A JEWISH CHAPLAIN IN FRANCE

[i]

[ii]

[iv]

A group of Jewish welfare workers at Le Mans, France, in March 1919. From left to right, George
Rooby, Julius Halperin, Frank M. Dart, Chaplain Lee J. Levinger, Adele Winston, Charles S. Rivitz, David
Rosenthal and Esther Levy.

[v]

A Jewish Chaplain in France

[ix]

FOREWORD

The tendency to “forget the war” is not admirable.
Such an attitude is in effect a negation of
thought. The agony which shook mankind for more
than four years and whose aftermath will be with
us in years to come cannot be forgotten unless the
conscience of mankind is dead. Rabbi Levinger’s
book is the narrative of a man who saw this great
tragedy, took a part in it and has thought about it.

In all the wars of the United States Jews participated,
increasingly as their numbers grew appreciably.
They served both as officers and privates
from Colonial days. But not until the World War
was a Rabbi appointed a Chaplain in the United
States Army or Navy for actual service with the
fighting forces. President Lincoln appointed several
Jewish ministers of religion as chaplains to
visit the wounded in the hospitals, but the tradition
of the Army up to the period of the Great War,
rendered the appointment of a Rabbi as chaplain
impossible. The chaplain had been a regimental
officer and was always either a Protestant or a
Catholic. The sect was determined by the majority
of the regiment. When the United States entered
the Great War, this was clearly brought out and it
required an Act of Congress to render possible the
appointment of chaplains of the faiths not then represented[x]
in the body of chaplains. Twenty chaplains
were thus authorized of whom six were allotted
to the Synagogue the remainder being distributed
among the Unitarians, who were not included in the
Evangelical Churches, and the other smaller Christian
sects which had grown up in America.

In order to meet the requirements of the War
Department and in consonance with the spirit of
unity which the war engendered, it was necessary
for the Jewish organizations to create a body which
could sift the applications for chaplaincies and
certify them to the War Department, as being
proper persons and meeting the requirements of the
law of being regularly ordained ministers of religion.

Judaism in America is far from being a united
body. Its differences may not be such as rise to
the dignity of separate sects but they are considerable
in belief and even more pronounced in practice.
Membership in the various Rabbinical and synagogue
organizations is voluntary and each synagogue
is autonomous. In the face of the awfulness
of the war, these differences seemed minimized and
through the coöperation of all the Rabbinical associations
and synagogue organizations, a Committee
was created under the general authority of the
Jewish Welfare Board which examined the credentials
of all Jewish candidates for chaplaincies and
made recommendations to the War Department.
So conscientiously did this Committee perform its
duties that every Rabbi recommended as a chaplain
was commissioned.

As the law exempted ministers of religion and[xi]
theological students, no person could be drafted for
a chaplaincy. Every clergyman who served was a
volunteer. It is therefore greatly to the credit of
the Jewish ministry in America that one-hundred
and forty men volunteered for the service. As
there are probably less than four hundred English
speaking Rabbis in the United States, many of whom
would have been disqualified by the age limit and
some by their country of origin, the response of the
American Rabbinate to this call, is a most gratifying
evidence of their patriotism and of their sense of
public service.

Rabbi Levinger’s narrative is his own, in the main
and properly enough a personal one, but it is representative
of the work of some thirty men some of
whom ministered to the troops who did not go
abroad whilst others had the opportunity of being
in the midst of the Great Adventure. Every one
who saw the troops overseas, could not doubt the
real service of the chaplain or the appeal that religion
made to the men in uniform. However the
armchair philosophers may have viewed the war, it
strengthened the faith of the men who were engaged;
hundreds of thousands of young men turned
to the chaplain who would have been indifferent to
him at home. That this was true of Jewish young
men is certain and if there has been a reaction on
the part of these young men who returned from the
war, let it be blamed not so much upon religion, as
upon the disappointment in the soldiers’ minds at
the attitude of the millions of their fellow citizens
who remained at home and who want to “forget the
war.” The soldier who came back and found that[xii]
his fellow citizens had their nerves so over-wrought
by reading of the war in newspapers that they
immediately entered upon a period of wild extravagances
and wilder pleasure, might very well have
had his faith, newly acquired if you choose, shaken
by this evident lack of seriousness on the part of
his fellow countrymen.

I shall not commend Rabbi Levinger’s book to his
readers, because if the book does not commend itself,
no approbation will. As an officer of the Jewish
Welfare Board whose purpose was to join with
other organizations in contributing to the welfare of
the American soldiers and sailors and particularly
to provide for the religious needs of those of the
Jewish faith, I want to express the obligations of
the Board to the Rabbis who without experience or
previous training for the purpose, entered upon this
service and carried it through with distinction.
Had it not been for them, the overseas work of the
Board would have been comparatively limited and
many a Jewish boy would have been deprived of the
comforts and solace of his religion.

I cannot help but think that the chaplain himself
derived much benefit from his service. In sections
of the synagogue, as I believe in sections of the
church, men are on many occasions a minority in
the congregation and ministration is largely to
women and children. It meant something for the
chaplain to have great congregations of men, and of
young men at that, and I am inclined to think hardened
his mental and even spiritual fiber. It emphasized
too the importance of emotion and sentiment
as against mere rationalism. The worship meant[xiii]
more than a preachment, and sympathetic human
contact for a minute was worth a barrel of oratory.

The fine spirit of liberality which grew up among
the chaplains of the various faiths, reflecting as it
did the comradeship of the men themselves, should
not and will not be lost. The brotherhood of man
will be a mere abstraction until individual men can
act as brothers to one another. The ministers of
religion, if they have any God-given mission above
all others, surely have that of leading men, however
different their physical and spiritual equipment, into
the bonds of a common brotherhood. By this
way and this way alone will mankind arrive at
lasting peace.

Cyrus Adler.

October 19, 1921.
[xiv]

[xv]

PREFACE

This book is the result of the profound conviction
that we are forgetting or ignoring the lessons of
the World War to Israel, America and humanity.
During the war such words as morale, democracy,
Americanism, became a sort of cant—so much so
that their actual content was forgotten. Now that
the war is over and their constant repetition is
discontinued, the grave danger exists that we may
lose their very real influence.

These personal experiences and conclusions
worked out by an army chaplain as a result of his
overseas service may have some historical value
also, especially as the same ground has not yet been
covered by any Jewish chaplain or welfare worker
in the American Expeditionary Forces. The rôle
played by Jews in the army and navy of the United
States and the Jewish contribution to the morale of
the forces overseas deserve preservation, both as
a reminder to ourselves and to the nation.

When the possibility of this book was first discussed
in Paris with the late Colonel Harry Cutler,
Chairman of the Jewish Welfare Board, he spoke
of writing a foreword for it. Since his lamented
death, Dr. Cyrus Adler, his successor as acting
Chairman, has consented to fulfill the same friendly
task. In addition to Dr. Adler, I acknowledge my
great indebtedness to Mr. Harry L. Glucksman, Executive
Director of the Jewish Welfare Board, for[xvi]
giving me full access to their records; to Mr. John
Goldhaar for his personal reminiscences of the welfare
work overseas; to Captain Elkan C. Voorsanger
for the invaluable suggestions based upon his vast
personal experiences; to Justice Irving Lehman,
President of the Young Men’s Hebrew Association,
for his encouragement and friendly advice; to a
host of coworkers and friends in both France and
America for the brilliant deeds and cordial comradeship
which are here embodied; and finally to
my secretary, Miss Hattie Tanzer, for her invaluable
assistance in seeing the book through the press.

Much of the material used here has already been
published in the form of articles appearing at various
times in the American Hebrew, American Israelite,
Biblical World, B’nai B’rith News, Hebrew Standard,
Jewish Forum and Reform Advocate.

Lee J. Levinger.

New York, May, 1921.
[xvii]

[xviii]

CONTENTS

[xix]

[1]

CHAPTER I

THE CHAPLAIN’S FUNCTION

In giving the story and the opinions of a Jewish
chaplain in the American Expeditionary Forces,
some statement is necessary of the work of the
chaplains as a whole. Chaplains are an essential
part of the organization of a modern army and it is
notable that General Pershing repeatedly requested
that the number of chaplains be doubled in the
forces under his command. Hardly a narrative of
soldiers’ experiences exists without due place being
given to the chaplain. In every army in France,
chaplains were frequently cited for heroism and in
innumerable instances suffered and died with the
men in the ranks.

There are two popular impressions of the purpose
of the chaplain in the military service; the one
sees him as a survival of mediævalism, blessing the
weapons of the men at arms; the other welcomes
him as a faint harbinger of a dawning humanitarianism,
one of the few men in an army who does not
have to kill, but is there to save. Some people
think of the physician and chaplain as having non-military
work to do, as being a kind of concession
to the pacific spirit of our generation.

The actual work of the chaplain is quite as unknown
to the general public. People wonder what
he does between weekly sermons, much as they wonder[2]
what the minister or rabbi does during the six
and a half days a week that he is not preaching. In
fact, I have been greeted with frank or hidden incredulity
whenever I admitted that in the army I
used to preach up to fifteen times a week, but never
had time to write a sermon. People wonder sometimes
whether the soldiers and sailors can bear so
much preaching, sometimes what else they demand
of the chaplain. In fact, to the non-military mind
the whole subject seems shrouded in mystery.

