“To disclose it all would take the genius and the understanding of a god.  I learned to talk from the side of my mouth and drink and curse with the rest of our ‘noble crusaders.’  Authority infuriated me and the first suspicion of an order made me sullen and dangerous....  Each man in his crudeness and lewdness nauseated me,” writes a service man.

“When our boy came back,” complains a mother, “we could hardly recognize for our strong, impulsive, loving son whom we had loaned to Uncle Sam this irritable, restless, nervous man with defective hearing from shells exploding all about him, and limbs aching and twitching from strain and exposure, and with that inevitable companion of all returned oversea boys, the coffin-nail, between his teeth.”

“In the army I found that hard drinkers and fast livers and profane-tongued men often proved to be the kindest-hearted, squarest friends one could ever have,” one mother reports.

So then the war brought to the souls of soldiers an extremity of debasement and uplift, a transformation incomprehensible to the mind of man.

Upon men outside the service the war pressed its materialism.  The spiritual progress of a thousand years seemed in a day to have been destroyed.  Self-preservation was the first law of nature.  And all the standards of life were abased.  Following the terrible fever of patriotism and sacrifice and fear came the inevitable selfishness and greed and frenzy.  The primitive in man stalked forth.  The world became a place of strife.

What then, reflected Lane, could have been the effect of war upon women?  The mothers of the race, of men!  The creatures whom emotions governed!  The beings who had the sex of tigresses!  “The female of the species!” What had the war done to the generation of its period—­to Helen, to Mel Iden, to Lorna, to Bessy Bell?  Had it made them what men wanted?

At eight o’clock that night Lane kept his tryst with Bessy.  The serene, mellow light of the moon shone down upon the garden.  The shade appeared spotted with patches of moonlight; the summer breeze rustled the leaves; the insects murmured their night song.  Romance and beauty still lived.  No war could kill them.  Bessy came gliding under the trees, white and graceful like a nymph, fearless, full of her dream, ripe to be made what a man would make of her.

Lane talked to Bessy of the war.  Words came like magic to his lips.  He told her of the thunder and fire and blood and heroism, of fight and agony and death.  He told her of himself—­of his service in the hours that tried his soul.  Bessy passed from fascinated intensity to rapture and terror.  She clung to Lane.  She kissed him.  She wept.