The Americans had morale at Chateau-Thierry.
SITUATION MAP—Showing principal battlefronts
The British at Mons, the French at Verdun, and the Americans at Chateau-Thierry, fought as they did because they knew, or thought they knew, the cause of the fight.
But in Russia, the soldier was never told why he fought. At first, this was not thought necessary. Then the High Command, remembering the importance of morale, and recognizing the need of some sort of explanation, if only for the purpose of regularity when men were asked to risk their lives, issued proclamations that puzzled and confused the soldier more than if a course of silence had been followed.
While all this time to the Americans came newspapers from home with accounts of speeches by politicians and demagogues who fired Bolshevik bullets from the rear and extolled the Soviet cause, hailing it as an heroic progression in human effort.
There is another axiom in the military books, that soldiers fight best on their native soil and in defense of their homes; but here was a company taken fresh from civil occupations, with a civilian mental outlook, set adrift in an alien country, six thousand miles from home, engaged in a desperate, sanguinary war, and asked to undergo privation and hardship, to face untold perils for unmentionable reasons.
Still, though the expedition was committed to no definite moral purpose, there was a morale in North Russia. A morale that arose from comradeship in a fated enterprise, a morale of seeing the bitter game through, taking risks and meeting perils that must be borne by others if even one shirked his share. A noble, selfless devotion, playing the man's part in a lottery with Death, where Life was the stake. The upholding of some elemental metaphysical creed that could be definitely felt but never understood, a code of challenged manhood that had come down through many generations of warring ancestors—this was the morale of North Russia; it brought forth the best and the purest in our manhood, and recorded deeds that no survivor can recall without quickening heart beats, and a profound belief from what he saw, that the spirit is supreme and triumphs over the body of man.
5. The Russian people did not rally to the Allied Cause.