fight, hyenas to snarl, beasts to debase,
hogs to wallow. There were equally as many who were forced to fight,
who could not kill, whose gentleness augmented under the brutal orders
of their officers. There were those who ran toward the front, heads
up, singing at the top of their lungs. There were those who slunk
back. Soldiers became cold, hard, materialistic, bitter, rancorous:
and qualities antithetic to these developed in their comrades.

Lane exhausted his resources of memory and searched in his notes for a
clipping he had torn from a magazine. He reread it, in the light of
his crystallizing knowledge:

"Had I not been afraid of the scorn of my brother
officers and the scoffs of my men, I would have fled
to the rear," confesses a Wisconsin officer, writing
of a battle.

"I see war as a horrible, grasping octopus with
hundreds of poisonous, death-dealing tentacle that
squeeze out the culture and refinement of a man,"
writes a veteran.

A regimental sergeant-major: "I considered myself
hardboiled, and acted the part with everybody,
including my wife. I scoffed at religion as unworthy
of a real man and a mark of the sissy and weakling."
Before going over the top for the first time he tried
to pray, but had even forgotten the Lord's Prayer.

"If I get out of this, I will never be unhappy again,"
reflected one of the contestants under shell-fire in
the Argonne Forest. To-day he is "not afraid of dead
men any more and is not in the least afraid to die."

"I went into the army a conscientious objector, a
radical, and a recluse.... I came out of it with the
knowledge of men and the philosophy of beauty," says
another.

"My moral fiber has been coarsened. The war has
blunted my sensitiveness to human suffering. In 1914 I
wept tears of distress over a rabbit which I had shot.
I could go out now at the command of my government in
cold-blooded fashion and commit all the barbarisms of
twentieth-century legalized murder," writes a Chicago
man.

A Denver man entered the war, lost himself and God,
and found manhood. "I played poker in the box-car
which carried me to the front and read the Testament
in the hospital train which took me to the rear," he
tells us.

"To disclose it all would take the genius and the
understanding of a god. I learned to talk from the
side of my mouth and drink and curse with t