It was the same in politics and religion. To be loyal to a party
or obedient to a Church was to stand self-confessed a fool or a
hypocrite. Self-realization, that was in our eyes the whole duty of
man.

And then I thought of what I had seen only a few days before. First,
of battalions of men marching in the darkness, steadily and in step,
towards the roar of the guns; destined in the next twelve hours to
charge as one man, without hesitation or doubt, through barrages
of cruel shell and storms of murderous bullets. Then, the following
afternoon, of a handful of men, all that was left of about three
battalions after ten hours of fighting, a handful of men exhausted,
parched, strained, holding on with grim determination to the last bit
of German trench, until they should receive the order to retire. And
lastly, on the days and nights following, of the constant streams
of wounded and dead being carried down the trench; of the unceasing
search that for three or four days was never fruitless.

Self-realization! How far we have travelled from the ideals of those
pre-war days. And as I thought things over I wondered at how faint a
response that phrase, "I loathe militarism in all its forms," found in
my own mind.

Before the war I too hated "militarism." I despised soldiers as men
who had sold their birthright for a mess of pottage. The sight of
the Guards drilling in Wellington Barracks, moving as one man to the
command of their drill instructor, stirred me to bitter mirth. They
were not men but manikins. When I first enlisted, and for many months
afterwards, the "mummeries of military discipline," the saluting, the
meticulous uniformity, the rigid suppression of individual exuberance,