A Jewish Chaplain in France

by Lee J. Levinger

MORALE AND MORALS

No thorough scientific study of the problem of morale has ever been made, in either military or civilian life. Every one is familiar with many of its manifestations, but very few have gone into their causes except incidentally to the practical needs of the moment. That was the case in the A. E. F., where both chaplains and line officers were deeply concerned in the morale of our troops, at first as fighting forces and after the armistice as citizens and representatives of America abroad. We tried this and that expedient, some good and some bad. Often we neglected the very act which was most essential. Often we did nothing whatever until it was too late. Unit commanders, chaplains, and even G. H. Q. were alike forced to employ empirical, trial-and-error methods instead of a fundamental, scientific approach. The only apology for this situation is that we went into the army with certain equipment which did not include a rounded view of mass psychology, and that this same ignorance is universal in civil life as well. A competent investigator would probably detect the same errors in similar social organizations of our young men in civil life which were so painfully obvious in the army. This brief chapter is by no means intended to take the place of such a scientific study; it may serve as material for one, and in addition may provide certain facts of importance in themselves.

Morale in the army represented two distinct problems, the front line and the rear. The former demanded high tension, the necessity of unified and instantaneous action. The latter demanded steadiness in daily duties, training, drill and study, the same qualities needed by the worker in civil life but under unusual circumstances. And between the two there was a gap, because the let-down from the one type of morale might result, not in the other type, but in no morale at all. The good soldier in camp might be a very poor soldier at the front, where different qualities were required; the man who would win his decoration at the front for reckless bravery was often the worst soldier in camp, judging by the number of punishments for the infraction of minor rules of discipline. There is the case, for example, of the former gunman who won his D. S. C. for the very qualities which had formerly sent him to prison. Even the best of soldiers, at both front and rear, had to withstand a serious mental shock when he passed from one of these situations to the other, and especially when he retired into a rest area after a hard spell in the trenches.

In the American army front-line morale was by far the easier type to maintain. In some other armies, I was told, the opposite was the case, but the average American boy makes a good fighting soldier with far less strain than it takes to turn him into a good barracks or training-camp soldier. His is the dash, the courage, the spirit of "Let's go!"; he is more likely to lack the sense of subordination, of instant obedience to orders, which constitutes the first essential of a good soldier in the rear. The object of morale at the front is action—instant, unified, aggressive, with every nerve and muscle strained to the utmost toward the one end. The means of this type of morale is confidence. The good soldier thinks that he belongs to the best company in the best division in any army in the world; that his officers are the ablest, his comrades the most loyal, his own soldierly qualities at least on a par with the best. Each division was firmly convinced that its own battles won the war, while the others merely helped. None of them would give the French and British credit for more than adequate assistance, ignoring completely their years of struggle before we even entered the conflict. But this sort of self-centered confidence was the characteristic of the good soldier, the man who would follow his captain in any attack, however desperate, who never looked whether his comrades were coming but went ahead in calm certainty that they would be even with him. One hint of wavering or doubt would break up this high steadiness of spirit, but as long as it held the men who possessed it would fight on in the face of seemingly insuperable difficulties.

I have mentioned the situation of the 27th Division from October 17th to 21st, 1918, how they entered the attack with depleted numbers, tired in body and mind, after insufficient rest and with no fresh replacements. Day after day their dearest wish was that their relief might come and they might enjoy the often promised rest. They had seen their comrades killed and wounded until a regiment had only the normal number of men to equip a company. Yet day after day the orders came for an advance, and every day those tired boys advanced. They did what we all considered impossible because they had the morale of good fighting men. They bore the ever-present danger of bursting shells and the sniper's bullet with boyish daring and constant success. They labored harder than any worker in civilian life, sleeping in the rain, marching, carrying their heavy rifles and packs made mercifully light for the occasion, digging in the clinging clay of the Somme valley. This, too, they did not gladly, often not willingly, but because it was part of the game, and they were good sportsmen and would see it through.

