ge enlistment and to
_en_courage desertion and "crime"? When would they realize that making
"crimes," and manufacturing "criminals" from honest men, is _not_
discipline, is _not_ making soldiers, is _not_ improving the Army--is
_not_ common ordinary sanity and sense? When would they break their
dull, unimaginative, hide-bound--no, tape-bound--souls from the ideas
that prevailed before (and murdered) the Crimean Army.... The Army is
not now the sweepings of the jails, and more in need of the wild-beast
tamer than of the kind firm teacher, as once it was. How long will
they continue to suppose that you make a fine fighting-man, and a
self-reliant, intelligent soldier, by treating him as a depraved
child, as a rightless slave, as a mindless automaton, and by
encouraging the public (whom he protects) to regard him as a low
criminal ruffian to be classed with the broad-arrowed convict, and to
be excluded from places where any loafing rotten lout may go.... When
would a lawyer-ridden Army Council realize that there is a trifle of
significance in the fact that there are four times as many soldier
suicides as there are civilian, and that the finest advertisement for
the dwindling Army _is the soldier_. To think that sober men should,
with one hand spend vast sums in lying advertisements for the Army,
and with the other maintain a system that makes the soldier on
furlough reply to the question "Shall I enlist, mate?" with the words
"Not while you got a razor to cut yer throat".... Ah, well, common
sense would reach even the Army some day, and the soldier be treated
and disciplined as a man and a citizen--and perhaps, when it did, and
the soldier gave a better description of his life, the other citizen,
the smug knave who despises him while he shelters behind him, will
become less averse from having his own round shoulders straightened,
his back flattened and his muscles developed as he takes his part in
the first fundamental elementary duty of a citizen--preparation for
the defence of hearth and home.... Lucille! Well ... Thank God she
could not see him and know his life. If _she_ had any kindness left
for him she would suffer to watch him eating well-nigh uneatable food,
grooming a horse, sweeping a stable, polishing trestle-legs with
blacklead, scrubbing floors, sleeping on damp straw, carrying coals,
doing scullion-work for uneducated roughs, being brow-beaten, bullied,
and cursed by them in tight-lipped silence--not that thes