A pity some of the energy that went to making the annual 20,000 military “criminals” out of honest, law-abiding, well-intending men could not go to harassing the Canteen instead of the soldier (whom the Canteen swindles right and left, and whence he gets salt-watery beer, and an “ounce” of tobacco that will go straight into his pipe in one “fill”—­no need to wrap it up, thank you) and discovering how handsome fortunes, as well as substantial “illegal gratifications,” are made out of his much-stoppaged one-and-tuppence-a-week.

Did the Authorities really yearn to discourage enlistment and to encourage desertion and “crime”?  When would they realize that making “crimes,” and manufacturing “criminals” from honest men, is not discipline, is not making soldiers, is not improving the Army—­is not common ordinary sanity and sense?  When would they break their dull, unimaginative, hide-bound—­no, tape-bound—­souls from the ideas that prevailed before (and murdered) the Crimean Army....  The Army is not now the sweepings of the jails, and more in need of the wild-beast tamer than of the kind firm teacher, as once it was.  How long will they continue to suppose that you make a fine fighting-man, and a self-reliant, intelligent soldier, by treating him as a depraved child, as a rightless slave, as a mindless automaton, and by encouraging the public (whom he protects) to regard him as a low criminal ruffian to be classed with the broad-arrowed convict, and to be excluded from places where any loafing rotten lout may go....  When would a lawyer-ridden Army Council realize that there is a trifle of significance in the fact that there are four times as many soldier suicides as there are civilian, and that the finest advertisement for the dwindling Army is the soldier.  To think that sober men should, with one hand spend vast sums in lying advertisements for the Army, and with the other maintain a system that makes the soldier on furlough reply to the question “Shall I enlist, mate?” with the words “Not while you got a razor to cut yer throat"....  Ah, well, common sense would reach even the Army some day, and the soldier be treated and disciplined as a man and a citizen—­and perhaps, when it did, and the soldier gave a better description of his life, the other citizen, the smug knave who despises him while he shelters behind him, will become less averse from having his own round shoulders straightened, his back flattened and his muscles developed as he takes his part in the first fundamental elementary duty of a citizen—­preparation for the defence of hearth and home....  Lucille!  Well ...  Thank God she could not see him and know his life.  If she had any kindness left for him she would suffer to watch him eating well-nigh uneatable food, grooming a horse, sweeping a stable, polishing trestle-legs with blacklead, scrubbing floors, sleeping on damp straw, carrying coals, doing scullion-work for uneducated roughs, being brow-beaten, bullied, and cursed by them in tight-lipped silence—­not that these things troubled him personally—­the less idle leisure for thought the better, and no real man minds physical hardship—­there is no indignity in labour per se any more than there is dignity....