Some War-time Lessons Part 1

Some War-time Lessons.

by Frederick P.(Frederick Paul) Keppel.

SOME WAR-TIME LESSONS

THE AMERICAN SOLDIER AND HIS STANDARDS OF CONDUCT[1]

Perhaps the greatest laboratory experiment in human conduct in the history of the world has been the development of our Army during the past two years. Under the provisions of the Selective Service Law, this Army has represented a cross section of American male humanity--even more representative indeed than was intended; for in the efforts of the Local Boards to send men who could best be spared, many found their way into the ranks who were handicapped from the start by low mentality or disease. What were the guiding forces which operated upon this body of nearly four million men?

In the first place, our country entered the war with a great moral purpose, untinged by any trace of national or individual selfishness.

We really have to go back to the Crusades to find the like. And, as then, each man supplemented this great basal impulse with whatever was to him the strongest incentive--religion, patriotism, pride of family or state or regiment, the desire to excel in what all were attempting.

In the second place, thanks primarily to the vision and determination of one man, the individual appeal to each soldier as to his personal share in the great enterprise was upon the highest plane. We were fortunate in having at the head of the War Department a man peculiarly sensitive to community problems and with no small experience in their solution.

Through the centuries men had come to the belief that if their soldiers were only valiant and disciplined in arms, it would not do to inquire too curiously into their personal standards of conduct in other matters--that a considerable wastage in military strength from drunkenness and disease was inevitable. And as we all know, this wastage has in the past sapped, not only the strength of the Army, but afterwards the very life of the nation to which the soldier must sooner or later return.

The Secretary of War and his lieutenants, chief among whom in this field should be placed the Chairman of the Committee on Training Camp Activities, Raymond B. Fosd.i.c.k, approached this problem neither in the fatalistic spirit that what has always been must continue to be, nor in a spirit of what, for want of a better term, I may call doctrinaire idealism. They faced the fact that among the hundreds of thousands of young men who were to be called to the colors, there would be many whose ears would be deaf to any abstract appeal, and many others to whom such an appeal might be made under normal conditions, but who in fatigue or the let-down following the strain of conflict, could not be depended upon to stand in the hour of temptation. As a result the whole field of preventive measures was thoroughly studied and vigorous treatment was applied. The Army regulations as to prophylaxis and the introduction of intoxicants into camps were strictly and honestly enforced. The Army saw to it that state and local laws as to liquor and prost.i.tution were properly carried out, and if these were lacking, they were promptly enacted. The so-called Zone Law was adopted for the purpose of placing the immediate vicinity of camps under Federal control. In some cases where the community showed signs of regarding the Army policy in this regard as a _beau geste_ and nothing more, it was made to realize that while the War Department could not compel the community to mend its ways, it could and would move the camp in twenty-four hours to a more wholesome environment. I am proud to say that it was necessary in only a very few instances to bring forward this aspect of the situation, but when it was necessary the Department spoke in no uncertain tone.

As a result of this general policy, in which the Navy shared, many a wide-open town received a thorough house cleaning for the first time in its career; in all between 120 and 140 red light districts were closed and kept closed; and the underlying sordidness of many a smug self-satisfied village was brought to light and remedied.

The men who came to the camps tainted with venereal disease or broken by drink or morphine--and the number of these was great enough to shock our national complacency (and incidentally to explode the national a.s.sumption that the country is primarily the abode of virtue as the city is of vice)--these men were salvaged by the tens of thousands and turned into useful self-respecting soldiers and citizens.

The lesson of clean living was taught by the spoken word, by the moving picture, by the printed page, by the doctor with a scientific thoroughness and by the layman with a frankness and sometimes a colloquialism which would for once have rendered Mrs. Grundy speechless.

As an instrument of virtue, the tract is, of course, of time-honored usage, but the name of George Ade in the list of tract writers is a new and significant one.

More important than all this, however, in my judgment, was the realization by the Army of the great truth that the soldier--or any one else for that matter--goes astray in only the rarest instances from innate depravity. What he seeks primarily is relaxation and amus.e.m.e.nt.

