“One day I put the question to myself: What was I really accomplishing, and what was the nature of my reward? The answer was that, from a human and intellectual point of view, my accomplishment was an absolute zero. My reward consisted of a number of privileges, the sum of which raised me very high in the social scale, but gave me this position only at the cost of surrendering my personality wholly. I had to obey my superiors and to command my inferiors. That was all. The power to command was conditioned in the duty to obey. And each man in the service, whatever his station, is bound in the identical way, and is simply a connective apparatus in a great electrical circuit. Only the humblest, the great mass of privates, were confined to obedience. The ultimate responsibility at the very top was lost in the vague. In spite of its ultimate primitiveness, the structure of every military organization has a mystery at its core. But between the arbitrary will of a very few and the touching and incomprehensible humility of the great mass, the parts function according to iron laws. Whoever refuses to function, or rebels, is crushed. “There are those who assert that this compulsion has a moral effect and subserves a higher conception of freedom. I was myself of that opinion for a long time; but I did not find it permanently tenable. I felt myself weakening, and a rebellion seething in my blood. I pulled myself together, and fought against criticism and doubt. In vain. Something had gone out of me. I lost the readiness to obey and the security to command. It was torment. Above me I saw implacable idols, below me defenceless victims. I myself was both idol and victim, implacable and defenceless at once. It seemed to me that humanity ceased where the circle of my activity began. My life seemed to me no longer a part of the general life of mankind, but a fossilized petrefaction conditioned in certain formulæ of command and obedience.