To the military man the subject is extremely
simple. There is no mystery about it. The chaplain
is in the army as the physician is, as the thousands
of other non-combatants are, for a strictly
military purpose. It happens that the non-combatants
may use non-military methods. One may
drive a locomotive, another carry a stretcher, another
sit in an office and make out papers. All are
essential to the military machine; none is in the service
for any special humanitarian purpose; none is
present as a survival of mediævalism, but all to take
part in the grim conflict of the twentieth century.
The work of a physician in the military service is
the very utilitarian one of saving men’s lives and
returning them to the front. The work of a chaplain
is the equally essential and practical one of
stimulating the morale of the troops.

Many factors bear upon the morale of a body of
men,—their physical environment, the strength and
spirit of their individual units, the temper and ability
of their leaders. In our army we were very
fortunate in the activity of various civilian organizations
which labored among the men in the service
with the backing of our entire citizenry, or at[3]
least of large and influential groups. The home
service of the Red Cross and other non-military
organizations was of great importance in keeping up
the morale of the families left behind and through
them of the men overseas. These important organizations,
however, were under the handicap of doing
civilian work among soldiers—a handicap whose seriousness
only a soldier himself can ever realize.
Some months after the war was over, the army
recognized its obligation by appointing morale
officers for both larger and smaller units, with others
under them to supervise athletics, entertainment,
and the like. The civilian organizations then conducted
their activities under the orders of the
morale officer.

But nearest of all to the men, because themselves
a part of the actual military machine, were their own
chaplains. The chaplain was under the same orders
as the men, took the same risk, wore the same uniform,
and naturally was regarded in every way as
one of their own. I have even heard old army men
scorning the new advances of all these new war-time
societies. “We have our own chaplain,” they said,
“He looks after us all right.”

The chaplain was first the religious guide of his
men. He knew how to talk to them, for talking, not
preaching, was the usual tone of the army or navy
chaplain. He knew how to speak their own “lingo,”
slang and all. He knew the spiritual appeal which
was most needed by these boys, transplanted, with all
their boyishness, into the deep realities which few
men have had to face. He knew their boyish shyness
of emotion, but with it their deep, immediate
need of such emotions as the love of home and God,[4]
to sustain them amid dangerous hours of duty and
tempting hours of idleness. This religious need
alone would have been enough work for the chaplain,
even with the intended increase in numbers to
three per regiment, or one chaplain for every twelve
hundred men. The need for religion was evident
in the training camp, the hospital, the transport, the
trenches; it was evident everywhere, and the chaplain
must be everywhere to satisfy it.

But in addition the chaplain had much welfare
work of a more general kind to transact in connection
with the various welfare agencies. One man
wanted advice about getting married before leaving
for the front; another had trouble at home and
desired a furlough; another found himself misplaced
in his work and would like a transfer. A
Jewish boy came in to ask that a letter be written
to his pious father; the old man had not wanted
him to enlist, but would feel better if he knew there
was a rabbi in the camp. Another had a request
for a small service (a minyan) that he might say
the memorial prayer on the anniversary of his
father’s death. And still another presented a letter
from his home community, for he was a fine musician
and wanted to help out at a concert or a “sing.”

The many requests for service and the occasional
offers of service made the circuit constantly from
a possible teacher to a number of boys with defective
English, from a potential comedy team to a
crowd of eager listeners, from a timid boy with personal
troubles to their remedy, either by a change
in circumstances or by convincing the boy himself.
Sometimes a complaint of religious prejudice had
to be adjusted which might work grave harm in a[5]
company unless it were investigated and either
proved groundless or remedied.

In a later chapter I shall have an opportunity to
go into this more deeply. All that I want to bring out
here is the important and usually misunderstood
fact that American boys are restive under authority.
They object vigorously to the domination of another’s
mind over theirs. And this objection too
often took the form of bitter resentment against
their officers. Therefore the final and most delicate
work of the chaplain was to befriend the enlisted
men against the oppression of their natural enemies
and tyrants, the line officers. The army often reminds
one of a school, the men are so boyish. In
this régime of stringent rules which must be constantly
obeyed, of short periods of intense and jovial
recreation, of constant oversight by authority, the
average enlisted man regarded his commanding
officer much as the average small boy regards his
school teacher, from whom he flees to a parent for
sympathy.

That rôle of sympathetic parent was precisely
the one which the chaplain was called upon to play
for these boys in uniform. Not that he believed
everything he was told, or took sides unfairly, or
was always against authority. Simply that any
boy could talk to him, as he could only to the exceptional
commanding officer, and that every boy was
sure that the chaplain would help him if he could.
Being himself an officer, the chaplain could talk to
officers more freely than any soldier could. And
not being a line officer, he did not himself issue commands
to any one except his own hard-worked orderly
or clerk.[6]

Thus the chaplain was fortunately placed. If he
was even partially congenial, he was the one man in
the army who had not an enemy high or low. The
soldier looked to him for friendly aid. The officer
referred to him as the great coöperating factor in
building up the spirit of the troops.

During the stress of actual warfare the work of
the chaplain changed in character though not in
purpose. At the front the chaplain was with his
boys. During a “push” he took his station at the
first-aid post and worked from there as the first
place to meet the wounded and dying who needed
his physical or spiritual aid. He stood beside the
surgeon on the battle field, he was with the stretcher-bearers
searching for wounded and bringing them
to safety. He rode from post to post with the
ambulance driver, or tramped up to the trenches
with a ration party. And wherever he went he
was welcomed for his presence and for the work
that he tried to do.

After a battle, when the men retired to rest and
recuperate, the chaplain had to remain behind. He
stayed with a group of men for the last terrible
task of burying the dead. And when, that sad duty
over, he returned to the troops in rest, he could not
yield for a time like the others, to delicious languor
after the ordeal of the battle field, hospital and cemetery.
Then the chaplain must take up his round
of duties, knowing that after the battle there is many
a prayer to be said, many a hospital to be visited,
many a soldier to be befriended. His task has just
begun.

The military object of the chaplain is clear, to
stimulate the morale of the men. But his methods[7]
were most unmilitary. Instead of reminding the
men of the respect due him as an officer, the wise
chaplain took his salutes as a matter of course and
tried to draw the men personally, to make them
forget all about military distinctions when they
came to talk to him. The minute a chaplain insisted
upon his rank as an officer, he lost his influence as
a minister. Rank was useful to the chaplain in so
far as it gave him free access to the highest authorities;
it became the greatest obstacle to his work
whenever the boys began to talk to him as “Lieutenant”
or “Captain” instead of “Father” or “Chaplain.”
In the military as in the civil field the religious
message can come only by personality, never by
command.

The chaplain appealed for the men whenever he
felt that the appeal was justified and had some
chance of success, but never when it would be
subversive of military discipline. He remembered
always that he was in the army, a part of a great
military machine, and that his presence and his
work were to make the men better, not worse
soldiers. He met the men personally, with their
various needs and appeals, and often his best work
was accomplished in short personal interviews,
which would not look at all imposing on a monthly
report, but which made better soldiers or happier
men in one way or another. He encouraged every
effort at recreation for the men, and often took
part in these efforts himself. This last applies especially
in the navy, where the chaplain aboard ship
is the whole staff for religious, recreational, and
welfare work.

In the main the work of the chaplain differed[8]
little, whatever his religion might be. He was first
of all a chaplain in the United States Army, and second
a representative of his own religious body.
That means that all welfare work or personal service
was rendered equally to men of any faith. The
only distinction authorized was between Protestant,
Catholic and Jewish services, and even to these a
“non-sectarian” service was often added. Wherever
I went I was called upon by Jew and non-Jew
alike, for in the service most men took their troubles
to the nearest chaplain irrespective of his religion.
The soldier discriminated only in a special case, such
as the memorial prayer (kaddish) for the Jewish
boy, or confession for the Catholic. The office at
once insured any soldier that he had a protector and
a friend.

But as there were only twelve Jewish chaplains in
the entire American Expeditionary Forces, we were
instructed to devote our time so far as possible to
the Jewish men. At the best it was impossible for
one man to fulfill the constant religious and personal
needs of the thousand Jewish soldiers scattered
in all the units of an entire division, as I, for
one, was supposed to do. When instead of one division
a Jewish chaplain was assigned several, his
troubles were multiplied and his effectiveness divided.
Naturally, most of the work of the Jewish
chaplains had to be devoted to the needs of the Jewish
soldiers, which would not otherwise be satisfied.

Any one who witnessed the labor and the self-sacrifice
of chaplains of all creeds in the American army
must preface an analysis of their work with a heartfelt
tribute to the men themselves. I think that
these men were a unique aggregation—devoted to
their country and its army, yet loving men of all nations;[9]
loving each his own religion, yet rendering
service to men of all creeds; bearing each his own
title, yet sharing equal service and equal friendship
with ministers of every other faith. I could never
have accomplished one-half of the work I did without
the constant friendship and hearty support of
such co-workers as Father Francis A. Kelley and
Rev. Almon A. Jaynes, of the 27th Division Headquarters,
to mention only two notable examples
among many others. I have seen Father Kelley on
the battlefield going from aid post to front line
trench, always most eager to be with the boys when
the danger was the greatest, always cheerful, yet always
a priest, doing the noble work which won him
his medals and his popularity. I have seen the devotion
and the regret which followed Chaplain John A.
Ward of the 108th Infantry to the hospital in England
after he was wounded in performance of duty,
and the burst of enthusiasm which welcomed his return
months afterward. I have seen one after another
laboring and serving in the same spirit,
and I tender to them the tribute of a co-worker who
knows and admires their great accomplishments.