And so wholesome relaxation and amus.e.m.e.nt were placed at his disposal to take the place of the unwholesome. The whole nation rose to help in this work of subst.i.tuting the clean for the unclean. It poured its money by the hundreds of millions into the coffers of the great welfare societies, the Red Cross, The Young Men's Christian a.s.sociation, Knights of Columbus, Jewish Welfare Board, and later in recognition of its work abroad, the Salvation Army. All of these vied with one another in a rivalry which was sometimes embarra.s.sing in its intensity. The American Library a.s.sociation supplied books and other reading matter, and the War Camp Community Service made sure that, to the towns and villages surrounding it, a cantonment presented an opportunity for service rather than for exploitation. Not the least important factor in the superb showing which our troops made in France was the spirit with which the men and women of these same towns inspired the men from the training camps whom they took into their homes and their hearts.

Within the fabric of the Army the chaplains were doing their share, as were the athletic leaders and song leaders and dramatic coaches. They were seconded by the officers of the line, most of whom, it should be said, saw the military usefulness of the whole program from the first, many of the experienced regulars having always done what they could with the limited means at their command along the same lines. Other officers, however, had to be shown--and were shown--the military importance of the truth that the merry heart goes all the day, and the sad one tires in a mile.

The work of planning and coordination was in the hands of the civilian Commission on Training Camp Activities, of which Mr. Fosd.i.c.k has been from the first the Chairman. The work of this Commission has been characterized from the outset by a courage and resourcefulness for which no praise can be too high. The theatre for example has not always been looked upon by the American people as a moral agency, but the Commission saw its place in the scheme of things and no fewer than thirty-seven great playhouses have been erected at the camps and the audiences have run literally into the millions. Boxing likewise was encouraged, even though some of the contests which resulted were not of the most gentle.

Cantonment towns were persuaded to open the "Movies" on Sunday, the only day on which most soldiers could leave the Camp--the outcries of the _unco guid_ to the contrary notwithstanding.

For more than a year the Commission and the welfare organizations were the only organized forces in this general field, but since last summer their work has been supplemented by the establishment within the Army itself of a Morale Branch of the General Staff, in the formation of which the Department was not too proud to take a leaf--perhaps one should say a Blatt--from the Germans, who had already developed this type of organization to a high degree, under the direct supervision of General Ludendorff.

I have spoken of the work of prevention, of the more important work of subst.i.tution, and I now come to the most important of all--the spirit of confidence which extended from top to bottom of the huge organization that the great ma.s.s of our men would go straight for the sake of going straight. We all instinctively couple the two words, "officer" and "gentleman." In the great Army which is now being disbanded, its work having been so gloriously done, we find a new and enlarged conception, that of the soldier and gentleman. It was, I am certain, the preliminary a.s.sumption that an American soldier was also an American gentleman in all the fundamentals of that much-abused term, which was the great factor in keeping down the number of those who proved the contrary to so negligibly small a total.

A few figures from the official records will show what the result of this all has been. In 1909, for instance, there were in the Army, in round numbers, 5500 court-martial convictions of enlisted men, out of a total of 75,000. For the fifteen months ending July 1, 1918, there were 11,500 convictions out of a total of 2,200,000 enlisted men, the percentage in the twelve months of peace being 7.3 and in the fifteen months of war, .53, about one-fourteenth as great. The significance of these later figures cannot be appreciated without some knowledge of the underlying circ.u.mstances. One case I remember was that of a man who got drunk, spent his money and that of some fellow soldiers, and stayed absent without leave to earn money enough to repay his fellow soldiers and then returned to camp to take his medicine. What on the surface appears to be the cowardly crime of desertion was, in several instances of which I have personal knowledge, a misguided effort to get to the front, through enlistment under another name in some branch of the service which seemed to have an earlier prospect of getting over. In France there were many cases of desertion, but nearly all were from the rear to the front. The progressive success of the policy of keeping the soldier from strong drink, by the way, stands out in the figures, which show that early in the war one out of every twelve offenses charged included drunkenness, but that this proportion dropped until the final figures were less than one in each thirty offenses, this including soldiers in France, where the soldier had to stand on his own feet unprotected by prohibition laws.

