Perhaps that is the root of the whole matter of morale. A good soldier at the rear was the man who sank his personality and became a unit in the squad. If too strongly defined an individual, he was a marked man; he became company clerk or kitchen police, according to his previous education. The good soldier was the one who acted automatically on receipt of orders, who saluted, said "Yes, sir," turned on his heel and seemed at once to be very busy. Even if he had been an executive or a lawyer in civil life, the constant drill made an automaton of the enlisted man; he sank back into the mind of the crowd, adopted the usual opinions in the usual words, and lost for the time being his personality. Drill made for automatic physical reactions to a certain set of commands and the temporary cessation of thought. In close-order drill Tom Smith submerged his personality and became "Number Three in the rear rank." He learned to swing about at the proper moment, following the man ahead of him, to respond instantly to the word of command without hesitating for its meaning, to stand and march and salute and obey. That was good for the rear, but at the front we needed Tom Smith again, and he might forget his place in the line, rush forward on his own initiative and become a hero. The finest acts were those of individuals acting without orders, the private forming a stretcher party of volunteers to go out for the wounded, the corporal reforming the platoon when all the sergeants were disabled and leading them forward. Then in the long period after the war Tom Smith had to be lost, for Number Three in the rear ranks was needed again.
The soldier lived in utter ignorance, not only of general events in the world and the army, but even of the things which would affect himself most closely. The enlisted man never knew a day in advance when he would be transferred to a different post or a different duty, when he would be promoted or degraded in rank, when he was to attack the enemy or retire for a rest. Even the things he saw became distorted. A doughboy remarked to me just before the battle of the Selle River, "We're held up by a little stream twenty feet wide, with Jerry on top of the railroad embankment on the other side. If we can just get across that river and up that embankment, we'll end the war right there." Of course, our success three days later did not end the war; it was only part of a tremendous program which the private soldier did not envisage at all. The attack on the Selle River was but one of a half-dozen actions carried on simultaneously in Flanders, on the Scheld, at Rheims, in the Argonne and on the Meuse. Our attack was made easier because of these others, and they in turn were successful because of ours. The three hundred miles of battle-line were all one, and only the broadest possible view could give any idea at all of the truth.
The officer, especially when on the staff, saw things in relation, but the soldier had to work in the dark. He never did understand the rules of the great game he was playing. Tactics were nothing to him. He knew only what it meant to march with a heavy pack all night, to rest in the damp cold of dawn when he was too weary to rest at all, to advance under fire and to dig in again and yet again. Much as he might later on revel in the raw heroism of it all, this arduous labor, blindfolded, left him a prey to doubt and rumor at the time. Rumors were one of the few foes of morale which persisted at both front and rear, because they were the product of ignorance and in both places ignorance persisted. No man can be quite steady in his duty when his mind is distracted by the countless rumors of army life. So far as we had information to dispense, we were building up morale, even when the facts were not reassuring. Rumors about going home, being the most desirable, were the greatest menace of all. Men would come back from the hospital with half-healed wounds because the rumor said we were going home at once, and they wanted to go along. Men would take unofficial leave to see Paris before they died, just because the latest rumor had it that we were not to leave for another month. Every such disappointment or lapse of duty made the next rumor more dangerous and wider spread.
The morale of the overseas forces described a slow downward curve from the high point at the armistice until the news that the particular unit was going home, when it took an immediate upward bound. During the downward trend of the curve, the men grew to hate the army. The definite elements which they naturally resented were emphasized and exaggerated, although that was hardly necessary. At the same time, they felt immense pride in their own achievements, and a thorough contempt for "joy-riders," as they termed the civilian travelers through France, the official investigators or representatives of civilian organizations, who witnessed the trenches as if on a sight-seeing party. This pride in their actual accomplishments, combined with resentment at the military subversion of ordinary civilian standards of life and manhood, was characteristic of the best minds in the ranks.
The military system is of necessity heteronomous, while democracy must be autonomous. The very virtues of self-reliance, independence, responsibility, which we most emphasize in civil life, were the ones most actively discouraged among enlisted men. At the same time, the moral influences put upon them were those of compulsion and restraint. The régime for officers was radically different; it demanded responsibility and removed much of the restraint. Hence the tendency of the army system was to produce officers with adequate mental processes and soldiers with automatic obedience to any kind of orders. The result, not difficult to foresee, was that the officers had far better minds but far poorer morals than the enlisted men. The officer was responsible for himself; the enlisted man had a number of superiors responsible for him. As a consequence the officer used his mind, the soldier stopped using his. On the other hand, the officer often abused his larger liberty, so that some of the officers of the A. E. F. were notorious for their loose living on the boulevards of Paris and other towns and brought shame upon their more decent comrades and the cause for which they fought.
The conspicuous difference was not the result of differences in the men themselves, for we had no castes in the American army. Officers and men came from the same stock and from every group. It was the direct consequence of the different type of discipline and control to which they were subjected. The best officers and the best men surmounted it; the worst yielded; the average were affected more or less.
Obviously, morale was a loose general term for many actual conditions. It meant one thing at the front, another thing at the rear. It included morals, although sometimes a high state of morale could exist together with many lapses from the moral code. It summed up the general state of mind of the troops at any time with regard to the special purpose for which the troops were just then intended. A study of morale gave insight into many related factors, including that of morality. The young man, as we saw him in the army, had a morality of his own, related closely to sport and business, but to neither law nor religion. It is a moral standard—we cannot possibly mistake that—the young man is not in his own mind immoral. But it is a standard which makes much of friendship, loyalty, fair play, something of honesty, nothing of the special code which we usually call "morality." It allowed much laxity in sexual relations; it laid no stress at all on obedience to military regulations; it had hardly such a word as "duty." Religion to the soldier meant habit, or sentiment, or fear, or longing; it did not mean a code of morals. The attempt to build up a moral standard on a basis of duty to one's country or to one's self was largely inadequate. Courage the soldier recognized, and sincerity and self-sacrifice; he did not know much of duty. This fact was both the cause and the result of military discipline, which made duty an external matter of obedience to a million trivial and arbitrary rules, rather than to a few definite and outstanding principles. The young man has a morality of his own in civil life; he had a slightly different, but related morality in the army. It was not the conventional morality of society, which rests upon the historical standards of the middle-aged. It was a type of morality which we must learn to recognize and understand for both his benefit and that of society as a whole.