Yet your arrant individualist is the last to see it. I remember recommending _The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft_ to a young man full of brains and sensibility--one of that Field Ambulance to which, as we saw it, the description applies in bulk. He came back enthusiastic, as I knew he would, and we discussed the book. I quarrelled with the passage in which Gissing rails at the weekly drill in his school playground: 'even after forty years' the memory brought on a 'tremor of passionate misery.... The loss of individuality seemed to me sheer disgrace.' My Red Cross friend applauded the sentiments that I deplored; himself as individual as a man need be, he assured me that the Army _did_ crush the individuality out of a man; and when, refraining from the _argumentum ad hominem_, I called his attention to many others present who showed no sign of such subdual, he said at any rate it happened to the weaker men. It may: and if a man has no personality of his own, will he be so much the worse for the composite substitute to be acquired in the Army? Better an efficient machine than a mere nonentity; but an efficient machine may be many things besides, and, under the British system, nearly always is. The truth is that discipline and restriction do not 'crush' the normal personality in the least. They compress it; and compression is strength. They prevent a man from 'slopping over'; they conserve his essence. They may not 'make a man' of one who is a man already, but they do exalt and intensify the quality of manhood; they do make a good man in that sense better, and a goodish man out of many a one who has been accounted 'no good' all his life.