Page:The Genius of America (1923).pdf/100

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soldiers than men of forty: they haven't any imagination. They don't consider what they are getting into, but put their heads down and go in. A man of forty stays awake nights seeing a picture of himself lying in No Man's Land under fire with his leg blown off. Duhamel sets your mind running that way."

"'Civilization,'" Thorpe admitted, "is not the thing to present to a soldier on the way to the front line trenches. It gives too vividly a sense of the sights and smells of the receiving hospital, the operating room, the morgue. But we are not on the way to the trenches now. Jack Fairley is probably reading The Cosmopolitan in his hammock at Bar Harbor. Other people, of whom life makes more serious exactions, are soberly reckoning up the profit and loss of the international readjustments we have just been making. There has been even a little fundamental reconsideration of the wisdom of making such adjustments in the manner hitherto fashionable among enlightened people. I should really like to see the matter quite thoroughly overhauled with all available evidence and testimony. The report of a French ambulance surgeon through whose hands the débris of battle drifted to the rear is a legitimate and useful portion of the evidence. I remember hearing