Fear, Benham held, drives the man back to the crowd, the dog to its master, the wolf to the pack, and when it is felt that the danger is pooled, then fear leaves us.He was quite prepared to meet the objection that animals of a solitary habit do nevertheless exhibit fear.Some of this apparent fear, he argued, was merely discretion, and what is not discretion is the survival of an infantile characteristic.The fear felt by a tiger cub is certainly a social emotion, that drives it back to the other cubs, to its mother and the dark hiding of the lair.The fear of a fully grown tiger sends it into the reeds and the shadows, to a refuge, that must be "still reminiscent of the maternal lair." But fear has very little hold upon the adult solitary animal, it changes with extreme readiness to resentment and rage.
"Like most inexperienced people," ran his notes, "I was astonished at the reported feats of men in war; I believed they were exaggerated, and that there was a kind of unpremeditated conspiracy of silence about their real behaviour.But when on my way to visit India for the third time I turned off to see what I could of the fighting before Adrianople, I discovered at once that a thousand casually selected conscripts will, every one of them, do things together that not one of them could by any means be induced to do alone.I saw men not merely obey orders that gave them the nearly certain prospect of death, but I saw them exceeding orders; I saw men leap out of cover for the mere sake of defiance, and fall shot through and smashed by a score of bullets.I saw a number of Bulgarians in the hands of the surgeon, several quite frightfully wounded, refuse chloroform merely to impress the English onlooker, some of their injuries I could scarcely endure to see, and I watched a line of infantry men go on up a hill and keep on quite manifestly cheerful with men dropping out and wriggling, and men dropping out and lying still until every other man was down....Not one man would have gone up that hill alone, without onlookers...."Rowe, the lion hunter, told Benham that only on one occasion in his life had he given way to ungovernable fear, and that was when he was alone.Many times he had been in fearful situations in the face of charging lions and elephants, and once he had been bowled over and carried some distance by a lion, but on none of these occasions had fear demoralized him.There was no question of his general pluck.
But on one occasion he was lost in rocky waterless country in Somaliland.He strayed out in the early morning while his camels were being loaded, followed some antelope too far, and lost his bearings.He looked up expecting to see the sun on his right hand and found it on his left.He became bewildered.He wandered some time and then fired three signal shots and got no reply.Then losing his head he began shouting.He had only four or five more cartridges and no water-bottle.His men were accustomed to his going on alone, and might not begin to remark upon his absence until sundown....It chanced, however, that one of the shikari noted the water-bottle he had left behind and organized a hunt for him.
Long before they found him he had passed to an extremity of terror.
The world had become hideous and threatening, the sun was a pitiless glare, each rocky ridge he clambered became more dreadful than the last, each new valley into which he looked more hateful and desolate, the cramped thorn bushes threatened him gauntly, the rocks had a sinister lustre, and in every blue shadow about him the night and death lurked and waited.There was no hurry for them, presently they would spread out again and join and submerge him, presently in the confederated darkness he could be stalked and seized and slain.
Yes, this he admitted was real fear.He had cracked his voice, yelling as a child yells.And then he had become afraid of his own voice....
"Now this excess of fear in isolation, this comfort in a crowd, in support and in a refuge, even when support or refuge is quite illusory, is just exactly what one would expect of fear if one believed it to be an instinct which has become a misfit.In the ease of the soldier fear is so much a misfit that instead of saving him for the most part it destroys him.Raw soldiers under fire bunch together and armies fight in masses, men are mowed down in swathes, because only so is the courage of the common men sustained, only so can they be brave, albeit spread out and handling their weapons as men of unqualified daring would handle them they would be infinitely safer and more effective....
"And all of us, it may be, are restrained by this misfit fear from a thousand bold successful gestures of mind and body, we are held back from the attainment of mighty securities in pitiful temporary shelters that are perhaps in the end no better than traps...."From such considerations Benham went on to speculate how far the crowd can be replaced in a man's imagination, how far some substitute for that social backing can be made to serve the same purpose in neutralizing fear.He wrote with the calm of a man who weighs the probabilities of a riddle, and with the zeal of a man lost to every material consideration.His writing, it seemed to White, had something of the enthusiastic whiteness of his face, the enthusiastic brightness of his eyes.We can no more banish fear from our being at present than we can carve out the fleshy pillars of the heart or the pineal gland in the brain.It is deep in our inheritance.As deep as hunger.And just as we have to satisfy hunger in order that it should leave us free, so we have to satisfy the unconquerable importunity of fear.We have to reassure our faltering instincts.There must be something to take the place of lair and familiars, something not ourselves but general, that we must carry with us into the lonely places.For it is true that man has now not only to learn to fight in open order instead of in a phalanx, but he has to think and plan and act in open order, to live in open order....
