If men who have been temperate and moral all their lives, or at the worst
indulging in moderation, spend their leaves of absence from the front like
swine, it is not a reaction from the monotony of trench life, or from
the nerve-racking din of war, but merely an extension of the fearful
stimulation of a purely carnal existence, even where the directing mind is
ever on the alert.
The aggressors of war should be pilloried in life and in history. Men must
defend their country if attacked; to do less would be to sink lower than
the beasts that defend their lairs; and for that reason all pacifists, and
conscientious objectors, are abject, mean, and shabby. In times of national
danger no man has a right to indulge his own conscience; it merges, if he
be a normal courageous man, into the national conscience. But that very
fact lowers the deliberate seekers of war so far below the high plane of
civilization as we know it, that they should be blotted out of existence.
III
As regards women Alexina was not likely to remain shocked for long at any
erratic manifestations of temperament. Pride and fastidiousness and the
steel armor fused by circumstances had protected her heretofore from any
divagations of her own; nor had crystallized temptation ever approached
her.
But her education had been liberal. Several of her intimate friends and
more that she associated with daily made what she euphemistically termed a
cult of men.
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