The average soldier did not meet the better class of French people, only the peasants and the prostitutes of the towns. He had little taste for the wonderful architectural and historical treasures of the country; he could not speak the language beyond his elementary needs; and—one of his great objections—the French undeniably have poor plumbing and bathing facilities.
On the other hand, the French country people did not like our soldiers over much. The soldier of any nation was rather noisy, rather rough, and had no idea whatever of property values. He took anything he needed, simply "finding" it, the worst possible trait to thrifty French country people. Then, talking only a few words of French, the American naturally left out phrases like "monsieur" or "s'il vous plait," and he was considered to be ignorant of ordinary politeness, a wild Indian, the brother of the savage still supposed to be thronging our plains. A small minority of our men did penetrate into French life and grew to love it; a minority of the French made the acquaintance of Americans and came to respect them. Unfortunately, the two peoples were introduced to each other under most unfavorable circumstances.
These conditions, together with the constant flood of rumors, had the worst possible influence on the spirit of the men, which went down steadily from its magnificent power at the front, until the news of our actual orders to move toward Brest brought it suddenly up again. As the first division in the American Embarkation Center on the way home, we had to suffer for the later units, all of which had a program of athletics, entertainments and schools ready for them when they arrived. Working to build up the spirit of the men under the most discouraging circumstances, we received a powerful object lesson of the influences most destructive to morale.
The value of my work was at least doubled by the Ford touring car lent me by the Jewish Welfare Board. I received it on New Year's Day, 1919, in Paris and drove back to Le Mans, almost transfigured by the fact. My driver, assigned for the trip only, was splendid; I could stop for a brief view of the château and park at Versailles and the cathedral of Chartres; I knew that from that time on I could go from unit to unit so long as the machine stuck together and the army store of gasoline held out. With this car I was able to visit the artillery in the Laval area, about fifty miles from our headquarters, and conduct one service in each of their regiments. The artillery had not been on the British front at all, but on the American, so they had quite different adventures from ours. They had supported several other American infantry units in the St. Mihiel sector and north of Verdun, and had received mercifully few casualties compared with our infantrymen and engineers. The trip to them by car was unusually delightful, over smooth roads which the great army trucks had not yet ruined, through country where American soldiers were a rarity and the children would crowd the doorways to cheer us as we went by; over the gentle wooded hills of western France, with the trees hung with mistletoe; through the tiny gray villages, with their quaint Romanesque churches, many of them older than the great Gothic cathedrals of the north.
While in Paris on New Year, I enjoyed the rare treat of a family dinner at the home of my friend Georges Lévy, an interpreter with our division. Through him and Lieutenant Bernstein I reached some sort of an impression of the state of French Jewry to-day. To tell the truth, neither I nor the average Jewish soldier received a very flattering impression. The shadow of the Dreyfus case seemed still to hang over the Jews of France. They feared to speak a word of Yiddish, which was often their only mode of communication with the American Jewish soldiers. One shopkeeper, asked whether he was a Jew, took the visitor far in the rear out of hearing of any possible customers before replying in the affirmative.
For one thing, except in Paris and the cities of eastern France, Jews exist only in very small groups. I have mentioned the four families of Nevers and the little synagogue of Tours, with its seventy-five seats. Le Mans possesses an old street named "Rue de la Juiverie," so that at one time there must have been enough Jews to need a Ghetto, but in 1919 Le Mans had only four resident Jewish families and one or two more of refugees from the occupied territory.
Another menace to the loyalty of Jews is the general difficulty of all religious liberalism in France. Religion to most people in France means orthodoxy, Jewish and Catholic; this naturally suits only those of conservative background or temperament. Almost the only other movement is irreligious in literature, art, government and philosophy. Those large groups of liberals who in America would be adherents of liberal movements, Jewish or Christian, in France are usually entirely alienated from religion. The liberals are intelligent but weak in numbers. As a converse of this, the synagogue is largely content with past glories, making little effort to adjust itself either in thought or organization to the conditions of the time. The American Jews were always interested to hear about the Jews of France, of the greatness of Rashi in former days, and eager to inquire about the present status. They never could quite understand the condition of a country where the government had been divided for years by a pro and anti-Jewish issue, as was the situation at the time of the Dreyfus case. American democracy, even in the young and unskilled mind of the average soldier, had no concept for anti-Semitism.
When we knew finally that the division was on its way home, I preferred a request through General O'Ryan that I should go home with it. But G. H. Q. Chaplains' Office could not grant my wish; there were too few chaplains of all religions overseas; and we Jews in particular needed every worker there. I was detached and assigned to the Le Mans area, under the senior chaplain of the American Embarkation Center. Naturally, I regretted deeply seeing my old comrades go without me. I reported at Le Mans, obtained fourteen days leave to the Riviera, which had been due me for over two months, and said good-by. The Twenty-Seventh was the first division to reach the Embarkation Center, the first to leave for home as a unit, and it finally paraded, without its Jewish chaplain, up Fifth Avenue to a tremendous ovation. I studied the pictures several weeks later in the New York papers, and actually thought I saw the vacant place in the column where I should have been.