he rest of
our 'noble crusaders.' Authority infuriated me and the
first suspicion of an order made me sullen and
dangerous.... Each man in his crudeness and lewdness
nauseated me," writes a service man.

"When our boy came back," complains a mother, "we could hardly
recognize for our strong, impulsive, loving son whom we had
loaned to Uncle Sam this irritable, restless, nervous man
with defective hearing from shells exploding all about him, and
limbs aching and twitching from strain and exposure, and with
that inevitable companion of all returned oversea boys, the
coffin-nail, between his teeth."

"In the army I found that hard drinkers and fast
livers and profane-tongued men often proved to be the
kindest-hearted, squarest friends one could ever
have," one mother reports.

So then the war brought to the souls of soldiers an extremity of
debasement and uplift, a transformation incomprehensible to the mind
of man.

Upon men outside the service the war pressed its materialism. The
spiritual progress of a thousand years seemed in a day to have been
destroyed. Self-preservation was the first law of nature. And all the
standards of life were abased. Following the terrible fever of
patriotism and sacrifice and fear came the inevitable selfishness and
greed and frenzy. The primitive in man stalked forth. The world became
a place of strife.

What then, reflected Lane, could have been the effect of war upon
women? The mothers of the race, of men! The creatures whom emotions
governed! The beings who had the sex of tigresses! "The female of the
species!" What had the war done to the generation of its period--to
Helen, to Mel Iden, to Lorna, to Bessy Bell? Had it made them what men
wanted?

At eight o'clock that night Lane kept his tryst with Bessy. The
serene, mellow light of the moon shone down upon the garden. The shade
appeared spotted with patches of moonlight; the summer breeze rustled
the leaves; the insects murmured their night song. Romance and beauty
still lived. No war could kill them. Bessy came gliding under the
trees, white and graceful like a nymph, fearless, full of her dream,
ripe to be made what a man would make of her.

Lane talked to Bessy of the war. Words came like magic to his lips. He
told her of the thunder and fire and blood and heroism, of fight and
agony and death. He told her of himself--of his service in the hours
that tried his soul. Bessy passe