f personal
liberty a mockery. From their own individuality they argued to broader
issues. Was this war for liberty? Were the masses of men on either side
fighting with free will as free men? Those Germans--were they not under
discipline, each man of them, forced to fight whether they liked it or
not? Compelled to go forward to sacrifice, with machine-guns behind them
to shoot them down if they revolted against their slave-drivers? What
liberty had they to follow their conscience or their judgment--"Theirs
not to reason why, theirs but to do and die"--like all soldiers in all
armies. Was it not rather that the masses of men engaged in slaughter
were serving the purpose of powers above them, rival powers, greedy for
one another's markets, covetous of one another's wealth, and callous of
the lives of humble men? Surely if the leaders of the warring nations
were put together for even a week in some such place as Hooge, or the
Hohenzollern redoubt, afflicted by the usual harassing fire, poison-gas,
mine explosions, lice, rats, and the stench of rotting corpses, with the
certainty of death or dismemberment at the week-end, they would settle
the business and come to terms before the week was out. I heard that
proposition put forward many times by young officers of ours, and as an
argument against their own sacrifice they found it unanswerable.

V

The condition and psychology of their own country as they read about
it in the Paris Daily Mail, which was first to come into their billets,
filled some of these young men with distress and disgust, strengthened
into rage when they went home on leave. The deliberate falsification
of news (the truth of which they heard from private channels) made
them discredit the whole presentation of our case and state. They said,
"Propaganda!" with a sharp note of scorn. The breezy optimism of public
men, preachers, and journalists, never downcast by black news, never
agonized by the slaughter in these fields, minimizing horrors and loss
and misery, crowing over the enemy, prophesying early victory which did
not come, accepting all the destruction of manhood (while they stayed
safe) as a necessary and inevitable "misfortune," had a depressing
effect on men who knew they were doomed to die, in the law of averages,
if the war went on. "Damn their optimism!" said some of our officers.
"It's too easy for those behind the lines. It is only we who have the
right of optimism. It's we who have to