Educational work of such varied sort was constantly carried on as part of the program of the Training Camp Committee as to give to much of the leisure time of every camp almost an academic atmosphere. The machinery of the university extension work and of the educational department of the Y. M. C. A. was utilized to provide for those wishing to take them a wide variety of college and commercial school courses. English was taught to those of little education and to those of foreign birth. Every camp had its classes in French. There was instruction in subjects which would prepare men to transfer from one branch of the service to another. And always and everywhere there were schools or classes or courses of study for intensive training in one or another phase of military affairs—training for those who would have to undertake these specific and varied duties, training for those who would instruct others in them, training for officers. Every camp and cantonment buzzed with these activities by which the men of a nation unused to military affairs and hating war zealously trained themselves for battle and schooled themselves in new methods of warfare.
The Commission on Training Camp Activities went vigorously into the work of education in social hygiene and the enforcement of law in order to make and keep the camp environment, the camps and the men themselves morally wholesome, to the end that the army should be of the best fighting material and that the men who composed it should return to their homes as fine and clean as when they left. A determined and unceasing effort was made to keep alcohol and the prostitute away from the cantonments. Wide zones in which the sale or gift of alcohol to soldiers was forbidden surrounded each training area. One section of the Commission dealt directly with the problem of woman and girl camp followers and sought to lessen this evil by work among the women themselves, by securing better enforcement of local police regulations and by educational and reformatory work in camp communities. A great educational program was carried on by the Government by which instruction in sex hygiene was given in the training camps. During the first six months of cantonment training more than a million men were reached in this way, and the work was continued with equal energy throughout the war period.
A system of government insurance, provided by act of Congress and taking the place of the old-time pension system, enabled any member of the fighting forces of the United States to insure himself against death or total permanent disability at a low premium, which was taken from his monthly pay. At the end of hostilities 4,000,000 of these insurance policies had been taken out by officers and men of the Army and Navy, totaling over $37,000,000,000. Most of them were for the maximum amount of $10,000. Arrangements were made that would enable each holder of a policy to continue it, if he so desired, after leaving the service. Allotments of pay which could be made directly to dependents and allowances paid by the United States to the families of men in service, if such allowance was necessary, helped to relieve the mind of the soldier of worry as to the welfare of his loved ones.
Unique in all history and an integral part of the War Department’s purpose to make army service become a means of personal development and betterment for every individual soldier was the extensive educational scheme for the Expeditionary Forces in France. The War Department and the Army Educational Commission of the Y. M. C. A. coöperated in the devising and carrying out of this plan, which enabled the officers and men of the American Army in France to continue their school, academic, technical or professional training while in camp. Worked out and put into operation in the summer of 1918, when the armistice was signed some 200,000 men, chiefly in the Service of Supply, had already begun studies of various kinds, but the scheme did not reach full development until some weeks later.
Interior of a Cantonment Library
As finally established in the winter of 1919, this educational plan ran the whole gamut of mental training, from learning to spell to post-graduate work in science, art and the professions. In the Army of Occupation there were compulsory schools for all illiterates, but otherwise the work was optional, and took the place of part of the hours of daily drill. Post schools were established for units of 500 or more men, and generally there were forty such schools for each division. Enrollment at the post schools ran as high as 2,000 and more. Correspondence courses were arranged for men with smaller isolated units. In each army division a high school gave both regular and vocational courses.
Located at Beaune, in the Cote d’Or region, where the huge base hospital had been built, in the great series of buildings no longer needed for trainloads of wounded men was the “Khaki University,” at which were given academic, agricultural, professional, commercial and technical courses of three months each. Of its many buildings four hundred were used for class room purposes and others were converted into laboratories, dormitories, libraries and recreation halls. Fourteen colleges comprised this Khaki University which, including the agricultural college associated with it but located elsewhere, became for the time of its existence the largest educational institution in the world. Its colleges gave instruction in language, literature, philosophy, science, fine and applied arts, journalism, education, engineering, music, business, medicine, and all other subjects usually provided for at educational institutions of every sort, whether technical, academic, commercial or professional. Especial attention was paid to agriculture. The engineering school offered a full variety of courses in civil, electrical, mining, mechanical and sanitary engineering. The college of arts, with an art training center near Paris, had 1,000 students and gave instruction in architecture, sculpture, painting, interior decoration, town planning, industrial art, landscape gardening, and furnished guidance for the study of art museums and structures of esthetic value. In the libraries of the Khaki University were 500,000 volumes. Its faculty numbered 500 members and 15,000 men, all of them privates and officers of the A. E. F., enrolled when the institution opened. The Y. M. C. A., whose Army Educational Commission had devised and organized the entire huge educational scheme, turned it all over to the War Department in the spring of 1919.
Many of the faculty members of important universities and colleges in the United States aided in the working out of this comprehensive educational plan and, under the direction of the Army Educational Commission of the Y. M. C. A. and army officers, coöperated with them in the immediate supervision of the schools. Nearly 50,000 officers and men whose record cards showed them to have been school teachers or university or college professors before they were soldiers were detailed from the army for the work of teaching this huge body of pupils in the post schools and at Beaune.
French and British universities and colleges threw open their doors for those who were prepared to undertake collegiate and post-graduate work. With the Sorbonne leading the list, thirty French institutions offered lectures and courses of study, while at Oxford, Cambridge, Dublin, Liverpool, Manchester, St. Andrews, and elsewhere in the British Isles a welcome awaited the American army man. Furloughs were granted to officers and enlisted men for this work and during the latter part of the winter and the spring of 1919 2,000 worked at British universities, filling to the last one the possibility for their accommodation, although four times as many had applied for the privilege. As many more attended the Sorbonne and other institutions in Paris, while the provincial universities and colleges of France had also their quota.