e with nails and teeth. The code of the ape-man is bad for some
temperaments. It is apt to become a habit of mind. It may surge up again
when there are no Germans present, but some old woman behind an open
till, or some policeman with a bull's-eye lantern and a truncheon, or in
a street riot where fellow-citizens are for the time being "the enemy."

Death, their own or other people's, does not mean very much to some who,
in the trenches, sat within a few yards of stinking corpses, knowing
that the next shell might make such of them. Life was cheap in war. Is
it not cheap in peace?...

The discipline of military life is mainly an imposed
discipline--mechanical, and enforced in the last resort not by reason,
but by field punishment or by a firing platoon. Whereas many men were
made brisk and alert by discipline and saw the need of it for the
general good, others were always in secret rebellion against its
restraints of the individual will, and as soon as they were liberated
broke away from it as slaves from their chains, and did not substitute
self-discipline for that which had weighed heavy on them. With all its
discipline, army life was full of lounging, hanging about, waste of
time, waiting for things to happen. It was an irresponsible life for
the rank and file. Food was brought to them, clothes were given to them,
entertainments were provided behind the line, sports organized, their
day ordered by high powers. There was no need to think for themselves,
to act for themselves. They moved in herds dependent on their leaders.
That, too, was a bad training for the individualism of civil life. It
tended to destroy personal initiative and willpower. Another evil of the
abnormal life of war sowed the seeds of insanity in the brains of men
not strong enough to resist it. Sexually they were starved. For months
they lived out of the sight and presence of women. But they came back
into villages or towns where they were tempted by any poor slut who
winked at them and infected them with illness. Men went to hospital with
venereal disease in appalling numbers. Boys were ruined and poisoned for
life. Future generations will pay the price of war not only in poverty
and by the loss of the unborn children of the boys who died, but by an
enfeebled stock and the heritage of insanity.

The Prime Minister said one day, "The world is suffering from
shell-shock." That was true. But it suffered also from the symptoms of
all that illness whi