it produced in the life of war? It is
because in war sordidness and petty worries are eliminated; because
the one great and ever-present fear, the fear of death, reduces all
other considerations to their proper values. The actual fear of death
is always present, but this fear itself cannot be sordid when men can
meet it of their own free will and with the most total absence of
cringing or of cowardice.

In commercial rivalry a man will sacrifice the friend of years to gain
a given sum, which will insure him increased material comforts. In war
a man will deliberately sacrifice the life for which he wanted those
comforts, to save perhaps a couple of men who have no claim on him
whatsoever. He who before feared any household calamity now throws
himself upon a live bomb, which, even though he might escape himself,
will without his action kill other men who are near it. This deed
loses none of its value because of the general belief among soldiers
that life is cheap. Other men's lives are cheap. One's own life is
always very dear.

One of the most precious results has been the resurrection of the
quality of admiration. The man who before the war said, "Why is he my
master?" is now only too glad to accept a leader who is a leader
indeed. He has learned that as his leader cannot do without him, so he
cannot do without his leader, and although each is of equal
importance in the scheme of affairs, their positions in the scheme are
different. He has learned that there is a higher equality than the
equality of class: it is the equality of spirit.

This same feeling is reflected, more especially among the leaders of
the men, in the complete disappearance of snobbishness. No such
artificial imposition can survive in a life where inherent value
automatically finds its level; where a disguise which in peace-time
passed as superiority, now disintegrates when in contact with this
life of essentials. For war is, above all, a reduction to essentials.
It is the touchstone which proves the qualities of our youth's
training. All those pleasures that formed the gamut of a young man's
life either fall away completely or find their proper place. Sport,
games, the open-air life, have taught him that high cheerfulness,
through failure or success, which makes endurance possible. But the
complicated, artificial pleasures of ordinary times have receded into
a dim, unspoken background. The wholesomeness of the existence that
he now leads has taug