World War, 1914-1918 -- War work -- Young Men's Christian Associations
One young major said: "Every day I am losing my boys. I've lost more
men through these forces of immorality than through the enemy's shot
and shell." The recent report of the Royal Commission shows the grave
menace of the disease to Britain, where twenty per cent of the urban
population has been infected. Flexner's terrible indictment in his
"Prostitution in Europe" proves how particularly dangerous and
pernicious is the system of inspection and regulation which legalizes
and standardizes vice as a "necessary evil" and spreads disease through
the false sense of security which it vainly promises. Even if the
inspection and regulation of vice were physically perfectly successful,
it might still lead to national degeneration, but instead of being a
success it has proved, especially in France, a miserable failure. We
cannot place all the blame upon local conditions, for the presence of
an army in a foreign land in wartime creates its own danger.
Among the men in the venereal hospitals of France are musicians,
artists, teachers, educated and refined boys from some of the best
homes, and in another camp we find several hundred officers and several
members of the nobility. What was the cause of their downfall? A
questionnaire replied to by several hundred of them revealed the fact
that six per cent attributed their downfall to curiosity, ten per cent
to ignorance, claiming that they had never been adequately warned by
the medical authorities, thirteen per cent to loss of home influences
and lack of leave, thirty-three per cent to drink and the loss of
self-control due to intoxication, while the largest number of all, or
thirty-eight per cent, attributed it to uncontrolled passion when they
were unconverted or had no higher power in their lives to enable them
to withstand temptation. But perhaps the chief cause of the spread of
immorality is the unnatural conditions under which the men are
compelled to live in a foreign land in war time.
Donald Hankey, the brilliant young author of "A Student in Arms," who
fell at the front, speaks thus of the moral problem in the soldier's
life:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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