CHAPTER XIII
THE MORAL GAIN AND LOSS OF THE SOLDIER
The military system, as I have tried to bring out in the last chapter, had a definite and profound influence on the life and thought of the individual soldier. It was so radically different from civilian life that this influence became all the more striking through contrast. The young man has certain moral standards and habits in civil life, some of which became intensified, while others altered in the army. The millions of young men who went through the military régime during the war have brought this influence back into civilian life with them, even though it is attenuated by environment and although they have largely returned to their former, pre-military habits. War and danger brought out certain characteristics and occasioned others. These new reactions of character were not, as the pacifists would have it, all bad; neither were they all good, as was generally proclaimed in patriotic fashion while the war was going on. Some influences were good and some were bad, while almost every man in the service would necessarily respond to both kinds. The military system itself caused or brought to light certain good and bad traits which appeared clearly enough in the average soldier after he had been in the army even a few months. It may be worth while to develop some of these at a little length, not scientifically nor psychologically, but simply and directly as they strike the soldier himself.
We saw at the front, as the experience of other armies had indicated, that the average man has in him the stuff of which heroes are made. Not merely the farmer or backwoodsman, but the men who followed prosaic city occupations, were ready to sacrifice themselves for their comrades and their country. The barber and the shipping clerk were as frequent winners of the D. S. C. as any others in our huge heterogeneous army. Heroism was evoked by the need, by the fact that it was the expected response, the response of thousands of others. The crowd mind produced heroism out of the most unexpected material. War created some of the heroism which we saw; it merely evoked some which was already latent, ready for the call. The stretcher-bearer, exposing himself to the severest fire to carry his precious burden to safety; the battalion runner, bearing his message through the barrage and then coming back again to bring the answer; the machine gunner, carrying his heavy weapon on his back to an advanced position where he could establish it effectively; the infantryman, advancing against machine-gun fire, or digging in under attack from heavy artillery or aëroplanes; the engineer, digging away debris or laying bridges in plain sight of the enemy, with his rifle laid near by to use in case of an attack—I might enumerate hundreds of such duties in which courage, loyalty, and endurance were exhibited by men who performed exceptional acts of bravery and devotion, volunteering for difficult service or carrying on in the face of overwhelming odds. All soldiers were afraid, but in the performance of their duty practically all soldiers learned to overcome fear and attend to their jobs in the face of every obstacle and every danger.
We felt that travel, with its attendant contact with other customs, language and people, would broaden our soldiers mentally and tend to break down the provincialism which has been often noticed in America, as well as in many other countries. Only a small minority of our men were equipped, either in knowledge or in attitude, to take advantage of the opportunities offered. Museums meant comparatively little to them, mediæval cathedrals not much more, Roman walls or ruins nothing at all. Scenery did not mean as much as some of us thought it should, forgetting that scenery looks entirely different to a man who rides past it and another who walks through it. Altogether, knowledge of France, England and Germany made, on the whole, not for a greater appreciation of foreign lands, but instead for a great appreciation of America.
The fact is that the boys grew homesick. Most of them were only boys in years, and practically all of them were reduced to the boyish level of thought by the general irresponsibility, thoughtlessness, and dependency of army life. They were like boys in a military school, very often, rather than men engaged in the grim business of modern war. To these boys absence from home brought a higher appreciation of home. This was often a true evaluation, in the face of previous neglect and underestimation; sometimes it may have been a sentimentalizing of a home that had never really meant very much. But in the danger, the monotony, and the distance, the soldiers grew to higher appreciation of their own homes and their home-land as well.
Their complaints were often ridiculous enough. They objected to the backwardness, the lack of sanitation, the absence of bathing facilities in the French villages. These were true enough, as far as they went, although I know personally that they can be matched in many details even in prosperous and enlightened America. They objected to the French climate, with the damp cold of its winters, not caring to remember that certain parts of our own Pacific coast suffer from a rainy season, too. This complaint becomes still more valueless when we remember how the boys grumbled about the heat of the Texas border, in fact, how soldiers not in action will always find a source of complaint in the weather, whatever kind of weather it may be. As General O'Ryan remarked in his famous definition of a soldier, "A soldier is a man who always wants to be somewhere else than where he is." This restlessness accounts for some of the complaints which we are apt to take a bit too seriously. A more real complaint was the language difficulty. Soldier French was a wonderful thing, consisting of the names of all ordinary things to eat and drink, together with a few common expressions, such as "toute de suite" (always pronounced "toot sweet"), and "combien." This prevented easy communication, even with such French people as were encountered. Few of the soldiers had any opportunity to use even their little French on respectable, middle-class French families, especially not on young men or girls. All these grievances, real and fancied, put the soldier out of ease in France and made him appreciate America so much the better. The sacrifices they were making for America, the service they were rendering her, united with the home-sickness of a stranger in a strange land to increase the devotion and respect of Americans for America.
