feet
Go marching with the marching street,
For yonder, yonder, goes the fife,
And what care I for human life!
The tears fill my astonished eyes
And my full heart is like to break."

And then, recovering himself again, he points out how wicked it is to clothe such a monstrous thing as war in pageantry:

and brings against art the charge of "infamy" for hiding in music this "hideous grinning thing,"

Now if all this tinsel glory of war has this effect on the mind of such a pacifist as Mr. Le Gallienne, what shall we say to its effect on the minds of men who have no particular convictions upon the subject? The fact of the matter is, there is no accident about all the artificial splendor which has been thrown about the conditions of warfare from time immemorial. The flags, the uniforms, the marching, the "heady music," have all attached themselves to war for the good and sufficient psychological reason that they exercise a transforming influence upon the human heart. Napoleon understood this when he issued his famous bulletins to his soldiers before going into battle. General Hancock understood this at Gettysburg when, in the fateful moments just preceding Pickett's charge, he rode along the crest of Cemetery Ridge clad in his dress uniform and mounted on a white horse with golden trappings. The Germans understood this when they sent their men into the conflict with the music of military bands and with the choral chants of Luther on their lips. Every humblest subaltern officer in any army understands this when he places the flag at the head of the moving regiment. Such appeals to the senses change men on the instant—make the best of them into saints and the worst of them into momentary heroes. They become stimulated as by some strange intoxicant, transformed as by some mystic conversion of the soul. They forget the horrors of the struggle, the peril of disaster, the chances of life and death. They are conscious only of glory and delight. Their eyes gleam, their hearts throb, the earth changes to beauty, the heavens break into song. And straightway deeds of valor become easy, heroism commonplace, and sacrifice the order of the day.

Now heroism, which is performed under circumstances such as these, is heroism still. But I want to lay down the principle that such heroism is of a type inferior to that performed under the drab, uninspiring, familiar circumstances of daily life. The soldier who goes marching into battle with the flag before his eyes and wild music in his ears, is a brave man—but the sailor who leaps into the foaming sea, the miner who descends into the flaming pit, the locomotive engineer who dies at his post of duty, without so much as a single human voice, perhaps, to give him cheer, is a braver man. I always recall in this connection, as a type and symbol of what we may term the heroism of common life, a story which I read some years ago in the newspapers. It concerned two laborers, William Phelps and James Stansbury, who were one day cleaning out the inside of a large boiler at the Cerealine mills in Indianapolis. By the error of another workman, live steam was turned into the boiler before the cleaners had left it. Instantly, by a common impulse, the two men jumped for the single ladder which led to safety. Phelps got there first, but no sooner had his foot touched the rounds than he stepped aside, seized his companion and boosted him up. "You first, Jim," was his gasping cry, "you first." Pushed and thrust by his friend, Stansbury escaped, but Phelps was rescued only to die two hours later in dreadful agony. And when told, just before he died, that Jim was all right, he said, "That's good—nobody'll miss me, but Jim had the wife and the kids." It was a wise reporter who put the story on the wire, for he closed it with the words, "No soldier in the siege of Pekin or the battle of Santiago ever proved himself a greater hero."

Stories of this kind might be multiplied indefinitely, but I can sum up all that I would say upon this point by describing a strange little building which I chanced to discover in an out-of-the-way corner of London some years ago. For many weeks I had been looking upon cathedrals and public buildings and city squares, where monuments to soldiers were as common as daisies in a summer field. Suddenly, on a certain morning, I came upon a little plot of grass and trees, near the great postoffice in St. Botolph's, Aldergate, which is called the "Postman's Park," and at one end of it saw the little open gallery, erected in 1887 by the great painter, George F. Watts, with its forty-eight tablets placed in commemoration of certain heroes and heroines who died unknown in the endeavor to save the lives of others. Here was name after name which meant nothing, but story after story which meant everything. Tablet 1 was in memory of Tom Griffin, aged 21, a steamfitter, who on April 12, 1899, was scalded to death while trying to save his "mate" from an exploded boiler; Tablet 3, in memory of Mary Rogers, stewardess of the steamship Stella, who on March 30, 1899, went down with her ship after embarking into life boats all the women passengers committed to her care; Tablet 5, in memory of Elizabeth Boxall, aged 17, who on January 20, 1888, died from injuries received in trying to rescue a little child from being run over; Tablet 8, in memory of Dr. Samuel Rabbath, officer of the Royal Free Hospital, who died on October 20, 1884, from diphtheria contracted by sucking through a glass tube into his mouth the infected membrane from the throat of a strangling child; Tablet 10, in memory of William Goodrum, aged 60, a railway flagman, who on February 28, 1880, stepped in front of a flying train to rescue a fellow-laborer, and was instantly killed; Tablet 16, in memory of Ella Donovan, a woman of the slums, who on July 28, 1873, entered a burning tenement to rescue little children, not her own; Tablet 23, in memory of Henry Bristow, a boy of 8, who on January 5, 1891, died from injuries received in trying to save his little sister, aged 3, from being burned to death. And so the tablets tell their pathetic tales! You read one after another until your eyes are dimmed with tears and you can read no more. And then you seat yourself for a moment in the quiet park, with all London roaring in your ears, and you think of these humble men and obscure women who, without the blare of any music or the flashing colors of any flag or the thrilling excitement of charge and countercharge, "laid down their lives for their friends." "Is my face cut?" said William Peart, a locomotive driver commemorated on Tablet 2, as he was pulled from out the wreckage of his exploded engine. He was told that it was. "Never mind," he replied, with his last breath, "I stopped the train." Here is heroism of a new type—dull, commonplace, everyday, without one trace of color or romance. But for this