d to the subtleties of half-tones, delicate scales
of emotion, fastidious in their choice of words, in their sense of
beauty, found themselves compelled to live and act like ape-men; and it
was abominably funny. They laughed at the most frightful episodes, which
revealed this contrast between civilized ethics and the old beast
law. The more revolting it was the more, sometimes, they shouted with
laughter, especially in reminiscence, when the tale was told in the
gilded salon of a French chateau, or at a mess-table.

It was, I think, the laughter of mortals at the trick which had been
played on them by an ironical fate. They had been taught to believe that
the whole object of life was to reach out to beauty and love, and that
mankind, in its progress to perfection, had killed the beast instinct,
cruelty, blood-lust, the primitive, savage law of survival by tooth and
claw and club and ax. All poetry, all art, all religion had preached
this gospel and this promise.

Now that ideal had broken like a china vase dashed to hard ground. The
contrast between That and This was devastating. It was, in an enormous
world-shaking way, like a highly dignified man in a silk hat, morning
coat, creased trousers, spats, and patent boots suddenly slipping on a
piece of orange-peel and sitting, all of a heap, with silk hat flying,
in a filthy gutter. The war-time humor of the soul roared with mirth at
the sight of all that dignity and elegance despoiled.

So we laughed merrily, I remember, when a military chaplain (Eton,
Christ Church, and Christian service) described how an English sergeant
stood round the traverse of a German trench, in a night raid, and as
the Germans came his way, thinking to escape, he cleft one skull after
another with a steel-studded bludgeon--a weapon which he had made with
loving craftsmanship on the model of Blunderbore's club in the pictures
of a fairy-tale.

So we laughed at the adventures of a young barrister (a brilliant fellow
in the Oxford "Union") whose pleasure it was to creep out o' nights into
No Man's Land and lie doggo in a shell-hole close to the enemy's barbed
wire, until presently, after an hour's waiting or two, a German soldier
would crawl out to fetch in a corpse. The English barrister lay with his
rifle ready. Where there had been one corpse there were two. Each night
he made a notch on his rifle--three notches one night--to check the
number of his victims. Then he came back to breakfast in h