ape. The rest, for the greater part of the time, live an unnatural
life, death near enough to make them reckless and far enough to make them
gay. Commonly men and women more or less restrain themselves because of
to-morrow; but what if there be no to-morrow? What if the dice are heavily
weighted against it? And what of their already jeoparded restraint when
the crisis has thrown the conventions to the winds and there is little
to lighten the end of the day?

Thus to lift the veil on life behind the lines in time of war is a
thankless task. The stay-at-homes will not believe, and particularly
they whose smug respectability and conventional religion has been put
to no such fiery trial. Moreover they will do more than disbelieve; they
will say that the story is not fit to be told. Nor is it. But then it
should never have been lived. That very respectability, that very
conventionality, that very contented backboneless religion made it
possible--all but made it necessary. For it was those things which
allowed the world to drift into the war, and what the war was nine days
out of ten ought to be thrust under the eyes of those who will not
believe. It is a small thing that men die in battle, for a man has but
one life to live and it is good to give it for one's friends; but it is
such an evil that it has no like, this drifting of a world into a hell to
which men's souls are driven like red maple leaves before the autumn
wind.

The old-fashioned pious books made hell stink of brimstone and painted
the Devil hideous. But Satan is not such a fool. Champagne and Martinis
do not taste like Gregory powder, nor was St. Anthony tempted by
shrivelled hags. Paganism can be gay, and passion look like love.
Moreover, still more truly, Christ could see the potentiality of virtue
in Mary Magdalene and of strength in Simon called Peter. The conventional
religious world does not.

A curious feature, too, of that strange life was its lack of
consecutiveness. It was like the pages of _La Vie Parisienne_. The friend
of to-day was gone for ever to-morrow. A man arrived, weary and dirty and
craving for excitement, in some unknown town; in half an hour he had
stepped into the gay glitter of wine and women's smiles; in half a dozen
he had been whirled away. The days lingered and yet flew; the pages were
twirled ever more dazzlingly; only at the end men saw in a blinding flash
whither they had been led.

These things, then, are set out in this bo