Military Professionalism

Men who adopt the profession of arms submit of their own free will to a law of perpetual constraint of their own accord. They resist their right to live where they choose, to say what they think, to dress as they like, it needs but an order to settle them from their family and dislocate their normal lives. In the world of command, they must rise, march, run, endure bad weather, go without sleep or food, be isolated in some distant post, work until they drop. They have ceased to be the master of their own fate. If they drop on their tracks, if their ashes are scattered to the four winds, that is all part and parcel of their job.