A Jewish Chaplain in France

by Lee J. Levinger

THE MORAL GAIN AND LOSS OF THE SOLDIER

The military system, as I have tried to bring out in the last chapter, had a definite and profound influence on the life and thought of the individual soldier. It was so radically different from civilian life that this influence became all the more striking through contrast. The young man has certain moral standards and habits in civil life, some of which became intensified, while others altered in the army. The millions of young men who went through the military régime during the war have brought this influence back into civilian life with them, even though it is attenuated by environment and although they have largely returned to their former, pre-military habits. War and danger brought out certain characteristics and occasioned others. These new reactions of character were not, as the pacifists would have it, all bad; neither were they all good, as was generally proclaimed in patriotic fashion while the war was going on. Some influences were good and some were bad, while almost every man in the service would necessarily respond to both kinds. The military system itself caused or brought to light certain good and bad traits which appeared clearly enough in the average soldier after he had been in the army even a few months. It may be worth while to develop some of these at a little length, not scientifically nor psychologically, but simply and directly as they strike the soldier himself.

We saw at the front, as the experience of other armies had indicated, that the average man has in him the stuff of which heroes are made. Not merely the farmer or backwoodsman, but the men who followed prosaic city occupations, were ready to sacrifice themselves for their comrades and their country. The barber and the shipping clerk were as frequent winners of the D. S. C. as any others in our huge heterogeneous army. Heroism was evoked by the need, by the fact that it was the expected response, the response of thousands of others. The crowd mind produced heroism out of the most unexpected material. War created some of the heroism which we saw; it merely evoked some which was already latent, ready for the call. The stretcher-bearer, exposing himself to the severest fire to carry his precious burden to safety; the battalion runner, bearing his message through the barrage and then coming back again to bring the answer; the machine gunner, carrying his heavy weapon on his back to an advanced position where he could establish it effectively; the infantryman, advancing against machine-gun fire, or digging in under attack from heavy artillery or aëroplanes; the engineer, digging away debris or laying bridges in plain sight of the enemy, with his rifle laid near by to use in case of an attack—I might enumerate hundreds of such duties in which courage, loyalty, and endurance were exhibited by men who performed exceptional acts of bravery and devotion, volunteering for difficult service or carrying on in the face of overwhelming odds. All soldiers were afraid, but in the performance of their duty practically all soldiers learned to overcome fear and attend to their jobs in the face of every obstacle and every danger.

We felt that travel, with its attendant contact with other customs, language and people, would broaden our soldiers mentally and tend to break down the provincialism which has been often noticed in America, as well as in many other countries. Only a small minority of our men were equipped, either in knowledge or in attitude, to take advantage of the opportunities offered. Museums meant comparatively little to them, mediæval cathedrals not much more, Roman walls or ruins nothing at all. Scenery did not mean as much as some of us thought it should, forgetting that scenery looks entirely different to a man who rides past it and another who walks through it. Altogether, knowledge of France, England and Germany made, on the whole, not for a greater appreciation of foreign lands, but instead for a great appreciation of America.

The fact is that the boys grew homesick. Most of them were only boys in years, and practically all of them were reduced to the boyish level of thought by the general irresponsibility, thoughtlessness, and dependency of army life. They were like boys in a military school, very often, rather than men engaged in the grim business of modern war. To these boys absence from home brought a higher appreciation of home. This was often a true evaluation, in the face of previous neglect and underestimation; sometimes it may have been a sentimentalizing of a home that had never really meant very much. But in the danger, the monotony, and the distance, the soldiers grew to higher appreciation of their own homes and their home-land as well.

