Page:The Dial (Volume 68).djvu/459

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SGANARELLE
395

foreword, and has enlisted the soldier in the new struggle, to make real the objects of the war. Mr. Gibbs has yet to see that the real tragedy of the war is not that it left the world unchanged. Quackery and hypocrisy and "the Hell of whoredom since the world began"—the war did not destroy them. Why should it have destroyed them? The pacifist and the jingo are equally unable to understand the tragedy because the one did not share in the war's ideals and the other does not know how they have been betrayed. For the tragedy of the war is that it brought into being and even into action a fair deal for human endeavour and then betrayed its own creation. It has robbed the world of its youth.

Youth! How much of it remains after the merciless self-exposition of Stephen Graham, which begins with the axiom that "the sterner the discipline the better the soldier" and is such a record of the means by which discipline is instilled as to turn the heart sick? My feeling that Mr. Graham is wrong-headed is due to his extraordinary fidelity to the fetish of Anglo-Prussian discipline. He refers to the dispersal of the Russian army after the Revolution as proof of the value of discipline based on "responsibility," which he seems to confuse with authority. Mr. Will Dyson has already taken Mr. Graham down for his blundering references to the Australian troops; but someone with more historical knowledge than I possess ought to give Mr. Graham the records, as fighters, of the unprussianized democratic armies which have fought from time immemorial and will always fight when their rights are invaded. When George Washington complained of his soldiers it was not because they did not fight well but because they went home to gather crops. The soldiers of the martinet Kolchak did not prevail against the democratically directed troops of the Reds. The Canadians may have sacrificed themselves in their own barrages, but it was with highly disciplined troops that some of the worst military failures of the war were achieved. I am convinced that because Mr. Graham went into the best disciplined regiments of the British Army, the Guards, he has felt it necessary to make out a case for the intolerable sufferings he went through. His entire book is an eloquent disproof of the comparative value of discipline, if one cares for humanity at all; and he gives his case away on the first page when he says . . . "sternly disciplined troops know that if they run from the face of the enemy they will be shot down from be-