chance to face
death or to bear an inhuman load. This state of mind does not exist of
itself; it is morale at its best, and it appears only when the occasion
strikes a nerve which arouses the super-earthly vistas of human
consciousness or subconsciousness. But it commonly appears at the
summons of a leader who himself welcomes the challenge of the task he
sets before his followers. It is the magic of King Alfred in his appeal
to his chiefs to do battle with the Danes, when all that he could hold
out to them was the prospect of his own vision,

This--that the sky grows darker yet
And the sea rises higher.

Morale, for all the greater purposes of war, is a state of faith; and
its logic will be the superb and elusive logic of human faith. It is for
this reason that morale, while not identical with the righteousness of
the cause, can never reach its height unless the aim of the war can be
held intact in the undissembled moral sense of the people. This is one
of the provisions in the deeper order of things for the slow
predominance of the better brands of justice.

There are still officers in army and navy--not as many as formerly--who
believe exclusively in the morale that works its way into every body of
recruits through discipline and the sway of _esprit de corps_. "They
know that they're here to can the Kaiser, and that's all they need to
know," said one such officer to me very recently. "After a man has been
here two months, the worst punishment you can give him is to tell him he
can't go to France right away. The soldier is a man of action; and the
less thinking he does, the better." There is an amount of practical
wisdom in this; for the human mind has a large capacity for adopting
beliefs that fit the trend of its habits and feelings, and this trend is
powerfully molded by the unanimous direction of an army's purpose. There
is an all but irresistible orthodoxy within a body committed to a war.
And the current (pragmatic) psychology referred to, making the
intelligence a mere instrument of the will, would seem to sanction the
maxim, "First decide, and then think accordingly."

But there are two remarks to be made about this view; first, that in the
actual creation of morale within an army corps much thinking is
included, and nothing is accomplished without the consent of such
thoughts as a man already has. Training does wonders in making morale,
when nothing in the mind opposes it. Second, that the morale