and many are misunderstood.  Those who would not and could not be bold are susceptible to advances that in an ordinary time would not affect them.  War invests a soldier with a glamour.  Love at first sight, flirtations, rash intimacies, quick engagements, immediate marriages.  The soldier who is soon going away to fight and perhaps to die strikes hard at the very heart of a girl.  Either she is not her real self then, or else she is suddenly transported to a womanhood that is instinctive, elemental, universal for the future.  She feels what she does not know.  She surrenders because there is an imperative call to the depths of her nature.  She sacrifices because she is the inspiritor of the soldier, the reward for his loss, the savior of the race.  If women are the spoils of barbarous conquerors, they are also the sinews, the strength, the soul of defenders.

And so, however you look at it, war means for women sacrifice, disillusion, heartbreak, agony, doom.  I feel that so powerfully that I am overcome; I am sick at the gaiety and playing; I am full of fear, wonder, admiration, and hopeless pity for them.

No man can tell what is going on in the souls of soldiers while noble women are offering love and tenderness, throwing themselves upon the altar of war, hoping blindly to send their great spirits marching to the front.  Perhaps the man who lives through the war will feel the change in his soul if he cannot tell it.  Day by day I think I see a change in my comrades.  As they grow physically stronger they seem to grow spiritually lesser.  But maybe that is only my idea.  I see evidences of fear, anger, sullenness, moodiness, shame.  I see a growing indifference to fatigue, toil, pain.  As these boys harden physically they harden mentally.  Always, ’way off there is the war, and that seems closely related to the near duty here—­what it takes to make a man.  These fellows will measure men differently after this experience with sacrifice, obedience, labor, and pain.  In that they will become great.  But I do not think these things stimulate a man’s mind.  Changes are going on in me, some of which I am unable to define.  For instance, physically I am much bigger and stronger than I was.  I weigh one hundred and eighty pounds!  As for my mind, something is always tugging at it.  I feel that it grows tired.  It wants to forget.  In spite of my will, all of these keen desires of mine to know everything lag and fail often, and I catch myself drifting.  I see and feel and hear without thinking.  I am only an animal then.  At these times sight of blood, or a fight, or a plunging horse, or a broken leg—­and these sights are common—­affects me little until I am quickened and think about the meaning of it all.  At such moments I have a revulsion of feeling.  With memory comes a revolt, and so on, until I am the distressed, inquisitive, and morbid person I am now.  I shudder at what war will make me.  Actual contact with earth, exploding