One of the people who is often spoken of as if he were doing an enormous amount of concentrated thinking is “the man in the trenches.”  We are told—­by gentlemen writing for the most part at home—­of the most extraordinary things that are going on in those devoted brains, how they are getting new views about the duties of labour, religion, morality, monarchy, and any other notions that the gentleman at home happens to fancy and wished to push.  Now that is not at all the impression of the khaki mentality I have reluctantly accepted as correct.  For the most part the man in khaki is up against a round of tedious immediate duties that forbid consecutive thought; he is usually rather crowded and not very comfortable.  He is bored.

The real horror of modern war, when all is said and done, is the boredom.  To get killed our wounded may be unpleasant, but it is at any rate interesting; the real tragedy is in the desolated fields, the desolated houses, the desolated hours and days, the bored and desolated minds that hang behind the melee and just outside the melee.  The peculiar beastliness of the German crime is the way the German war cant and its consequences have seized upon and paralysed the mental movement of Western Europe.  Before 1914 war was theoretically unpopular in every European country; we thought of it as something tragic and dreadful.  Now everyone knows by experience that it is something utterly dirty and detestable.  We thought it was the Nemean lion, and we have found it is the Augean stable.  But being bored by war and hating war is quite unproductive unless you are thinking about its nature and causes so thoroughly that you will presently be able to take hold of it and control it and end it. It is no good for everyone to say unanimously, “We will have no more war,” unless you have thought out how to avoid it, and mean to bring that end about.  It is as if everyone said, “We will have no more catarrh,” or “no more flies,” or “no more east wind.”  And my point is that the immense sorrows at home in every European country and the vast boredom of the combatants are probably not really producing any effective remedial mental action at all, and will not do so unless we get much more thoroughly to work upon the thinking-out process.

In such talks as I could get with men close up to the front I found beyond this great boredom and attempts at distraction only very specialised talk about changes in the future.  Men were keen upon questions of army promotion, of the future of conscription, of the future of the temporary officer, upon the education of boys in relation to army needs.  But the war itself was bearing them all upon its way, as unquestioned and uncontrolled as if it were the planet on which they lived.

II.  THE YIELDING PACIFIST AND THE CONSCIENTIOUS OBJECTOR