ts of pure instincts having definite
cooerdinated reactions. These undoubtedly do play a part, but probably
a very small part in the present moods of war. So far as they remain
purely instinctive their place as a general motive of war seems
negligible. It is a question, in fact, whether even in the state of
savagery any pure instinct for killing ever played a considerable
part. There were already practical motives, motives of fear and anger,
and presumably also complex states of pleasure connected with beliefs,
customs and ceremonies as well as with battle, so that even then men
cannot be said to have acted upon anything like purely instinctive
impulses.

Numerous accounts have come from the scenes of the great war about men
who appear for a time to be dominated by irresistible instincts. Gibbs
(80) says there are some men in every army who like slaughter for its
own sake. They find an intoxication in it. They love the hunting
spirit of it all. We have the story of a French soldier of peaceable
disposition who appeared to experience an ecstasy of delight as he lay
concealed in a shell hole and was able to pick off many of the enemy.
This was not the exhilaration and abandon experienced by men while
making attack, when violent muscular exertion produces an
intoxication of mind, but a dominance of the mind by something which
seems very much like the hunting spirit, under circumstances in which,
we may suppose, the enemy had undergone some process of dehumanization
in the mind of the hunter. We may suppose also that there are
individuals in every army who have pathological impulses or
perversions, which show themselves in instinctive reactions of a
specific nature and in excess of the normal.

Both the Germans and the French are accused by French and German
writers respectively with being the real lovers of battle. German
writers say that the Germans are peculiarly peace-loving and by nature
lacking in the battle spirit, but that the French love battle for its
own sake, and that this is shown clearly by their history. Others see
love of conflict, aggressiveness and cruelty in the German
disposition. Boutroux (13) wishes to place among the causes of the
great war the native brutality of the German disposition, a trait
existing from long ago, and now become a disciplined cruelty--a
_zuchtmaessige Grausamkeit_, regarded as right and meritorious. Many
think they find this love of fighting, bloodthirst and love of
destructio