The Indianapolis journal. [volume] (Indianapolis [Ind.]) 1867-1904, 1897-06-27
WHAT WAR FEELS LIKE
DIFFERS FROM EXPECTATIONS-NO
EMOTIONS AND NO MORAL.
The Sensations Anticipated Are Not
Experienced. and Minor Matters
Press Upon the Attention.
G. w. Stevens, in London Mail.

Inc strange tnlnS ABOUT war Is IH1I IL
is so wonderfully like peace.
Going to war is like coming of age. You
expect to wake up one morning and find
everything changed-a new self in new
world You do wake up and you are very
much the same sort of boy at tWenty-one
as at twenty. So with war You are rather
disappointed to find yourself doing exactly
the same things in war as you do in peace.
You wear very much the same clothes
you eat very much the same amount of
breakfast; your disposition is no harder nor
bloodthirstier than before. The horrors Of
war, of which you expected so much, leave
you quite unmoved-just because you did
expect SO much.
You wondered whether you would be sick
when you came across the dead and you
were not even sorry. They were so still
and restful-neither hot nor cold, nor nun
CRY nor thirsty nor tired nor furnishing
for sleep any more; it was not possible
to be very sorry for them. Even when
death had caught them unawares, twisting
them awry and knotting arms and legs
they only looked like strange shapes turned
out of mold, and you cannot weep for
shape out of a mold. When shell had
ripped all the features off a face 1t was
not pleasant to look at, but there was
nothing human left about it to stir COM
passion. Put it in a Greek trench and
cover it up hang up it's Iez on peg at
it's head. The poor crumpled fez that used
to get so carefully blocked and ironed ev-
cry morning in Elassona-it was so much
more pathetic than the body. Somebody
will cry for the body but not us. There
are plenty of bayonets left in it's battalion;
roll up your overcoats, and sling on your
water cans, and march, and leave it be-
hind.
The wounded were worse, but even with
them tragedy soon lost it's poignancy. In
any other army the treatment of them
would have been an atrocity AS soon as
the war was general and wounded were
plenty the ambulance service broke down
utterly A man was hit at in the morn
ing. One of the rare surgeons, or else
comrade, tied up the place with handker-
chief, and left water, if there was any, at
his side. There he lay in the sun till night
fall. When it was dark, and the Greeks
had begun retreating. his comrades came
back with pony and pack saddle The
wounded man was hOiSted on, cllnglng with
his hands to the pommel if he could; if not,
Spread-eagled on his belly and tied on with
ropes. So he stumbled on all night, ten
or twenty or thirty miles, to the hospital
Arrived there-unless he had the luck to
expert Swiss and French and Turkish sur
geons-the army doctor prodded at him
with a probe. BY the time the limb was a
bundle of bleeding ribbons it was nearly
an even chance that the bullet would be
worried out And when he saw the bullet
the, bleeding bundle turned peacefully over
own eyes that the bullet was out; that was
all right And in three weeks he was on
touched liquor in his life, and seldom saw
meat; his blood was clean and sweet, his
muscles lean and hard, his nerves had
never been shaken. Why should he ever
die?
WHERE SURPRISE CAME.
With the dead gone out of the world of
human sympathy and the wounded begin
ming to heal up from the moment they were
hit there was little enough left to draw
the line between war and peace. Not even
in action. 1t was interesting to see masses
of men trying to kill each other but not
surprising; you knew before that this was
what they did in war. 1t was most sur
prising to see them sit about and talk and
smoke through the best part of an engage
ment, quite unperturbed And a cigarette
tasted no better and no worse in war than
in peace.
Yet war was still like coming of age.
Some day you start thinking, and you sud
denly see that some time, somehow-you
don't know when or how-you have really
become man; the boy of twenty is gone,
and there is a new self in his place. So
once more with war. Gradually, impercep-
tibly, there was an utter difference after
ALL You saw it much better when you got
into the enemys country. The preoccupa-
tons of peace had imperceptibly ceased to
preoccupy; things that mattered everything
had ceased to matter in the least. The sum
of it was that everything artificial, conVen-
tional, social, had vanished, and you We're
left the bare, natural man. Not absolutely
so. perhaps in correspondent case, Tor
headquarters but even for correspondent
very nearly so. 1t no longer mattered
what your clothes looked like; but it mat
tered as it had never mattered before that
they were not too hot in the sun and not
too cold in the night wind. Bread was
food that you never set much store by be-
fore, and perhaps it may be true that it
contains less nourishment than cocoa,
chocolate or beef lozenges But bread fills
up the empty stomach, while the other
things do not, and the empty stomach
howled aloud to be filled. And so you
bread. or soldiers dog biscuit for that
matter. Your stomach had to be filled. In
peace there are a host of People whose bus
mess it is to make it easy for you to fill
your stomach at the proper time. In war
they are all gone, and you have got to see
to filling it yourself when it needs it.
division of day and night. We civilized
English people have superseded day and
night. We have got curtains to shut out
the morning sun and electric lamps to sup
plement the stars. But in war marching
and shooting can only be satisfactorily
done by daylight and there is no daylight
to spare So marching and shooting begin
as soon as there is light to march and shoot
by and If you are not awake by then you
viii miss it, And If you have not suppered
yourself and found your sleeping place and
looked to your horses by nightfall you will
lose supper and bed and horses together.
There is nothing left then but to go to
sleep, which you have been hungering, to