Has the involuntary discipline of armies much to do with the voluntary discipline of peace? The aftermath of the late war goes to prove that the relation is a little remote. I know hundreds of young men—British, French, Belgian, Italian, American—whom the war seemed to have spoiled at least temporarily for civilian pursuits. Accustomed to be disciplined by others, they seemed to have lost the habit of disciplining themselves. They found it difficult, almost impossible, to make themselves go to work at regular hours, stick to any one job or any practical object very long at a time. This psychological aftermath of the war we all know, I think. You might lay it all to the actual war—its stresses and excitements, its alternate tense action and idleness—were it not that we find the same state of mind in young Americans who were mobilized in the draft, had their year and a half of army training, and never got abroad. It was hard to “settle down”; which means that it was hard to change from imposed discipline to self-discipline, from the regularity of army life to the fast, irregular competition of civilian life.
The world over, we found that the hate-propaganda, the conscious effort to make the soldier “a bit of a brute” had long effects. Everywhere were “crime waves”—highway robbery, burglary, sudden murders of passion. Ours was perhaps the lightest of all. The police records of Berlin in 1919 read like annals of the old days of Jack Sheppard. The