The welfare program was, from the nature of the case, most effective among the men of the National Army, where it was possible to take the soldiers in hand from the first. If we a.n.a.lyze the court-martial records, we find that the proportion of court-martials was distinctly lowest in this group. The records as of June 30, 1918, show that the number of court-martials among the Regular Army was a little less than one per cent, to be accurate 8/10 of one per cent; in the National Guard the proportion was about 9/10 of one per cent; and in the National Army it was less than 2/10 of one per cent, the exact figure being .143 per cent, one-fiftieth of the percentage ten years ago.

Another check on the efficiency of the program is found in the records as to venereal disease in the Surgeon General's Office. It is hard to get comparative figures because of constantly changing conditions, but it has been shown beyond all doubt that the health conditions in the Army have been far, far better than in the community at large. While the latter are not so bad as the alarmists have implied, they are serious enough in all conscience, when in no fewer than seventeen of the states, sixty or more of every thousand men who appeared at the mobilization camps were found to be infected. Taking a typical month before the signing of the armistice, we find that the proportion of cases coming to the camps from the civil community was fifteen times as great as the proportion among our soldiers in France, even including the soldiers in the port towns, where most of our difficulties there were found. The comparison with the records of the cantonments in this country is even more striking.

As to the purely religious appeal and its influence on the men it is hard to speak with any degree of certainty. A visiting British general in Was.h.i.+ngton, shortly after our entry into the war, was asked as to conditions in England, and is reported to have replied, "Upon my soul, if you ask me, I should say that with us the dear old Church has rather missed the bus." In this country the organized religious forces have by no means missed the bus, but if we are honest with ourselves we must face the fact that since the last great national test, the Civil War, other appeals to higher standards of conduct have both actually and relatively been tremendously strengthened, and our religious leaders must address themselves, in the light of experience during these past two years, to a clearer understanding of these other forces and to a closer cooperation with them. We cannot to-day close our eyes to the truth that many of our finest men played their splendid parts quite untouched by a religious motive or appeal--or at least doctrinal appeal; one hesitates to call their att.i.tude a non-religious one. It must always be remembered, however, that their standards, no matter how unconscious they may have been of the fact, were fundamentally based upon the development of a Christian civilization.

If thus far I may have seemed to measure soldier conduct by two standards only, by his relation to drink and to women, it is because the results of the policy of the Army in these two matters are measurable, the records are outstanding. The Army and its experience however would furnish but a poor guide to the Churches and the other civilian forces for righteousness if its lessons were limited to the negative virtues, important as they are, of sobriety and continence.

The real contribution, what we have learned as to the positive virtues, is harder to describe and impossible to measure, but the lessons are worth looking for and may be learned from the letters and from the lips of our men. Perhaps I can best indicate what the men themselves regard as vital by telling the experience of a friend who started one of the customary practical talks before an audience of our men behind the lines in France. His homily didn't seem to be "getting across" and he was inspired to ascertain just what to their minds were the most serious offenses. He asked each man to write down what he regarded as the three very worst faults against which a soldier should be on his guard. When the answers were collected, one word appeared on practically every slip of paper, _cowardice_; the second was not so nearly unanimous, but appears on a strong majority of the papers, _selfishness_; and the third was evidently _conceitedness_, though the defect was worded in different ways, as _big head_, _crust_, and the like.

In other words, the virtues which the soldier most admires and regarding which he had evidently learned the most valuable lessons, are courage, unselfishness or cooperativeness, and modesty.

The record of our soldiers has proved beyond a doubt that once you get men into groups with a common and a worth-while purpose, courage--both the reckless courage that comes by instinct and that higher type, the courage of the man who recognizes his danger--can no longer be a.s.sumed to be a rare virtue. It is a very common virtue. Cowardice is infinitely rarer. The citations and the casualty records, for instance, have completely rehabilitated the Jew as a fighting man, and the faithful need no longer go back to Josephus for their war legends.

