POTENTATE (feebly).  No ... the Crucified ...  Time ...  Stay, stay!

    (The SAGE turns with a gesture of triumph.)

    (Curtain.)

II

THE BAD SIDE OF MILITARY SERVICE

A Padre who has earned the right to talk about the “average Tommy,” writes to me that A Student in Arms gives a very one-sided picture of him.  While cordially admitting his unselfishness, his good comradeship, his patience, and his pluck, my friend challenges me to deny that military, and especially active, service often has a brutalizing effect on the soldier, weakening his moral fibres, and causing him to sink to a low animal level.

Those who are in the habit of reading between the lines will, I think, often have seen the shadow of this darker side of army life on the pages of A Student in Arms; but I have not written of it specifically for several reasons.  It will suffice if I mention two.  First, I was writing mainly of the private and the N.C.O.  Rightly or wrongly, I imagined that those for whom I was writing were in the habit of taking for granted this darker side of life in the ranks.  I imagined that they thought of the “lower classes” as being naturally coarser and more animal than the “upper classes.”  I wanted then, and I want now, to contradict that belief with all the vehemence of which I am capable.  Officers and men necessarily develop different qualities, different forms of expression, different mental attitudes.  But I am confident that I speak the truth when I say that essentially, and in the eyes of God there is nothing to choose between them.

If I must write of the brutalizing effect of war on the soldier, let it be clearly understood that I am speaking, not of officers only, nor of privates only, but of fighting men of every class and rank.  As a matter of fact I have never, whether before or during the war, belonged to a mess where the tone was cleaner or more wholesome than it was in the Sergeants’ Mess of my old battalion.

My second reason for not writing about the bad side of Army life was that mere condemnation is so futile.  I have listened to countless sermons in which the “lusts of the flesh” were denounced, and have known for certain that their power for good was nil.  If I write about it now, it is only because I hope that I may be able to make clearer the causes and processes of such moral deterioration as exists, and thus to help those who are trying to combat it, to do so with greater understanding and sympathy.

Even in England most officers, and all privates, are cut off from their womenfolk.  Mothers, sisters, wives, and sweethearts are inaccessible.  All have a certain amount of leisure, and very little to do with it.  All are physically fit and mentally rather unoccupied.  All are living under an unnatural discipline from which, when the last parade of the day is over, there is a natural reaction.  Finally, wherever there are troops, and especially in war time, there are “bad” women and weak women.  The result is inevitable.  A certain number of both officers and men “go wrong.”