
 to the general art of living in a democracy if it could 
 ingrain the idea of the necessary consent to some 
 
120 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 
 
 arbitrary basis of action involved in carrying out 
 every common purpose. 
 
 Before any gathering can take place, a meeting- 
 point must be set — if need be by arbitrary decision. 
 Before a race can be run or a game played, the goal 
 posts must be placed, and the placing will require 
 some other faculty than pure reason. I am inclined 
 to think that the finer points of character and prin- 
 ciple grow up about some more or less arbitrary 
 self-requirement. If a battalion on being relieved 
 after six mortal days in the trenches marches to 
 its billets at attention, it is giving the last unneces- 
 sary touch of perfection to its work, but in a way 
 that means much to morale; for it asserts what 
 every man wants to believe of his deed, "we did it 
 with a margin." Discipline means subjection; but 
 not subjection to officers. It means subjection of 
 the body to the mind; it means the superiority of 
 the human spirit to the last efforts of wind and 
 weather, and the demons of fear, pain, and fatigue. 
 It is the element of Stoicism without which no man 
 can do his living well. 
 
 During the opening years of the war, we heard 
 a great deal about the changed conditions of war- 
 fare. The technique of the trenches seemed to ren- 
 der all traditional tactics obsolete, and especially to 
 throw close-order drill into relative unimportance. 
 Digging-in, bomb-throwing, sniping, bayonet-prac- 
 tice, etc. — these arts had risen to the first magni- 
 
DISCIPLINE AND DBILL 121 
 
 tude : ' ' On right into line ' ' and even ' ' Squads right' ' 
 appeared ornamental rather than useful accomplish- 
 ments. 
 
 So it seemed also to the first contingents from 
 the British provinces. And when the Guards regi- 
 ments of London, the be-plumed and be-buttoned 
 admiration of the London streets, entrained for the 
 front, there was much shrewd comment to the effect 
 that they would shine less gloriously in the rude 
 conditions of trench warfare, less gloriously than 
 the rough-and-ready fighters at their sides. 
 
 The prophets were wrong. The Guards continued 
 to shine, and to outshine. The rough-and-readies 
 lacked nothing in spirit, but they suffered fright- 
 fully through inaccuracies, through overreaching, 
 through running into their own barrage, through 
 carelessness in details. All of the training camps, 
 in the provinces and elsewhere, changed their minds. 
 Wherever opportunity offered, at the front, at 
 Etaples, at Aldershot, I asked the question and re- 
 ceived the same answer. " Whatever you Ameri- 
 cans do, give us men who have the elements of dis- 
 cipline, the close-order drill. If they lack in the 
 field work, we can make that good over here; but 
 nothing can make up for weakness in the drill. ' ' 
 
 What is the explanation? It lies partly in the 
 enormous difficulties of perfect team-work among 
 large numbers of men under any conditions, and 
 partly in the phenomenal capacity of the human 
 mind for careless and inaccurate workmanship, in 
 
122 MOBALE AND ITS ENEMIES 
 
 which we of America certainly hold a high place.* 
 As in the case of other new lands, we have won a 
 certain level of result easily: we have not had to 
 count the farthings, nor to measure our farms by 
 the square foot. Informality has been one of our 
 ideals ; and it has a rare distinction among ideals, — 
 we have achieved it. We have gained a freedom 
 from red tape, a directness of fitting means to ends, 
 a deliverance from the worship of insignia and plum- 
 age, which are integral parts of our democracy and 
 which have shown their worth too often to be given 
 up. At the same time, however, a certain slackness 
 has leaked in, a toleration of incompetence, and a 
 forgetting of the value, the meaning, the positive en- 
 joyment of good form. 
 
 I say the enjoyment of good form, because I doubt 
 whether there is any human being who does not take 
 pleasure in a maneuver, or any other bit of work- 
 manship, done with skill and accuracy. But the 
 case for discipline does not rest on the enjoyment 
 of the finished result : it rests on its practical value, 
 and on its meaning. 
 
 The practical value of discipline is largely a mat- 
 
 *As an example, those who have the happy task of instructing 
 cadet officers will appreciate the following set of replies which 
 came to me in an examination in which the men were asked to 
 describe the position of the soldier — naturally not all from one 
 man: 
 
 "Heels together and pointing outward, making an angle of 45 
 degrees ; 
 
 "Hips in, as nearly as the conformation of the man permits; 
 
 "Body placed squarely on the hips; 
 
 "Shoulders straight, drawn back, and arched; 
 
 -'The chin and eyes remain on an axis of 90 degrees from the neck." 
 
DISCIPLINE AND DRILL 123 
 
 ter of psychology. The more intently men learn to 
 observe each others' movements, to listen to the 
 words of command, and to accommodate themselves 
 to the doings of the unit they are with, the more 
 fit they are for team work of any kind, the more 
 they form the habit of feeling themselves a unit. 
 The insistent practice of a few unit-operations until 
 they retire into subconsciousness and become me- 
 chanical, allows the mind to be free and to think of 
 the total formation. Freeing the mind is the func- 
 tion of all technique : no one who has to think of 
 the individual placing of his fingers can be a pianist. 
 It is a necessity, not a luxury, for a commanding 
 officer to be able to think of his command as a unit, 
 to handle it as a unit, — which can only be the case 
 if it has mentally grown together into unity. Army- 
 making is a process of mental grafting; and this 
 can only be achieved by training attention until 
 each man's mind is rooted into the mind of his 
 neighbors, not by his separate conscious efforts, 
 but by great subconscious blocks of habit. 
 
 Quite apart from this is the practical value of 
 doing some one thing to perfection. Some mental 
 habits spread faster than others : a boy who studies 
 mathematics and hates it will gain very few mental 
 virtues that can be used on other things. But a 
 man who can do the manual to the point of taking 
 pride in it has a mental interest in perfection that 
 will spread to other things, by degrees. It may take 
 a little pedagogical skill on the part of the officer 
 
124 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 
 
 to make it spread, an occasional "Do this as you do 
 your ' Right shoulder, arms, ' ' ' but it is a permanent 
 resource, a high point in morale to which other 
 points can be levelled up. 
 
 It marks, among other things, the high point of 
 obedience; for in a body of men at drill the response 
 to the word of command becomes as automatic as 
 the response of the body to the will. All command- 
 ers make instinctive use of the attitude of attention 
 for communicating orders and instructions of im- 
 portance : for this attitude forms the sluiceway down 
 which the disposition of obedience is communicated 
 from the drill-head, so to speak, to the outlying por- 
 tions of the day's duty. And many a commander 
 has found, in practical experience, that troops get- 
 ting slightly out of hand for any reason may be 
 restored to control by the call to attention, and the 
 repetition of a few of the well-known formations 
 of close order. 
 
 It is sometimes felt that just this element of obe- 
 dience has something in it contrary to the spirit 
 of free man ; that however valuable or necessary it 
 may be for purposes of war-making it is oppressive 
 and damaging to the individual; and that America, 
 for this reason, should always fight shy of the train- 
 ing to arms, which cannot be separated from train- 
 ing to an undue subordination. There is a very 
 simple answer to this scruple from a psychological 
 law of habit, which deserves to be better known. 
 
 The law is this: that the habit which is formed 
 
DISCIPLINE AND DRILL 125 
 
 by any act or series of acts depends on the motive 
 of the act more than on the external shape of it. >. 
 
 For instance, a solicitor for some charity comes 
 into my office and asks for a subscription. If I 
 make a subscription, what habit am I forming? No- 
 body can answer unless he knows why I do it. If 
 I do it because I see everybody else is doing it and 
 I don't want to be out of line, I am forming the 
 habit of social imitation, not of charity. If I do it 
 because I want to impress somebody who happens 
 to be in the office at the time, I am forming the habit 
 of pretense. If I do it to get rid of the solicitor, 
 the habit of evasion. The habit-forming power of 
 any act is determined from inside, not from outside._^/ 
 
 For this reason the obedience of a free man, who 
 is a consenting party to the relation of obedience, 
 will never form the same habit as the obedience of a 
 man who acts from fear. It would be impossible to 
 Prussianize America, even with the same system of 
 compulsory service ; for the obedience of the Amer- 
 ican would never have the same inner stamp.* It 
 is as foolish to suppose that universal service would 
 mechanize and subdue the spirits of Americans as 
 
 *There is also a difference in methods of discipline, which is well 
 brought out by Major General William A. Pew, in his capital little 
 book on "Making a Soldier": 
 
 "We can follow the lead of the old Prussian model, or that of 
 West Point. What I call the old Prussian model was described 
 by Marshal Saxe when he declared that soldiers should be machines 
 animated only by the voice of their commander. There is one 
 drawback to this system. When men are trained into machines, 
 they become subject to the limitations of machines. The West Point 
 method tries to make good where the old Prussian system runs the 
 risk of failure. The cadets are put through a novel type of efficiency 
 calisthenics. Major Koehler in his drills gives any descriptive order 
 
126 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 
 
 to suppose that voluntary working for wages has 
 that effect. If the war should drag on for a long 
 series of years, there would be a real danger from 
 the slow enfeeblement of the larger powers of per- 
 sonal initiative involved in plan-making, but not 
 from the relation of obedience. As a nation we 
 stand to gain a great deal from the development of 
 alert and careful attention to directions, and exacti- 
 tude in executing them. In the Special Training De- 
 tachments, in which technical training is carried on 
 side by side with military drill, there is a practi- 
 cally unanimous testimony on the part of the tech- 
 nical instructors that the work is improved both in 
 quality and in speed by its association with the mil- 
 itary ideal.* The men bring to their carpentry, 
 sheet metal work, lathe-work, electric wiring, etc., 
 the mental atmosphere of attention and "pep." 
 
 It goes without saying that if discipline is to have 
 any value for the individual subject to it, the rules, 
 orders, and commands to which he submits his will, 
 must be, on the whole, wise. In the special discipline 
 of drill or technique this question does not arise : the 
 more perfectly one has mastered the unit operations, 
 the fitter he is to carry out any general order which 
 employs them, be that order wise or foolish. But the 
 
 that comes into his head. He may say, 'Right hand on hip,' 'Left 
 hand on nose,' or anything else. The cadets have to keep awake. 
 The West Point idea of subordination is not the unintelligent re- 
 sponse of a machine, but the loyal support of an active mind, whicn 
 grasps the purpose of a commander and strives to advance it with 
 force and energy." Pages 51-53. 
 
 •Which may be dependent on the presence of a real war to give 
 these drill exercises their value. I do not prejudge this question. 
 
DISCIPLINE AND DRILL 127 
 
 wider discipline of obedience to the general control 
 of army authority is another matter, and its value 
 is more conditional. If men are at odds with the 
 general spirit or management of things; if they 
 chafe under their rules or hate their rulers — whether 
 the fault is in the rules or in the commanders or in 
 themselves, the regime may bring out the worst in 
 them rather than the best. External discipline, held 
 in place by a vista of punishment, develops chiefly 
 the powers of deception and evasion ; makes adepts 
 at beating the rules, and turns the times of freedom 
 and furlough into times of kicking over the traces. 
 And this will be to some extent the tendency of every 
 system which pretends to a greater measure of in- 
 fallibility than it actually possesses, or which as- 
 sumes a "military" finality of form which it cannot 
 make good in substance. 
 
 But in a democratic army these dangers are at a 
 minimum ; the absolute theory of command is every- 
 where subordinated to the human equation ; author- 
 ity has learned that it must be built on confidence 
 and good- will, that the obedience of the spirit is 
 something which commanders have to earn. 
 
 I have spoken of the practical value of discipline. 
 I wish to add a few words regarding its meaning. 
 
 There is a great contrast between the parade 
 ground and the trenches; and it is sometimes felt 
 that the soldier of the parade ground has vanished 
 when the soldier of the trenches takes his place. 
 
128 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 
 
 This is very far from being the case. For one of 
 the most genuine needs of the man under harsh, 
 racking, destable conditions is for what I will call 
 a "self of reference," — that is, a state of mind 
 which he can remember as being normal, even 
 though he cannot attain it. We live more than we 
 realize upon what we can hark back to: we forget 
 our mathematical proofs, but we remember the self 
 that knew them ; we slip away from our best insights, 
 but we remember and respect the self that had 
 them. The soldier in mortal difficulty will have no 
 more valuable asset than the memory of his own 
 parade-ground self, as the being who foresaw just 
 these perils, but in the large only, and so in a 
 sounder and more normal proportion. 
 
 But this self of reference does not come into be- 
 ing of itself: it has to be built. It is rather mis- 
 leading to speak of the parade-ground self, or any 
 other feature of discipline, as having a meaning. 
 Like other elements of ceremony, they have only 
 the meaning that is put into them. An act of formal 
 courtesy, a handshake, a bow, may mean anything 
 or nothing ; likewise, a military salute. But all such 
 formalities are capable of being taken as symbols; 
 and it is worth while to consider them in that light. 
 
 It is notable that the life of the soldier, a constant 
 tussle with the most literal of literal facts, should 
 be so full of symbols, many of them relics of ancient 
 usages. The "present arms" and "parade rest," 
 the position of "attention," the uniform itself, the 
 
DISCIPLINE AND DBILL 129 
 
 insignia, the flag, the bugle calls, all the curious dis- 
 tinctive elements of military language, parade, and 
 review, are like so many signs manual of the most 
 ancient of all fraternities, one more conservative of 
 its rites, sentiments, and customs than the law. This 
 fact is of itself a powerful evidence of the psycho- 
 logical value of these symbols. 
 