Not all the courage and fort.i.tude was shown on the field of battle. We must not forget that last fall we suffered from by far the most serious epidemic in the history of America, and, in the dark days in our training camps, opportunities were offered, and gladly accepted, for a display of heroism and devotion of the highest type.

In the realm of fort.i.tude, if not of physical courage, the war certainly tapped new sources of determination and provided a kind of stimulus which would keep a man to whom no personal glory or conspicuousness could possibly come, some poor devil sentenced to a swivel chair, laboring in that same chair day and night for the purpose of making some single improvement in nut or bolt, or perhaps filing card. Given the impetus of a great common purpose, our possibilities for industry are limitless.

One thing that mankind should have learned long since is that, broadly speaking, selfishness as a guiding motive is essentially negative--the absence of something better--the man is a rare exception who does not lose himself and his self-interest in the conception or the ambition of the group, the squad or battalion or regiment, the division, the army or the nation. An interesting side-light upon this is the fact that two-thirds of the men who get into trouble in the Army, or at any rate who get into sufficiently serious trouble to land them in Fort Leavenworth, are markedly of the ego-centric type; in other words, are men for whom the group cannot overcome the individual bias.

That our soldiers as a whole possess the virtue of modesty, though it is often overlaid by a veneer of innocent swagger, is beyond dispute, as any one who has had to do with them can testify. And underlying and inspiring their whole conduct have been the qualities of whole-souledness and determination and an indomitable cheerfulness.

We must learn the lessons which the soldiers have to teach us in the large just as we must grasp their accomplishments in the large. There is a morning after for nations as well as for individuals, and we seem just now to be in danger of losing our conception of the greatness of the enterprise, and its essential soundness, through the intrusion of the instances, relatively very few, where things did not go right; where human nature did not reach the heights, or having reached them, failed to remain upon them.

It has, I think, been definitely proved that the mixing up of the so-called welfare work with the special function of the clergymen or other religious adviser, in order that the latter may be made more palatable to the soldier, has an effect exactly the reverse of what was intended. The policy of interpolating a prayer meeting, or a heart-to-heart talk, between the third and fourth reels of the moving picture play, and I grieve to say that such a policy was actually followed for a while, is of course a fantastic example, but it shows exactly how we ought not to do it.

The soldiers are peculiarly sensitive to any feeling that what is done for them is done for some other purpose than the ostensible one, entirely apart from how worthy such other purpose may be. Let me quote from a letter written by an officer of the Army who had been visiting a number of camps:

"The Camp Library to my mind fulfills one of the most vital needs of the camp. It is a place where our men can get relaxation and mental stimulus, and where they can feel at ease without the 'G.o.d-bless-you'

atmosphere of the other welfare organizations."... "It is the one place in camp where you can go and have a chance to meditate or read in peace and quiet without a piano jangling in your ears or the imminent possibility of a prayer meeting."

The chaplain or the lay religious worker to whom a man instinctively turned at the moment when he needed spiritual help was the one whom he had learned to respect for courage and devotion and dignity, the man who had helped to bury his dead friend, to comfort and amuse his wounded friend, and to advise his misguided friend in the guard-house; not the one whose ill-timed ministrations he had learned to avoid. I understand that the story of the chaplain who entirely forgot that he was to appear at a review for the purpose of receiving a medal and delayed the entire proceedings while he was sought for and found in his customary post in the connecting trench, is absolutely authentic.

The man who could forget his denomination in his devotion to the great common mission was the man whom the soldier learned to love and to trust and who could do the most in the day of battle. The most popular tales among the chaplains are the tales of unorthodoxy: The Catholic priest who baptized a group of his men before action in a sh.e.l.l hole with water which was not only unblessed, but I fear unsanitary, and who simply referred to Philip and the Eunuch when reproved; the Methodist and Baptist, and I think the Episcopalian, who in the absence of their Presbyterian colleague, solemnly and quite illegally received a youngster into the Presbyterian fold before he went overseas, and confessed the next morning to the Presbyterian Board; the Wesleyan chaplain in the British Army who carried a crucifix to comfort the dying Catholics on the battlefield when no priest of their faith was near, and who administered the last rites to them as best he could. There are hundreds of such stories.