The place of morale in the army has not yet been
studied scientifically. All that can be done as yet is
to gather such personal and empirical observations
as mine, which may have bearing on the general
problem. These experiences were typical and these
conclusions are not mine alone. They are shared
by great masses, in many cases by the majority of
thinking men who had like experiences. I am here
setting down the most typical of the incidents which
I saw or underwent and summing up the little known
work of the Jewish chaplains and the Jewish Welfare
Board overseas.

[10]

CHAPTER II

THE JEWISH HOLYDAYS OF 1918 IN THE A. E. F.

My experiences as chaplain were as nearly typical
as possible with any individual. A few
of the Jewish chaplains saw more actual
fighting than I did; a few were assigned to the Army
of Occupation and saw the occupied portion of Germany.
But for nine months I served as chaplain in
the American Expeditionary Forces, first at the
headquarters of the Intermediate Section, Service of
Supply, at Nevers; then with the Twenty-Seventh
Division at the front and after the armistice at the
rear; finally at the American Embarkation Center
at Le Mans. I worked in coöperation with the Jewish
Welfare Board; I saw Paris in war time and
after; I had two weeks’ leave in the Riviera.

My commission as First Lieutenant Chaplain U. S. A.
came to me on July 4th, 1918 at Great Lakes
Naval Station, just north of Chicago, where I was
then serving as Field Representative of the Jewish
Welfare Board. Two weeks later I reported at
Hoboken for the trip overseas. There I had the
good fortune to obtain a furlough of ten days
before sailing so that I was able to be back in Chicago
just in time to see my newborn son and daughter.
I left when the babies were a week old to report
back to Hoboken again for my sailing orders and
found myself at sea during the tense and crucial
month of August 1918.[11]

The trip was the usual one of those anxious days—thirteen
days at sea, constant look-out for a submarine,
but finally a mild disappointment when we
sailed into harbor without even a scare. We carried
our life preservers constantly and waited daily
for the sudden alarm of a boat drill. Our ship, the
Balmoral Castle, was one of a convoy of twelve, with
the usual quota of destroyers accompanying us.
Two days from England we met a flotilla of destroyers;
later two “mystery” ships joined us and in
the Irish Sea we were greeted by a huge Blimp or
dirigible balloon. With this escort we sailed down
the Irish Sea, had a glimpse of Ireland and Scotland
and finally disembarked at Liverpool. Our first impression
was the flatness of a European metropolis
when viewed at a distance and its entire lack of the
jagged sky-line of an American city.

Our pleasurable anticipations of a view of Liverpool
and perhaps a glimpse of London were
rudely disappointed. We disembarked about noon,
marched through side streets, which looked like side streets
in any of the dirtiest of American cities, lined
up at a freight station, and were loaded at once on
waiting trains and started off for Southampton.
All that afternoon we absorbed eagerly the dainty
beauty of the English countryside which most of
us knew only through literary references. We were
sorry when the late twilight shut off the view and
we had to take our first lesson at sleeping while sitting
up in a train, a custom which afterward became
a habit to all officers in France.

Daybreak found us at Southampton in the rest
camp; evening on the Maid of Orleans, bound across
the channel. We had not seen England, we had no[12]
place to sleep and not too much to eat, even sitting
room on the decks was at a premium, but we were
hastening on our way to the war. At Le Havre we
were again assigned to a British rest camp, where
we appreciated the contrast between the excellent
meals of the officers’ canteen and the primitive
bunks in double tiers where we had to sleep. After
two days of this sort of rest and a hasty visit to
the city in between, I received orders to report to
the G. H. Q. Chaplains’ Office at Chaumont.

My first train journey across France impressed
me at once with the unique character of the landscape.
The English landscape is distinguished by
meadows, the French by trees. The most realistic
picture of the English landscape is the fantastic description
of a checker-board in “Alice in Wonderland.”
In France, however, one is struck chiefly
by the profusion and arrangement of trees. They
are everywhere, alone or in clumps, and of all kinds,
with often a formal row of poplars or a little wood
of beeches to make the sky-line more impressive.
In northern France the houses and barns are all of
stone, peaked and windowless, with gardens that
seem bent on contrasting as strongly as possible
with the grayness of the walls. It seems as though
tiny villages are every few feet, and always with a
church steeple in the middle.

In Paris the first man I met was my old friend,
Dr. H. G. Enelow, of Temple Emanu-El, New York,
who was standing by the desk in the Hotel Regina
when I registered. As the next day was Sunday,
Dr. Enelow was able to devote some time to me,
taking me for a long walk on the left bank of the
Seine, where we enjoyed the gardens of the Luxembourg[13]
and sipped liqueurs at a side-walk café at the
famous corner of Boulevarde St. Michel and Germain.
Paris in war-time was infinitely touching.
It had all the marks of the great luxury center of
the world: shops, boulevards, hotels, and show places
of every kind. But many of the most attractive of
its tiny shops were closed; the streets at night were
wrapped in the deepest gloom, with tiny shaded
lights which were not intended to illuminate but only
to show the direction of the street. The crowds
were only a little repressed in the day-time, for the
extreme crisis of the summer had just passed, but
with dusk the streets became entirely deserted.
Through Dr. Enelow I met also Dr. Jacob Kohn,
who with Dr. Enelow and Congressman Siegel constituted
the commission of the Jewish Welfare
Board to outline its program for overseas work.
Dr. Enelow introduced me also to Mr. John Goldhaar,
the secretary of the commission, afterward
in charge of the Paris Office of the Jewish Welfare
Board, to whom I shall refer more fully in another
connection.

At Chaumont the first man I met was my old
class-mate of the Hebrew Union College, Chaplain
Elkan C. Voorsanger, who was there temporarily detached
from the 77th Division to arrange for the
celebration of the Jewish holydays throughout
France. He welcomed me, told me something of
what my work was to be, and listened to my month-old
news, which was all fresh to him. For a few
days I lingered at the chaplains’ headquarters at
the old château of Neuilly sur Suisse, not far from
Chaumont, where thirty chaplains received their
gas mask training and instruction in front line[14]
work, and waited for assignments. The château
was a queer angular mediæval affair, set off by
lovely lawns, with the usual rows of straight poplars
all about. A few steps away was a little
village with a quaint old twelfth century church,
beautiful in feeling, if not in workmanship. We
chaplains newly arrived in France, most of us young,
and all eager to be at work, hung on the words of
our leaders fresh from the line. We talked much
of our ideals and our preparation, as most of the
men were graduates of the Chaplains’ Training
School at Camp Taylor, Kentucky. My assignment
came very soon to organize and conduct services
for the Jewish holydays at Nevers, headquarters
of the Intermediate Section, Service of Supply.

The entire American area in France had been
charted out for the purpose of holyday services
and the central cities designated, either those which
had French synagogues to receive our men, or
those points like Nevers where Americans were to
be found and had to be provided for. I quote the
official order which carried authority for our
arrangements.

“Tours, Sept. 1, 1918.

Wherever it will not interfere with military operations
soldiers of Jewish Faith will be excused from all
duty and where practicable granted passes to enable them to
observe Jewish Holidays as follows: from noon Sept. 6th
to morning of Sept. 9th and from noon Sept. 15th to
morning of Sept. 17th. If military necessity prevents
granting passes on days mentioned provision should be
made to hold divine services wherever possible.”

This meant that all those had leave who were not[15]
at the time in action or on the move. Chaplain
Voorsanger, for example, was not able to have any
service in the 77th Division as his troops were on
the march on New Year’s Day and in action on the
Day of Atonement. Most of the central points
designated for Jewish services were important
cities with French synagogues,—Paris, Toul, Belfort,
Dijon, Épinal, Nantes, Rouen, Tours, Bordeaux
and Marseilles. Three of the chief American
centers had none, so Dr. Enelow was assigned to
Brest, Dr. Kohn to Chaumont, and I was sent to
Nevers.

I spent a single busy day in Tours after leaving
Chaumont. I met the wife and father-in-law of
Rabbi Leon Sommers and inspected their little
synagogue with its seventy-five seats. The Rabbi
was on duty in the French army where he had been
from the very beginning of the war. I went to the
army headquarters and arranged for the proper
notices to be sent out to troops in the district, then
with two or three Jewish families whom I met I
discussed arrangements to accommodate the large
number of Jewish soldiers who would come in. I
was empowered to offer them the financial assistance
of the Jewish Welfare Board in providing
such accommodations as were possible.

One surprise of a kind which I afterward came
to expect, was meeting an old friend of mine from
Great Lakes, a former sergeant in the Canadian
Army, mustered out of service because of the loss
of several fingers and now back in France again as
a representative of the Knights of Columbus.
When he left Great Lakes for overseas, I had parted
with one of the two knitted sweaters I possessed,[16]
that if I did not see service at least my sweater
would. Now I met the sweater and its owner again
for a few brief moments. These fleeting glimpses
of friends became a delightful but always tense
element in our army life. Men came and went
like an ever-flowing stream, now and then pausing
for a greeting and always hurrying on again. A
single day sufficed for my work in Tours and then to
my own city for the holydays.

