ual quality
which requires a spiritual inducement. Men do not set a price on their
chance of being blown to bits by shells. Even patriotism is too vague
to be a sufficient incentive. The justice of the cause to be fought
for helps; it must be proportionate to the magnitude of the sacrifice
demanded. But always an ideal is necessary--an ideal of liberty,
indignation and mercy. If this is true of the men who go out to die,
it is even more true of the women who send them,

"Where there're no children left to pull
The few scared, ragged flowers--
All that was ours, and, God, how beautiful!
All, all that was once ours,
Lies faceless, mouthless, mire to mire,
So lost to all sweet semblance of desire
That we, in those fields seeking desperately
One face long-lost to love, one face that lies
Only upon the breast of Memory,
Would never find it--even the very blood
Is stamped into the horror of the mud--
Something that mad men trample under-foot
In the narrow trench--for these things are not men--
Things shapeless, sodden, mute
Beneath the monstrous limber of the guns;
Those things that loved us once...
Those that were ours, but never ours again."

For two and a half years the American press specialized on the terror
aspect of the European hell. Every sensational, exceptional fact was
not only chronicled, but widely circulated. The bodily and mental
havoc that can be wrought by shell fire was exaggerated out of all
proportion to reality. Photographs, almost criminal in type, were
published to illustrate the brutal expression of men who had taken
part in bayonet charges. Lies were spread broadcast by supposedly
reputable persons, stating how soldiers had to be maddened with
drugs or alcohol before they would go over the top. Much of what was
recorded was calculated to stagger the imagination and intimidate the
heart. The reason for this was that the supposed eye-witnesses rarely
saw what they recorded. They had usually never been within ten miles
of the front, for only combatants are allowed in the line. They
brought civilian minds, undisciplined to the conquest of fear, to
their task; they never for one instant guessed the truly spiritual
exaltation which gives wings to the soul of the man who fights in a
just cause. Squalor, depravity, brutalisation, death--moral, mental
and physical deformity were the rewards which the American public
learned the fighting man gained in the trenches. The