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 Washington, 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 coöperation 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 attitude 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 coöperativeness, 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 assumed 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 fortitude 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 fortitude, 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.