I need not refer especially to the rather mixed gain in religious attitude, as I have already devoted a chapter to that subject. I must, however, repeat one point I mentioned there, the meanings of physical sacrifice as these men saw it and practised it in the army. It was the outcome of their courage, their dash, their enthusiasm, that when the time of stress came ordinary men offered their lives for their friends and their country. The soldier at the front equaled or exceeded the forgetfulness of self of the fireman or the life-saver in time of peace. This lesson of self-forgetfulness, of self-sacrifice, was one of the great impressions made by the war upon the best men it influenced, and one which touched in its way even the most thoughtless and careless of all the soldiers who had their hour at the front.
This brought out the group solidarity of the American army in stronger relief. The fine thing about morale at the front, as I have outlined it, was the mutual confidence which it called out in every breast. The pride in his own company, his regiment, his division, in the American army as a whole, which held a man to his duty under fire and impelled him to resist the almost overwhelming influence of a sudden attack of panic, made for loyalty at the rear as well and formed one basis for the whole-hearted return of the young men into civilian society after the war. Pride in one's division meant also pride in one's state; pride in the United States Army meant pride in the United States. Self-sacrifice, devotion, heroism,—all these were profound lessons for any man, young or old, a lesson which American democracy can profitably utilize in the daily humdrum of American life.
It was surprising how constantly our expectations were disappointed by the actual facts of the men in the service. Most books and articles since the war and all of those before the war were written on a theoretical basis, and every one approached the facts with a theoretical view. But the theory was proved wrong in so many instances that I am making the present study entirely empirical, leaving theory out altogether as more of a pitfall than an advantage. For one thing, I had expected war to exert a directly brutalizing influence on the soldier. This was never evident at all except in the actual stress of battle when killing was a daily necessity, and human life, although the most valuable asset of the contending forces, was still held cheaply enough to be used up at a terrific rate. Men could not stop there to pity every corpse; they had to save their own lives and at the same time to win the war. But the effect wore off quickly; probably it left no result at all except on men with a previous tendency to brutality or crime. I remember the thrill of horror which went through Le Mans and the entire A. E. F. in April 1919, when a railroad accident occurred near our post and a group of soldiers and sailors on furlough were injured, some of them fatally. We forgot all about the fact that these men had risked death in entering the service, that the few of them in this accident were the smallest fraction of a day's toll at the front if the war had continued. We melted in sympathy, and the French population of Le Mans did the same.
The men were not brutalized, contrary to expectation. Human life was held cheaply under exceptional circumstances and evidently the men felt that they were exceptional. But the men did become accustomed to the use of firearms, and those already brutalized were given the knowledge and the means for crimes of violence. The carelessness with which men used and flung about all kinds of deadly weapons shocked those of us with a sense of responsibility; it was part of their boyish heedlessness in the midst of the fierce game they were playing. They threw their discarded rifles in a heap by the first-aid post when they went back to hospital; they even played catch with hand-grenades, sometimes with most serious results. Once I met a pair of Australians out hunting rabbits with their high-powered rifles, in a place where hundreds of men were passing hourly by the much-traveled road. When I remonstrated with them, they only replied, "Oh, well, we haven't anything else to do. And we know how to shoot without hurting anybody."
But with all these real character acquisitions on the part of the men in the service, and with the lack of that brutalizing which many theorists had feared, at the same time certain moral losses were occasioned by the military system. I shall not enter into the question of sexual morality here, partly because I have discussed it in the previous chapter, and partly because it was not distinctly the product of the army. The sexual standards of the young men in the army were much the same as those of young men everywhere, with some modifications through discipline. But to the man who has served in any army at any time, the outstanding moral weakness of the soldier is his entire disregard of the rights of property. The sense of property, so strong in civilian life, which is implanted so carefully into the little child, seems lost in the first month of a man's army life. One brigade headquarters I knew in France was established in a fine château, with large grounds surrounded by a high wooden fence. At the same time, the men of the nearest unit were living in barns and attics, with no light or heat of any kind in their quarters. The result was that the fence disappeared, little by little. Nobody ever saw the culprits, but I had reliable information that the men billeted in that village had all the heat they needed. When we left the area, about half the fence was gone, and I have little doubt it vanished entirely during the occupancy of the next division.
