General Ironside conducted his defensive campaign with inspiring leadership, with unfailing heartsome courage; and he won the sympathy of all by his rare tact and understanding, and the affection of all by his consideration for the men, his efforts to stay the casualty lists. 4. The want of a definite moral purpose. Since the days of Thermopylae, the effect of spiritual stimulus upon the fighting qualities of fighting men has been known the world over. The military people make a concrete thing of this, and attempt to diagram it, analyze and classify it in their treatises, where they call it morale. As well might one try to reach out and touch any other manifestation of the soul. This exaltation that comes over soldiers and makes them glad to die, firm in their faith of the sacred character of their cause is above all finite measurements. It is the purging light of the spirit that floods men's souls and raises them aloft from the restraining imprisonment of physical being to the heights of the gods. On no other grounds can one explain the superhuman valor of the lone Cheshire Company of the "Contemptibles," which, in the retreat from Mons, held up until dusk a German column of three battalions. The French had morale at Verdun when they said, "They shall not pass," and fulfilled the eloquence of their words by the offering of their bodies. The Americans had morale at Chateau-Thierry. [Illustration: SITUATION MAP--Showing principal battlefronts] The British at Mons, the French at Verdun, and the Americans at Chateau-Thierry, fought as they did because they knew, or thought they knew, the cause of the fight. But in Russia, the soldier was never told why he fought. At first, this was not thought necessary. Then the High Command, remembering the importance of morale, and recognizing the need of some sort of explanation, if only for the purpose of regularity when men were asked to risk their lives, issued proclamations that puzzled and confused the soldier more than if a course of silence had been followed. While all this time to the Americans came newspapers from home with accounts of speeches by politicians and demagogues who fired Bolshevik bullets from the rear and extolled the Soviet cause, hailing it as an heroic progression in human effort. There is another axiom in the military books, that soldiers fight best on their native soil and in defense of their homes; but here was a company taken fresh from civil occupations, with a civilian mental outlook, set adrift in an alien country, six thousand miles from home, engaged in a desperate, sanguinary war, and asked to undergo privation and hardship, to face untold perils for unmentionable reasons.