The Kansas City sun. (Kansas City, Mo.) 1908-1924, 1915-01-16
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less degree when we mentally place ourselves
within range of the enemy's fesh-mangling shrap-
mel, parrying the vicious thrust of a bowel-ripping
bayonet or lodging the decapitating swing of a
cavalryman's saber.
And there are many of us who, If we we're about
to be placed in such a position, ~would-finch, to
say the least. And then there are those, no one
will ever know what proportion of the whole,
who when ordered into action would drop out,
flop over and play 'possum or just plain beat it"
providing he could do so without attracting the
attention of his more loyal comrades or being de-
tected by his officers, which last eventuality he
knows would result in a quick dealt penalty OF
death.
Even if so disposed, such a getaway could, Of
course, be effected only in a thin line of troops
advancing in open or extended order, where the
chances of or opportunities for detection would be
minimized, and where, too, such action would be
likely TO occur, because the individual is deprived
of the moral support and psychological encourage
ment of elbow-touching comrades to spur him on.
1t is in the cognizance of this element in hui
man nature, which is concrete rather than abb
stract, that the German commanders show their
fine understanding of this phenomenon of temper
amental idiosyncrasy, the mental attitude, If you
please, of the soldier facing the enemy, for, after
all, the soldier is only the average citizen in
uniform.
And this particular attitude of the soldier is the
story. all over again, of the boy and the dark and
the graveyard road. Alone and unsupported, he Is
the victim of fear. Touching elbows with fellow
compatriots, the sense of fear either is momentar-
lily allayed, or shame prevents an open display of
it. Almost any man would accept the challenge
of the risk in such environment rather than be
called a coward by his comrades-or to be shot
as such by a watchful officer.
1t is the understanding of this fact, for 1t is a
fact, not a theory, that %justifes and possibly COM
pensates the Germans in their tactics of charging
the enemy en- masse.
And then, too, the military experts, and even
the layman, has learned that with the great ad-
vances made both in offensive and defensive
means in modern warfare, the battles are won by
masses rather than by the individual as the unit.
When a certain objective is aimed at the COM
manders, having millions of men in hand and
more in reserve, coldly calculate the sacrifice of
many men to reach it, and to do so hurl men in
solid masses at the enemy with the purpose of
breaking him by sheer weight of numbers.
The battle value of the individual as developed
in wars of the past, when musket, bayonet and
saber were prominent factors, is largely lost in
the face of ultra-modern machinery devised for
wholesale killing, which demands the co-opera-
ton of masses rather than the distinguish
ing activities of the individual. Such machinery
makes for barbarism and brutal slaughter rather
than civilized warfare, if war can be considered
a civilized institution, but in this day of a blood
red continent it is a part of the game, and we
must perforee accept it.-New York Press.