Their complaints were often ridiculous enough. They objected to the backwardness, the lack of sanitation, the absence of bathing facilities in the French villages. These were true enough, as far as they went, although I know personally that they can be matched in many details even in prosperous and enlightened America. They objected to the French climate, with the damp cold of its winters, not caring to remember that certain parts of our own Pacific coast suffer from a rainy season, too. This complaint becomes still more valueless when we remember how the boys grumbled about the heat of the Texas border, in fact, how soldiers not in action will always find a source of complaint in the weather, whatever kind of weather it may be. As General O'Ryan remarked in his famous definition of a soldier, "A soldier is a man who always wants to be somewhere else than where he is." This restlessness accounts for some of the complaints which we are apt to take a bit too seriously. A more real complaint was the language difficulty. Soldier French was a wonderful thing, consisting of the names of all ordinary things to eat and drink, together with a few common expressions, such as "toute de suite" (always pronounced "toot sweet"), and "combien." This prevented easy communication, even with such French people as were encountered. Few of the soldiers had any opportunity to use even their little French on respectable, middle-class French families, especially not on young men or girls. All these grievances, real and fancied, put the soldier out of ease in France and made him appreciate America so much the better. The sacrifices they were making for America, the service they were rendering her, united with the home-sickness of a stranger in a strange land to increase the devotion and respect of Americans for America.

I need not refer especially to the rather mixed gain in religious attitude, as I have already devoted a chapter to that subject. I must, however, repeat one point I mentioned there, the meanings of physical sacrifice as these men saw it and practised it in the army. It was the outcome of their courage, their dash, their enthusiasm, that when the time of stress came ordinary men offered their lives for their friends and their country. The soldier at the front equaled or exceeded the forgetfulness of self of the fireman or the life-saver in time of peace. This lesson of self-forgetfulness, of self-sacrifice, was one of the great impressions made by the war upon the best men it influenced, and one which touched in its way even the most thoughtless and careless of all the soldiers who had their hour at the front.

This brought out the group solidarity of the American army in stronger relief. The fine thing about morale at the front, as I have outlined it, was the mutual confidence which it called out in every breast. The pride in his own company, his regiment, his division, in the American army as a whole, which held a man to his duty under fire and impelled him to resist the almost overwhelming influence of a sudden attack of panic, made for loyalty at the rear as well and formed one basis for the whole-hearted return of the young men into civilian society after the war. Pride in one's division meant also pride in one's state; pride in the United States Army meant pride in the United States. Self-sacrifice, devotion, heroism,—all these were profound lessons for any man, young or old, a lesson which American democracy can profitably utilize in the daily humdrum of American life.

It was surprising how constantly our expectations were disappointed by the actual facts of the men in the service. Most books and articles since the war and all of those before the war were written on a theoretical basis, and every one approached the facts with a theoretical view. But the theory was proved wrong in so many instances that I am making the present study entirely empirical, leaving theory out altogether as more of a pitfall than an advantage. For one thing, I had expected war to exert a directly brutalizing influence on the soldier. This was never evident at all except in the actual stress of battle when killing was a daily necessity, and human life, although the most valuable asset of the contending forces, was still held cheaply enough to be used up at a terrific rate. Men could not stop there to pity every corpse; they had to save their own lives and at the same time to win the war. But the effect wore off quickly; probably it left no result at all except on men with a previous tendency to brutality or crime. I remember the thrill of horror which went through Le Mans and the entire A. E. F. in April 1919, when a railroad accident occurred near our post and a group of soldiers and sailors on furlough were injured, some of them fatally. We forgot all about the fact that these men had risked death in entering the service, that the few of them in this accident were the smallest fraction of a day's toll at the front if the war had continued. We melted in sympathy, and the French population of Le Mans did the same.

The men were not brutalized, contrary to expectation. Human life was held cheaply under exceptional circumstances and evidently the men felt that they were exceptional. But the men did become accustomed to the use of firearms, and those already brutalized were given the knowledge and the means for crimes of violence. The carelessness with which men used and flung about all kinds of deadly weapons shocked those of us with a sense of responsibility; it was part of their boyish heedlessness in the midst of the fierce game they were playing. They threw their discarded rifles in a heap by the first-aid post when they went back to hospital; they even played catch with hand-grenades, sometimes with most serious results. Once I met a pair of Australians out hunting rabbits with their high-powered rifles, in a place where hundreds of men were passing hourly by the much-traveled road. When I remonstrated with them, they only replied, "Oh, well, we haven't anything else to do. And we know how to shoot without hurting anybody."