Page:"The next war"; an appeal to common sense (IA thenextwarappeal01irwi).pdf/143

 designed to lash them up, when the moment of action came, to a love of war and a desire for victory. That, and the new experience, seemed to keep them in a state of blithe morale for the first few months. There is a curious, exalted state of mind about the early days of a war. All of us who dodged about the rear, immune from its hardships, nearly immune from its dangers, felt that mood. Never again shall I be so poignantly moved by the beauty of paintings, of old cathedrals, of women, of blossoming fields, as during those early days of the war. It was as though I were constantly and pleasantly a little drunk. Now the men at the front—wallowing in filth and misery, hardening themselves against instant death—felt nevertheless something of the same mood. Then it passed, as intoxication will. Thereafter, they “carried on” because they must. They had been taught it was their duty; most of them believed that; but deep down lay a rebellion against the whole principle of the thing. Boards of morale and of propaganda invented the phrase “the war to end war.” The men of the trenches clutched at that. “It must never happen again”—you hear the phrase to weariness from the British ranks, the French ranks, the Belgian ranks, the Italian ranks. They did not consider themselves as men making an act of sacrifice but rather as men caught in a wheel from which there was no present escape. Germany went to war in a state of exaltation, lashed up through forty years of military