FIGHTING WORK FOR THE MAN OF FIGHTING AGE
October 25, 1917
The Y.M.C.A. is one of the most powerful agencies for good in our military camps here at home and with our armies abroad. It would be a veritable calamity not to have it do this work. The women and the elderly men who have gone abroad under present conditions are rendering a patriotic service of high value, but every young man of fighting age who has gone abroad for the Y.M.C.A. at this time is a positive damage to the work and should be instantly sent home. It is an ignoble thing for an able-bodied man to be in such a position of bodily safety where his example must naturally excite contempt and resentment among the men who, unlike him, are risking their lives and have left their families for the sake of a great ideal. Of course, no man of draft age should be sent over, but this is not enough. The draft represents merely the minimum performance of duty. No man of age to permit his entering the army abroad or at home should be sent over. If any such man is not in the army, it should be either because he has been turned down by the army authorities for physical reasons or because his work at home either for his family or for the Government imperatively demands his presence here. If he is able to go abroad at all, he should go abroad in the army. The fact that he is abroad for the Y.M.C.A. is proof positive that he has no business to be there.
An officer in high command in France recently wrote home a letter, which I have seen, describing the experiences of the junior officers of his command with some of the young able-bodied Y.M.C.A. representatives. He began by an emphatic testimony to the admirable work the Y.M.C.A. had done and to its great importance, and by an emphatic statement that it had a thoroughly bad effect on the enlisted men to see a young man of their own age engaged in such work. He then illustrated its effect on the young officers with whom these Y.M.C.A. men messed, writing:
Two young Y.M.C.A. men have been at two of the battalion messes. They are of the age whose presence here is an annoyance to the army because they seem to have been exempted from the draft. They have obtained bullet-proof jobs and their presence here is a bad example to all the young men in the army. Last night at one mess the officers were so disgusted with the Y.M.C.A., who was actually wearing a uniform with an officer’s belt on, that they began to chaff him, telling him that they were married men and were entitled to play safety first themselves and thought they would apply for jobs in the Salvation Army. The Y.M.C.A. had to stand for this because he was the only unmarried man there, and it is said that his mother persuaded him that he owed her a duty not to go in a dangerous place. He evidently feels his duty keenly. The other young fellow from the Y.M.C.A. was a real man and he left the soft job and has enlisted as a private.
The Y.M.C.A. is so very useful an organization that it is profoundly to be regretted that it should in any way damage its usefulness. Its work with the armies abroad should be done exclusively by women and elderly men. No able-bodied man under forty-five should represent the Y.M.C.A. in the war zone or with the army camps.