Nevers is a historic town of thirty thousand on
the banks of the River Loire. The streets are as
wide as alleys and the sidewalks narrow and haphazard,
so that usually one walks in the street,
whether it goes up hill, down hill, or (as frequently)
around the corner. But the parks and squares are
frequent and lovely, and the old buildings have
a charm of their own, even if it is chiefly in the
quaintness of their outlines and the contrast of
their gray with the sunny skies of autumn. The
air was always cool and the skies always bright.
I stayed at the Grand Hotel de l’Europe, a rather
small place, which one had to enter by a back door
through a court. With the men at war, all the work
was being done by women, while most of the guests
were American officers on temporary or permanent
duty at the post. The cathedral (every French
city seems to have one) is interesting chiefly to the
antiquarian, as it has several different styles combined
rather inharmoniously, and the tower is not
at all imposing.

Of course, a great many Americans were stationed
in or near the city—railroad engineers, training
camps of combat units newly arrived in France,
construction engineers, quartermaster units, and[17]
two great hospital centers. Every company I
visited, every ward in the hospitals, had at least a
few Jewish boys, and all of them were equally glad
to see me and to attend my services. In fact, my
first clear impression in France was that here lay
a tremendous field for work, crying out for Jewish
chaplains and other religious workers, and that we
had such a pitiful force to answer the demand. At
that time there were over fifty thousand Jewish
soldiers in the A. E. F. at a very conservative estimate,
with exactly six chaplains and four representatives
of the Jewish Welfare Board to minister
to them. When I took up my work at Nevers, I
was simply staggered by the demands made on me
and my inability to fulfill more than a fraction of
them.

At first came the sudden rush of men into the
city for the first day of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish
New Year. The hotels filled up almost at once; then
came others who could not find accommodations,
and still others who had been confined to hospitals,
had drawn no pay for several months, and could not
pay for a hotel room or even a shave. The problem
was solved by two very helpful officers who stayed
up most of the night until they had provided enough
room on the barrack floors and enough blankets for
all who needed them. The accommodations were
crude, but the men were soldiers and glad to get
them. I was doubly proud, therefore, that this
crowd of ours, without official control, coming for
the festival and therefore released from the incessant
discipline they had become used to, never once
took advantage of their privileges. We troubled
the authorities for their sleeping quarters and for[18]
special permission to be on the street after nine at
night—but that was all. Many of the boys may
have appreciated their leave more than the festival,
but all justified the confidence shown in them by
their conduct.

Imagine the difference between our services in
France and those to which I have been accustomed
in our rather tame and formal civilian congregations.
My congregation there was composed
almost entirely of men, and those men all very
young. We were meeting in a strange land, amid
an ancient but alien civilization, which some of us
liked and some disliked, but which none of us could
quite understand. We had no scroll of the Law, no
ram’s horn, not even a complete prayerbook for the
festivals. We had no synagogue, and the places
we used were lent us by people of another faith,
friends and co-workers, indeed, but with little interest
in our festivals or our religious needs.

Our services were held in the large Y. M. C. A.
hut at the chief barracks. The large, bare room
was turned over to us for certain hours; the workers
closed the canteen and attended the services. And
in return I concluded one of the evening services
fifteen minutes early so that the regular clientele
would not miss their semi-weekly motion pictures.
In fact, I found the Y. M. C. A. here, as everywhere,
most eager to coöperate with me and to serve the
Jews as well as the Christians in the army. My cantor
for most of the services was Corporal Cohen of
New York, although several other men volunteered
for certain portions of the prayers. The head usher
was Sergeant Wolf, who looked after the hall and the
seating with the thoroughness characteristic of sergeants[19]
everywhere. Among the congregation were
ten officers, two nurses, and three families of French
Jews, as well as a mixed group of enlisted men from
every branch in the army, from every section of
America and every group of Jewry. The festival
had caught us in a foreign land, in the service of
America, and it had brought us together as nothing
else could have done.

We wore our hats during the service because that
was the natural desire of the majority, who were of
orthodox upbringing. Of course, a soldier naturally
wears his overseas cap under any circumstances and
it would have needed a special ruling to bring them
off. The service was read out of the little prayer
book circulated by the Jewish Welfare Board, with
which about a fourth of the congregation were already
provided from the camps in the States. We
read the abbreviated Hebrew service, then about half
of the prayers in English, and had an English sermon.
The only objection to these innovations came
from the cantor, Corporal Cohen, a young man with
a traditional Jewish background, who had gathered
the other Jews in his company every Friday evening
for a brief service and was generally looked up to
(although not always followed) as a religious leader.
My only way of convincing him was to inquire among
some of the other men as to the number who did not
understand Hebrew. When he saw that over half of
the Jewish soldiers had no understanding of the Hebrew
service he withdrew his insistent request for a
strict traditionalism and I was saved the necessity of
falling back on my military rank.

I was much amused after the several services at
the number of young men who came to me, complaining[20]
about Cohen’s rendering of the services and
boasting of their own ability. I was able to give
several of them the chance in the ensuing days and
found out that it is easy to get a Hebrew reader,
quite possible to find one who reads with feeling
and understanding, but utterly impossible to pick
up in the army a cantor with a trained voice.

Our arrangements were made under the approval
of my commanding officer, the senior chaplain of the
post, and few features of our service were more appreciated
than the address of Chaplain Stull at our
services on the second day of the festival. I had hesitated
to invite him, and was therefore doubly surprised
when he assured me that this was the third
successive year that he had preached at a Jewish
New Year service: two years before on the Mexican
Border, the year before in training camp in the
States and now in the American Forces in France,
Chaplain Stull was a regular army chaplain of eighteen
years standing, and his membership in the
Methodist Episcopal church was less conspicuous
in his makeup than his long experience in army
life. His sermon was one of the outstanding events
of our holy season. His explanation of the vital importance
of the Service of Supply to the army at the
front came with personal weight for he had just
come back from the fighting forces to take a promotion
in the rear. His moral interpretation of the
significance of each man to the whole army
was the sort of thing that the soldier needs and likes.

These services were unusual in that they were the
first holy season which most of the men had spent
away from home. The war was still on then; the St.[21]
Mihiel drive took place the day after Rosh Hashana;
the news from the front was usually good
and always thrilling. We at the rear were deeply
stirred. Some of us had been wounded and were
now recovering; some were in training and were
soon to leave for the front; some were in the S. O. S.
permanently. But the shadow of war was dark upon
us all. We were in the uncertainty, the danger,
the horror of it. We felt a personal thrill at the
words of the prayers,—”Who are to live and who to
die; who by the sword and who by fire.” We
recited with personal fervor the memorial prayer for
our fallen comrades. Many among us were eager
to give thanks at recovery from wounds. Therefore,
the desire for a religious observance of our
solemn days was all the greater. Men came
in from a hundred miles, often walking ten miles to a
train before they could ride the rest.

Brothers, long separated, often met by chance,
soon to separate again for an unknown future. I
remember two—one a veteran of two battles, now
convalescing at a hospital, the other newly arrived
from the States and still in training. They met on
Rosh Hashanah, each ignorant of the other’s whereabouts
and the veteran not even knowing whether
his brother had arrived in France. The touching
scene of their reunion had its humorous side too, for
the wounded soldier from the hospital naturally had
not a franc in his possession, and the boy from the
States had enough money for a real holiday and
had reserved a hotel room with a luxurious French
bed. He was thus able to act as host for two happy
days and nights. But on Yom Kippur when the[22]
wounded soldier came again his brother was not
there. His unit had been ordered to the front and
I do not know whether they ever met again.

War had us all in its iron grip. I, for one,
expected soon to have my request granted that I
be assigned to a combat division. Not that I overlooked
the need for Jewish work in the S. O. S., but
the most pressing need at that time was at the front,
and I was looking forward to taking up the more
exacting duties there.

The three Jewish families of the city added a
pathetic touch, for they were glad indeed to attend a
Jewish service and for the sake of the soldiers were
willing to sit through our English additions. Their
situation seemed similar to that of most recent immigrants
of the United States; the parents spoke
both Yiddish and French, the young people like
ours in America, spoke chiefly the language of the
country. It was both ludicrous and touching to see
American soldiers competing to exchange the few
French words they knew with the two or three
Jewish daughters. It was often their first chance
for a word with a girl of their own class, certainly
with a Jewish girl, since they had left America.
And the fact that the girl with her familiar appearance
could not communicate with them on a
conversational basis, did not seem to impede their
relations in the least. The isolated condition of
these French Jews in a city of 30,000 can only be
compared to that of American Jews in a country village.

While at Nevers I could not overlook the opportunity
to visit the two great hospital centers at
Mars and at Mesves sur Loire. I visited from[23]
ward to ward in both of them, paying special attention
to the Jewish boys and finding always plenty of
occasion for favors of a hundred different kinds.
At that time we were short of chaplains of all denominations
in the army, so that even the hospitals
had not enough to minister fully to their thousands
of sick and wounded, while the convalescent camps
with their hundreds of problems were almost uncared
for in this respect.

At Mars I held a service on Friday night which
was fairly typical of conditions in France. The
service was announced as a Jewish religious service,
but on my arrival I found the Red Cross room
crowded with men of every type, including four
negroes in the front row. Evidently it was the
only place the men had outside the wards, so they
came there every night for the show, movie, or
service which might be provided. They were not
merely respectful to the service and the minority of
Jews who took part in it. They were actively responsive
to the message I brought them of conditions
in America and the backing the people at
home were giving them in their great work abroad.
These wounded men from the lines, these medical
corpsmen who might never see the front, were alike
eager to feel the part they personally were playing
in the great, chaotic outlines of the world-wide
struggle. And they responded to a Jewish service
with an interest which I soon found was typical of
the soldier, in his restless attention, his open-mindedness,
his intolerance of cant but love of
genuine religion.

