the war correspondent is not a human being, but a lay figure with a gift for repartee, little more than the manikin that we thought him in those far-off days before the war, when we watched him drilling on the barrack square.  We soldiers know better.  We know that each one of those men is an individual, full of human affections, many of them writing tender letters home every week, each one longing with all his soul for the end of this hateful business of war which divides him from all that he loves best in life.  We know that every one of these men has a healthy individual’s repugnance to being maimed, and a human shrinking from hurt and from the Valley of the Shadow of Death.

The knowledge of all this does not do away with the even tread of the troops as they pass, the steady eye and mouth, the cheery jest; but it makes these a hundred times more significant.  For we know that what these things signify is not lack of human affection, or weakness, or want of imagination, but something superimposed on these, to which they are wholly subordinated.  Over and above the individuality of each man, his personal desires and fears and hopes, there is the corporate personality of the soldier which knows no fear and only one ambition—­to defeat the enemy, and so to further the righteous cause for which he is fighting.  In each of those men there is this dual personality:  the ordinary human ego that hates danger and shrinks from hurt and death, that longs for home, and would welcome the end of the war on any terms; and also the stronger personality of the soldier who can tolerate but one end to this war, cost what that may—­the victory of liberty and justice, and the utter abasement of brute force.

And when one looks back over the months of training that the soldier has had, one recognizes how every feature of it, though at the time it often seemed trivial and senseless and irritating, was in reality directed to this end.  For from the moment that a man becomes a soldier his dual personality begins.  Henceforth he is both a man and a soldier.  Before his training is complete the order must be reversed, and he must be a soldier and a man.  As a soldier he must obey and salute those whom, as a man, he very likely dislikes and despises.  In his conduct he no longer only has to consider his reputation as a man, but still more his honour as a soldier.  In all the conditions of his life, his dress, appearance, food, drink, accommodation, and work, his individual preferences count for nothing, his efficiency as a soldier counts for everything.  At first he “hates” this, and “can’t see the point of” that.  But by the time his training is complete he has realized that whether he hates a thing or not, sees the point of a thing or not, is a matter of the uttermost unimportance.  If he is wise, he keeps his likes and dislikes to himself.