 The history of an observance does not determine 
 its present meaning: though it may add to the in- 
 terest of the hand salute to regard it as a relic of 
 the practice of lifting the visor to an honored knight 
 in the days of tourney. The meaning of a saluta- 
 tion must grow out of present conditions ; the salute 
 should mean a sign of respect to the will of a nation, 
 embodied in an individual figure. If to any man it 
 means a sign of subordination to a person, it can 
 only be because he had so interpreted it himself. 
 The salute should be understood as a recognition of 
 the tie between the individual giving the salute and 
 the organism of the army, whatever that may mean 
 for him. And if such meaning is once made clear, 
 the repetition of the symbol — for the most part 
 without any explicit thought of its meaning — will 
 still tend to solidify in subconsciousness the senti- 
 ment it signifies. 
 
 Few human traditions are richer in fine symbols 
 than the army. There are few ceremonies so ade- 
 quate as that act of reverence in which officers and 
 men together salute the flag at " retreat." And 
 there are few notes of music that can convey so 
 
130 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 
 
 much as the bugle-song of "taps" at the close of a 
 soldier's day, or of a soldier's life. 
 
 Such elements of discipline are at the same time 
 elements of art, and follow the laws of art. They 
 may be perfunctory and vapid: they may be capi- 
 talized, enriched by daily deposit. An officer can 
 do much to fill or empty a given bit of ceremony for 
 his men. A man may fill or empty it for himself. 
 But whatever is put into such forms will be returned 
 with interest. They become stabilizers, ways of es- 
 cape from the ups and downs of feeling, ways of 
 tacit access to the elusive background of meaning 
 and to the ' ' self of reference ' ' therewith. It is fair 
 to say that for one's own sake it is impossible to do 
 one's formalities too well. 
 
CHAPTER XII 
 
 prestige: the psychology of command 
 
 If there is a psychological transformation when a 
 man puts on the uniform, there is another, not less 
 profound, when he gets his first chevrons and gives 
 his first command. Sometimes I think that the 
 critical moment in a soldier's career is the moment 
 when he first acts as corporal of his squad. Those 
 who say that it is hard for an American to take 
 orders may not realize that it is equally hard for 
 the average American to give them. The art of 
 command is an art by itself. 
 
 The reasons for this difficulty are various. The 
 main one, I believe, is this: that while the experi- 
 enced commander forgets his own special person- 
 ality, and uses quite naturally the voice and author- 
 ity of the organization, the raw commander is con- 
 scious of his individual self, and consequently real- 
 izes that the words falling out of his mouth have 
 hardly the weight that should make men obey them. 
 The relation of command and obedience is not a 
 relation between two individuals: a third and in- 
 visible party to the situation is always present — the 
 authority of the State and army — and unless this 
 third member is at home in the group, the business 
 of commanding will be a little forced and thin. 
 
 131 
 
132 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 
 
 There are other reasons which apply more espe- 
 cially to the American, trained in a tradition of 
 equality which makes him instinctively feel the posi- 
 tion of commander as a peculiarly exposed posi- 
 tion. Dignity and assertiveness are perhaps not 
 his strong leads. He knows he has to face, not so 
 much the surly criticism as the more searching hu- 
 mor of his men ; he has still to learn his individual 
 variation on the one word which must never, in the 
 army, be pronounced as it is spelled: ''March." 
 'He needs the manner which only experience can 
 justify, the manner of confidence, authority, pres- 
 tige. 
 
 The embarrassment of assuming command is, in 
 fact, but the counterpart of the embarrassment of 
 obedience: both are due to a false idea of individ- 
 ualism which forgets the third party in the situa- 
 tion. But there is no doubt a natural psychological 
 difficulty in beginning the role of commander (to 
 all but the unduly rich in self-assurance, who never 
 make good officers), a difficulty which gives rise to 
 something like a superstition about the "born lead- 
 ers." A theory of "prestige" springs up as of an 
 innate quality akin to genius, which, once for all, 
 some men have and other men are hopelessly with- 
 out. 
 
 The legends of Napoleon have done much to en- 
 force the idea that there is something uncanny about 
 leadership, as if the awe which great leaders un- 
 questionably evoke were due to something more 
 
prestige: the psychology of command 133 
 
 than the greatness conferred upon them by men's 
 inveterate need to idealize and admire. 
 
 Major Eltinge regards prestige in this way as a 
 unique quality, and surrounds it with a certain air 
 of mystery. "Prestige," he says, "causes the ac- 
 ceptance of an idea without discussion or contro- 
 versy . . . the suggestion is received from the out- 
 set, and appears most logical and true in the eyes of 
 all. Orders given under these conditions partake 
 of a peculiar force ; and it may be said that the best 
 obeyed commanders are neither the best instructed, 
 the most intelligent, the most paternal, nor the most 
 severe, but are those that have innate or acquired 
 prestige." 
 
 Where does this leave us? Rather helpless in 
 cultivating this quality, which we are told ' ' must be 
 the dominating quality in a leader of men. ' ' There 
 can be no doubt, I think, that some men are en- 
 dowed more highly than others with the disposition 
 to "boss" others, and with the natural bearing of 
 command. Many begin the practice in the cradle, 
 and have to have some of the disposition extracted. 
 But I believe no normal human being is without it ; 
 an4 that the germs of it are capable of analysis, 
 and so of development. Let me mention what seem 
 to me the chief ingredients of prestige. 
 
 1. Concentration of purpose. Respect involun- 
 tarily goes to the man who respects his own work, 
 especially if he is so much absorbed in it as to for- 
 
134 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 
 
 get his own private self and convenience at the de- 
 mand of the job. Men take subconscious note of 
 what their officers prize, and of what these officers 
 ignore. They are never deceived about what their 
 commander is putting first in his scale of impor- 
 tance. They do not expect him always to put their 
 comfort before his own; — though the paternal ele- 
 ment which makes for affection will add to prestige 
 if the other elements be present: but they know at 
 once whether he puts his ease above his duty, and 
 they know also whether his duty is a grind to him or 
 a thing he relishes and tries to grow up to. It is 
 only the latter man that can hope for prestige. The 
 foundation stone in the Napoleonic psychology, as 
 I see it, was an absorbing passion for the art of war. 
 
 2. Competence. A quality which almost always 
 follows from the first, but not always. It implies 
 painstaking forethought so that one is not caught at 
 a loss for information, nor taken by surprise. It is 
 forethought which enables a man to be the source 
 of knowledge to those about him ; and one can hardly 
 have prestige who leans habitually on others for 
 his facts. It is forethought again which lays the 
 foundation for prompt decision and resolute action ; 
 and one can hardly have prestige who falters and 
 vacillates, and therefore fails. 
 
 Failure does not destroy prestige, when it is 
 plainly not due to incompetence : the retreat of 1914 
 left many a leader on the side of France and Eng- 
 land stronger with his men than before — Joff re and 
 
prestige: the psychology of command 135 
 
 Foch among them.* But a few simple successes due 
 to plain forethought will create the tradition of 
 success which is half the battle of prestige. 
 
 One need hardly assume in the personality of 
 great commanders any other native trait than that 
 of surpassing competence, with the acquired ability 
 to think as quickly and firmly in public as in solitude, 
 and in emergency as in leisure. 
 
 3. Honesty and generosity. The man who cares 
 so much for prestige that he will not admit a mistake 
 is sure to lose it. No man becomes strong with his 
 followers by belittling their insight in order to 
 fortify the contrast between them and himself: the 
 great leader is one who makes his associates great, 
 and gives them rather more than due credit for any 
 wisdom they possess. It is safe to say that no one 
 can acquire prestige who worries about it, and more 
 particularly if he tries to build it on ' bluff. ' 
 
 One bit of bluff is perhaps allowable, namely, that 
 of keeping out of sight any disturbance you may feel 
 in an emergency. But even here, the best way to get 
 rid of excitement, oftentimes, is to blow it off rather 
 than bottle it up. For when you try to surpress it 
 
 # Stephane Lauzanne explains the victory of the Marne partly by 
 generalship, and partly by the morale of the troops, "armies which 
 without exception had kept intact their fighting spirit, that is, 
 their faith in themselves, in their leaders, in the destiny of their 
 country, in the beauty of the cause for which they fought. 
 
 "I remember asking many of the officers attached to the forces 
 which after the battle of Charleroi retreated under a broiling sun 
 along roads burning with heat through a suffocating dust, how they 
 felt at that disheartening time. 'We did not know where we were 
 going nor what we were doing, but we did know one thing, — that 
 we would beat them.' " 
 
136 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 
 
 you show to yourself a sort of fear of your own 
 emotion. 
 
 It is also a concession to human nature to transfer 
 an officer from the command in which he has made 
 his maiden mistakes to one in which he can act with 
 the advantage of the unknown, receiving the benefit 
 of all doubts. But here again, a man of genuine 
 candor and strength of character has no need of 
 this artifice. The surest basis for prestige is the 
 assumption that one is certain to be known, sooner 
 or later, for what one is. 
 
 4. Dignity and symbolism of behavior. There is 
 no doubt that much of the quality of prestige lies 
 in the manner, the decision of gesture, the unflinch- 
 ing expectation of being obeyed. It is also true that 
 these qualities cannot be laid on by mere dint of will. 
 It is they, perhaps, which chiefly give rise to the 
 superstition regarding prestige. But it is they 
 which naturally follow, as the outward expression 
 of the qualities above mentioned. 
 
 Dignity comes from seeing things in their right 
 proportion. It has no opposition to fun and com- 
 radeship with the men. In the etiquette of all 
 armies, some barriers are placed which prevent 
 undue familiarity of officers with men ; but there are 
 no barriers to an open human relationship, and to 
 humor. The test of dignity is not stiffness or 
 haughtiness, but elasticity, — the power of making a 
 quick transition from fun to business, and of carry- 
 ing your men with you. 
 
prestige: the psychology of command 137 
 
 But dignity of behavior is not enough without the 
 second quality above mentioned, — symbolism. This 
 implies first of all, that the officer's words and 
 gestures should not alone tell what is to be done, 
 but suggest also the spirit of doing it. If you expect 
 commands to be executed with snap and vigor, this 
 quality must precede, in the tone and attitude with 
 which you give the command. And symbolism im- 
 plies, besides this, that the action of a man is an 
 index to his habitual thinking. Gestures express 
 the subconscious parts of the mind ; they reveal what 
 words cannot, the mental region in which a man 
 lives. If he is seeing the horizons of his own office, 
 and is filled with the meaning and issues of the 
 campaign, these things will make themselves felt, 
 involuntarily, in his manner. The symbolism which 
 in the ritual of the army is concentrated in the occa- 
 sional ceremonies will be constantly present in his 
 actions ; without any effort on his part, his carriage 
 will be itself a ceremony, individual and natural. 
 
 In choosing its officers for their personal quali- 
 fications, the army does not leave them to work out 
 the problem of command unaided: it supplies them 
 with some nest-egg of original capital in the way 
 of the dignity and symbolism that enter into pres- 
 tige. By the insignia of rank, by making them the 
 channel of information to the men, by supplying 
 them with special knowledge about situations and 
 plans, by backing their native authority with the 
 whole weight of its will, its punishments and re- 
 
138 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 
 
 wards, it does all that an external power could do 
 to mount and equip the officer's own power. 
 
 The army creates the office; it cannot create the 
 man. Prestige can only result when the trappings 
 and powers of office fit the man like a natural gar- 
 ment because he has grown into them. The officer 
 who falls back on his office, has frequently to invoke 
 its authority and punishments, is not on the way to 
 prestige: for this can come only when he is trans- 
 parent, so to speak, to the office, feeling no distinc- 
 tion between it and himself, and so suggesting none. 
 Then, he gives an order without the shadow of sug- 
 gestion that it might be disobeyed: and his abso- 
 lute expectation of obedience becomes a powerful 
 factor in bringing about the reality. 
 
 In reaching this state of mind in which authorita- 
 tiveness has become second nature, there is no sub- 
 stitute for experience. It is natural that in a thou- 
 sand matters of judgment, of how much and how 
 little to require, only the seasoned officer can have 
 the true intuition which gives simplicity and cer- 
 tainty in command. The beginner will at times be 
 too severe for fear of being too lenient, and at others 
 too lenient for fear of being too severe. It is in 
 human nature I will not say to stand, but to prefer, 
 being held to rigorous standards, — but only on one 
 condition : that beneath the iron will there is known 
 to be a complete knowledge and consideration of the 
 limits of the human organism. As long as obedience 
 
prestige: the psychology of command 139 
 
 is an act of confidence which commits vital interests 
 into the hands of officers, command must be an act 
 of thorough responsibility ; and a large, though un- 
 scheduled, part of the life of an army consists in 
 the gradual education of the officers by the privates, 
 through their spontaneous reactions. Hence there 
 is not, and there ought not to be, prestige apart from 
 experience, none like that of the man who has been 
 tested and has made good, who knows his instru- 
 ment, and is fortified against miscalculation. 
 
 In his account of experiences as a dragoon at the 
 beginning of the war, Christian Mallett tells of a 
 speech by General Foch to the officers of his unit: 
 
 " Listening to the General was like experiencing 
 a species of shock. He hammered out his words and 
 scanned his phrases in a manner which made us 
 feel ill at ease. His speech was a flagellation, and 
 we felt a sort of moral abaissement as a result of it. 
 His look seized us and held us. 
 
 1 ' First he spoke to us of our mission, of the utility 
 of training the men in view of the coming fatigues : 
 
 " 'Train their arms, train their legs, train their 
 muscles, train their backs. You possess fine quali- 
 ties: draw on them from the soles of your feet if 
 necessary but get them into your heads. I have no 
 use for people who are said to be animated by good 
 intentions. Good intentions are not enough. I want 
 people who are determined to get there, and who 
 do.' 
 
