of personal dissociation from the behaviour of
one's flesh. Your teeth may chatter and your knees quake, but as long
as the real you disapproves and derides this absurdity of the flesh,
the composite you can carry on. Closely allied to the sensation of
nameless dread caused by high explosives is that caused by gas. No one
can carry out a relief in the trenches without a certain anxiety and
dread if he knows that the enemy has gas cylinders in position and
that the wind is in the east. But this, again, is not exactly the
fear of death; but much more a physical reaction to uncertainty and
suspense combined with the threat of physical suffering.

Personally, I believe that very few men indeed fear death. The vast
majority experience a more or less violent physical shrinking from
the pain of death and wounds, especially when they are obliged to be
physically inactive, and when they have nothing else to think about.
This kind of dread is, in the case of a good many men, intensified
by darkness and suspense, and by the deafening noise and shock that
accompany the detonation of high explosives. But it cannot properly be
called the fear of death, and it is a purely physical reaction which
can be, and nearly always is, controlled by the mind.

Last of all there is the repulsion and loathing for the whole business
of war, with its bloody ruthlessness, its fiendish ingenuity, and
its insensate cruelty, that comes to a man after a battle, when the
tortured and dismembered dead lie strewn about the trench, and the
wounded groan from No-Man's-Land. But neither is that the fear of
death. It is a repulsion which breeds hot anger more often than cold
fear, reckless hatred of life more often than abject clinging to it.

The cases where any sort of fear, even for a moment, obtains the
mastery of a man are very rare. Sometimes in the case of a boy,
whose nerves are more sensitive than a man's, and whose habit of
self-control is less formed, a sudden shock will upset his mental
balance. Sometimes a very egotistical man will succumb to danger long
drawn out. The same applies to men who are very introspective. I have
seen a man of obviously low intelligence break down on the eve of an
attack. The anticipation of danger makes many men "windy," especially
officers who are responsible for other lives than their own. But even
where men are afraid it is generally not death that they fear. Their
fear is a physical and instinctive shrinking from