The meetings and partings of war-time came home
to me several times at Nevers. I was called to see a[24]
young man in the hospital, suffering from spinal
meningitis. I found him a highly intelligent boy
from Chicago who knew a number of my old friends
there. I was able to do a few minor favors for him
such as obtaining his belongings and notifying his
unit that he was not absent without leave, but simply
locked up in the contagious ward. But on his recovery
the news went to his family in Chicago to get in
touch with my wife and a friendship was established
on a genuine basis of interests in common. At another
time I was approached at the Y. M. C. A. by
one of their women workers who had heard my name
announced. She turned out to be a Mrs. Campbell of
my old home town, Sioux City, Iowa, and an acquaintance
of my mother through several charity boards
of which they both were members. She was acting
as instructor in French and advisor to the American
soldiers in Nevers, while her husband, Prof. Campbell
of Morningside College, was on the French front
with the French auxiliary of the Y. M. C. A.

Another interesting incident was my meeting with
Mr. Julius Rosenwald of Chicago, then touring
France as a member of the National Council of
Defense. The Y. M. C. A. secretary asked me to
introduce him to a soldier audience in one of their
huts. The first day I came, however, Mr. Rosenwald
was delayed and the boys had to put up with a new
film of Douglas Fairbanks in his stead, like good
soldiers accepting the substitution gladly enough.
On the second day Mr. Rosenwald himself was there
and I had the pleasure of introducing him to an
audience of about five hundred soldiers, as varied
a group as ever wore the American uniform. His[25]
simple personal appeal was a direct attempt to build
up the morale of the troops through a hearty report
of the interest and enthusiasm of the people at home.
He called for a show of hands of the home states of
the different men, then responded by reading letters
and telegrams from governors and other local officials.
Mr. Rosenwald was one of the very few official
travelers in France whose trip was not merely
informative to himself but also valuable to the army.
We in the army grew to dislike “joy riders” so
heartily that it is a positive pleasure to mention
such a conspicuous exception.

Another duty typical of the variety of tasks which
welcomed me as a chaplain, was to conduct the
defense of a Jewish boy at a general court martial.
He asked to see me during the holydays, told me his
story, and I stayed over in Nevers a few days to act
as his counsel. Since that time I have frequently
been called on for advice in similar cases, for an
army chaplain has almost as many legal and medical
duties as strictly religious ones. In this particular
case circumstantial evidence seemed to show that
the young man had stolen and sold some musical
instruments from an army warehouse where he
worked. He was only a boy, a volunteer who had
falsified his age in order to enlist. According to
his own story he was partially involved in the case,
acting ignorantly as agent for the real criminal.

The trial was quite fair, bringing out the circumstantial
evidence against him, and his sentence was
as low as could possibly be expected. So, with memories
of friendships made, of work accomplished, of a
new world opening ahead, I left Nevers on September[26]
20th after only eighteen days of service. I had to
report at Chaumont again to receive my orders to
join the 27th Division.

For two months after that no Jewish chaplain was
stationed in the Intermediate Section, which covered
the entire central part of France and contained
many thousands of American troops, including
everywhere a certain proportion of Jews. Then
Chaplain Rabinowitz reported at Nevers temporarily
and served for his entire time in France in
various points in the Intermediate Section, at
Nevers, Blois and at St. Aignan.

I had been thrust into the midst of this tremendous,
crying need for service of every kind,
religious, personal and military. I went to my
division to find the same or greater need, as the
situation was always more tense at the actual front.
For three weeks I had ministered as much as I
could to the Jewish men scattered about Nevers and
all through the central portion of France. Now I
left them for good. Their usual greeting on meeting
me had been, “You are the first Jewish chaplain
or worker we have met on this side.” And unfortunately,
the same greeting was addressed to me
every time I came to a new unit or city until the
very day I left France. The need among these two
million soldiers was so tremendous that a hundred
times our resources would not have been sufficient.
As it was, we made no pretense at covering the
field, but simply did day labor wherever we were
stationed, serving the soldiers, Jews and Christians
alike, and giving our special attention to the religious
services and other needs of the Jewish men.

[27]

CHAPTER III

AT THE FRONT WITH THE TWENTY-SEVENTH DIVISION

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[28]
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[29]
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[30]
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[31]
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[32]
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.

We saw the heavy guns lumbering on their way
to the front, the aëroplanes humming overhead like
a swarm of dragon-flies. Day and night we could
hear the rumble of guns like distant thunder, while
at night the flashes showed low on the horizon like[33]
heat lightning. Our salvage depot was at Tincourt
at the foot of the hill, and when I went over there
Corporal Klein and Sergeant Friedlander were
quick to repair gaps in my equipment. One night
I witnessed the division musical comedy (the
“Broadway Boys”) in an old barn at Templeux
le Fosse, where we walked in the dark, found the
place up an alley and witnessed a really excellent
performance with costumes, scenery and real orchestra.
In the middle of an act, an announcement
would be made that all men of the third battalion,
108th Infantry, should report back at once, and a
group of fellows would rise and file out for the five-mile
hike back in the darkness: they were to move up
to the front before morning.

My chief effort during those few hurried days
was to get into touch with the various units so that
I could be of some definite service to them when they
went into action. Unfortunately, almost every time
I arranged for a service and appeared to hold it the
“outfit” would already be on the move. The best
service I held was at the village of Buire, where
about forty boys gathered together under the trees
among the ruined houses. They were a deeply devotional
group, told me about their holyday services
conducted by a British army chaplain at Doulens,
about their fallen comrades for whom they wanted to
repeat the memorial prayers, and about their own
narrow escapes for which they were eager to offer
thanks. They had the deep spiritual consciousness
which comes to most men in moments of great peril.

I managed to reach most of the infantry regiments,
however, by hiking down from the woods and sometimes
catching a ride. Everywhere was action. It[34]
was the breathing space between our two great
battles of the war. Every unit was hoping and expecting
a long rest. But that hope could not be
fulfilled. The intensity of the drive against the entire
German line was beginning to tell and every
possible unit was needed in the line to push ahead.
So the rest of the Twenty-Seventh Division was
brief indeed. Every regiment was starting for the
front with no replacements after the terrific
slaughter of two weeks before, with very little new
equipment and practically no rest. And the front
was now further away than it had been. The success
of the allied forces meant longer marches for
our tired troops.

All the villages were devastated in this area. It
was the section between Peronne and the old Hindenburg
Line. Not until we came to the German side
of the Hindenburg Line did we find the villages
in any sort of repair. The men lived in cellars
without roofs, in rooms without walls or sometimes
in barracks which were constructed by either of the
opposing armies during the long years of the struggle.
Of course, many shelters existed such as our
“elephant huts” in the woods or the perfect honeycomb
of dugouts in the sides of the quarry at Templeux
le Gerard.

One day I “lorried” up to the division cemeteries
near the old battlefield, which were being laid out
by a group of chaplains with a large detail of enlisted
men. I saw the occasional Jewish graves
marked with the Star of David and later was able to
complete the list and have all Jewish graves in our
division similarly marked. I got to know the country
about Bellicourt and Bony, where our heaviest[35]
fighting had taken place. I heard the story of the
eight British tanks, lying helpless at the top of
the long ridge near Bony, where they had run upon
a mine field. I got to know the “Ausies,” always
the best friends and great admiration of our soldiers,
with their dashing courage and reckless heroism,
and the “Tommies,” those steady, matter-of-fact
workmen at the business of war, whom our boys
could never quite understand.

Finally our headquarters moved forward, too. I
jumped out of a colonel’s car one dark night and
hunted for an hour and a half among the hills before
I found the chalk quarry where they now were hidden
from prying air scouts. At last, finding the quarry,
I met a boy I knew, who took me to the dugout where
the senior chaplain was sleeping. I crawled into
a vacant bunk, made myself at home and left the
next morning for good. The quarry did not appeal
to me when wet; one was too likely to slide from the
top to the bottom and stay there; and I had no desire
to test its advantages when dry. The next time I
came back to headquarters they were in the village
of Joncourt, beyond the Hindenburg Line, in territory
which we had released from the Germans. The
chief attraction of Joncourt was an occasional roof—of
course, there were no windows. The cemetery
had been used as a “strong point” by the retreating
Germans, who had scattered the bodies about and
used the little vaults as pill-boxes in which to mount
machine guns. And our message center was located
in a German dugout fully fifty feet underground;
evidently plenty of precautions had been taken
against allied air raids. In fact, from this point
on every house in every village had a conspicuous[36]
sign, telling of the Fliegerschutz for a certain
number of men in its cellar. In addition, the placard
told the number of officers, men and horses which
could be accommodated with billets on the premises.
Evidently, the Germans in laying out their permanently
occupied territory, went about it in their
usual business-like fashion.

But between my glimpses of these various headquarters,
I was at the front with the troops going
into the trenches and had had a glimpse of war. My
first experience under fire was in some woods near
Maretz, where I spent part of the night with one
battalion, as they paused before going into the
trenches. I finished the night on the floor of a house
in the village, having grown accustomed enough to
the sound of the shells to sleep in spite of it. Like
most people I had wondered how one feels under
fire, and experienced a queer sensation when I first
heard the long whine of a distant shell culminating
in a sudden explosion. Now I realized that I was
under fire, too. But I speedily found that one feels
more curiosity than fear under long-distance fire;
real fear comes chiefly when the shells begin to land
really near by. I was to experience that, too, a little
later. In fact, I found out soon that every soldier
is frightened; a good soldier is simply one who does
his duty in spite of fear.