 " There are shreds of his phrases that remain 
 graven upon my memory, curt short phrases, punc- 
 
140 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 
 
 tuated by a sharp gesture, or by an indescribable 
 look of the eye : 
 
 " 'If you want to overturn that wall, don't blunt 
 your bayonet point on it; what is necessary is to 
 break it, shatter it, overturn it, stamp on it, and 
 walk over the ruins, for we are going to walk over 
 ruins. If we have not done so already . . . (and 
 here he suddenly lowered his voice, and gave it an 
 intonation almost mysterious) it is because we were 
 not ready. We lacked explosives, bombs, grenades, 
 minnewerfers, which we now have. And we are 
 going to strike : for we have a stock such as you can- 
 not even have an idea of. We are going to swamp 
 the enemy, strike him everywhere at once, — in his 
 defenses, in his morale, — harass him, madden him, 
 crush him. We will march over nothing but ruins. ' 
 
 "Then he went off quite naturally, without any 
 theatrical effect. He said just what he had to say, 
 and he did not say a word too many. He saluted us : 
 
 " 'I hope, gentlemen, to have the honor of seeing 
 you again.' 
 
 1 ' A moment later his motor car was carrying him 
 off." 
 
 In this account, all the above-mentioned qualities 
 are exemplified, and in addition the quality which is 
 at the basis of all of them, invincible resolution, that 
 undismayable, undefeatable determination to win, 
 founded on a grasp of the situation capable of pull- 
 ing victory out of apparent disaster, that could well 
 come to men of less force as "a species of shock." 
 Such a man through his eye, through his voice, 
 through his gesture, through the substance of what 
 
prestige: the psychology of command 141 
 
 he says, through an absorption in his work and a 
 belief in his mission, — homely qualities rising to the 
 point of genius — can infuse his own state of mind 
 and will into his men and magnify them. 
 
 Mr. Yeats has denned genius as the deliberate 
 choice of living with the major issues of life. The 
 simple and poor of the world live with these major 
 issues, — life and death, fortune and misfortune, dan- 
 gers and hazards of all sorts, — not by choice but by 
 necessity; and men of genius often prefer to find 
 their associates among them (Mr. Yeats was think- 
 ing of Synge at the time) because they find their 
 proper interests there. Whether or not this is true 
 of other kinds of genius, it may be taken as giving 
 a helpful light upon military genius, — for this too 
 might be described as the deliberate preference of 
 living with the major issues. And this is certainly 
 the secret of prestige, so far as it has a secret: it 
 is, as we said, a kind of transparency of a man to 
 that greater thing, the will of army and nation, 
 which visibly is working through his agency. With 
 this understanding of prestige and of genius, 
 we can readily agree that prestige is a matter of 
 genius. But it is not out of the reach of any officer 
 who has the capacity to desire it, and the moral 
 courage to pay its price. 
 
CHAPTER XIII 
 
 MOKALE-BUILDING FACTORS 
 
 We have spoken of the qualities which constitute 
 morale in officers and men. We have so far said lit- 
 tle of the chief enemies of morale which the soldier 
 has to meet, especially of fear, because we wish to 
 speak of them more fully by themselves. But before 
 doing this, let me bring together here for summary 
 view, the various factors that help to build morale, 
 several of which have already been incidentally 
 mentioned. 
 
 Certain of these factors are mechanical; they 
 affect morale automatically without requiring sepa- 
 rate attention. Anyone who has watched a group 
 of recruits go through the early stages of training 
 until they are reasonably skilled in the close-order 
 work will have seen that changes are taking place in 
 their mental attitude at the same time. I shall begin 
 with these automatic influences, and first of all, the 
 simple lapse of time. 
 
 1. Time. The average raw recruit is a bundle of 
 ignorance and corresponding embarrassment if not 
 dismay, regarding the ways of war. Time answers 
 his questions, gives him self-confidence, reassures 
 him regarding the disposition of the world of neces- 
 sity that surrounds him. He has come with the 
 
 142 
 
MORALE-BUILDING FACTORS 143 
 
 ragged strands of broken-off interests badgering his 
 mind : the new business has as yet little if any hold 
 on his fancy. Time reverses the situation: the 
 former interests heal over — unless there is some- 
 thing at home that keeps them sore — and the new 
 interests acquire warmth and actuality of them- 
 selves. Time gives back the mental bearings, the 
 new points of reference for mental comings and 
 goings, which were momentarily lost in the days of 
 transition. 
 
 2. Physical condition. All purposes and habits 
 have a twofold base, physical and mental : and each 
 of these two sides affects the other. The lethargic 
 body has fears and dreads that the sound body is 
 free from. Apathy is largely a compound of sub- 
 conscious shrinkings from hardship and subcon- 
 scious fears, which generate an equally subconscious 
 wish that by some lucky accident the brunt of 
 things would fall — anywhere else than on number 
 one. These shrinkings are largely due to physical 
 softness and unfitness. 
 
 We have to bear in mind that morale, as a state 
 of readiness to act, requires an alertness and con- 
 fidence in one's powers of action. " Self-reliance," 
 says an army manual, "is after all a physical qual- 
 ity, as it induces men to dare, because of the con- 
 sciousness of ability to do." I dare say that there 
 is something more in self-reliance than the physical 
 ability; but certain it is that lazy muscles and slug- 
 gish blood and half-good digestion with half-good 
 
144 MOKALE AND ITS ENEMIES 
 
 sleep are no fit soil for purposes to grow in that 
 promise effort and pain. 
 
 Conversely, physical fitness changes the whole 
 mental attitude. Generous willingness to assume 
 the troubles of others as well as one's own is pos- 
 sible only to those who have margins of energy. 
 The primary enemy of morale is not pessimism, it is 
 plain apathy or indifference; and the conditions of 
 camp life, especially with an abundance of athletics 
 in the form of vigorous and aggressive games, box- 
 ing, etc., are such that indifference, feebleness of 
 spirit, self-centeredness, without much attention, die 
 a natural death. 
 
 3. Skill. Ability to do a thing generates a wish 
 to do it. This is true of skill with rifle and bayonet 
 as well as of skill with the instruments of peace : it 
 is as true of tactical and strategic ability as it is of 
 political ability. It has been recognized as one of 
 the dangers of highly trained military establish- 
 ments in time of peace: the German army having 
 been brought to an almost imperative sense of 
 ability, a huge restless impulse to go to arms per- 
 vaded the nation, — that "tramping, drilling foolery 
 at the heart of Europe,'' as Mr. Wells described it, 
 aching to set itself in motion. There is plenty to 
 offset this wish in the wiser military heads; our 
 own army has never been an irritant toward war. 
 But given the war, the same impulsive quality of 
 conscious skill becomes one of the primary assets 
 of morale. 
 
MORALE-BUILDING FACTORS 145 
 
 4. Authority of the environment. The spirit of 
 the army will work its way through the skin of the 
 recruit without any effort on the army's part. Men 
 who live much together differ not less widely in 
 opinions, etc., than men who live apart; but in the 
 undiscussed things they acquire insensibly a com- 
 mon outlook. The purposes that are in the air, and 
 are taken more or less for granted, seize upon 
 them. Especially, the presence of officers whom the 
 men have learned to respect, who have the prestige 
 we were lately speaking of, gradually makes the 
 whole detachment over into their likeness. Assum- 
 ing that there are no mental hangings-back which 
 prevent this factor from having its full effect, I 
 should judge this natural self-propagation of the 
 spirit of the group and of its leaders to be the great- 
 est single factor in the making of morale. A train- 
 ing detachment seldom fails to take on the character 
 of its commanding officer to a greater or less degree. 
 
 5. The community. A part of the environment 
 that cannot be ignored in its morale-making effect 
 is the civil community in which the detachment is 
 located. And nothing has been made clearer, in our 
 short experience at war, than that communities have 
 much to learn in the exercise of this function. An 
 undue indifference on the one side to the welfare 
 and entertainment of the men, and an undue and 
 fussy hero-worship on the other, highly embarrass- 
 ing to commanding officers, are extremes between 
 which the steering is not easy. 
 
146 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 
 
 The young women of a community are perhaps 
 chiefly responsible for the quality of the self-esteem 
 of enlisted men. It is a fair, and not unanswerable 
 question for each community whether on the whole 
 it is aiding soldierly sobriety of self-judgment, or 
 encouraging the recruit to collect too much in ad- 
 vance upon his undoubted future heroism. The re- 
 cruit has not ceased to be human because he has be- 
 come a soldier. 
 
 6. Elimination of friction. Having mentioned, so 
 far, morale-forming agencies which have their effect 
 without any direct official effort, I come to a point 
 at which deliberate effort can well be directed. 
 Morale is a plant that will grow — to a certain extent 
 — by itself, if hindrances are removed. A little psy- 
 chological discernment used in discovering points of 
 friction, ignorance, misunderstanding, or avoidable 
 discomfort in the order of living, will do much to 
 remove unnecessary barriers to the growth of fight- 
 ing spirit. For there are queer paradoxes in human 
 nature, which allow those who have given all with- 
 out reserve to balk inwardly at trifles, such as food 
 slightly below camp standard, when they regard 
 those minor troubles as unnecessary. 
 
 Perhaps there is here a general principle of train- 
 ing, namely, No hardship for hardship's sake. Mor- 
 ale, which includes a good-will to endure whatever 
 the undertaking calls for, cannot be made without 
 hardship; but for training purposes a line should 
 be drawn at the point where the difficulty in question 
 
MORALE-BUILDING FACTORS 147 
 
 ceases to be a genuine preparation, and becomes a 
 mere stunt. Thus, for example, night guard duty 
 is a normal part of training. This may involve, 
 later on, standing in ice-water during winter nights ; 
 and that is one of the things men will do without a 
 murmur when it is necessary. But it is also one 
 of the things which nobody is better fitted for by 
 practising it ; and to require it as a part of training 
 would be an excess of zeal. 
 
 The elimination of friction does not mean molly- 
 coddling the army nor softening the work of train- 
 ing: it means the recognition of waste motion, the 
 removal of useless puzzles, and the diminution of 
 hardship which is without disciplinary value. 
 
 7. Appeal to feeling and imagination. When we 
 reach the positive factors of morale-building, i. e., 
 those in which a direct effort may be employed, we 
 have to tread with some care. It is easy for a posi- 
 tive effort to defeat its own purpose, particularly 
 if it is labeled or recognized as an effort to improve 
 morale. There is always something dismal and 
 pathetic, whether in college athletics or elsewhere, 
 in an effort to arouse a spirit which the very effort 
 declares to be lacking.* 
 
 But it is possible at times to appeal directly to 
 
 *So, for example, the important work of introducing amuse- 
 ments of various sorts into camp life, if it gives the impression 
 of sugar-coating a pill rather than of meeting a definite demand, 
 will have a reaction not wholly expected. Camps cannot have too 
 much good entertainment in the right place; but the sense that 
 "we" are being good to "you" must be kept out of it. The best 
 entertainments are those in which the men themselves take part; 
 and the best of all is camp music. 
 
148 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 
 
 the feeling of soldiers in training ; and it goes with- 
 out saying that the fundamental feelings involved in 
 war-making of which we spoke at the outset,* 
 must be enlisted if the morale is to be more 
 than a Platonic affair. These feelings, however, 
 can hardly live without the aid of imagination. An 
 historic opportunity is something that the physical 
 eye wholly fails to perceive ; and in a sense, this war, 
 whose origins are so remote from us, and whose op- 
 erations are so immense, has to be fought on the 
 strength of imagination. 
 
 Feeling and imagination are communicated most 
 directly by contagion from those who have it; and 
 this is true not only of the fundamental feelings in 
 the soldier's purpose, but also of those powerful 
 auxiliary feelings, his pride as a soldier and his 
 pride in his unit. 
 
 In the early days of the war, when Great Britain 
 was faced with the problem of making an immense 
 and rapid increase in its army, it might have done 
 so by creating many new regiments out of the new 
 material. Instead, it was decided as far as possible 
 to increase the number of battalions in each regi- 
 ment, in order that the recruits should have about 
 them not alone the traditions of old organizations, 
 but the expectant and requiring spirit of men con- 
 cerned to maintain their historic standards. 
 
 A remark may not be out of order on the unwis- 
 dom of dealing too harshly with the vanity and 
 
 ♦Chapter III. 
 
MORALE-BUILDING FACTORS 149 
 
 swagger of young soldiers who are on the way to a 
 more decent pride. There are diseases in all child- 
 hoods. The soldier has his own dramatic types, 
 chesty, * ' Full of strange oaths, and bearded like the 
 pard," wanting you to feel in him the old military 
 dog. It is true, the mild-eyed diffident chap may beat 
 him out as a soldier. But on the whole, bravura is 
 the mere excrescence of a valuable quality, and the 
 least wise thing an officer can do is to humiliate the 
 man who is in the first stages of soldierly self -con- 
 sciousness. 
 
 The soldier's pride is involved in the distinction 
 that has been persistently drawn between the 
 drafted man and the volunteer. Nobody should be 
 permitted to make this contrast unrebuked : it is the 
 whole meaning of the general draft that the dis- 
 tinction shall be obliterated. All drafted men are 
 volunteers, but the volunteering has been done en 
 bloc by their representatives in Congress. The 
 nation has volunteered: the draft is a method for 
 organizing the nation at war. 
 
 The problem of morale, in its practical form, is 
 very largely that of getting rid of the half -morale 
 that is engendered by the situation of necessary 
 service created by the draft method. The difficulty 
 is the difficulty of all law as it descends upon free- 
 men, " leaving them as free as before" — yet not 
 quite feeling so free. It is necessary to insert a 
 sense of freedom underneath the load of necessity; 
 this may be done by flooding the man's own motive 
 
150 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 
 
 power until he, too, wants the war and the draft; 
 but it can never be done while the fact of the draft 
 seems to him even slightly a derogation from hi9 
 personal dignity. 
 
