“Mm,” said White, and pressed his lips together and knotted his brows and shook his head.

10

But the bulk of Benham’s discussion of fear was not concerned with this perverse and overstrained suggestion of pleasure reached through torture, this exaggeration of the man resolved not to shrink at anything; it was an examination of the present range and use of fear that led gradually to something like a theory of control and discipline.  The second of his two dominating ideas was that fear is an instinct arising only in isolation, that in a crowd there may be a collective panic, but that there is no real individual fear.  Fear, Benham held, drives the man back to the crowd, the dog to its master, the wolf to the pack, and when it is felt that the danger is pooled, then fear leaves us.  He was quite prepared to meet the objection that animals of a solitary habit do nevertheless exhibit fear.  Some of this apparent fear, he argued, was merely discretion, and what is not discretion is the survival of an infantile characteristic.  The fear felt by a tiger cub is certainly a social emotion, that drives it back to the other cubs, to its mother and the dark hiding of the lair.  The fear of a fully grown tiger sends it into the reeds and the shadows, to a refuge, that must be “still reminiscent of the maternal lair.”  But fear has very little hold upon the adult solitary animal, it changes with extreme readiness to resentment and rage.

“Like most inexperienced people,” ran his notes, “I was astonished at the reported feats of men in war; I believed they were exaggerated, and that there was a kind of unpremeditated conspiracy of silence about their real behaviour.  But when on my way to visit India for the third time I turned off to see what I could of the fighting before Adrianople, I discovered at once that a thousand casually selected conscripts will, every one of them, do things together that not one of them could by any means be induced to do alone.  I saw men not merely obey orders that gave them the nearly certain prospect of death, but I saw them exceeding orders; I saw men leap out of cover for the mere sake of defiance, and fall shot through and smashed by a score of bullets.  I saw a number of Bulgarians in the hands of the surgeon, several quite frightfully wounded, refuse chloroform merely to impress the English onlooker, some of their injuries I could scarcely endure to see, and I watched a line of infantry men go on up a hill and keep on quite manifestly cheerful with men dropping out and wriggling, and men dropping out and lying still until every other man was down. . . .  Not one man would have gone up that hill alone, without onlookers. . . .”