The appeal of any denomination as such, or of the Y, or the corresponding societies of other faiths, as such, was always mistaken.

It was the united appeal of all the doers of good deeds which counted.

If we never knew before, we know now the truth of the fable of the bundle of f.a.gots. Personally, I believe the united drive for welfare work last fall, during which Protestant, Catholic and Jew, and men of no formal religion whatever, appealed from the same platform for the same great purpose, was an event of the greatest importance in our nation, and it will go ill with us if we forget the lesson that it has to teach.

The appeal must be not only disinterested, but it must be simple and direct. This, and the careful selection of its personnel, had much, if not most, to do with the extraordinary success of the Salvation Army.

There are times in a soldier's life when the sewing on of a b.u.t.ton at some vital spot will do more to "get" him than anything else in the world.

Out of this spirit of general helpfulness, there were developed at almost every point the most beautiful and sympathetic adjustments to immediate conditions. For example, take the plan of showing moving pictures upon the ceilings of hospital wards, so that the very ill may enjoy them without the strain even of raising their heads. This small piece of thoughtfulness to me represents the standard of thinking a problem through which we will have to maintain if we are to hold what we have gained, and what we have gained includes, or should include, a realization that active and willing loving-kindness furnishes the keenest of all pleasures.

Thus far I have spoken mainly of the work of preparation in the United States. Overseas our soldiers and their officers found new conditions and were forced to make new adjustments. We no longer could control the laws and ordinances, and we found different standards of conduct--not necessarily lower standards, but different standards. We could no longer enforce prohibition for example, but we did maintain a high average of temperance. We showed our allies, some of whom I may say were honestly sceptical on the subject, that with our soldiers continence was the rule, and not the exception. When I was in France last year, I asked those who were in a position to know upon this point and was told that, comparatively speaking, very, very few of our men lowered in France the standards of conduct which they held when they came into the Army, that many more greatly improved those standards, either because of the lessons they had learned in our training camps, or because of the wholesome companions.h.i.+p of the women workers with whom they were daily brought in contact, or because, and this was probably the most potent factor of all, they were so desperately keen to get into the fighting line that they were taking no chances of being put out of commission beforehand. Their morality was the morality of the team in training for the big game, and it kept tens of thousands of boys straight. Indeed, until November 11, disciplinary problems may be said to have been practically non-existent among combat troops and almost negligible among the others. After the armistice was signed, there was a let-down, this being after all a very human body of young men, and the first remedy tried by some of the old-time regulars did not help a bit. This was to "give 'em plenty of drill and make 'em so tired they won't have energy to get into mischief," but as one returning artillery officer pointed out to me, when a battery a month before has fired 50,000 rounds of high-explosive at the Boche, and worked its guns over craters and through thickets, a drill with dummy ammunition on a parade ground is almost a justification for mutiny. Wiser counsel soon prevailed and the welfare work, which had slumped with the rest, was again brought up to concert pitch. It was for the first time in France, properly coordinated under Army control. The misfits and the workers who had worn themselves out were returned to this country and their places taken by fresh blood.

I remember in this connection a paragraph tucked in the middle of the uncompromising officialdom of the daily departmental cable: "Send over plenty of welfare workers and remember the best men you can send are the women."

Let me take this chance to say a word about the criticisms we have been hearing of this welfare work abroad. In the first place, the success of the work in this country among the men in training set up an expectation which it was humanly impossible to meet under the conditions overseas; in other words, the men who went over a.s.sumed standards as to the minimum amount of attention which it was their right to expect, the like of which had never been dreamed in the history of mankind. As a matter of fact, and taken as a whole, the treatment which they received was admirable and the comparatively few who now doubt the truth of this statement will come to realize it as time goes on. They will see that the misfits, the over-wrought, stood out in their minds like men out of alignment at parade, that they simply did not notice the thousands of men and women whose work for them was all that their own mothers could have asked.

The following official cablegram records the state of educational, recreation and welfare work at the end of April, 1919.