 8. The strengthening of belief. With all that can 
 be done to support and inspire the soldier's feelings, 
 the one durable factor of morale that is open to di- 
 rect control is the man's thought; and the constant 
 insistence of our argument has been that it is 
 through his thought and belief that his serious feel- 
 ings are most honorably as well as most effectively 
 approached. 
 
 Beneath the superficial soldier, sensitive about 
 his small discomforts, and ready to be amused, there 
 is a thoughtful soldier who, perhaps, seldom comes 
 to expression, but who nevertheless is thinking his 
 long thoughts in his quiet moments, by himself or 
 in company with his bunky. To a large degree, men 
 take their ideas and beliefs on trust, from the crowd, 
 through the gate of emotion. And the soldier is not 
 less amenable to these influences than other men. 
 But on the other hand, to no one is the individual 
 issue so poignant as to the soldier, and his private 
 concern must nourish his private thought. The 
 time comes when he must realize that it is his career 
 that is going into the hopper, his life, possibly the 
 welfare of his family. Social persuasions will not 
 help him then, — nothing but his own convictions. 
 
 Morale is at bottom a state of will or purpose: 
 and the first factor in any mature human purpose 
 
MORALE-BUILDING FACTORS 151 
 
 is knowledge, i. e., knowledge of the thing to be 
 gained by the purpose, — the good to be reached or 
 the evil to be averted, or both. Hence, in any de- 
 velopment of military morale the supreme worth of 
 the aims of the war must be made the object of par- 
 ticular care.* 
 
 Certain elements of morale, the more personal ele- 
 ments relating to the soldier's outlook on religion 
 and moral principle in general, must come from out- 
 side the army. It is not the business of the army 
 to take the place of priest, parent, or schoolmaster. 
 If an officer has anything paternal in his tempera- 
 ment — and fortunately most officers have — he will 
 find many an unofficial occasion for acting in all 
 these capacities toward individual men. Non-coms, 
 especially top sergeants, who have the advantage of 
 mingling much with the members of the company, 
 have many an opportunity for a friendly word ; but 
 if the captain is of the right sort, he can without loss 
 of military dignity bring much of the quality of the 
 family into his entire command; the French are 
 
 *It is better to take this motive for granted than to tamper with 
 it and belabor it ineffectively, argumentatively, or oratorically. 
 The inspiring speech always has its function; but for the longer 
 thoughts of the soldier in training, nothing but sober truth in tho 
 form of information and reflection will give him the grist he needs. 
 Nothing could be more powerful as a morale-making agency than the 
 action of a nation which should, as it were, lay its cards on the 
 table before its soldiers in training, and say, "These are the data 
 upon which our decision is based; this is the history of the case; 
 these are the principles involved. Judge for yourself." I dare say 
 it is unprecedented in the history of warfare that the United States 
 in the summer of 1918 inaugurated just this undertaking in a 
 large number of its training detachments. 
 
102 MOEALE AND ITS ENEMIES 
 
 especially gifted in this way. But these are matters 
 of personality; and it relieves the army for single- 
 minded attention to its proper work to have outside 
 agencies in co-operation with it, — provided these 
 agencies do not become too numerous and distract- 
 ing. The church in some form, preferably in its 
 own representatives than in its numerous offshoots, 
 should be always accessible. For in the long run a 
 man must fight on the strength of his religion; his 
 beliefs about things above the human level permeate 
 all those human and social beliefs which directly 
 concern the war. 
 
 Belief in the validity of the cause, belief in the 
 method of procedure — i. e., that war is called for, 
 belief in the possibility (not the ease) of success, 
 belief in the army and its management. These are 
 the chief building-stones for lasting morale, — and 
 whatever the army can do to strengthen these be- 
 liefs, by direct instruction or otherwise, will add to 
 its resources throughout the war. 
 
 In addition to these, each soldier needs a phil- 
 osophy of life which enables him to adjust himself 
 to the minor and major troubles of his situation and 
 work. These for the most part, he must work out 
 for himself in the school of experience : but he may 
 be aided by whatever of light his personal advisers, 
 religious and other, may give him. And there is 
 also a good chance that the psychologist may be of 
 use to him, especially in dealing with the problem of 
 fear. 
 
CHAPTER XIV 
 
 FEAB AND ITS CONTROL 
 
 Courage is the traditional kernel of morale and the 
 characteristic quality of the soldier. I doubt, how- 
 ever, whether it is a distinct and separate quality. 
 Given discipline, experience, good condition, pug- 
 nacity, and faith, you will not find courage lacking 
 in any body of men. It is hardly distinct from 
 morale in general. The same influences that under- 
 mine morale will also undermine courage; namely, 
 indifference, discouragement, and fear. But cour- 
 age is generally considered as the especial element 
 of character which overcomes fear. And as fear is 
 universal, we shall give some attention to its nature, 
 and to the ways of meeting it. 
 
 Many men suffer, during their training days, from 
 a fear of fear. They hope they will not funk when 
 the time comes; but they are not inwardly sure of 
 it. The fact is, no one knows in advance how he is 
 going to behave in an emergency. But one thing 
 can be said with entire confidence — and this should 
 be of some service to those who fancy that their 
 being afraid will mark them out from their com- 
 rades — everybody fears. 
 
 This is the unanimous testimony of men who have 
 seen enough of war to judge competently, and to 
 
 153 
 
154 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 
 
 speak with candor. But the biological nature of 
 fear would lead to the same conclusion. 
 
 For while there are many things which ordinarily 
 arouse fear, they all have this in common: they are 
 or represent conditions for which man has no organs 
 of instinctive adaptation. Being held under water, 
 or over deep spaces of empty air, causes instinctive 
 shrinking to the creature who has neither gills nor 
 wings. Fire, loud noises (suggesting changes too 
 rapid for our powers of adjustment), and for a time, 
 darkness and solitude, indicate in the same way a 
 world unfit for our native powers. 
 
 Fear, in short, may be described as the natural 
 reaction to a radically unfit environment ; and there 
 is no better composite example of such an environ- 
 ment than the field of battle. There are innate nerv- 
 ous connections which tend to operate spontane- 
 ously, without consulting will and reason, to 
 diminish the steadiness of muscular control, obscure 
 the vision, alter the breathing, and dry the throat. 
 fThey can be brought under control, but as in most 
 other matters, after having been experienced, and 
 by the aid of experience, — not before. 
 
 In fact, it is rather what a man thinks than what 
 he physically experiences in battle that arouses fear : 
 man's imagination has always been, since the days 
 of taboo-magic, spooks, and witchcraft, his chief 
 source of apprehension and dread. All animals have 
 life-preservative reactions; but probably it is only 
 man that fears death, for it is only man that knows — 
 
FEAB AND ITS CONTROL 155 
 
 or thinks he knows — enough about death to feel in 
 it the terror of the unfathomed and unknown. 
 
 It is within the truth to say that man is naturally 
 the most fear-ful of animals,* partly on account of 
 this reflectiveness and forethought, partly because 
 he is more sensitive to pain, and largely because of 
 his purely aesthetic regard for his own body. In 
 the instinctive shrinking from the impact of bullet 
 or shell-fragment it is less the pain or the finish that 
 one dreads than the idea of mutilation, of the ruth- 
 less mixing and tearing of fine-wrought tissues, and 
 of perpetual bondage to the consciousness of a 
 broken frame. There is withal a disinterested 
 hatred of the shame and waste of it — the miserable 
 destruction of this fair and serviceable machine, the 
 body. None of these elements of human fear would 
 trouble the brute. 
 
 Fear is, therefore, no discredit to a man: on the 
 contrary it would be rather less than human to be 
 undisturbed at the beginning of one's experience 
 under fire. 
 
 But the beginning of the control of fear comes 
 from the same human faculty of self -consciousness ; 
 namely, from understanding the psychological 
 nature of fear, and its normal function in the organ- 
 ism. For fear, as a sign that instinctive processes 
 of concealment or flight have been aroused, is a 
 normal reaction to an abnormal situation. It is a 
 
 "Du Picq says that "of all animals man is the most cowardly." 
 The idea is right, but the expression is misleading, for reasons 
 given below. 
 
156 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 
 
 state of transition from a lower to a higher level of 
 activity, having in common with anger the secretion 
 of adrenalin which throws the balance of circula- 
 tion from the viscera to the large body muscles, in- 
 creases the quantity of sugar in the blood — the most 
 available of organic fuels, and raises the threshold 
 of fatigue, preparing the body for the long and 
 heavy exertion of flight or fight, as the case may be. 
 In a small way, any one who has gone through the 
 experience of embarrassment in speaking before an 
 audience can recognize this function. Spealdng is a 
 matter of vigorous organic activity; and what we 
 call embarrassment indicates the transition — per- 
 haps from the comparative inaction and irrespon- 
 sibility of sitting, one among many, on a platform, 
 to the state of effort in which alone you must ''hold" 
 your audience. As your moment approaches you 
 may find your heart chugging uneasily, your breath 
 impeded, and your mouth dry : and you may say to 
 yourself, "I am embarrassed; this is wholly unrea- 
 sonable," a bit of introspection which — if it goes 
 no farther — only adds to your confusion. But if 
 your reflection goes a stage farther, and you realize 
 that your body is making dumb efforts to prepare 
 for a new level of action, your self -consciousness 
 may become a help : by rousing yourself to a position 
 of alertness and taking a few deep breaths of your 
 own accord, you can give nature a lift, and make 
 the transition less abrupt. The same is true to some 
 extent of more serious types of fear : one who real- 
 
FEAE AND ITS CONTROL 157 
 
 izes what nature is trying to do for him in its rather 
 bedevilled attempts to supply him with unwonted 
 active-capacity can to a certain extent look on and 
 guide the process. 
 
 For there is no doubt that a fearsome body can 
 co-exist with a thoroughly cool and determined head. 
 The old story of General Turenne will bear repeat- 
 ing. Finding himself on one occasion unable to sup- 
 press his shaking, he addressed his body thus: 
 1 'Tremble, body: you would tremble still more if 
 you knew into what I am going to take you." 
 The same observant detachment of mind from body, 
 — just short of the more effective freedom of con- 
 trol — is seen in a tale of our own late unpleasantness 
 in which a subordinate officer ventured to remark to 
 his colonel, ' ' Colonel, you seem frightened, ' ' and re- 
 ceived the retort, "So I am: and if you were half 
 as frightened as I am, you would be several miles 
 from this spot."* 
 
 It is well to know, also, that fear is a matter of 
 degree and is highly variable, sometimes unaccount- 
 ably so. Fatigue, drowsiness, darkness, and sur- 
 prise, all increase liability to fear. Nearly every 
 
 *I imagine that this same sense of detachment and semi-externa! 
 control of his body is what suggested the idea of being an "actor" 
 to the British officer who wrote these words in a letter: 
 
 "An officer out here has to be very brave or a very good actor, — 
 I think 90 per cent are actors. A bad actor is sent home, and a good 
 one is either polished off or earns the reputation of being a 'fearless 
 leader.' I think it is an insult to call a man 'fearless': I would 
 rather be called 'brainless.' . . . However there are times when 
 one can't help feeling that the acting can't go on forever, and I 
 am much more frightened of losing my head than I am of losing 
 my life. Discipline must be the strongest force in the world." 
 
158 MOEALE AND ITS ENEMIES 
 
 man is subject to transitory conditions of "nerves" 
 in which he will behave as under normal circum- 
 stances he would not. The man who when played 
 out will jump at a snap of the finger may go over 
 the top without a tremor when he is fresh.* It is 
 estimated that the general average accuracy of fire 
 in an engagement is l/50th of the normal accuracy. 
 General de Negrier has said that five out of a hun- 
 dred keep cool enough to fire as they would on the 
 range : but it must be said that ninety out of a hun- 
 dred are cool enough to fire in the general direction 
 of the enemy. f And there are few unable to use 
 the bayonet when they have reached that point. 
 
 Because of this variability, no one should be 
 counted cowardly on the strength of his behavior 
 in any particular case. It seems to me, indeed, very 
 uncertain whether the noun "coward" has any valid 
 application. There are certainly cowardly actions, 
 but I doubt whether there are any cowards. Fear 
 does not mean cowardice, for every normal human 
 being fears ; and every normal human being can con- 
 trol his fear, given sufficient experience, sufficient 
 opportunity to reckon with himself, and withal suf- 
 ficient interest in what he is doing 
 
 The courage required in the present war is of a 
 
 *The behavior of Napoleon's right wing in the battle of Wagram 
 shows this variability. 
 
 fin this respect, as in others, the American Marines at Chateau 
 Thierry achieved distinction. A participant writing of their rifle 
 fire says: "That men should fire deliberately use their sights, and 
 adjust their range was beyond their experience. It must have had 
 a telling effect on the morale of the Boche." 
 
FEAK AND ITS CONTROL 159 
 
 more deliberate sort than that of previous wars, 
 less supported by dash and the admiring eyes of 
 comrades. "Trench courage,' ' as LeBon says, "is 
 unaccompanied by fame : it consists almost entirely 
 in keeping cool and in giving brain and will free 
 play." The picture of courage is for the most part 
 simply the picture of steadiness, the mental poise 
 which comes from learning what can and what can- 
 not be done in given situations, of ceasing to try to 
 calculate what is incalculable, or to dodge the dan- 
 ger that is past ; and from reducing as much as pos- 
 sible to the level of habit. 
 
