Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE MORAL EQUIVALENT OF WAR During many months of war-experience I have often tried to discover what impressions were being most deeply recorded upon my mind. At first all was chaos. To go up into the line straight from an English parish, reasonably secure from the dangers and horrors of war-time, is to be plunged into surroundings where for a time at least the personal equation has a quite undue importance. It is so near death, and it is so hard to die, not for one's own sake so much as for those one must leave behind. But gradually there comes a change. A man begins to feel the relative insignificance even of this which touches him most nearly. There are other things which far outweigh his own value to his people at home. Are there not tens of thousands just like himself, with home-folk to whom they are equally dear, and much more likely to be killed than the padre, whose risks, though often very real, are so much less than theirs ? There is duty, there is service, there is his job; and these are much greater things than the preservation of his life. Presently there begins to dawn upon him a new conception of his work. He becomes a soldier, and puts first things first. He has broken away from security and comfort, and there are times when he longs for them as he longs for nothing else, and loathes with a bitter hatred the confusion of blood and dirt which life has now become. But with wondering surprise he discovers that there are compensations, and that he has found something he never knew before. A new sense of emancipation lights up a new cheerfulness inside him, and he feels a strange freedom from care. Deep down in his soul—if he thinks it out—he knows that this is due to the fact that he is learning the meaning of utter self-devotion to something larger than his own ...