about a young English officer in Flanders who, to the great disgust of his men, always wore a monocle. This elegant stripling would come out of his dugout of a morning for inspection, yawn, stretch, insert his eye-glass, and, after glancing over the battalion, remark casually: "You may carry on, sergeant-carry on!" One morning he made his appearance as usual to find that each man had cut the identification tag off his wrist and was wearing it in his right eye-a battalion of monocled soldiers! The young captain put on his own eye-glass, stared at them for a moment, then dropped the monocle into the palm of his hand, spun it in the air with his thumb, made a free catch of it in his eye, straightened up, looked at them sternly and said: "Now, you bloomin' blighters, can you do that?" It is a fortunate thing for the world that this war is to be fought out by the young. They are going into it courageously and gladly; gayly like the two boys who fell leading the charge at Fontenoy, and of whom the old French chronicler wrote: "They were very noble-they cared nothing for their lives!" For them war is a thing of romance and of glory, for them the sword still sings: "The War-Thing, the Comrade, Father of honor And giver of kingship, The fame-smith, the song master, To be staked in the pastime The change the war has wrought in Jack it has wrought in hundreds of thousands of other hitherto careless boys. No one can look at the fellows in uniform, however young, without realizing that they have something of the nobility and gravity that always comes to those who hold their lives secondary to the cause they serve. It is true that most of them carry it lightly. "What's the use of worrying?" But all the same they know what they are up against and they are not going into it as an adventure. Their example has stiffened the backbone of all the rest of us. The man who is not in uniform is anxious to show that it is not his fault he isn't. It has made men ashamed to be any less decent than the chaps who are going to fight for them. Wearing the uniform has also done a good deal to reduce the amount of drinking among the younger men at an age when taking a drink is still regarded as a sign of emancipation. On the other hand, we may become a race of chronic cigarette fiends. But no one can question that the health of the nation must improve as a result of the training our boys are receiving and the effect of their example upon the civilian population. That and the reduction in individual food consumption may give us a concave national waist-line. Even the sight of Walter Camp's adipose office-holders going through their matutinal exercises in Washington was not without its inspiration. Unconsciously a lot of us are already in training; and before long most of us will be so consciously. In the East, at any rate, practically all the boys who have prepared for or gone to college and are of the proper military age have enlisted or received officers' commissions. They are not taking the chance of being relegated after the war to the class that didn't go. For their generation it is probably true that hereafter there will be in effect only two sorts-those who went and those who didn't. No boy of twenty in this part of the world is willing to invite the suspicion of being a coward or even to have said to him as Henry IV wrote to Crillon: "Go hang yourself, brave Crillon; you were not with me at Arques!" Some of Jack's friends whose eyes are bad or who have some other physical limitation have tried and been rejected over and over again-one as many as eleven times. If nothing else was open to them they have secured work in the Y. M. C. A., Red Cross, or War Relief on the other side. Already the boy of military age is conspicuous by his absence in New York City-unless he is in uniform. The girls are sending them. "No slackers need apply!" is their motto. They won't dance with anybody not in uniform. Why should they? My own feeling is that the best thing that could happen to this country after its half-century of financial drunkenness would be compulsory military training. It is not so bad now for fellows like Jack, whose parents can send them out of the city to country boarding-schools and afterward to college, where they will get plenty of athletics; but think what army life would mean for the city boys who otherwise would be working indoors in banks and factories! Think, too, what it would do for Jack and his like in the way of discipline and making men of them! Then we should not need a full year to put an army of two hundred and fifty thousand men in the field, and we might have enough rifles to go round. I sometimes wonder what the ultimate effect of the fierce life of the trenches, particularly if the war continues for several years, will be upon the youth of this country. Dr. Alexis Carrel tells me that the war has produced in France a race of warriors-men who eat, sleep, and think only in terms of war. He says that one day, while on his way from one part of the front to another, as he passed through a half-ruined village, he was hailed by a burly whiskered soldier, in a major's uniform, who was leaning against a shattered wall. "It was my old friend X.," he explained with a smile, "though at first I failed to recognize him. When I had last seen him he was a clerk in the Crédit Lyonnais. He had been shy, anæmic, narrow-chested, clean-shaved. Now he was vigorous and masterful. Moreover, he had a huge beard, which added to the fierceness of his appearance. He had lost all interest in anything except fighting, and could talk of nothing else. The years prior to the war no longer counted for him. He had become a gladiator. He will never be anything else. When the war is over he will spend the rest of his life reliving the 'battles, sieges, fortunes,' he has passed through." "But they are not all like that!" I protested. "How about the young men and the boys?" "X. is not an unusual case," he answered; "there will be many like him. For the youth of France— those who are left-the war has done much. It has sobered them and taught them to bring their wills and their bodies into subjection. It will mean a great deal to France to have the rising generation know the value of discipline and the necessity of obedience to authority." "Do you think the war will have the same beneficial effect on American youth?" I asked. |