Then a report came in that Chaplain John Ward,
of the 108th Infantry, had been seriously wounded
and I was sent to take his place with the unit. In
a push the chaplain works with the wounded; after
it, with the dead. Of many sad duties at the front,
his is perhaps the saddest of all. My first station
was with the third battalion headquarters and aid[37]
post in a big white house set back in a little park
in the tiny village of Escaufourt, a mile or so behind
the lines. Captain Merrill was in command
of the battalion and one could see how the work and
responsibility wore on him day by day, reducing the
round, cheerful soldier for the time almost to a
whispering, tottering old man. But his spirit held
him to the task; he slept for only a few minutes at a
time, and then was back at work again. A conscientious
man can have no more exacting duty than
this, to care for the lives of a thousand men.

We were under constant fire there, though not
under observation, but the little ambulances ran up
to the gate of the château for the wounded, who had
to walk or be carried in and out from the house to the
gate. We ate upstairs in the stately dining room
at times, though we usually ate and always slept
in the crowded cellar where the major and his staff
were housed. There eight or nine of us would sit on
our brick seats and sleep with our backs against the
wall, being awakened from time to time by a messenger
coming in or by the ringing of the field telephone
in the corner. The telephone operator was
always testing one or another connection, day
and night, for the emergency when it would be
needed.

One night companies H and I of the 108th Infantry
were almost completely wiped out by gas. They
were in low lying trenches by the side of the canal
under a constant fire of gas shells, while the damp
weather kept the dangerous fumes near the ground.
They had no orders to evacuate to a safer post and
no human being can live forever in a gas mask, so
one after another the men yielded to temptation, took[38]
off their masks for momentary relief, and inhaled
the gas-laden air. All evening and night they kept
coming in by twos and threes to our aid post, the
stronger ones walking, the rest on stretchers.
Their clothing reeked of the sickeningly sweet odor.
The room was soon full of it, so that we had to
blow out the candles and open the door for a few
minutes to avoid being gassed ourselves. There
were three ambulances running that night to the
Main Dressing Station, and I made it my task to
meet each car, notify the doctor and bring the gassed
and wounded men out to the ambulance. Most of
them were blinded for the time being by the effect
of the gas. No light was possible, as that would
have drawn fire at once. Every ten minutes through
the night our village was shelled, and in walking
the forty or fifty yards through the park to the gate,
I had to make two detours with my blinded men to
avoid fresh shell-holes made that very afternoon. I
admit feeling an occasional touch of panic as I led
the big helpless fellows around those fresh shell
holes and helped them into the ambulances. The
final touch came when a youngster of perhaps seventeen
entered the aid post alone, walking painfully.
“What outfit are you from, sonny?” was my natural
greeting. “I am the last man left in Company H,”
was the proud reply.

This was the sort of fatal blunder which seemed
to occur once in every command before the lesson
was learned that gas-filled trenches need no defending,
and that troops, safely withdrawn a hundred
yards or more, can be moved forward again
quickly enough the moment the gas lifts. The English
had had the same lesson more than once until[39]
they learned it thoroughly; so had the Germans;
now our armies, with their examples before us, had
to learn it again through the suffering of our own
soldiers. Our division was not the only one in which
the same or a similar blunder cost the men so dearly,
for I have read the same incident of more than one
unit on other parts of the American line, and have
had them verified by officers who were present at
those other catastrophes. In the art of war the instruction
of the generals costs the lives of the
soldiers.

We had the peculiar experience of seeing the village
which we had entered in good condition crumbling
about us under the enemy fire. Even the windows
were intact when we reached it; the Germans
were just out, and our artillery had been outstripped
completely in the forward rush. Under the constant
pounding of back area fire, designed to prevent
ammunition and supplies coming up to the line unmolested,
our little village lost windows, roofs and
walls, disintegrating steadily into a heap of ruins.

One evening we were assigned the task of evacuating
some old French peasants who had clung to
their little homes through all the world-shaking
catastrophe. At last they had to leave, as the danger
to them was too direct and, in addition, they constituted
a hidden menace to our troops in case even
one of them had been left behind as a spy. I went
with a party of Australians and a few of our men to
the houses in the outskirts of the town, where the
greatest danger existed. I remember the utterly
disconsolate attitude of two old men and a little
old woman in one of them, when they were told
they had to leave. They seemed numb in the midst[40]
of all the rush and roar of warfare. Their little possessions
were there, they were of the peasant type
and had probably never been out of the district in
their lives. The advance of the enemy in 1914 had
been accompanied by no fighting near their homes,
and now the allied victory, the one hope of their
country, was the one thing that bore destruction to
their little village and tore them away from the spot
where they were rooted.

One evening I joined a ration party going forward
and visited the lines and advanced headquarters
at St. Souplet, hearing the peculiar whistle
of a sniper’s bullet pass me as I made my way back
after dusk. One of the boys carrying a heavy bag
of hardtack had a sore shoulder, not quite well
from a previous wound. So I shouldered his bag
for a decidedly weary mile of skulking along a
sunken road and hurrying across the occasional
open spaces. When we came to his unit I was
glad to turn the bag over to him; I felt no pleasure
in such lumpy burden, and would far rather have
worn out my shoulder with something more appreciated
by the boys than hardtack,—the one thing
which nobody enjoyed but which was eaten only
because they were desperately hungry. On the night
of October 16th we all moved over, preparatory to
the push across the Selle River. We installed ourselves
in the large building at the cross roads, where
the aid post was stationed. I joined a group of
sleepers on the cellar floor, picking my way in the
darkness to find a vacant spot. My trench coat on
the plank floor made a really luxurious bed.

The next morning, October 17th, I was awakened
at 5:20 by the barrage; the boys were going over;[41]
the battle of the Selle River had began. By six
o’clock the wounded began to flow in, at first by
twos and threes, then in a steady stream. They
came walking wearily along or were carried on the
shoulders of German prisoners or occasionally by
our own men. As we were at the crossroads, we got
most of the wounded, English, German and American,
as well as a great deal of the shelling with
which back areas are always deluged during an attack.
In this case, our post was just behind the
lines at first, but it became a back area within a
very few days owing to the dash and brilliancy
of our tired troops when the orders came to go over
the top. They stormed the heights across the
stream after wading it in the first rush, and then
went on across the hills and fields.

Our attack was a part of the campaign of the
British Third Army and a small element in the great
“push” going on at that time over the entire front.
Our task with that of the Thirtieth Division on our
right was to cross the Selle River and advance
toward the Sambre Canal. On our left were British
troops, while we were supported by Australian artillery
and the British Air Service. In our first
great battle, that of the Hindenburg Line, the “Ausies”
had acted as the second wave, coming up
just in time to save some of the hard pressed units
of our Division and to complete the success of our
assault. So we knew them well enough and were
glad indeed to have their excellent artillery to put
over the barrage for our second attack.

The Australians and, in fact, all the British Colonial
troops, had much more in common with the
American soldiers than had the British troops themselves.[42]
They were like our men, young, hardy, dashing.
They were all volunteers. They had a type
of discipline of their own, which included saluting
their own officers when they wanted to and never
saluting British officers under any circumstances.
I took a natural pride in hearing of their commanding
officer, Lieutenant General Sir John Monash,
who held the highest rank of any Jew in the war.
It was no little honor to be the commander of those
magnificent troops from Australia.

Meanwhile we were busy at the first aid post. I
found myself the only person at hand who could
speak any German, so I took charge of the door, with
a group of prisoners to carry the wounded in and
out and load them in the ambulances. As soon as
my dozen or so prisoners were tired out I would send
them on to the “cage” and pick up new men from
the constant stream flowing in from the front. Our
opponents here were chiefly Wurtembergers, young
boys of about twenty, although one regiment of Prussian
marines was among them. Among the first
prisoners were two German physicians who offered
to assist ours in the work. They worked all day,
one in our aid post, the other in that of the 107th
Infantry, side by side with our surgeons and doing
excellent work for Americans and Germans alike.
They picked their own assistants from among their
captured medical corpsmen, and were strictly professional
in their attitude throughout. One of them
was Dr. Beckhard, a Jew from Stuttgart, with whom
I had a few snatches of conversation and whom I
should certainly like to meet again under more congenial
circumstances. I was amused in the midst
of it all when the doctor noticed his brother, an artilleryman,[43]
coming in as one of the endless file of
stretcher bearers, carrying wounded in gray or olive
drab. The doctor asked me whether he might take
his brother as one of his assistants for the day.
“Is he any good?” I asked. “Oh, yes,” was the
answer, “as good as any medical orderly.” So I
gave permission and the two, together with a real
medical orderly and another young prisoner as interpreter,
ran one room of the first aid post in their
own way. I kept an American soldier on guard there
chiefly to be prepared for any eventualities; as a
matter of fact the German surgeons treated American
wounded and American surgeons treated German
wounded with the same impartial spirit. The
two physicians joined the other prisoners at the
end of the day bearing letters of appreciation written
by Captain Miller, the surgeon in charge of our
post.

About a year later when communication with Germany
was opened again, I found that this chance
meeting at the front proved an odd means of communication
with my German cousins. When Dr.
Beckhard returned to Stuttgart he lectured on his
experiences at the front, mentioning among other
things that he had met an American Rabbi by the
name of Levinger. Some distant relatives of mine
living in the city heard the talk and wrote to a
nearer branch of the family living in another part
of Wurtemberg, so that shortly after the actual experience
they knew of my being in the army and
serving at the front.