 Much depends on this matter of habit; for no mind 
 can keep its balance unless there is a goodly propor- 
 tion of what it can count on in the midst of what is 
 new and unanticipated from moment to moment. 
 The whole business of training, so far as it bears 
 on fear, consists in increasing the proportion of the 
 known to the unknown in every situation of combat. 
 Beside this, men in the trenches become keen ob- 
 servers of the habits of the enemy, know his mess 
 hours, his methods of shelling, and his hours for 
 strafing different spots : in all this our boys are much 
 aided by the methodical disposition of Fritzy, or 
 were so aided in earlier days. During my visit to 
 the front, I heard that the Germans had begun to 
 learn that their regularity was to our advantage, 
 and had begun methodically to vary their methods. 
 At the best the amount of uncertainty and shifting 
 in warfare is greatly in excess of the amount of 
 
160 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 
 
 possible habit; the mind has to live much in what 
 may be called the secondary habits — the habits of 
 making changes and adjustments of given kinds, 
 as from firing line to billets, from holding to attack, 
 from extreme idleness to extreme action. Almost 
 we might say, warfare of to-day requires the habit 
 of passing from extreme to extreme. But in any 
 case, a basis of habit is created, and with it the pos- 
 sibility of mentally classing the dangers, taking their 
 measure, and so reducing the scope of fear. 
 
 "Familiarity with the same dangers eventually 
 leaves the human animal unmoved. One's nerves no 
 longer quiver; the conscious and constant effort to 
 keep control over one's self is successful in the end. 
 Therein lies the secret of all military courage. Men 
 are not born brave; they become brave. The in- 
 stinct to be conquered is more or less resistant, that 
 is all. 
 
 "Moreover, one must live on the field of battle, 
 just as elsewhere: it is necessary to become accus- 
 tomed to this new existence no matter how perilous 
 or harsh it may be. And what renders it difficult, 
 more intolerable, is fear, the fear that throttles and 
 paralyzes. It has to be conquered, and finally one 
 does conquer it."* 
 
 Instinctively, in this way, the mind builds up its 
 own first line of defense against panic. But beside 
 this, there are various ways of dealing with the un- 
 welcome emotion as it begins to make itself felt, 
 such as every man learns for himself. It may not 
 be out of place to suggest certain of the more natu- 
 ral ways in which an antidote to fear can be found. 
 
 •Paul Lintier in "My 75." 
 
FEAR AND ITS CONTROL 161 
 
 THE CONTROL OF FEAR 
 
 Fear seldom outlasts the first plunge into combat ; 
 it has its chance to grow during the tense time of 
 waiting for the moment of attack. Action is the 
 sufficient antidote for fear in most cases; but for 
 the moments in which there is still a chance to direct 
 one's thoughts, the following natural aids to con- 
 trol may be mentioned: 
 
 1. Turning the mind deliberately to some- 
 thing in the region of habit, — i. e., to something in 
 which your control is certain and easy. The self- 
 suggestion of mastery of the situation flows outward 
 from any such center. A triviality of routine is 
 evidently better for this purpose than a thought- 
 demanding enterprise. Hence the instinctive resort 
 to cigarette or pipe; the mechanical review of the 
 equipment, etc. 
 
 2. Turning the mind to the troubles of the other 
 man. Fear is an attack of acute self -consciousness, 
 and is accordingly incompatible with self-forgetful- 
 ness. Here the habit of unselfishness is a great 
 stand-by. It is a general psychological law that self- 
 ishness predisposes to fear; and we may add that 
 all forms of sensuality predispose to selfishness. 
 
 3. Turning the mind to what you are going to do 
 to the enemy, rather than to what he is going to do 
 to you. The most complete antidote for fear is pug- 
 nacity. Nature has made the organic base of the 
 two emotions the same: both fighting and running 
 
162 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 
 
 away require large stocks of available energy for 
 intense and prolonged exertion. In the animal 
 world, the question whether to fight or run is some- 
 times a close one; and there is an obvious advan- 
 tage in having the two instinctive mechanisms 
 mounted, so to speak, on the same groundwork. A 
 recollection of the sources of indignation that are 
 most vital to the individual soldier may make just 
 the difference between an inward-turned and an 
 outward-turned set of mind, and between hesitation 
 and resolve. General Grant, in the well-known pas- 
 sage of his Memoirs, tells how he was afraid of the 
 enemy until it occurred to him that the enemy was 
 just as much afraid of him. 
 
 4. Recollection of first principles. The relative 
 importance of things is distorted by fear, as by other 
 emotions: the possibilities of the present crisis in 
 bringing pain or disfigurement or death loom bigger 
 than the things one is fighting for — which have a 
 way of retreating into the shadow. This is the time 
 for the philosophy of a man's quieter hours ; a time 
 for recalling that self of reference we were speak- 
 ing of, and the symbols of the drill-ground with all 
 that has been put into them of meaning. Plato's 
 definition of courage has not lost its point : he said 
 that courage was a holding to one's knowledge of 
 what is better and what is worse, — i. e., when cir- 
 cumstances favor forgetting. Sentiment distin- 
 guishes itself from belief in the moment of trial; 
 and the mind of the man that is furnished with the 
 
FEAR AND ITS CONTROL 163 
 
 belief in the proportions of thirds set forth in these 
 quiet words of Captain Norman Leslie of the Irish 
 Rifle Brigade will hold its level: 
 
 "Try not to worry too much about the war," he 
 wrote in a letter shortly before his death in action. 
 "Units and individuals cannot count. Remember 
 we are writing a new page of history. Future gen- 
 erations cannot be allowed to read of the decline of 
 the British Empire, and attribute it to us. We live 
 our little lives and die. To some are given chances 
 of proving themselves men, and to others no chance 
 comes." 
 
 What is it to "prove one's self a man"? I think 
 it means, to prove one's power to see the greatness 
 of the great purposes of history, as only a man can 
 see them; and to count oneself ennobled by giving 
 himself to them. 
 
 Fear is, of course, a sign of incomplete dedica- 
 tion. It is due to the lingering physical hope still 
 to save something of what in principle one has given 
 away. Of the "Spirit of the French Troops" 
 Lieut. Col. Paul Azan says, "The certainty of being 
 hit one day or another is in the mind of each; far 
 from quenching enthusiasm this stimulates it." 
 This spirit is surely the desideratum, whether or not 
 it is within reach of the average human frame: to 
 have made up one's mind to the final sacrifice, and 
 then to fill what time one has with the maximum of 
 effect. 
 
164 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 
 
 SUGGESTIONS FOB OFFICERS ON THE CONTROL OF FEAR IN 
 THEIR MEN 
 
 1. While it is for the soldier to lean against his 
 own self-concern, it is for the officer to take the 
 other direction, and meet more than half way the 
 natural element of self-interest that is in all fear. 
 Every man has a reasonable interest in not being 
 forgotten, or being simply a bit of waste in the 
 great scrap heap of war:* anything that reminds 
 him that he counts, and will not be lost sight of, will 
 reach the right spot. A sign of personal interest 
 will mean much; such a formality as calling the 
 roll will likewise mean much in another way, for it is 
 a sign of the presence there of the State itself, tak- 
 ing strict account of its individual members. 
 
 A French officer writes as follows of the morning 
 of the great and costly offensive of April 16, 1917 : 
 
 ' ' I remember when my battalion was preparing to 
 jump over the parapet. I went through the trenches 
 to see if everybody was ready. I shook hands with 
 many of the soldiers; their officers were among 
 them. I felt everywhere a wave of brotherhood, a 
 feeling of duty, of grim determination. . Part of 
 the officers were killed during the battle. One of 
 them was a young priest, a company commander 
 named Marck. When we were relieved on April 
 20, those men went across to his grave. Nobody 
 could stop them. They disinterred the corpse and 
 
 *These words of a wounded British soldier at Southampton show 
 the persistent feeling that waste is the only intolerable thing: 
 
 "It's well thought out, and I think you'll find that all our casual- 
 ties whatever they may be will be well paid for, — nothing wasted 
 or chucked away. . . . Myself? — You can't make such big omelettes 
 as this without cracking a good many eggs, you know!" 
 
FEAR AND ITS CONTROL 165 
 
 carried it with them wrapped in canvas, though we 
 had a very hard march of ten miles in the mud dur- 
 ing the night, pitch dark, and under continual bom- 
 bardment. Those men wanted to give to the chief 
 they loved a solemn funeral." Thus the individual 
 quality asserts itself and seeks its rights in the midst 
 of the vast impersonality of war. 
 
 2. Aid the outward-turning of their minds, by 
 giving them something to do while waiting. Call 
 their attention to the small concrete duties that have 
 become semi-automatic, the order of their equip- 
 ment, etc., thus reminding them of their "self of 
 reference." If circumstances permit their being 
 allowed to fire, whether or not the firing will do much 
 good, so much the better: whatever suggests doing 
 things to the enemy will aid the turning of bodily 
 preparations down the pugnacity-channel rather 
 than the fear-channel. Fear can better be met by 
 substitution of alternative interests than by di- 
 rectly rebuking it and so recognizing and consoli- 
 dating it, producing a division within the mind. 
 It is here that "suggestion" has its place: ideas of 
 action and of success can be suggested, ideas of the 
 game side of the operation, rivalry with other units, 
 etc. 
 
 3. But fear will never be met by minimizing the 
 occasion : this only drives it to deeper, more private 
 and dangerous recesses. What men have the great- 
 est right to, under the circumstances of battle, is 
 the fullest knowledge of their general situation that 
 can be given them. Their objectives they already 
 
166 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 
 
 know, probably in minute detail, together with the 
 exact routes of reaching them. But they also are 
 concerned to have full knowledge of what is against 
 them, of what suport and reserve is behind them, 
 — and if possible of the strength and disposition of 
 the artillery. 
 
 It is not incompatible with the suggestion of suc- 
 cess to prepare the men with the greatest candor for 
 all contingencies, forestalling in this way the pos- 
 sibility of surprise, the greatest breeder of panic. 
 An officer who has once concealed the worst facts 
 of the situation from his command, can hardly hope 
 for their full confidence, — an indispensable element 
 in any power he may have over their fears. 
 
 4. Be alert for the beginnings of agitation, hurry 
 or confusion; slow the men down, suspend firing, 
 or otherwise give them a chance to recover control. 
 If you have to deal with an infectious bit of fear, 
 avoid violent methods except as a last resort. Do 
 not, however, use threat or bluster as a substitute 
 for action ; mean everything you say. Only remem- 
 ber that extremes, before extremes are necessary, 
 are a confession of your own alarm, and make the 
 case worse. Caesar's way of rallying a broken col- 
 umn may still have an application. Finding the 
 standard bearer, he said, "Friend, you are mis- 
 taken : it is in this direction you mean to run. ' ' 
 
 5. Many men fear through a false conception of 
 the nature of heroism. They are likely to think that 
 it consists in an imprudent and irregular ' ' contempt 
 
FEAB AND ITS CONTROL 167 
 
 of danger"; and this feeling is enhanced by the gen- 
 eral approval of occasional brilliant and foolhardy 
 escapades. There is a real dilemma here for the 
 officer; and I see no complete solution of it, — for 
 what the dare-devils do is often immensely worth 
 doing. But the men must learn that steady team- 
 work and strict adherence to orders are the basis of 
 the courage that counts ; and that a dead soldier is 
 seldom of further use to the present emergency. 
 
 The same applies, of course, to the officer's own 
 action. The most powerful means, to-day as always, 
 of steadying a wavering line at a critical moment 
 is the instant readiness of officers to act in "con- 
 tempt of danger"; but the example of self -exposure 
 will be powerful just in proportion as it has been 
 kept in reserve, and so bears the meaning of a 
 deliberate rather than an impulsive or flurried act. 
 Even in the heat of battle, that command of the 
 head which can instantly bend every means accu- 
 rately to the end, and in the most lavish spending 
 still conserve, — that presence of the mind, is the one 
 supreme source of stability and control, 
 
CHAPTER XV 
 
 WAR AND WOMEN 
 
 The seasoned soldier is apt to regard with some im- 
 patience the various signs of public concern about 
 the morals of men in service. The main reason for 
 this impatience we can readily understand. It is 
 not a simple case of the annoyance which any ex- 
 ternal solicitude for the personal consciences of 
 mature men is bound to excite. It is a feeling that 
 such solicitude at such a moment is out of order and 
 out of perspective. When everything depends upon 
 speed, concentration, and the good-will on all hands 
 to suppress distracting side-issues, the questionings 
 of the personal moralist might well seem strangely 
 ill-timed. 
 
 There are other reasons less elementary and less 
 general. There are many who feel that in war all 
 values are somewhat altered ; that the moral balance 
 of the men is bound to undergo a temporary change 
 for the work in hand; that we must be prepared to 
 accept a certain amount of crudity and error as a 
 part of the cost of war in exactly the same spirit as 
 that in which Lincoln accepted the rampant profit- 
 eering of his day as a part of the cost of the Civil 
 War. And there are some who believe that our 
 nominal standards of social conduct are over-refined 
 
 168 
 
WAB AND WOMEN 169 
 
 if not actually dishonest; that soldiering promises 
 to bring a franker and freer and sounder temper 
 into our bourgeois existence; that the burden of 
 proof, at any rate, rests rather upon the civilian 
 than upon the military ideal, wherever they prove 
 to differ. 
 
 But among the many things which make this war 
 unusual, one of the most conspicious is the fact that, 
 while men have never been put to such intense and 
 long-continued strain, there has never been such 
 organized and minute study of the soldier's needs. 
 It is a part of the great and critical game of 
 efficiency that every leak should be examined and 
 understood. There is no disposition to accept as a 
 necessary evil anything that has a bearing on the 
 health or morale of the men. And while morality, 
 in the narrower sense, is far from identical with 
 morale, it distinctly bears on it — as, for example, 
 in the connection between sensuality and fear of 
 which we were speaking. The old-fashioned army 
 officer who played the double role of regarding the 
 morals of his men as their own private affair, and 
 at the same time of seeing to it that in view of 
 human nature a degree of opportunity for self- 
 indulgence was not lacking, has all but disappeared. 
 Our army commands are becoming studiously pater- 
 nal in order that no element of success shall be 
 overlooked. 
 
