A Jewish Chaplain in France

by Lee J. Levinger

I reached my division on the first of October, 1918, after a tedious ten days on the way. I traveled most of the way with Lieutenant Colonel True, whom I met on the train coming out of Chaumont. I found that the higher ranking officers invariably approached the chaplains not as officers of inferior rank but as leaders of a different kind, much as a prominent business man treats his minister in civil life. Colonel True was a regular army man of long standing who was being transferred from another division to the Twenty-Seventh. When we arrived at the Hotel Richmond, the Y. M. C. A. hotel for officers in Paris, we found only one room available with a double bed, and so for the first time in my life I had the honor of sleeping with a Lieutenant Colonel. The honor was a doubtful one as he had at the time a slight attack of "flu" brought on from exposure and a touch of gas in the recent St. Mihiel drive. Colonel True had received his promotion from a majority and his transfer before the drive, but had not reported until he had gone through the whole fight at the head of his battalion. I mention this not as a striking, but strictly as a typical proceeding on the part of the average American officer.

For a few days we were held at the Replacement Camp at Eu in Normandy—an idyllic spot within sight of the English Channel, surrounded by gentle hills. While there I made several trips to Tréport, a favorite summer resort on the Channel before the war. It is a quaint little fishing village with a typical modern summer resort superimposed. The old stone Norman cottages with their high roofs always had a touch of decoration somewhere, in mosaic, paint or stained glass, different from the plainer architecture of Central France. The modern part consists of several beautiful hotels and a number of cheap restaurants and curio shops. Of course, the hotels were all used by the British Army as hospitals at this time. I visited Base Hospital 16, a Philadelphia Unit, which was loaned to the British. I had a delightful talk with our Red Cross Chaplain and made a tour of many of the wards. The patients were almost all British with a few Americans from the August campaign in Flanders. Among the rest I met about a dozen Jewish boys, English and Australian, who were naturally delighted by the rare visit of a Jewish Chaplain. The eight Jewish Chaplains in the British Expeditionary Forces were attached to the various Army Headquarters, and so had to cover impossible areas in their work. The nearest one to Tréport was Rabbi Geffen at Boulogne with whom I afterward came into communication, and from whom I obtained a large number of the army prayer books arranged by the Chief Rabbi of England for use in the British Forces.

Hospital visiting is dreary work, especially when there is action going on from which one is separated. The work is exhausting physically, walking up and down the long wards and stopping by bedsides. It is especially a drain on the nerves and sympathies, to see so many sick and mutilated boys—boys in age most of them, certainly boys in spirit—and giving oneself as the need arises. And in a hospital so many men have requests. They are helpless and it is always impossible to have enough visitors and enough chaplains for them. I was glad to be useful at Tréport but gladder still when the word came through to release all troops in the Second Corps Replacement Depot.

We were loaded on a train, the soldiers in box-cars of the familiar type ("40 men or 8 horses") with the little group of officers crowded together in a single first-class coach. Broken windows, flat wheels and no lights showing—we were beginning to feel that we were in the war zone. From Eu to Peronne took from 4:30 A. M. to 9:30 P. M. with three changes of trains and ten additional stops. We got only a short view of the railroad station at Amiens, at that time almost completely destroyed. Our division was then in the British area on the Somme sector, and at the time of our arrival they had just come out of the great victory at the Hindenburg Line.

Our first ruined city was Peronne, which will never leave my memory. The feeling of a ruined town is absolutely indescribable, for how can one imagine a town with neither houses nor people, where the very streets have often been destroyed? This situation contradicts our very definition of a town, for a town is made of streets, houses and people; no imagination can quite grasp the reality of war and ruin without its actual experience. And Peronne was much more striking than most cities in the war zone; it had been fought through six different times, and its originally stately public buildings showed only enough to impress us with the ruin that had been wrought. Only one wall of one end of the church was standing, with two fine Gothic arches, only one side of the building on the square and so on through the whole town. We became inured to the sight of ruined villages later on, but the first shock of seeing Peronne will be indelible.

The headquarters of the division were then located at the Bois de Buire, about ten miles out, though for almost a half day we could find nobody to give us exact directions. At last Lieutenant Colonel H. S. Sternberger, the division quartermaster, put in an appearance and offered to take me and Lieutenant Colonel True up to headquarters in his car. The rest of our party had all wandered off by then in the direction of their various units. Colonel Sternberger was the highest ranking officer at the time among the thousand Jews in the Twenty-Seventh Division. Lieutenant Colonel Morris Liebman of the 106th Infantry, also a Jew, had been killed in action in Flanders six weeks before, a loss which was very deeply felt in his regiment. Colonel Sternberger was one of the popular staff officers of the division owing to his indefatigable labors for the welfare of the boys. His great efforts at the expense of much personal risk and of serious damage to his health were directed to get the food up to the front on time. While I was with the division, Colonel Sternberger proved both a staunch personal friend and an active ally in my work.

It took more than a day to become acquainted with the camouflaged offices in the woods. Small huts, with semicircular iron roofs covered with branches, were scattered about among the trees. Some of them had signs, Division Adjutant, Commanding General, and the rest; others were billets. I invariably lost my way when I went to lunch and wandered for some minutes before finding "home." "Home" was a hut exactly like the rest, where the French mission and the gas officer had their offices during the day and where six of us slept at night. I fell heir to the cot of one of the interpreters then home on leave, Georges Lévy, who afterward became one of my best friends. My baggage had disappeared on the trip, so that I had only my hand bag with the little it could hold. My first need, naturally, was for blankets to cover the cot. I collected these from various places, official and otherwise, until the end of the month found me plentifully provided. I must admit that the first cool nights in the woods forced me to sleep in my clothes. Naturally, my first task was to wire for my baggage, but it had completely vanished and did not return for four long months. Everybody lost his possessions at some time during the war; I was unique only in losing them at the outset and not seeing them until the whole need for them was over.

The boys had just come out of the line, worn out, with terrible losses, but after a great victory such as occurs only a few times in any war. They had broken the Hindenburg Line, that triple row of trenches and barbed wire, with its concrete pill-boxes, its enfilading fire from machine guns, its intricate and tremendous system of defenses. I crossed the line many times during the month that followed and never failed to marvel that human beings could ever have forced it. The famous tunnel of the St. Quentin Canal was in our sector, too, as well as part of the canal itself. The villages about us were destroyed so completely that no single roof or complete wall was standing for a shelter and the men had to live in the cellars.

One wall always bore the name of the former village in large letters, which became still larger and more striking in the territory near the Hindenburg Line, so long occupied by the Germans. I used to repay the generous Tommies for their rides on the constant stream of trucks (we called them "lorries," like the English) by translating the numerous German signs at railroad crossings and the like, about which they always had much curiosity.

One could travel anywhere on main roads by waiting until a truck came along and then hailing it. If the seat was occupied there was usually some room in the rear, and the British drivers were always glad to take one on and equally glad to air their views on the war. When one came to a cross road, he jumped off, hailed the M. P. (Military Police) for directions and took the next truck which was going in the proper direction. In that way I have often traveled on a dozen trucks in a day, with stop-overs and occasional walks of a few miles to fill in the gaps. Between a map, a compass and the M. P.'s, we always managed to circulate and eventually find our way home again.