Only the small Ford ambulances could come as
near the front as our post, while the larger ones
came only to the Advanced Dressing Station at[44]
Busigny. These smaller ambulances were unable to
accommodate the constant stream of gassed and
wounded men coming from the lines. Those who
had minor wounds, especially in the arms, had to
be directed along the proper road according to that
ironical term, “walking wounded.” Cases which
in civil life would be carried to an ambulance, given
full treatment, and then driven gently to the nearest
hospital, were here given emergency dressings and
told, “The Advanced Dressing Station is two miles
down that road, boys. Walk slow and don’t miss
the sign telling where to turn to the left.” Other
more serious cases for whom there was no room in
ambulances, at the moment were carried on
stretchers by prisoners. I would assemble three or
four such cases, take a revolver left by some
wounded officer or non-com, and give it to a “walking
wounded” with instructions to “see that they get
safely to the next point.” Naturally, these boys
with minor wounds of their own were safe guardians
to see that the German prisoners did their
duty. I can still see their grins as they assured
me: “Those fellows are sure going to stick on the
job, sir. I’ll say they will!” The attitude of the
slightly wounded men was often full of grim humor.
I remember one Australian carried in on a stretcher
who called me to his side with their customary
“Here, Yank,” and when I responded handed me
very gravely a Mills bomb which he had used to
overawe his captive bearers, apparently threatening
to blow them up with himself should they prove
insubordinate.

A constant worry of mine were the weapons which
the wounded men dropped in front or within the[45]
aid post. Knowing that all army supplies would
be reissued to them on release from the hospital, the
soldiers did not care to carry heavy rifles or even revolvers
and bombs back with them. The result was
a pile of weapons at just the point where my
prisoner stretcher-bearers could have easy access
to them. I kept an M. P. busy much of the time
removing these to a place of comparative safety.

Behind the aid post we found a shed which served
as temporary morgue for the men who died before
we could give them emergency treatment and rush
them off in the ambulances. The extreme tension
of the actual fight and the tremendous pressure of
administering to the living calloused the heart
for the moment to these horrible necessities, which
come back to memory in later days with the full
measure of ghastly detail.

The chaplain is the handy man at the front, one
of the few who is not limited by special duties or
confined to a particular spot. He works forward or
backward as the need exists. He ladles out hot
chocolate with the Red Cross, carries a stretcher
with the Medical Corps, ties up a bandage when that
is needed, and prays for Jew and Christian alike.
I ministered to a number of Jewish and Christian
soldiers who were dying, leading the Jews in the
traditional confession of faith, and reading a psalm
for the Protestants. One of the surgeons came to
me and said, “Captain Connor here is dying, and
Chaplain Hoffman our priest is at Battalion Headquarters
acting as interpreter to examine some
prisoners. What can we do?” So I borrowed the
surgeon’s rosary and held the cross to the lips of
the dying Catholic. This incident, so impossible[46]
in civil life, is really expected among soldiers,—it
has been repeated so many times and in so many
different ways.

We were constantly under heavy shell fire, as our
place at the cross roads was not only convenient
of access, but was also the only route for bringing
supplies and ammunition to our part of the front.
Once as I was in the middle of the road with several
prisoners loading stretchers on an ambulance, a shell
burst in a pool about twenty feet away, covering us
with a shower of mud. My prisoners, who had a
wholesome respect for their own artillery, could
hardly be prevented from dropping the stretcher.
However, we were too near the explosion to be hurt,
as the fragments flew over our heads, killing one boy
and wounding four others across the street. One
of the wounded was an American runner from the
front, who was enjoying a hasty bite at the army
field kitchen around the corner. He came over in
a hurry to have his cheek tied up and then went
calmly back to the field kitchen to finish his interrupted
lunch. The man who was killed was standing
about seventy-five feet from the spot of the
explosion beside the motor-cycle which he drove,
waiting for his commanding officer to come and use
the side-car. He pitched forward as though falling
to avoid the explosion, just as we would have done
if we had not been holding a stretcher. When he
did not rise, Father Kelley and I went over to him
and found that a fatal bit of metal had struck him
in the head just below his steel helmet.

And so the work went on. The next day we heard
of some wounded who had not yet been brought in
from Bandival Farm. Chaplain Burgh of the 107th[47]
Infantry and I gathered together a few volunteers of
our ambulance men and several prisoners to go out
and carry them in. It was about a mile and a half
out across the battlefield under intermittent shell
fire. I placed my captured Luger revolver, which
one of the boys had brought me the day before, in a
conspicuous position with the handle projecting
from my front pocket. I had had the thing unloaded
as soon as I got it because I preferred not
to run any unnecessary risks. Being a non-combatant
both by orders and inclination, I was afraid it
might go off. But my prisoners did not know that
and so I had no difficulty in silencing their muttered
protests against such a hard and dangerous hike.
Working prisoners under fire like this was strictly
against international law, but that sort of a provision
we violated frankly and cheerfully. On the way
back with our wounded across the muddy and shell-pitted
fields, we passed German machine gun emplacements
with the dead gunners still beside the
guns, Americans lying with their faces toward the
enemy, and constant heaps of supplies of all kinds
strewn about. One of our stretchers was put down
for a moment’s rest near such a scattered group of
German knapsacks. One of the prisoners asked if
he might help himself, and when I nodded all four
made a wild dash for the supplies and each man
came back carrying an army overcoat and a bag of
emergency rations, the little sweetish crackers
which they carried instead of our hard tack.

On the third day of the attack I joined two men
of the Intelligence Department in walking out to
the front line, then over five miles from the village.
It was a hard hike through the mud and about the[48]
shell holes. Finally we found our friends dug in
(for the fourth time that day) on a little ridge.
Each time their temporary trenches had been completed
orders had come either for a short retreat
or a further advance, and now by the middle of the
afternoon the boys were digging another at the
place where they were to stay till the next morning.
Across the ravine in a little wood the Germans
were hanging on for the time being until their artillery
could be saved. I visited the 108th Infantry
in reserve and emptied my musette bag of the sacks
of Bull Durham which I had brought along from
the Red Cross. Then the boys wanted matches,
which I had forgotten, and their gratitude was lost
in their disgust.

I found Captain Merrill with his staff inspecting
two captured German 77’s, on which they had just
placed the name of their unit. By that time, after
three consecutive battles without replacements, our
units were so depleted that a regiment had only 250
rifles in the line instead of the original 3,000. Captain
Merrill’s battalion consisted on that day of
87 riflemen. Just as we finished our inspection of
the guns the enemy artillery started “strafing”
again, so we jumped into a shell-hole which had
been hollowed out into convenient form and finished
our conversation there. I then visited some of the
107th Infantry in the front line rifle pits, one hundred
yards or so ahead, and turned back again
toward the village.

I was just losing my way among the hills with
approaching twilight, when I met an Australian artillery
train on their way back for supplies, and
climbed on a limber to ride into town. It was a wild[49]
ride, with the rough roads and the drivers’ habit of
trotting over the spots where shell-holes showed
that danger might linger. I held on in quite unmilitary
fashion and wondered if the horse behind
would be careful when I fell. But they brought me
in safely and added one more means of locomotion
to the dozens which I had utilized at various times:
ammunition “lorries,” ambulances, side-cars and
even a railway locomotive—everything in fact except
a tank.

The next day we breathed more freely again.
Our tired boys, reduced in numbers, weakened in
physical resistance, but going forward day after day
as their orders came, were at last to go out of the
lines. Their job was done; they had reached the
Sambre Canal; and though we did not know it, they
were not to go into battle again. I lorried back to
Joncourt, the temporary division headquarters, for
the night, changed my clothes, slept in a borrowed
cot, read a very heartening pile of home letters
which had accumulated for some weeks, and returned
to St. Souplet the next day for the burial detail.
It was the 21st of October; while the division as a
whole marched back to the railhead, five chaplains
with a detail of a hundred and fifty men stayed behind
for the sad work that remained to be done.

At this time I stopped off at the 108th Infantry
for a few minutes, as they halted for a meal after
coming out of the lines, and had my orderly, David
Lefkowitz, detached from his unit to serve with
me for my entire remaining period with the division.
I had become acquainted with him during my first
few days in the division and found that he would
be interested to work with me as orderly and assistant.[50]
The order assigning him to this special work
was made out before we left the woods at Buire.
But our various units were so depleted at the time
that I arranged to leave him with his “outfit” for
the battle. It was a serious deprivation to me, as
Lefkowitz had been through the earlier battle at the
Hindenburg Line and could have given me much assistance
and advice in the front line work. Now
that the fighting was over, he left his company to go
with me and enjoy the comparative luxury of division
headquarters until he rejoined his company
to sail home from France. He was one of the many
Jewish soldiers who welcomed the presence of a
chaplain and gladly coöperated in every possible
way to make my work successful.