 To my mind there is no need for the services 
 either of the censor or of the professional white- 
 
170 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 
 
 washer in this matter of the soldier's morality. In 
 this day of general willingness to face facts, and 
 ability to judge them sanely, these services are more 
 likely to do harm than good. The cure for the critic 
 is not suppression; and the cure for any incidental 
 evil of army life is not criticism. In each case the 
 need is for accurate knowledge and a wider psy- 
 chological understanding. 
 
 Two facts inseparable from war tend to make the 
 soldier in general and the woman in general un- 
 usually interesting to each other. One is that the 
 soldier regards himself, and is regarded, as engaged 
 in protecting women and what women stand for. 
 Women become the symbols for the whole of that 
 amenity of life built up and cherished by the finer 
 sensitivities of the race; the soldier becomes the 
 symbol of its defense. The other is that in the 
 actual business of war men are segregated and 
 women are segregated. The communities at the 
 front, and to a lesser degree the communities at 
 home, are communities of one sex. If it were only 
 a matter of the habitual balance of mental existence, 
 this fact might be expected to develop in each sex a 
 heightened wish for the companionship of the other. 
 
 Further, the innumerable subtle filaments that in 
 ordinary conditions carry away the direct conscious- 
 ness of manhood and womanhood are swept away. 
 In the daily routine of peace, men and women 
 acquire the habit of forgetting that they are men 
 
WAR AND WOMEN 171 
 
 and women. They are able to deal with one another, 
 not quite impersonally, but unsexually — as buyers 
 and sellers, as employers and employed, as providers 
 of services, as thinkers, choosers, connoisseurs, hu- 
 man beings. Or rather, they are able to keep the 
 continuous current of sex-interest in the position 
 of an inactive spectator, making its own remarks, 
 stimulating or retarding the flow of intercourse, but 
 wholly out of circuit for the main business in hand. 
 This is a late and difficult achievement of civiliza- 
 tion, an achievement in equilibrium, a bit of ground 
 won from a masterful instinctive prepossession, 
 won precariously and unequally by different races 
 and members of races, but an achievement upon 
 which obviously the freedom and scope of civilized 
 life directly depend. Hard work, the pursuit of 
 science, concern for justice, and in fact for every 
 end we call "objective," naturally inhibit the sexual 
 motive, and can thrive only as it is inhibited or 
 sublimated. This equilibrium war everywhere de- 
 stroys. 
 
 Turn from general forces to the individual human 
 being caught in the flood of war. Accustomed to 
 live in the future, sometimes far in the future, the 
 plan-making animal finds his plans cut across by 
 war as peremptorily as by death ; no longer master 
 of to-morrow, the spirit of chance and adventure 
 enters as foresight disappears. But the adventure 
 in any case is great and radical; in place of those 
 small groups of specialized men with whom one car- 
 
172 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 
 
 ried on one's thoughtful dealings, one is now sensi- 
 bly taking part in something vast, something total. 
 One may hate war without limit ; in every man there 
 is still a love of the sweeping catastrophic event just 
 because it is immense — as one may gaze at a great 
 fire, not without horror and yet not without de- 
 lighted wonder. In this new and great world old 
 habits fail to fit; at the roots of the tree of char- 
 acter there works, in spite of all, an unsettling 
 spirit. 
 
 The intoxication of war might well be held in 
 check by the tragic meaning of the event if men 
 went to war singly. But the strange comradeship 
 of camp and barracks fans the common and simpler 
 elements of excitement, and sends into swift retire- 
 ment the sober and reflective self of civil life. Where 
 so many habits must be broken, it is small wonder if 
 the feeling prevails that all rules are off — all the 
 old rules. The life of the soldier has its own rules 
 and ideals; but the tamer virtues stand in a paler 
 light : they are not means to the great ends of war. 
 They lose in the perspective of psychological impor- 
 tance. 
 
 If in such radical readjustment the ties of conven- 
 tion are loosened, this is not an unmixed calamity. 
 Unless we are prepared to say that our conventions 
 are all good, such a liquidation of mental fixities 
 should bring with it many salutary liberations. 
 Whatever makes the world consciously kin, breaks 
 down reserve, caste, and crust, and favors the direct 
 
WAR AND WOMEN 173 
 
 approach and prompt response of one mind to an- 
 other, leaves humanity its debtor. The spirit of 
 war is experimental, pragmatic, accustomed to large 
 changes, discounting all ordinary impossibilities. 
 The tether of imagination is loosened; and men be- 
 come fearless — irreverent perhaps, but at least 
 fearless — in dealing with the issues of life and 
 death, and hence with all minor issues. If anything 
 in the world is merely conventional it will fare badly 
 before this temper; and all conventions, however 
 well-founded, may expect a challenge. What of the 
 conventions that surround the family; will they be 
 held immune? 
 
 Though I put the question as one of the psychol- 
 ogy of the soldier, it becomes part of his problem 
 that women are not unaffected by the same unrest. 
 If the men are more released and venturesome, the 
 women are more at a loss without their usual 
 helpers. Their fireside is no longer the place of 
 safety and reassurance. In the small towns of 
 Europe one sees the simple expression of this 
 change. Moved by a mixture of enthusiasm, grati- 
 tude, bewilderment, and fear, the women are drawn 
 out into the companionship of the market and the 
 street, where the news, the passing excitements, the 
 spirit of the tribe, the physical presence of the 
 bearers of power, provide the needed mental sus- 
 tainment. It is as if in times of war the god of com- 
 mon life had withdrawn from the family hearth and 
 had taken up his residence in the places of public 
 
174 MOKALE AND ITS ENEMIES 
 
 concourse. The general interest grows at the ex- 
 pense of the particular; and as in ancient days, a 
 certain promiscuity of feeling, a community of 
 goods and destinies, breaks down ordinary barriers. 
 Some of the same psychological forces that make 
 patriotism and religion prominent, and result in the 
 merging of interests and services in the tide of com- 
 mon devotion, threaten for the moment the finer 
 sense of propriety and distinction in the minds of 
 the keepers of distinction, the women. 
 
 One who cannot understand and sympathize with 
 these general tendencies is so far untouched by the 
 psychological mood of war. And given these tend- 
 encies, we have to expect as a matter of statistics 
 that there will be laxity in relations of sex. When 
 the stream rises, it picks up at first the floatable and 
 unanchored objects along its banks ; and we get an 
 impression of disorder and dissolution. Rumor 
 seizes on local troubles and paints them as universal. 
 What we need is some way of gauging the meaning 
 and extent of the situation ; we need a judgment of 
 proportion. 
 
 It is well to remember that no " general tendency" 
 has all its own way with men. One of the most 
 extraordinary qualities of human nature is its 
 power to recognize when it is being affected by a 
 general tendency, and to institute counteractive 
 measures. At the theater one perceives the on- 
 coming of the emotional onslaught and fortifies 
 
WAR AND WOMEN 175 
 
 himself; so with the excitement at a great game, or 
 with the beginnings of fear in an emergency. In 
 the same way, every soldier knows more or less 
 clearly that he is subject to the illusions of the un- 
 usual, and is to this extent on his guard. Despite 
 all superficial disturbances, a man's conscience is 
 the most persistent and unyielding of his mental 
 ingredients; and every man remains the keeper of 
 his own conscience. When the first chaotic period 
 of readjustment has ended in the making of new 
 habits and a recovery of some mental steadiness, 
 he finds that what he has cared for continues to 
 exist, even if his direct active connection with it is 
 broken. Its laws, so far as they are valid, still bind 
 him, and perhaps the more firmly because what he 
 has cared for is out of his present reach. The sol- 
 dier who can keep alive his communication with his 
 own family has a powerful stabilizer in the unsettle- 
 ments of war. 
 
 What we should naturally expect, even if nothing 
 were done about it, would be first of all a segrega- 
 tion of the lightly anchored from the firmly anchored 
 members of society; and then a steady clearing of 
 the stream, as both the individual soldier and the 
 army as a whole begin to get their bearings and to 
 learn from experience. Errors at first are not to be 
 taken as a measure of what is to follow. Self- 
 respect is too vital an asset whether in war or in 
 peace not to become in time, and by its own obvious 
 worth, the rule of the great majority. 
 
176 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 
 
 Naturally, the boys who are over-seas are more 
 likely to feel themselves in a world apart, where 
 moral causality seems to pursue them less relent- 
 lessly. In their case, much depends on the tradition 
 of their own particular unit. Men have a startling 
 tendency to yield their opinions to what they believe 
 (whether rightly or not) most of the rest of their 
 group are doing. They have an equally prompt and 
 surprising tendency to control themselves, even to 
 the point of asceticism, if they believe that control 
 is the order of the day with their comrades, and 
 particularly with their officers. 
 
 There is in London an office where soldiers belong- 
 ing to one of the expeditionary forces are required 
 to register when they are in the city on leave, and 
 where surgeons in charge explain to them and warn 
 them against the conditions they will meet in the 
 London streets. Between March 1 and July 1, 1917, 
 34,374 members of this expeditionary force regis- 
 tered here ; and of these a certain number took from 
 the office the prophylactic there supplied which 
 would measurably guard them against venereal in- 
 fection. This number was given to me by the officer 
 in charge as 30,000. From the medical point of view 
 the work of this office is a great success ; for among 
 these men the percentage of infection is only about 
 two per cent as compared with over four per cent 
 in the British army.* But the officers in charge 
 
 •The rate in the American Expeditionary Force is reported, Au- 
 gust, 1918, as less than one per cent. 
 
WAR AND WOMEN 177 
 
 realized that they had no prophylactic against moral 
 infection, if this is the right name for it. The con- 
 ditions of the London streets and the tradition of 
 the units concerned, they had at the time no way of 
 contending against. 
 
 The German army was in pre-war times more suc- 
 cessful than either the French army or the British 
 army in reducing its percentage of veneral disease 
 through scientific prophylaxis. Recruits entering 
 the British army during the years 1900-1908 showed 
 5 cases of venereal disease per thousand, as against 
 7.5 cases per thousand among the German recruits. 
 As members of the British army, these same men 
 showed 66 cases per thousand, as against 19.4 cases 
 per thousand in the German army. It is said that 
 since 1914, the British rate has been reduced to 48.3 
 per thousand ; the German rate is unknown to me. 
 
 Nothing could show more vividly than these figures 
 the contrast between physical and moral prophy- 
 laxis. Hygienically successful as the German meth- 
 ods of dealing with this problem are, it is a fair ques- 
 tion whether there is not a direct causal connection 
 between those methods and the coarsening of fiber 
 implied in the incomparable animality of the Ger- 
 man armies in the field. The systematic official ad- 
 ministering of prophylaxis in our navies and armies 
 is a necessity. Any such administration acknowl- 
 edges to the men the customariness of the breach of 
 custom involved; the psychological step from this 
 to an appearance of official sanction is a short one. 
 
178 MOBALE AND ITS ENEMIES 
 
 It is safe to assume that we have no desire to move 
 in the direction of the German temper in this mat- 
 ter, while using or copying German remedies. It is 
 a pertinent question, then, whether the act of deal- 
 ing in physical immunity does not create an obliga- 
 tion to go a step farther in a positive effort to coun- 
 teract the impression of sanction. 
 
 We have no right to jump to the conclusion that 
 the city of London, or the city of Paris, or any other 
 city could control the situation entirely. For the 
 above-mentioned officer has found by careful in- 
 quiry that of the women involved the number of 
 professional prostitutes is smaller than the num- 
 ber of " amateurs, ' ' that is to say, of girls who 
 accept no money. The control must come through 
 such measures as our own army in France has 
 already wisely instituted, keeping the boys as far 
 as possible out of the large cities until they have 
 got their balance ; and so starting their life abroad 
 with a tradition of the reverse order; and, further, 
 through a careful study of the special needs of the 
 soldier on leave. 
 
 The data already mentioned were of men on leave, 
 after a time of severe fighting, not of men going to 
 the front for the first time. The man who has just 
 come from the trenches is in a state of mind which, 
 if not precisely abnormal, has problems of its own 
 The same inhuman strain, which makes "permis- 
 sion" necessarily more frequent in this war than in 
 
WAR AND WOMEN 179 
 
 preceding wars, makes the release a time of peculiar 
 difficulty. As it was put to me by an American boy 
 in the Canadian army who was enjoying ten days' 
 leave in Paris : ' ' When a man comes out of the 
 trenches, he doesn't care what he does — he doesn't 
 care." All our civil scruples and weighings and 
 haltings look small to him. This is his moment of 
 freedom; and perhaps his one chance to take what 
 joy there is in existence. He is going back again; 
 he has signed away his claim on life. He feels that 
 he has acquired special rights — and here are the 
 opportunities. And beside this, he has been starv- 
 ing, probably not in body, but in spirit ; he has been 
 living in barrenness, and he has been starving for 
 the tender and kindly side of life. He has a need 
 for the society of women. 
 
 It is worse than useless to go at this problem as a 
 problem of repression. So long as the soldier is a 
 drilling and preparing soldier, repression is in 
 place. If he fails to practise restraint, it is chiefly 
 his captain or his major or his colonel who is re- 
 sponsible. There is no excuse for looseness about 
 drill-camps; our experience on the Mexican border 
 has opened our eyes on this point. At the great 
 camp at Aldershot, I saw a group of men training in 
 gymnastics. Their spirit was as amazing as their 
 form ; they had a passion for perfection ; ninety out 
 of a hundred of them gave voluntary extra hours 
 after a heavy day's work. Dissipation to these 
 men was an impossibility; and for them the problem 
 
180 MOEALE AND ITS ENEMIES 
 
 did not exist. But the soldier on leave is without 
 any such immediate ambition for being in condition ; 
 and he has, I repeat, a definite need for the society 
 of women. 
 
