Numerous accounts have come from the scenes of the great war about men who appear for a time to be dominated by irresistible instincts. Gibbs (80) says there are some men in every army who like slaughter for its own sake. They find an intoxication in it. They love the hunting spirit of it all. We have the story of a French soldier of peaceable disposition who appeared to experience an ecstasy of delight as he lay concealed in a shell hole and was able to pick off many of the enemy. This was not the exhilaration and abandon experienced by men while making attack, when violent muscular exertion produces an intoxication of mind, but a dominance of the mind by something which seems very much like the hunting spirit, under circumstances in which, we may suppose, the enemy had undergone some process of dehumanization in the mind of the hunter. We may suppose also that there are individuals in every army who have pathological impulses or perversions, which show themselves in instinctive reactions of a specific nature and in excess of the normal. Both the Germans and the French are accused by French and German writers respectively with being the real lovers of battle. German writers say that the Germans are peculiarly peace-loving and by nature lacking in the battle spirit, but that the French love battle for its own sake, and that this is shown clearly by their history. Others see love of conflict, aggressiveness and cruelty in the German disposition. Boutroux (13) wishes to place among the causes of the great war the native brutality of the German disposition, a trait existing from long ago, and now become a disciplined cruelty--a _zuchtmaessige Grausamkeit_, regarded as right and meritorious. Many think they find this love of fighting, bloodthirst and love of destruction in the German soul. Many attribute pure aggressiveness of a pronounced type or an exaggerated predatory instinct to the Germans. Chapman (39) says that the war is a flaming forth of passions that have covertly been burning in the soul of Germany for several decades. He adds that with the Germans war is instinctive; there is no _casus belli_ at all. War 'is for war's sake, and is a need of nature with the German. Smith (64) declares that the German is innately brutal, and as one proof of this he shows the statistics of brutal crimes in Germany. He writes of the truculent aggressiveness of the Teutonic race, of the hatred and love of destruction displayed by the robber knights of the Middle Ages, and regards quarrelsome aggressiveness as innate in German character. Dide (20) thinks that such aggressive warfare as is practiced by the Germans always goes with a pessimistic disposition. Thayer (58) connects bloodthirstiness with the paganism of Germany, and says that bloodthirstiness crops out again and again in German history. Nicolai (79) also refers to the craving for blood in the German character, and says that it has been shown throughout the history of the Germans.