Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/214

 Certain military romancists, such as Pierre Loti and Georges EckhoudEekhoud [sic], have expressed this in their stories, and many works on military service on the Continent have referred to it. The English, French, German, Italian and other regiments in Africa and Asia, on foreign duty, have aided in cultivating the taste. Occasionally grave scandals have occurred, through some sudden discovery of homosexualism in a garrison or caserne. In France and Germany and Austria several such dramas may he fresh in the minds of reader of this study. The English army has had its share, whereat an aghast British public has gasped in horror and disbelief. The British tongue can hardly stammer its disgust as to such "unnatural offenses", in mess or plebeian circles, pretending to know nothing of what is tolerated, right and left. A famous old-time scandal, dragged into glaring publicity,—serving as type of such regimental and garrison uranism among officers—was the Augustus Cornwall esclandre, in Dublin. The "De Cobain Affair" was notable in the annals of such explosions. Ruined careers and accounts of self-destroyed existences usually follow their publicity. Of military prostitution in the ranks, as a vastly broadened practice in England and on the Continent, a regular institution, will be said something presently.

German army-centers fairly reek with pederasty, in all regimental grades. A melancholy proportion of "unexplained suicides", unaccountable disappearings, and so on, in military life, are to be traced to homosexual undercurrents; exactly as runs the dark story in civil life. Within a few years, the phrases "severe nervous illness", or "suffering from incurable headaches" have passed.into the cant of the journals when a young officer's suicide is reported. Sometimes the words mean the end of a dire struggle to explain Nature—to excuse it. Sometimes they mean the need of excusing closest associates, with a scandal hanging over many