 But the soldier on leave is not much in a mood for 
 the apparatus of introductions and other proprieties 
 which hedge our women about. What he wants is 
 a freer kind of association, a gayer and readier 
 choice, an easier come and go. To put it baldly, to 
 meet his needs, women must be accessible and rela- 
 tively anonymous, as well as agreeable in the sense 
 of meeting his particular fancy and being ready 
 for a good time. The soldier on leave would prefer 
 not to be burdened with the fact that Miss X is the 
 daughter of So-and-so, living in the city of Boston, 
 Mass., and related to the B's and C's. He wishes 
 to take her as a companion, without other history 
 than naturally finds its way into conversation, and 
 without future obligations. His mind is fatigued 
 with obligations ; his relief consists largely in being 
 irresponsible. He is in a frame of mind for what 
 Wiliam James has called a moral holiday. We can 
 sympathize with him; without any such excuse as 
 his, most of us feel the need for an occasional moral 
 holiday. 
 
 Such a relationship is neither objectionable nor 
 impossible. For example, a British soldier on leave 
 in Paris " picked up," as he said to me, a little 
 French girl on the Champs Elysees. It was his first 
 visit to Paris. She called a taxi, and took him to 
 
WAR AND WOMEN 181 
 
 various places which she thought a stranger would 
 care to see. They had dinner together and went to 
 a theater. After it was over she said, "Good night, 
 I must go home now, ' ' and left him. I do not know 
 how often this particular poise is to be found; but 
 I believe it is more frequent than the suspicious 
 eye imagines. It has its difficulties ; and is obviously 
 beyond the reach of a general policy. But it may 
 serve to point the way to what is possible. 
 
 Among the possibilities are the admission of 
 qualified women into service at the canteens both 
 within and outside the war zone. Thousands of 
 English women, — I have heard the number stated at 
 30,000, and a number of American women are 
 already engaged in this work, which should be ex- 
 tended. What is wanted is the woman who has 
 unlimited good fellowship together with unlimited 
 good sense and poise, a type of woman in which 
 America is peculiarly rich, though the official diffi- 
 culties of excluding the undesirables, the faddists, 
 and the excitables, are very great. The opening of 
 cafes and tea-houses in the cities is also of use; 
 though it suffers by comparison because of the 
 greater formality which our women feel obliged to 
 assume in the city. The Red Triangle huts in the 
 main centers have a certain number of women 
 helpers; but there is for the most part a palpable 
 pressure of decorum and caution which discour- 
 ages the gayer give-and-take. In Liverpool, and, I 
 am told, in Leeds, an experiment is being made 
 
182 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 
 
 which sounds promising. There is a refreshment 
 room with a dancing-floor and music; and into this 
 place any man in uniform may bring any woman he 
 chooses, and the pair may enjoy themselves, at 
 small expense, so long as they remain within liberal 
 bounds of propriety. There the men meet their 
 acquaintances; and there any respectable girl may 
 spend a pleasant evening with a soldier under good 
 auspices and without any intrusive restrictions, 
 while the declassees, whom there is no attempt to 
 exclude, being on the whole less intelligent and at- 
 tractive, suffer in comparison; and the men grad- 
 ually tend to drop them in favor of their more 
 scrupulous sisters. 
 
 All of these things will increase the percentage of 
 men who retain their orginal principle, by making 
 the cost less severe at the critical moment. But no 
 amount of effort can eliminate the intrinsic difficulty 
 of keeping straight. Times of war are inevitably 
 times when the staying power of a man's scruples 
 is put to the severest test; when there is a rapid 
 slaughter of the morally unprepared and the morally 
 weak; and when the fine and strong come out the 
 finer and stronger for the ordeal. There is nothing 
 in the new situation which makes it either necessary 
 or probable that any man will lose the fight, unless 
 it is that when the numerous moments come in 
 which he asks himself the question, "Why not?" he 
 has no certain answer to give. And this fact in- 
 
WAE AND WOMEN 183 
 
 dicates where the real remedy and prophylactic must 
 be sought. 
 
 A Canadian banker, returning on the same ship 
 with me from Liverpool, told me that he had a son 
 in training who would soon be ready to go to the 
 front. "I am, of course, concerned for his safety," 
 he said, "but I am a hundred times more concerned 
 for his standards. The only thing that I worry 
 over, as I think of him, is the question whether 
 he will come back as sound of spirit as he is now." 
 "What reasons have you given him for keeping 
 straight?" I asked. "No reasons. He knows well 
 enough what is right and what is wrong, just as well 
 as he knows black from white." 
 
 I would not wish to be behind this Scotch-Cana- 
 dian father in my respect for the moral intuitions. 
 But I have no faith that intuition is a sufficient reli- 
 ance under any circumstances — still less under 
 present circumstances. If an intuition is valid, there 
 are assignable reasons for it; and to have the rea- 
 sons — together with a proviso that the reasons are 
 never complete — is an important reserve to fall 
 back upon. I should want to add to the arsenal of 
 any boy of mine a few reasons for the standard of 
 conduct I believe in. And it seems to me that every 
 American soldier could, with advantage, be re- 
 minded in advance that America has its own stand- 
 ards, which have a reasonable claim upon his par- 
 ticular regard. 
 
 For if we, in America, have any achievement in 
 
184 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 
 
 the field of civilization to be proud of — apart from 
 our great experiment in democracy — it is our atti- 
 tude towards women. I am making no claim for 
 national righteousness such as might be shown (or 
 more probably disproved) by comparative statistics 
 of disease and crime. I am simply saying that 
 America, the assimilating America, in spite of the 
 struggle of all the traditions in the melting-pot, has 
 a genuine nationality, a state of public mind, re- 
 flected in literature and art as well as in law and 
 custom. And without attempting to define more 
 explicitly the American attitude towards women, or 
 to describe the free and comradely and honestly 
 chivalrous relations that have grown out of it here 
 and there, I simply state it as my belief that in this 
 respect we have hit upon something worthy of par- 
 ticular adherence, because its principles are valid 
 everywhere. 
 
 There are always two ways of taking differences 
 of temperament and their expression in custom and 
 manners. One may say, " Customs vary, and each 
 mode of life is justified on its own ground : morality 
 is a matter of the folkways, the mores which can 
 make anything right." Or he may say, " There is 
 a better and a worse in the case; and our way is 
 better." The latter sounds dogmatic and narrow; 
 it seems to stand for an attitude which would render 
 all possible broadening effects of travel null and 
 void from the start. My own deliberate judgment is 
 that, in this case, it is the truth. If we judge, with 
 
WAB AND WOMEN 185 
 
 the prevalent social philosophy, that every custom 
 is justified by its existence, we should recommend to 
 our boys to ' * do in Rome as the Romans do ' ' — or as 
 they appear to do. Already, largely under the in- 
 fluence of European literature and habit, many 
 tendencies in social psychology current among us 
 have been favoring (as immature cosmopolitanism 
 always does) the complete surrender of American 
 peculiarities on this point, as being merely provin- 
 cial. 
 
 If we decline to make this surrender, or if we can- 
 not accept the theory that each custom is justified in 
 its own habitat, we must have our reasons. And 
 there are two reasons in particular which lead me to 
 adhere to the American view. 
 
 First : prostitution, even in its kindliest guises, is 
 inconsistent with democracy. It implies stratifica- 
 tion, at least among women ; and a relegation of one 
 stratum to a lower level by those very men who 
 claim the privilege of moving freely in both levels. 
 A relationship which you are unwilling to acknowl- 
 edge among your other relationships can accord 
 with the ideas only of those who regard some hu- 
 man beings as so much better than others that the 
 others are only fit to serve them. But no man who 
 supposes himself fighting for democracy can afford 
 to admit into his life any such contradictory prin- 
 ciple. 
 
 Second : every human relation has its obligations ; 
 and there is one obligation which, as I see it, goes 
 
186 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 
 
 with all human relationships. It is the obligation of 
 treating every human being according to what that 
 being is capable of, not according to what he or she 
 at the moment is. Every man, on this basis, is the 
 guardian of the better self of every person he deals 
 with, including the woman who waives her own 
 claim to such regard. He cannot without damage 
 to himself use her for his pleasure and sign off this 
 general obligation of respect, not to mention the 
 more specific obligations naturally growing out of 
 that relationship. 
 
 The thing we have gone out to fight is a form of 
 cynicism — cynicism accepted as a philosophy of 
 life, and with a great army behind it. Cynicism is 
 simply the consistent denial of the two principles 
 we have mentioned: it estimates human nature in 
 material terms and is consequently ready to exploit 
 it without responsibility ; it rejects moral democracy 
 in favor of moral privilege and social duplicity. The 
 greatest peril of war, and one of its common tend- 
 encies, is that the cynicism of the enemy should 
 subtly infect and conquer the forces brought against 
 him, even while he is being driven from the field. 
 
 But we have also to look beyond the war to the 
 unprecedented task in which our fighting men are 
 to join with the rest of us in cutting away from our 
 civilization the cynical elements which have brought 
 this wreck upon it, and in building an honester and 
 better world. For this task no clarity of head and 
 no firmness of resolution can be too great. There is 
 
WAR AND WOMEN 187 
 
 a practical consideration which has had its part in 
 shaping the American standard, and which will have 
 increasing weight everywhere in the years ahead 
 of us, namely, that the serious work of the world is 
 too pressing to allow responsible men to play with 
 the absorbing entanglements of the irregular games 
 of sex. Only the simple life of the family is com- 
 patible with that repose and whole-heartedness of 
 effort which can carry men or nations to the level 
 of achievement henceforth demanded of them. For 
 both men and nations, the line between success and 
 failure, or between greatness and mediocrity, will be 
 close drawn ; and the powerful impetus of sex inter- 
 est must be interpreted so that it will second and 
 magnify the force of the main thrust of life, not 
 oppose or confuse it. 
 
 These are some of the reasons which lead me to 
 believe in, and to plead for, the American standard 
 as valid everywhere. There is a certain proportion, 
 I believe a large proportion, of our men that will 
 remain straight under any circumstances. They 
 are deterred from the easier course not by any fear 
 of physical results, nor by regulations, nor by any 
 overt reasons ; but simply by an ingrained soundness 
 of feeling, or by a sense of right lying deeper than 
 the human level. And many another man will lose 
 his mooring for a time, recognize the fact, and pull 
 himself together. Those who are swept into the cur- 
 rent are men whose standards have only a conven- 
 tional and superficial footing, or none at all; in 
 
188 MOBALE AND ITS ENEMIES 
 
 them our civilization has already failed. If we do 
 our part, most of our boys will come back the better 
 for their experience — provided the war does not last 
 too long. 
 
 And our part I It is first of all to achieve a better 
 grasp of our own convictions, such as they are ; and 
 to weed out from them all that is merely traditional 
 and inert. It is as fatal to condemn what is harm- 
 less as to approve what is wrong. Nowhere, per- 
 haps, is the right balance between meaningless 
 rigidity and ruinous laissez faire so hard to strike. 
 Hospitality of mind together with firmness of 
 character will alone fit us for meeting the strains of 
 the moment, and save the day for the America of to- 
 morrow. 
 
CHAPTER XVI 
 
 THE LONGER STRAINS OF WAR 
 
 The effects of war upon human nature depend very- 
 much on its duration. The whole problem of morale, 
 from the military angle, changes with the prolonga- 
 tion of the war. The difficulties of dealing with fear 
 and with the inner frictions of a raw military ma- 
 chine diminish. The difficulties of inciting fresh in- 
 terest and the unlimited faith that often works mili- 
 tary miracles, increase. And for the soldier, the 
 memory of his civil self begins to grow unclear, as 
 the routine parts of the business of war-making 
 settle into second nature, and the more insidious and 
 subconscious parts of the strain of war begin to do 
 their work. 
 
 This does not mean that a long war affects all men 
 alike. The constantly recurring question, Does war 
 improve men or deteriorate them? is a question 
 which has no answer. For war itself does neither 
 one thing nor another. Certainly neither war nor 
 any other drastic experience leaves men where it 
 found them. But any exposure of large bodies of 
 men to extraordinary conditions will segregate them 
 into two groups, those who are strengthened by the 
 ordeal and those who are weakened by it. And, as a 
 matter of common sense, the longer the campaign, 
 the larger the probable number in the latter class; 
 
 189 
 
190 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 
 
 the more need for a certain amount of forethought, 
 and perhaps for a degree of psychological insight to 
 show where the subtler strains are located. 
 
 The human being builds habits and unbuilds them 
 more readily than any other animal: there is a 
 wholly unmeasured amount of " come-back" in men 
 who have been thrown out of their normal grooves 
 for a period of years. It is not hard to lose ready 
 use of a foreign language; but it is next to impos- 
 sible for most people to forget it beyond fairly easy 
 recovery; and the same is true of other acquired 
 abilities. This fact should lighten the reasonable 
 anxiety of many men who feel it as one of the deeper 
 wastes of war that their former skills and powers 
 are irrevocably dropping from them by disuse. And 
 it should also remind us that even a warping strain 
 has less effect than at the time it seems to have. 
 
 There are two ways in particular in which these 
 longer strains of war may affect morale, which are 
 sometimes as puzzling as the "going stale" of an 
 athlete in the midst of his training, and quite as 
 worth an effort to understand. The one touches 
 with a sort of psychological blight his pugnacity, or 
 fighting temper; the other his sense of solidarity 
 with his nation. 
 
