It
was as that thought touched one mind and another that the recruiting
offices were crowded with young men. Some of them offered their bodies
because of the promise of a great adventure--and life had been rather
dull in office and factory and on the farm. Something stirred in their
blood--an old call to youth. Some instinct of a primitive, savage
kind, for open-air life, fighting, killing, the comradeship of
hunters, violent emotions, the chance of death, surged up into the
brains of quiet boys, clerks, mechanics, miners, factory hands. It was
the call of the wild--the hark-back of the mind to the old barbarities
of the world's dawn, which is in the embryo of modern man. The shock
of anger at frightful tales from Belgium--little children with their
hands cut off (no evidence for that one); women foully outraged;
civilians shot in cold blood--sent many men at a quick pace to the
recruiting agents. Others were sent there by the taunt of a girl, or
the sneer of a comrade in khaki, or the straight, steady look in the
eyes of a father who said, "What about it, Dick? .
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