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There were cries of
agony and terror from the German trenches, and young officers of the
Guards told the story as an amusing anecdote, with loud laughter.


XVI

It was astonishing how loudly one laughed at tales of gruesome things,
of war's brutality-I with the rest of them. I think at the bottom of
it was a sense of the ironical contrast between the normal ways of
civilian life and this hark-back to the caveman code. It made all our
old philosophy of life monstrously ridiculous. It played the "hat
trick" with the gentility of modern manners. Men who had been brought
up to Christian virtues, who had prattled their little prayers at
mothers' knees, who had grown up to a love of poetry, painting, music,
the gentle arts, over-sensitized to the subtleties of half-tones,
delicate scales of emotion, fastidious in their choice of words, in
their sense of beauty, found themselves compelled to live and act like
ape-men; and it was abominably funny. They laughed at the most
frightful episodes, which revealed this contrast between civilized
ethics and the old beast law.


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