The peril to morale at the front was nerves. Although it may be hard to conceive, the dashing, aggressive soldiers might fall before this danger. Aggravated cases, true neuroses, we called "shell shock," slighter ones, "nerves," but the two were the same. The constant noise, exertion, hard work, loss of sleep, undernourishment, produced a peculiar mental state. Above all, the high nervous tension which was necessary for men to persist in these conditions had its dangers, too. By reason of it the wounded were able to bear more than their ordinary share of suffering, so that we saw constant examples of stoicism at the front. But when the excitement and tension wore off its effect was lost, and in base hospitals the soldiers were no better patients than young men in civilian life. When overburdened nerves gave way, the soldier was completely lost. A chaplain has told me of a long night spent with a patrol in front of the lines, not talking with the men but instead trying to hold the top sergeant to his post. The sergeant was a fine soldier, with a splendid record all through the Meuse-Argonne campaign, but that night, in the long vigil, his nerves had given way and the big, stolid soldier was trembling with fear. Only constant persuasion and the threat of force held him to his duty, and the next day he had to be assigned to work as supply sergeant in order to save the nightly patrol from panic that would certainly come if the non-com. in command failed them.

The soldier had a mixed feeling toward battle. The shock of conflict is exciting and exerts a sort of fascination. But the excitement was short while the danger was omnipresent and the work could never be escaped. The soldier regarded war as a sort of deadly game, where the contest called forth every energy and the stakes were life itself. But battle contains another factor—a compound of work and discomfort. War is nine parts sordid labor to one of glorious action. It was mixed with cooties, mud, sleeping in the rain, marching all night and lying down under artillery fire. It included digging, and the soldier found no more romance in digging in at the front than in digging a ditch at home, except that under fire he dug considerably faster. War involved carrying a pack, and that became speedily the pet hatred of the enlisted man. As the prisoner dreads the cell in which he is confined, so the infantryman feels toward his pack clinging with its eighty-odd pounds as he trudges along the weary roads. War is a glorious memory now, but it was neither glorious nor pleasant to live through.

When the troops retired for rest and training, the problem of morale became reversed at once. Now it became a matter of discipline and drill. Instead of danger and discomfort, our trials were work and monotony. A high type of morale in the rear meant that the men were not absent without leave, that they worked hard at their drill and became automatic in its motions, that they obeyed every rule of discipline, large and small. Saluting, for example, was very important at the rear; we never once thought of it at the front. This régime was not always easy, though at first we could hold out the object of winning the war, as in the pamphlet on sex education, "Fit to Fight." After the war was over that object no longer remained. But the hard work remained, the kitchen police, the cleaning up of quarters, the carrying of the pack, the incessant drill. "Squads east and west," when the fighting was at an end and there was no direct use for maneuvers, seemed to the soldiers simply made work. In fact, much of the work imposed on them during this period was actually devised with the special object of keeping them busy and therefore out of mischief.

The peril of this situation was obvious. It was that the tedium might grow too great and the men yield to the temptations of drink, gambling and vice. These would result in disorder, insubordination, time lost from duty, venereal disease,—any number of possible evils. They would demoralize a unit at the rear as readily as nerves would demoralize it at the front. Sexual vice and sexual disease, while statistically not so great in the army as among the same age groups in civil life, was still serious. The different social system of France put temptation directly in the way; prostitution was open and licensed, and the women of the streets quick to accost the wealthy foreigners, whose dollar a day was so much greater than the pay of the French soldier. At the same time, the French girls of good family did not meet strange soldiers, dance with them, talk to them, as was done in the States. Their whole conception of good breeding and of marriage combined to forbid any contact except in the rare case of a proper introduction into the French home. Courteous in showing the stranger his way or telling him the time of day, the average Frenchman was in no hurry to introduce foreign soldiers into his family circle unless he had certificates or personal introductions to the particular soldiers. At home the soldier had been lionized from the time of his enlistment until his leaving for overseas. He had been entertained, fed, provided with dances, shows and automobile rides. The daughters of rich and cultivated families tended canteen or danced with the soldiers. But in France the daughter of a good family went out only with a man she knew, and then strictly chaperoned. Even when she knew a man personally, a respectable girl would hardly think of walking down the street with him.

This seclusion of respectable French girls and the conspicuousness of the loose element made many soldiers hold a light opinion of the virtue of French women generally. I remember an argument with one of the boys who had just stated that all French girls were careless in their morals. When pinned down to particulars, he admitted that he had met exactly three French girls beside those who had accosted him on the street. Two had been sisters, at whose home a friend of his had been billeted, and when he and his friend had wanted to take them to an army vaudeville their mother had gone along. The third was the daughter of my landlady at Montfort, a fine rounded peasant type. On this scanty basis he had formed his typical opinions.