It seems certain that the practice of doping soldiers with ether or other spirit before an attack has been largely resorted to by certain nations in this war. Nothing that is happening so illuminates the nature of modern warfare; illustrates more utterly the absorption of human bodies and souls into the Machines that are crashing into each other. Men have become mere lumps of coal to be converted into driving power. And in supreme moments, lest the bewildered spirit, brought up to peace, should move hand or foot in protest or recoil, that spirit is first stolen away. The usage is not prompted by motives of mercy, yet has in it a kind of awful humanity. Granted the premises, who dare grudge this anodyne to the doomed?

Verily on every man who in time of peace speaks or writes one word to foster bad spirit between nations a curse should rest; he is part and parcel of that malevolence which at last sets these great Engines, fed by lumps of human coal, to crash along, and pile up against each other, in splintered wreckage. Only too well he plays the game of those grim schemers to whose account lie the death, the dehumanization, the despair of millions of their brother men.