I can still hear the indignation of the driver of my "tin Lizzie" when the precious lamps were stolen out of our car and we had to drive home ten miles in the dark. Of course, lamps were scarce, having to be shipped from the States, and the thief undoubtedly drove an army car like ours. But a few days later after a visit to the city my driver reported back in triumph—he had found another machine parked in a side street and "salvaged" the lights. I tried to make him return them, but for once he proved insubordinate. It was only another army car; the other fellow had probably got them the same way; he could not identify the car, anyway. Then came the finishing stroke when we tried the lights and found them burned out! The other driver had left them in as a blind. My driver felt a sense of personal injury, as though he had been directly cheated in a legitimate business deal. And practically any soldier would have agreed with him.
The men "found" whatever they needed if it was not issued to them properly, because property had no meaning to them in the army. They owned nothing whatever; even their clothes, food and lodging belonged to Uncle Sam. When their clothes wore out, they were replaced; when the company's weekly supply of food was eaten up, more was forthcoming. Rifles fallen into disrepair were exchanged for good ones; shoes were sent to the salvage depot to be repaired and then issued to another man. Equipment lost at the front or in the hospital was reissued without question. Therefore the enlisted man felt a community sense of ownership rather than a personal one. At the same time, he was constantly in need of one thing or another. He needed fire wood, as in the incident of the fence, or automobile supplies, as with my driver. The legend even goes that the Australians, famous in their ability to care for their own units, have been known to take an entire field kitchen, with the food still cooking, from a British unit and make a successful escape. I know that I have personally seen a British colonial soldier in a village near the front taking a large mirror with a gilt frame out of a dwelling house and making off toward his quarters. "What are you doing with that?" I asked him. "Oh, I think we can use it," was his unembarrassed answer.
The soldier learned to disregard law, just as he learned to disregard property. Discipline meant obedience to constant minute surveillance. It meant getting up at reveille, rolling his blankets in just such a way, reporting at roll call, lining up for mess, working at whatever menial tasks he might be detailed to do by the sergeant, asking for a pass when he wanted to go to the nearest city, submitting his mail to censorship, getting a day off for sickness only after lining up for "sick call," and finally going to bed at night as soon as the bugle sounded "taps." These men were not trained soldiers, accustomed to such a system; they were healthy American boys in whom this constant subjection to external control meant the immediate seeds of revolt. Autonomy meant then the evasion of the law. A man could assert his individuality only in such ways as going absent without leave, wearing a serge uniform (not regulation for private soldiers), or gambling away his last month's scanty pay. Add to this his constant contact with officers, who, if they had to bear a heavy burden of responsibility and were forced to pay for all the things the enlisted man received for nothing, still were not subject to many of the restrictions which he found most galling. The test of manly independence came to be simply "getting away with it." If a man was caught in an infraction of the rules he had to take his punishment; if he was not detected or not convicted he was a successful soldier. This applied, for example, to a trip to Paris, the golden dream of every American soldier. For a long time this was strictly forbidden, although later three-day leaves to Paris were allowed to a certain number of men. Yet thousands of Americans saw the lovely and forbidden city unofficially. They got leave to Versailles, and rode into Paris daily by street car. They took the wrong train, ostensibly by accident, and had to change trains at Paris, dropping out of sight for a day or two meanwhile. They borrowed the travel orders of other men and used them over, risking detection. Neither the extreme harshness of the Paris military police nor the menace of their own angry captains could keep them from the enticing adventure. It was their boyishness, combined with their lack of respect for the law itself, that led them into such devious modes of disobedience. "If you know how, you can get away with murder," was the usual apology—further excuse was not needed.
