consequence except the consequence of punishment to his own person.
The rules are plain and simple; the ceremonies of respect and
submission are as easy and mechanical as a prayer wheel, the orders
are always to be obeyed thoughtlessly, however inept or
dishonorable they may be.... No doubt this weakness is just what
the military system aims at, its ideal soldier being, not a
complete man, but a docile unit or cannon fodder which can be
trusted to respond promptly and certainly to the external stimulus
of a shouted order, and is intimidated to the pitch of being afraid
to run away from a battle."

Nor is Mr. Shaw less sparing to the officer, and he represents in this
case also the most unanimous Socialist view:--

"If he [the officer] calls his men dogs," says Shaw, "and perverts
a musketry drill order to make them kneel to him as an act of
personal humiliation, and thereby provokes a mutiny among men not
yet thoroughly broken in to the abjectness of the military
condition, he is not, as might be expected, shot, but, at the
worst, reprimanded, whilst the leader of the mutiny, instead of
getting the Victoria Cross and a public testimonial, is condemned
to five years' penal servitude by Lynch Law (technically called
martial law) administered by a trade union of officers."

Like all Socialists, Mr. Shaw recognizes that the evils of militarism
rest even more heavily on subject peoples than on the soldiers,
citizens, or taxpayers of the dominating races. He says of the officer
he has been describing, who is humane and intelligent in civil life,
that in his military capacity he will frantically declare that "he dare
not walk about in a foreign country unless every crime of violence
against an Englishman in uniform is punished by the bombardment and
destruction of a whole village, or the wholesale flogging and execution
of every native in the neighborhood; and also that unless he and his
fellow officers have power, without the intervention of a jury, to
punish the slightest self-assertion or hesitation to obey orders,
however grossly insulting or disastrous those orders may be, with
sentences which are reserved in civil life for the worst crimes, he
cannot secure the obedience and respect of his men, and the country
would accordingly lose all of its colonies and dependencies, and be
helplessly conquered in the German invasion