Page:"The next war"; an appeal to common sense (IA thenextwarappeal01irwi).pdf/152

 but who spared him, too. “Brave as a lion, gentle as a woman,” The Germans showed that there was a more useful method. “The best soldier is a bit of a brute,” they said. In our military schools, we have always forbidden hazing. The German military schools encouraged it, in forms more gross than any of our youth imagined. That was done to cultivate the required touch of brutality. In the close race for victory of the last war, we all had to follow. Uninstructed civilians, visiting the American, French and British training-camps, wondered at the time given to bayonet practice. They knew that the bayonet was rarely used in action. Why so much stress upon it? Any sergeant could explain that. It was a means of cultivating hate, of making your soldier a bit of a brute. That dummy at which you were thrusting—the instructor encouraged you to imagine him a German, to curse him, to work up a savage delight in mutilating him. It was a part of the higher psychology of modern war.

There was propaganda, too—and here I must condense a theme for a whole book. This was one of the human forces existing before the great war, which the war reduced to its scientific terms; made tremendously usable. It was, really, our contribution. The American science of advertising had shown by what means an idea may best be implanted in the greatest number of people. With all the press under control, the European Boards of Morale and Bureaus of Propaganda proceeded with conscious