Explore "The Inverted Pyramid" by Bertrand W. Sinclair on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
When men walk often in the shadow of death they rise superior to its dread aspect, or they become indifferent to it, or they succumb to its ghastly presence and welcome it as a relief from unendurable suspense. Upon these emotional reagents all the heroism and endurance and cowardice of humanity in war is based. And when the shouting and the tumult dies the survivors sometimes find themselves incredible of their survival in a world excitedly muttering the shibboleths of peace, -- peace, where there is only a truce. For the dumb clods, led or driven, and the high-spirited adventurers did not alone comprise the armies which the nations lately sent forth. Willy-nilly, by outward compulsion or inner sense of duty, the sensitive, the lovers of beauty, the humanitarian, the altruist, those strange souls to whom disorder is an evil, justice a passionately cherished dream, freedom the birthright of every man, -- they too wore khaki and were deafened by the guns.
Upon them, and they are no inconsiderable portion of this our country's manhood, the war has left its mark. Not so much in the scars on their bodies -- for those are things men forget as easily as women forget the pangs of childbirth -- but in the more tenuous fabric of their souls, in the processes of their intellect. Many question the value of the ordeal, -- judged by its results.