barbarism, and of Christian morality over the devil's law. They believed
that they were fighting to dethrone militarism, to insure the happiness
and liberties of civilized peoples, and were sure of the gratitude of
their nation should they not have the fate to fall upon the field of
honor, but go home blind or helpless.

I have read many letters from boys now dead in which they express that
faith.

"Do not grieve for me," wrote one of them, "for I shall be proud to die
for my country's sake."

"I am happy," wrote another (I quote the tenor of his letters),
"because, though I hate war, I feel that this is the war to end war.
We are the last victims of this way of argument. By smashing the German
war-machine we shall prove for all time the criminal folly of militarism
and Junkerdom."

There were young idealists like that, and they were to be envied for
their faith, which they brought with them from public schools and from
humble homes where they had read old books and heard old watchwords. I
think, at the beginning of the war there were many like that. But as it
continued year after year doubts crept in, dreadful suspicions of
truth more complex than the old simplicity, a sense of revolt against
sacrifice unequally shared and devoted to a purpose which was not that
for which they had been called to fight.

They had been told that they were fighting for liberty. But their first
lesson was the utter loss of individual liberty under a discipline which
made the private soldier no more than a number. They were ordered about
like galley--slaves, herded about like cattle, treated individually and
in the mass with utter disregard of their comfort and well-being. Often,
as I know, they were detrained at rail-heads in the wind and rain and by
ghastly errors of staff-work kept waiting for their food until they were
weak and famished. In the base camps men of one battalion were drafted
into other battalions, where they lost their old comrades and were
unfamiliar with the speech and habits of a crowd belonging to different
counties, the Sussex men going to a Manchester regiment, the Yorkshire
men being drafted to a Surrey unit. By R.T.O.'s and A.M.L.O.'s and camp
commandments and town majors and staff pups men were bullied and bundled
about, not like human beings, but like dumb beasts, and in a thousand
ways injustice, petty tyranny, hard work, degrading punishments for
trivial offenses, struck at their souls and made the name o