The men were not brutalized, contrary to expectation. Human life was held cheaply under exceptional circumstances and evidently the men felt that they were exceptional. But the men did become accustomed to the use of firearms, and those already brutalized were given the knowledge and the means for crimes of violence. The carelessness with which men used and flung about all kinds of deadly weapons shocked those of us with a sense of responsibility; it was part of their boyish heedlessness in the midst of the fierce game they were playing. They threw their discarded rifles in a heap by the first-aid post when they went back to hospital; they even played catch with hand-grenades, sometimes with most serious results. Once I met a pair of Australians out hunting rabbits with their high-powered rifles, in a place where hundreds of men were passing hourly by the much-traveled road. When I remonstrated with them, they only replied, "Oh, well, we haven't anything else to do. And we know how to shoot without hurting anybody." But with all these real character acquisitions on the part of the men in the service, and with the lack of that brutalizing which many theorists had feared, at the same time certain moral losses were occasioned by the military system. I shall not enter into the question of sexual morality here, partly because I have discussed it in the previous chapter, and partly because it was not distinctly the product of the army. The sexual standards of the young men in the army were much the same as those of young men everywhere, with some modifications through discipline. But to the man who has served in any army at any time, the outstanding moral weakness of the soldier is his entire disregard of the rights of property. The sense of property, so strong in civilian life, which is implanted so carefully into the little child, seems lost in the first month of a man's army life. One brigade headquarters I knew in France was established in a fine chateau, with large grounds surrounded by a high wooden fence. At the same time, the men of the nearest unit were living in barns and attics, with no light or heat of any kind in their quarters. The result was that the fence disappeared, little by little. Nobody ever saw the culprits, but I had reliable information that the men billeted in that village had all the heat they needed. When we left the area, about half the fence was gone, and I have little doubt it vanished entirely during the occupancy of the next division.