changeful vagrant minds? These good influences had failed. There was a greater moral abandonment than would ever be known.
Before the war Bessy Bell would have presented the perfect type of the beautiful, highly sensitive, delicately organized girl so peculiarly and distinctively American. She would have ripened before her time. Perhaps she would not have been greatly different in feeling from the old-fashioned girl: only different in that she had restraint, no deceit.
But after the war—now—what was Bessy Bell? What actuated her? What was the secret spring of her abnormal tendencies? Were they abnormal? Bessy was wild to abandon herself to she knew not what. Some glint of intelligence, some force of character as exceptional in her as it was wanting in Lorna, some heritage of innate sacredness of person, had kept Bessy from the abyss. She had absorbed in mind all the impurities of the day, but had miraculously escaped them in body. If her parents could have known Bessy as Lane now realized her they would have been horrified. But Lane's horror was fading. Bessy was illuminating the darkness of his mind.
To understand more clearly what the war had done to Bessy Bell, and to the millions of American girls like her, it was necessary for Lane to understand what the war had done to soldiers, to men, and to the world.
Lane could grasp some infinitesimal truth of the sublime and horrible change war had wrought in the souls of soldiers. That change was too great for any mind but the omniscient to grasp in its entirety. War had killed in some soldiers a belief in Christ: in others it had created one. War had unleashed the old hidden primitive instincts of manhood: likewise it had fired hearts to hate of hate and love of love, to the supreme ideal consciousness could conceive. War had brought out the monstrous in men and as well the godlike. Some soldiers had become cowards; others, heroes. There were thousands of soldiers who became lions to fight, hyenas to snarl, beasts to debase, hogs to wallow. There were equally as many who were forced to fight, who could not kill, whose gentleness augmented under the brutal orders of their officers. There were those who ran toward the front, heads up, singing at the top of their lungs. There were those who slunk back. Soldiers became cold, hard, materialistic, bitter, rancorous: and qualities antithetic to these developed in their comrades.
Lane exhausted his resources of memory and searched in his notes for a clipping he had torn from a magazine. He reread it, in the light of his crystallizing knowledge:
“Had I not been afraid of the scorn of my brother
officers and the scoffs of my men, I would have fled
to the rear,” confesses a Wisconsin officer, writing
of a battle.
“I see war as a horrible, grasping octopus with
hundreds of poisonous, death-dealing tentacle that
squeeze out the culture and refinement of a man,”
writes a veteran.
A regimental sergeant-major: “I considered myself
hardboiled, and acted the part with everybody,
including my wife. I scoffed at religion as unworthy
of a real man and a mark of the sissy and weakling.”
Before going over the top for the first time he tried
to pray, but had even forgotten the Lord's Prayer.
“If I get out of this, I will never be unhappy again,”
reflected one of the contestants under shell-fire in
the Argonne Forest. To-day he is “not afraid of dead
men any more and is not in the least afraid to die.”
“I went into the army a conscientious objector, a
radical, and a recluse.... I came out of it with the
knowledge of men and the philosophy of beauty,” says
another.
“My moral fiber has been coarsened. The war has
blunted my sensitiveness to human suffering. In 1914 I
wept tears of distress over a rabbit which I had shot.
I could go out now at the command of my government in
cold-blooded fashion and commit all the barbarisms of
twentieth-century legalized murder,” writes a Chicago
man.
A Denver man entered the war, lost himself and God,
and found manhood. “I played poker in the box-car
which carried me to the front and read the Testament
in the hospital train which took me to the rear,” he
tells us.
