in every blue shadow about him the night and death lurked and
waited. There was no hurry for them, presently they would spread out
again and join and submerge him, presently in the confederated darkness
he could be stalked and seized and slain. Yes, this he admitted was real
fear. He had cracked his voice, yelling as a child yells. And then he
had become afraid of his own voice....

"Now this excess of fear in isolation, this comfort in a crowd, in
support and in a refuge, even when support or refuge is quite illusory,
is just exactly what one would expect of fear if one believed it to be
an instinct which has become a misfit. In the ease of the soldier fear
is so much a misfit that instead of saving him for the most part it
destroys him. Raw soldiers under fire bunch together and armies fight in
masses, men are mowed down in swathes, because only so is the courage of
the common men sustained, only so can they be brave, albeit spread out
and handling their weapons as men of unqualified daring would handle
them they would be infinitely safer and more effective....

"And all of us, it may be, are restrained by this misfit fear from a
thousand bold successful gestures of mind and body, we are held back
from the attainment of mighty securities in pitiful temporary shelters
that are perhaps in the end no better than traps...."

From such considerations Benham went on to speculate how far the crowd
can be replaced in a man's imagination, how far some substitute for that
social backing can be made to serve the same purpose in neutralizing
fear. He wrote with the calm of a man who weighs the probabilities of a
riddle, and with the zeal of a man lost to every material consideration.
His writing, it seemed to White, had something of the enthusiastic
whiteness of his face, the enthusiastic brightness of his eyes. We can
no more banish fear from our being at present than we can carve out the
fleshy pillars of the heart or the pineal gland in the brain. It is deep
in our inheritance. As deep as hunger. And just as we have to satisfy
hunger in order that it should leave us free, so we have to satisfy the
unconquerable importunity of fear. We have to reassure our faltering
instincts. There must be something to take the place of lair and
familiars, something not ourselves but general, that we must carry with
us into the lonely places. For it is true that man has now not only
to learn to fight in open order instead of in a phalanx, bu