It ought to be evident from our experience that for any great enterprise we need all the young men and the young women, and all the older ones who are still young in heart. We need to know who they are, where they are, what they can do, and we need to touch them at every point; for not only do we need them all, but we need all of each one of them. We should never again face a great national crisis with nearly one-third of our men of military age unfit for hard physical work. We need campaigns of physical education and social hygiene, and we need to apply the lessons in human salvage which the army has learned during the war. But we need more than each individual and all of him. We must see to it that the individual star, of whatever magnitude, is subordinated to the team play of the group. And team play means more than energy and "pep." It means a marshalling of the old fashioned and homely virtues of courtesy, deference and consideration.
In the third place, we have learned that to accomplish a great result we need the leadership of those who know and who know vividly and constructively. Our experience has been that in certain fields, finance, science, manufacturing in quantity production, medicine, we had a supply of those who knew. In other fields, in intimate knowledge of foreign conditions and foreign languages for example, we had not.
At first we didn't know where our leaders were, and in many cases we began by following false prophets. The value of one man with training, brains and persistence can be shown by a single example: There was a man who answered these qualifications connected with the Council of National Defence, not in a very exalted position. He was the first in all this country to see that the army program and the shipping program did not fit. It took him a long time to convince the two groups of overworked, harried officials that neither could play the game alone; that the closest coöperation was necessary. He had no access to the records, but he finally managed to build up a convincing statement out of the shreds of information which he gathered here and there, and at last he succeeded in getting everyone concerned into the attitude of wanting to face the facts. Everyone would have had to face them sooner or later, but without the devotion and leadership of this one man, it would have been only as the result of a very serious dislocation of function.
One field in which the right leadership has been most brilliantly rewarded is that of medicine. Just consider what we have done in this field: The success of the anti-typhoid injections; the reduction in dysenteric diseases due to chlorination of drinking water; the encouraging fight against cerebro-spinal meningitis and pneumonia; the identification of trench fever, and the practical freedom from typhus. As to wounds, a tetanus antitoxin which has made lock-jaw almost a negligible disease; a serum against gas gangrene; the Carrel-Dakin method of chemical sterilization of wounds; the splinting of fractures on the battle field and overhead extension apparatus in the hospital. To quote Simon Flexner, "The entire psychology of the wounded men was altered, the wards made cheerful and happy, pain abolished, infection controlled, and recovery hastened by means of the new or improved surgical and mechanical measures put into common use."
The fourth lesson of which I wish to speak is that a high aim and ideal is what counts most of all, what lifts the individual up from selfishness and sloth. To bind the country together and to make the transformation which still seems miraculous, we had a noble national aim, a complete dedication to the task before us, an utter absence of any selfish or self-seeking factor in the whole enterprise. The conduct of our soldiers, their submission to a discipline to which most of them were completely unused was, I think, in a very large measure due to the recognition of this aim. We recognized it as a nation and we recognized it in one another. The standard of contact set by our soldiers during the days of conflict is unique in military history. Whole divisions went for months without a single court-martial. The reason was, more than anything else, the national assumption that they would give a good account of themselves and the fact that they felt themselves in training for the championship, and no man wanted to miss his chance on the battlefield for the sake of a selfish indulgence.
Some of the experiments in conduct tried in the American Expeditionary Forces were extraordinary in their success. The leave areas, an immense enterprise, were run on the basis of absolute freedom to the enlisted man. He lived in the best hotels in Europe and amused himself in casinos where crowned heads had been in the habit of gambling away the money of their subjects. He had no roll calls, no taps, no officers in sight, no military machinery whatever. He arose when he pleased, either before or after his breakfast; he ate and drank when he pleased, and he stayed out as late as he pleased. The physical and moral effect of this absolute change from the military régime was a very interesting and instructive phenomenon, but that is not the point I wish to make. Out of the thousands and thousands of men who were sent to these leave areas, there was hardly a single case in which a man abused the trust which was put upon him or failed to turn up on time to go back to the grind of military duty. This could never have been done with soldiers of another type, with soldiers lacking an ideal.
Someone has recently written that fine minds have been finely touched by the war, and base minds basely. He might have added that wise minds have been wisely touched, and foolish minds foolishly. In general, I think it may fairly be said that when the appeal was to the finest in a man's character, the result was correspondingly fine.