hind . . . they do not entertain the hope of escape and consequently their minds are at rest—as the mind of the machine gunner voluntarily [sic] chained to his machine may be said to be at rest. . . . Stern discipline can manufacture collective heroism." I conceive it to be the duty of a book reviewer not to let pass such an impudent illogicality as is contained in the word I have noted, nor to labour further a point which the author so handsomely yields.
As soon as Mr. Graham gives over defending the discipline based on the fear of death (or disgrace) and begins telling the truths of its methods, he becomes admirable, becomes in fact the Stephen Graham who wrote with insight and prejudice running apace of Russians and the poor and depressed everywhere who believe in Christ. What we have liked in Mr. Graham is that he could always fortify his own faith by the faith of those who suffered far more than he. As a private in the ranks he suffered more than his fellow-men, and I am glad that his faith triumphed in the end. I am glad that he is not romantic about the men, glad that at last some one has spoken the truth about the foulness and the obscenity of speech, the sickening dirtiness of human intercourse as one learns it in the barracks and on the drill field. Mr. Graham finds the precise word: they are "frantically repulsive." I am well aware that the civilian reader will imagine that I allude to the practice of telling smutty stories and I do not know how to undeceive him except by the flat statement that soldiers do not tell smutty stories at all. They talk dirt, which is quite another matter. In a hundred nights spent in the orderly room of as representative a company as the American army brought forth, I never heard one indecent "story," but the foul impurity of the discourse held there is in my nostrils still and I think I know what Mr. Graham means when he cries out, "Oh the grief in the secret places of the heart when . . . perchance, in a moment of confraternity, a man says an indecent thing about his own wife." Elsewhere in Mr. Graham I sense the prig, but here I understand him fully because he knows what I know, that this impurity was not healthy, it was not naive and frank and Greek—such are, I believe, the terms of honour. No. It was corrupt, rotten, and it was endless.
The second point on which Mr. Graham's testimony is valuable concerns the tyranny of the drill sergeant. Mad Lear once defined the image of authority in the words "a dog's obeyed in office." Mr. Graham does not admit that it was the duty of the drill sergeant