Among officers a similar tendency showed itself in a different way. The officer was not limited in the most petty ways which irritated the men, although he also could not take a trip to Paris without proper travel orders and could not absent himself from duty without special permission. But the officer likewise grew to disregard the law essentially, even while he obeyed it most carefully in its minutiæ. An officer was bound by his signature on written documents. A request coming from the sergeant had to be endorsed by the lieutenant, with his reasons if he did not favor granting it. It would then pass on to the captain, the major, the colonel, and if necessary also the brigadier and the major general. Having passed through military channels for its consideration, it came back again by the same route until it reached the originator. This system made at once for diffusion of responsibility, or, to use the familiar army term, "passing the buck." The first man who approved the request had no responsibility, as it was approved likewise by his superiors; the later endorsers had none, as they had signed it on his recommendation, assuming his knowledge of the facts. Nobody could be held responsible and every one was careful to evade responsibility wherever he could. Naturally, this made for endless delays, for complications interminable when a previous order had to be rescinded for any reasons whatever, for evasion in case of difficulty or doubt. It meant fundamentally the disregard of law, expressed by the soldier in disobedience and by the officer in evasion.
The military régime likewise tended to break down habits of regular industry. During the war there was the alternation of short periods of intense and exhausting activity at the front and longer ones of as complete rest as the men could obtain at the rear. It was a reversion to the life of the savage, busy by spells at hunting or war, with rest and languor between. The entire exhaustion, physical and mental, after a "spell in the trenches" demanded complete relaxation afterward, while there was always a little necessary work in the way of drill, reëquipment and inspection. After the war was over, the drill went on in still larger doses but without the incentive of returning to the trenches again afterward. This alternation of work and rest together with the general rebellion against routine, broke down the habit of consistent work which is built up with such effort and such inducements in civil life. Boys do not want to work until they are taught to do so and given inducements in the form of money and the things money will buy. But the soldiers, so boyish in their life and their feelings, had few such inducements given them. Their universal experience after leaving the army was that it took a tremendous effort of will to return to the routine and responsibility of a civilian occupation.
Exceptions existed, of course, to every generalization in this chapter, as they do to any generalization of any kind. But the exceptions speedily lifted themselves out of the ranks by promotion, and were therefore covered by the different influences on the officers and the higher ranks of non-commissioned officers. And I feel that even these exceptional men who retained their respect for law and property, their habits of regular industry, did so only in comparison with the general break-down, that even they felt a certain loosening of the standards which they had possessed in civilian life.
Army life developed a new series of moral values and moral reactions. It brought out virtues which were latent or non-existent in civil life; it reduced others to impotence. It produced love of country, of home, and of God; it brought forth courage, loyalty, self-sacrifice, the extreme of heroism, in such numbers and such variety that they seemed commonplace. It did not brutalize any who were not very ready for such a process. But at the same time, it destroyed the citizen's respect for law and order, his respect for property, his habit of hard and persistent work. It made him, for the time being, a lazy hero; a jovial, careless, and lovable lawbreaker. It brought out exactly the qualities which are least necessary in civil life, and injured those most necessary; it took the student, the workingman, the farmer, and made of him the doughboy. Army life was opposed directly to the whole tenor of democracy, the régime where men control themselves, where they work through ambition and desire for success, and where they strive to accumulate property of their own, at the same time respecting the law and the property of others. Army life meant a break in the lives of millions of young Americans, an interruption of the steady development of their characters and habits, a reversal of their tendencies and a postponement of their ambitions.
I feel that it is a great evidence of the essential soundness of American manhood that these millions have returned to civil life, in most cases to their former circles and their former occupations, with so little difficulty. Society helped them at the moment by the splendid reception home, by the plaudits, the speeches, and the parades. It helped them also to obtain positions and then left them to find themselves. Fortunately, after a brief transition most of them did find themselves, and the ex-soldiers to-day are back in every type of work as before. The former captain may sell you a suit; the holder of a D. S. C. may wait on you at the restaurant. They have overcome the restlessness, the carelessness, the thrill; they are civilians again. But here and there the seeds fell on different soil; here and there a former soldier has not found himself again. We see him most often among the wounded and gassed, who cannot fit into industry so easily, and whose sufferings have often affected their mentality and always their point of view. America has wasted criminally precious years of these young ruined lives, in not bringing to them instantly the full care and service of a grateful nation. On the other hand, industry has made little effort to absorb our soldiers; I have seen men with trades selling fruit from push-carts because there was no other work at hand. I have seen a jobless boy, honestly trying to make a little money by selling trinkets in the street and driven away by a patriotic store-keeper, who felt that he had done his duty by buying Liberty Bonds and need not bother about the man who had fought his battles for him. The soldier who cannot return to civil life is a rare exception, but he is an exception caused in an unstable youth by our military or our industrial system. Our nation, which profited by that army, must remember for good every weakest individual whose sweat and blood poured forth to make that army great.