THE PSYCHOLOGY OF WAR 165 



are old friends to the human mind. The nation was at war but it was 

 at rest. A certain strange harmony settled down upon the people. The 

 war was hardly two months old when we began to hear of a new Eussia, 

 a new France, a new England and a new Germany, all regenerated by 

 the baptism of blood, full of high aspirations, purified visions and noble 

 resolutions. 



To those acquainted with the psychology of play and sport, war is 

 more easily understood. The high tension of the modern work-a-day 

 life must be periodically relieved by a return to primitive forms of 

 behavior, as in football, baseball, hunting, fishing, horseracing, the circus, 

 the arena, the cock-fight, the prize-fight, and the countless forms of 

 outing. Man must once again use his arms, his legs, his larger 

 muscles, his lower brain centers. He must live again in the open, by 

 the camp-fire, by the stream, in the forest. He must kill something, be 

 it fish or bird or deer, as his ancestors did in times remote. Thereafter 

 come peace and harmony and he is ready once more to return to the 

 life of the intellect and will, to the life of " efficiency." 



Periodically, however, man seems to need a deeper plunge into the 

 primeval and this is war. War has always been the release of nations 

 from the tension of progress. Man is a fighting animal; at first from 

 necessity, afterwards from habit. In former centuries when the contrast 

 between peace and war was not so great, it was undertaken with more 

 ease and less apology, almost as a matter of course. Life was less intense 

 then and the reaction of war less extreme. ISTow in the face of an 

 advanced public sentiment, of peace societies and arbitration boards, 

 the tension has to become very great, the potential very high before the 

 spark is struck and, when this happens, we have the ludicrous spectacle 

 of the warring nations apologizing and explaining to an astonished world. 



War, therefore, seems to act as a kind of katharsis. The warring 

 nation is purified by war and thereafter with a spirit chastened and 

 purged enters again upon the upward way to attain still greater heights 

 of progress. In strictness, however, the katharsis figure is misleading. 

 The situation is not one of gross emotions to be purged away, as Aristotle 

 implied. It is rather merely a question of fatigue and rest. Our de- 

 mand for an ever-increasing efficiency has brought too great a strain upon 

 those cerebral functions associated with the peculiar mental powers 

 upon which efficiency depends. Efficiency demands great powers of 

 (attention, concentration, analysis, self-control, inhibition, sustained 

 effort, all of which are extremely fatiguing and demand frequent in- 

 tervals of rest and relaxation. When this rest and relaxation are lack- 

 ing, we may always expect cataclysmic reactions which shall restore the 

 balance. 



In war, society sinks back to the primitive type, the primitive mortal 

 combat of man with man, the primitive religious conception of God as 