 To speak of the first. One might expect that as 
 the soldier becomes expert in the business of kill- 
 ing, and as that mental difficulty which at first 
 brought out the trait of "severity" disappears into 
 habit, he would go to his fighting with greater relish, 
 
THE LONGER STRAINS OF WAR 191 
 
 and like Achilles ''put might into his rage." If, 
 instead, might somehow leaks out of it, the reason 
 may lie, not in the revulsion that follows all passion, 
 but rather in the subconscious logic of the case. 
 
 For while it is a part of the mental achievement of 
 the soldier that he holds his own life at no high 
 value, and that of his enemy at less than nothing, it 
 is a part of his creed as a soldier and a citizen that 
 the lives at home, the lives which directly or indi- 
 rectly he is defending, have a high value, sometimes 
 one says, a sacred value. It is not easy to keep these 
 two divergent estimates of the value of different 
 human lives from spreading and interfering with 
 one another to some extent. And it stands to rea- 
 son that the person whose preoccupation day and 
 night is the destruction of the enemy, who re- 
 joices, and ought to rejoice, in the numbers he 
 has accounted for as an Indian in his scalps, 
 in whom the hunting instinct and the game in- 
 stinct come to lend an aboriginal zest to the work 
 of war (a trait by no means confined to the firing 
 line), and who of necessity becomes all but indiffer- 
 ent to the spectacle of suffering, mutilation and 
 death, — it stands to reason that this person may 
 find his sense of the "sacred value of human life" 
 somewhat dulled. Yet it is this sense upon which 
 the whole fabric of "human rights" is built, which 
 is the parent of our wrath when these rights are 
 violated, and so stands at the basis of every cause 
 worth fighting for. Hence the deepening paradox 
 
192 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 
 
 iii the soldier's position, that there is in the busi- 
 ness of fighting a tendency to undermine the lively 
 sense of the things worth fighting for, and there- 
 with his own fighting- spirit. 
 
 With time, it is always likely that a certain num- 
 ber will succumb to this trend. Confused by the clash 
 of the principles that fit their divergent selves, they 
 allow the self of the foreground to cancel the self 
 of the ideal background which alone justifies their 
 business, becoming "hardened veterans" in more 
 senses than one, falling back on a dour superiority 
 to all "sentiment," like the old Prussian soldier who 
 said that after twenty-two years of campaigning, he 
 had come to loathe the very sound of such words as 
 justice, loyalty, honor, etc., associated as they were 
 in his mind with the purely pragmatic employment 
 of spurring men to fight. A soldier can work a good 
 deal of this skeptical tough-mindedness into his dis- 
 position without ceasing to be very dependable fight- 
 ing-material, — up to a certain point. It is sufficient 
 to say, however, that the morale that comes of it is, 
 at best, of the Prussian type : it is capable of strong 
 things, but not of the limitless elan of those legions 
 of young devotees that went into the slaughter at 
 Mons, a-t Vimy, at Verdun, at Gallipoli, and whose 
 comparative fighting value is now evident on the 
 fields of France. The mentality which comes of the 
 surrender of the man in the soldier to his fore- 
 ground is not the soldierly mentality, though it may 
 pose as such : it is the dry rot of soldierdom. 
 
THE LONGER STRAINS OF WAR 193 
 
 Most of our soldiers carry with them the natural 
 antidote for this disease. Whatever part of the 
 profession of arms may take root in their affection, 
 the carnage itself is kept outside. Few men, what- 
 ever their occupation, are wholly hypnotized by 
 their own " business-personalities," and least of all 
 the soldier. Particularly in the fantastic business of 
 war, there are strange psychological eddies and un- 
 dercurrents ; and the mental bents that come out of 
 it are not the obvious ones. Frequently it is the 
 surgeon — whose whole professional activity is gov- 
 erned by the principle of saving life — that becomes 
 callous and wholesale; whereas the soldier, whose 
 practical purpose is wrapped up in the toll of his 
 slaughter, may acquire in his habitual feeling a 
 solemn gentleness like that sometimes attributed to 
 the angel of death. 
 
 Morale may also be subtly affected in a long war — 
 and this is the second point of which we were going 
 to speak — by a falling out of touch and out of step 
 between soldiers and civilians, so that the sense 
 of solidarity with one's own nation is gradually 
 weakened. 
 
 It has always hitherto been one of the incidents of 
 a long war that the civil and the military mentalities 
 tended to diverge, through the accumulated effects 
 of feeding on a different set of experiences and 
 thoughts. Unless there are counteracting influ- 
 ences, all divisions tend to increase: and while the 
 
194 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 
 
 soldier is likely to find himself the specialist in 
 action, with insufficient diet of thought and feeling, 
 he is for the same reason likely to think of the rest 
 of the nation, whether civil or official, as the special- 
 ists in talking and theorizing, too far away from the 
 facts as he sees them to be trustworthy guides and 
 directors. 
 
 In the present war there has so far been very little 
 of the friction and sense of divergence between the 
 two groups. Yet there have been occasional expres- 
 sions from the civilian side of a more or less wistful 
 sense that some impassable gulf has arisen between 
 the stay-at-homes and those who have plunged into 
 the physical maelstrom. 
 
 And there have been occasional observations from 
 the military side of a failure of civilian sympathy. 
 "An army," writes a soldier on leave, "does not live 
 by munitions alone, but also by the fellowship in a 
 moral idea, and that you cannot give. ' ' The civilian, 
 the writer felt, is too easily able to relieve his con- 
 sciousness of the insistent physical torment of war, 
 the suffering of others. He has the proper senti- 
 ment toward it all : he can use the right words, even 
 more violent words ; but this is what makes the situa- 
 tion most painful. For he cannot fill these words 
 with the meaning they have for the soldier : he can- 
 not know what they mean, and decency would recom- 
 mend silence. "Oh, how I wish they would all shut 
 up ! " Mr. Jacks reports one such soldier as putting 
 it. In my wanderings from war zone to capital 
 
THE LONGER STRAINS OF WAR 195 
 
 cities and back again, one impression was every- 
 where repeated and deepened, — how immensely the 
 gamut of human experience in war time is extended, 
 how far apart the extremes are in all sensible 
 particulars, how much is trusted to the vicarious- 
 ness of our minds;* and because of all this, how 
 dangerously society is organized. A step from 
 a Paris street full of the soldiers of a dozen na- 
 tions, from a conversation perhaps with a man 
 just now from the front, into some formal tea-room 
 managed it may be by great ladies for the "benefit" 
 of these same soldiers, would sometimes start a 
 doubt whether all our present stock of wisdom and 
 imagination are enough to span these distances, and 
 hold the understandings of the world together. 
 
 But it is hardly a misfortune, if different ways 
 of looking at things arise from wide differences of 
 experience : it would be a misfortune if they did not 
 arise. Society can ill afford to lose the pioneer's 
 view of itself, even if it involves the conviction that 
 many things in it, and many people, still need to be 
 shaken up. My own fear is rather that reflections 
 of this sort, among our own soldiers, may not yet 
 have struck deep enough. 
 
 The sense of divergence only becomes a menace 
 to morale, in or out of the army, when the soldier 
 mentally gives society up, adopts fatalistic views 
 of human stupidity and selfishness, and decides that 
 the breach of sympathy is hopeless. This kind of 
 
 ♦Page 48. 
 
196 MOKALE AND ITS ENEMIES 
 
 pessimism can never take root while thoughtful men 
 on each side are as alert as they are to the need of 
 keeping the ways of understanding open, while 
 everything written or spoken by soldiers is eagerly 
 consumed by the public, and while the various 
 civilian agencies accompanying the army, and 
 rapidly becoming skilled in the arts of mental mid- 
 dlemen, continue to serve as an army of interpreters 
 between the two groups of minds. It will be hard 
 to kill the essential sympathy between them, so long 
 as the deeper common sense of the soldier — fully 
 aware that the State he serves is not identical with 
 this or that group of civilians — continues its hope- 
 ful comment on his occasional bitter or melancholy 
 reactions. 
 
 And after all, this deeper judge and self -critic in 
 the soldier's mind is the essential thing in the whole 
 psychological outcome of war-making. No one can 
 say what effect war, be it short or long, will have on 
 human beings unless he knows the longest thoughts 
 of those beings. It is the slant of the mind that 
 determines what 'effect' any cause shall have. To 
 take a minor instance : there are probably few sol- 
 diers at the front who are not familiar with the feel- 
 ing of being an almost negligible atom in the im- 
 mense business of war. What 'effect' will such a 
 feeling produce on one's temper? If the soldier 
 happens to be a character of Barbusse, it may be 
 this: 
 
THE LONGER STRAINS OP WAR 197 
 
 "In all that, you see what we amount to, we who 
 are here ... so many drops of blood amid the 
 deluge of men and things, ' ' — 
 
 a sense of exposure and helplessness, promising to 
 reduce morale sooner or later to the passive variety. 
 If it happens to be another French soldier, this time 
 a real one, the effect may be this : 
 
 "With it all comes the consciousness of one's own 
 role, which is humble and yet great. For that wall 
 is a wall of steel made of glittering, separate points, 
 — and I am one of them!"* 
 
 And thus it is with all the other pressures of war 
 upon character : the bent they produce will vary with 
 the ideas upon which they fall, and defeat all obvious 
 prophecies. We have no right even to assert that 
 war will generate in men a "military point of view." 
 To argue that men who have been long schooled in 
 this or that of the ways of war will therefore be 
 enamored of those ways is to leave human nature 
 out of the calculation. 
 
 One fine day on top of a London bus a lad sat 
 down beside me, and after a minute or two of silence 
 burst out with the remark, "Gee, but these feel 
 good ! ' ' " These, ' ' I learned after some vain specu- 
 lation, were his civilian clothes. "It's the first time 
 I've been in 'em for three years." Then I noticed 
 the bandage where one of his hands should have 
 been, and understood his further words: "I got 
 off lucky, believe me ; and I 'm going back to Amer- 
 ica, the first ship." What this lad felt at the mo- 
 
 *From "The Lieutenant's Story," Atlantic Monthly, Feb., 1917, 
 p. 280. 
 
198 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 
 
 ment about his clothes, many another lad will feel 
 about various inner aspects of war-making. The law 
 of habit, as we have found it*, is a spiritual law: it 
 is the ultimate attitude, not the visible practice, that 
 decides what states of mind will come out of the war. 
 
 The soldier's life is unsettled: will that produce 
 in him a habit of restlessness and roving 1 ? He is 
 accustomed to destroy, not to construct: will that 
 make of him a waster, and put him out of patience 
 with the slow building of production? He is used 
 to sensational and sudden effectiveness: will this 
 impose on him a dramatic or melodramatic mind, 
 make all "piping times of peace" dull to him, and 
 unnerve him for all quiet labor? He is habituated 
 to consuming, living by requisition on goods sup- 
 plied lavishly (sometimes) by others: will this 
 create in him the temper of dependency? 
 
 The soldier has been through-and-through an 
 executive, schooled in sharp decision, braced for 
 grim issues involving the overthrow of an enemy: 
 will he now be unfit for judicial thinking, and will 
 " adjustment' ' in the give and take of social con- 
 struction, — will "adjustment" seem to him a vile 
 and loathsome word? He has been drilled in army 
 methods and "system": will he come back believing 
 that all things can be achieved by strategy and an- 
 alysis, and carried out "by the numbers"? Will he 
 desire to storm education, culture, art, religion it- 
 self by "intensive methods"? Or will he come back 
 
 •Page 125. 
 
THE LONGER STRAINS OF WAR 199 
 
 eager to discard the more mechanical linkages of 
 man to man, and to cherish the role of reflection, 
 leisure, the listening mind, the mystical element m 
 all spiritual efficiency? 
 
 Above all, the soldier nas borne the brunt, and he 
 knows it What will be the effect of that? What 
 argument is it building up in him to-day? "Now, 
 civilians, our share is done : we rest on our laurels ; 
 give us our leisure, and our rewards"? Or is it 
 this : ' ' We have learned to choose the harder part, 
 and to do more than our share ; give us your heaviest 
 burdens, and we will show you how men can carry 
 them"? 
 
 There is no prophet who ought to venture an an- 
 swer to these questions, unless he can see with what 
 hidden approvals, rebellions, provisos, the alleged 
 'habits' are being accepted. It is a man's idea, his 
 philosophy, that fixes the angle of impact of all ex- 
 perience upon him, and so decides what 'effect' 
 that experience will have. But by the same sign it 
 can be said with some certainty that if the ideas 
 with which a man is carrying on his service are 
 right at the core, its total effect on him — whatever 
 its character or duration — will be for the better: 
 he will come out of it broadened, liberated, ennobled 
 by the daily companionship with duty, wise with the 
 wisdom of one who has explored the extremes of 
 the human lot. 
 
 No one need fear that the beauty of the gratitude 
 of a delivered world will make our returning soldiers 
 
200 MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES 
 
 over-proud ; the reverse will be the case. But there 
 will be men in ihat multitude who will keep the next 
 generation true to the genuine proportions ot things, 
 because what they have seen they can neither forget 
 nor allow others to forget. 
 
 "We have been so long on the frontiers of hu- 
 manity that we may cross over from one moment to 
 another. Beyond the border, everything is stripped 
 of superfluities, is reduced to lowest terms. In this 
 collapse of animate matter, in this besetting destruc- 
 tion, we naturally attribute less vital force to the 
 body that is so quickly shattered than to the thought 
 that abides."* 
 
 In such minds, war, the most drastically phys- 
 ical of all human works, does indeed become the 
 vehicle for the most spiritual of achievements. And 
 the morale springing from such philosophy may be 
 counted on to win the wars that lie beyond the war. 
 
 ♦Henri Malherbe in La Flamme au Poing. 
 
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