Chaplain Francis A. Kelley, in charge of our
burial work, laid out the cemetery on a hill overlooking
the village and the battlefield. The rest
of us searched the field with details of men, brought
in the bodies on limbers, searched and identified
them as well as possible. In doubtful cases the
final identification was made at the cemetery, where
men from every regiment were working and where
most soldiers would have some one to recognize them.
In addition, we buried German dead on the field,
marking the graves and keeping a record of their
location for the Graves Registration Service. A
hundred and fifty-two men were buried there at St.
Souplet, the last cemetery of the Twenty-Seventh
Division in their battle grounds of France. The
last body of all, found after the work had been finished
and the men released from duty, was buried
by us chaplains and the surgeon, who went out under
the leadership of Father Kelley and dug the grave[51]
ourselves. Every evening the six of us gathered
about our grate fire and relaxed from the grim business
of the day. If we had allowed ourselves to
dwell on it, we would have been incapable of carrying
on the work: it was so ghastly, so full of pathetic
and horrible details. We sang, played checkers,
argued on religion. Imagine us singing the “Darktown
Strutters’ Ball,” or discussing the fundamental
principles of Judaism and Christianity for several
hours! The five of us were all of different creeds,
too—Catholic, Baptist, Christian, Christian Scientist
and Jew. Our coöperation and our congeniality
were typical of the spirit of the service throughout.

On the last day we held our burial service. We
gathered together at the cemetery with a large flag
spread out in the middle of the plot. I read a brief
Jewish service, followed by Chaplains Bagby and
Stewart in the Protestant and Father Kelley in the
Catholic burial service, and at the end the bugle
sounded “taps” for all those men of different faiths
lying there together. We could see and hear the
shells bursting beyond the hill, probably a hostile
scout had caught sight of us at work. Above floated
a British aëroplane. Some English soldiers working
on their burial plot nearby stopped their digging
and listened to our service.

And so we said farewell to our lost comrades and
to the war at the same time.

[52]

CHAPTER IV

AFTER THE ARMISTICE

AFTER the burial work at St. Souplet was over,
great covered lorries took us back the sixty
miles or more to Corbie, in the vicinity of
Amiens, which was to be our rest area. We greeted
its paved streets, its fairly intact houses, its few
tiny shops, as the height of luxury. Here and there
a roof was destroyed or a wall down, for the enemy
had come within three miles of Corbie in their
drives earlier in the year. But we were in rest and
comparative plenty at last. We saw real civilians
again, not merely the few old people and little
children left behind in the towns we had liberated.
We had regular meals again and a chance to purchase
a few luxuries beside, such as French bread
at a shop and hard candy at the “Y.” We no longer
heard the whine of the shell or whistle of the bullet,
nor smelled gas, nor slept in cellars. I was even
lucky enough to capture a thick spring mattress
which, with my blankets, made a bed that even a
certain staff colonel envied me. A home-made grate
in the fire-place fitted it for a tiny coal fire; the
window frames were re-covered with oiled paper;
we read the London Daily Mail in its Paris edition
only one day late, instead of seeing it every ten
days and then often two weeks out of date.

My billet, which I obtained from the British town[53]
major, was a tall, narrow house just off the principal
square, very pleasant indeed in dry weather. Its
chief defect was a huge shell-hole in the roof through
which the water poured in torrents when it rained,
so that we had to cover ourselves with our rubber
shelter-halves when we slept at night. The shell-hole,
however, was a constant source of fuel, and we
burned the laths and wood-work, of which small
pieces were lying all about the top floor, until we
found means to obtain a small but steady supply
of coal. The house afforded room, after I had
preëmpted it, for the Senior Chaplain of the Division,
the Division Burial Officer and myself, together
with our three orderlies.

Even in dry weather there was some excitement
about the old house. There was the time when
some tipsy soldiers, seeing the light in the Senior
Chaplain’s room late at night, mistook the place
for a café and came stumbling in for a drink.
When they saw the chaplain, they suddenly sobered
and accepted very gravely the drink of water he
offered them from his canteen. On another day the
old woman who owned the house came in with her
son, a French lieutenant, to take away her furniture.
We did not mind losing the pretty inlaid table—we
were soldiers and could stand that—but our mattresses
and chairs were a different matter. None
of us could argue with her torrential flow of French,
but Lieutenant Curtiss, the Burial Officer, suddenly
felt his real attack of flu redoubled in violence and
had to take to his mattress. So the old lady finally
relented sufficiently to leave us our beds and a
chair or two, while her son became our devoted
friend at the price of an American cigar.[54]

I think that I shall never forget Corbie, with its
narrow streets, its half-ruined houses, its great ancient
church of gray, with one transept a heap of
ruins, and the straight rows of poplars on both
sides of the Somme Canal,—a bit of Corot in the
mist of twilight. I remember the quiet, gray square
one day with the American band playing a medley
from the “Chocolate Soldier,” for all the world
like a phonograph at home. I remember the great
memorial review of the division by General O’Ryan
in honor of our men who had fallen; the staff stood
behind the General at the top of a long, gentle
slope, with three villages in the distance, the church
looming up with its square, ruined tower, and the
men spread out before us, a vanishing mass of olive
drab against the dull shades of early winter.

I remember the day when three of us chaplains
made the long trip back to our division cemeteries at
St. Emelie, Bony and Guillemont Farm to read the
burial service over those many graves, the result
of the terrible battle at the Hindenburg Line. Chaplain
Burgh, Protestant, of the 105th Infantry, Chaplain
Eilers, Catholic, of the 106th Infantry, and I
were sent back the fifty miles or more by automobile
for this duty. It happened that it rained
that day, as on most days, and the car was an open
one. So the few soldiers still about in that deserted
region had the rare sight of three cold and dripping
chaplains standing out in the mud and rain
to read the burial services, one holding his steel
helmet as an umbrella over the prayerbook from
which the other read, and then accepting the same
service in return. There was none of the panoply
of war, no bugle, firing party or parade, just the[55]
prayer uttered for each man in the faith to which
he was born or to which he had clung. We did not
even know the religion of every man buried there,
but we knew that our prayers would serve for all.

We were lucky to be in Corbie on November 11th
when the armistice was signed. Day after day we
had stopped at Division Headquarters to inspect the
maps and study the color pins which were constantly
moving forward across France and Belgium.
It was a study that made us all drunk with enthusiasm.
We were under orders to move toward the
front again on the 9th of November and to enter
the lines once more on November 14th. The men
had had very little rest and no fresh troops had
come up to fill the losses made by wounds, exposure
and disease. Our men could never hold a full divisional
area now; only the knowledge of the
wonders they had already accomplished made us
consider it possible that they could fight again so
soon. Time after time when their strength and
spirit seemed both exhausted they had responded
and gone ahead. Now they deserved their rest.

We greeted the good news very calmly; the German
prisoners were a little more elated; the French
went mad with ecstasy. It was the only time I
have ever seen Frenchmen drunk, heard them go
home after midnight singing patriotic songs out of
key. In Amiens, where several thousand of the
inhabitants had returned by that time, the few
restaurants were crowded and gaiety was unrestrained.
I heard a middle-aged British lieutenant
sing the “Marseillaise” with a pretty waitress in
the “Café de la Cathédral” the following evening,
and respond when asked to repeat it in the main[56]
dining room. He returned to our side room decidedly
redder than he had gone out. “Why, the
whole British general staff’s in there!” he gasped.
But he received only applause without a reprimand.
The war was over and for the moment all France
was overcome with joy and all the allied armies
with relief and satisfaction.

After the armistice the front line work, with its
absorption on the problems of the wounded and the
dead, became a thing of the past. The chaplain
could now turn to the more normal aspects of his
work, to religious ministration, personal service,
advice and assistance in the thousands of cases
which came before him constantly. In fact, on the
whole his work became much the same as it had been
in training camp in the States. A few differences
persisted; in France the chaplain was without the
magnificent backing of the Jewish communities at
home, which were always so eager to assist in entertaining
and helping the Jewish men in the nearby
camps. The Jewish Welfare Board with its excellent
workers could never cover the entire field
as well as it could at home in America. Then there
were special problems because the men were so far
away from home, because the mail service was
poor, because worries about allotments were more
acute than if home had been nearer, and because the
alien civilization and language never made the men
feel quite comfortable.

In the Corbie area the 27th Division was scattered
about in twelve villages, the farthest one eight miles
from division headquarters. Transportation was
still common on the roads, though often I had to
walk and once I made the trip to Amiens in the[57]
cab of a locomotive when neither train nor truck
was running, and found a ride back in an empty
ambulance which had brought patients to the evacuation
hospital. The villages were almost deserted,
and were in rather bad condition after their nearness
to the German advance of 1918, so that the men
could be crowded together and were very easy to
reach in a body. I began making regular visits to
the various units of the division, meeting the men,
holding services, receiving their requests and carrying
them out as well as possible. And I was constantly
making new acquaintances, as the wounded
and sick began coming back from the hospitals to
rejoin the division.

I had the opportunity of an occasional visit to
Amiens, a city built for a hundred thousand, but at
the time inhabited by only a few thousand of the
more venturesome inhabitants, who had returned
to open shops and restaurants for the British, Australian
and American troops. On account of lack
of competition, prices were extreme even for France
in war-time. The great cathedral was piled high
with sandbags to protect its precious sculptures,
but it stood as always, the sentinel of the city, visible
ten miles away as one approached. The Church
Army Hut of the British forces afforded separate
accommodations for enlisted men and officers, and I
had the pleasure of afternoon tea once or twice
with some of the latter. Amiens was an unsatisfactory
place to shop, but my baggage had not been
found and winter was coming on fast, so I had to
replace some of my possessions at once at any prices
that might be demanded.

Our mess held its formal celebration on November[58]
17th, with Lieutenant Robert Bernstein, the French
liaison officer, as the guest of honor because of his
exact prediction of the date of the armistice when
he had returned from a visit to Paris several weeks
previously. Our mess, officers’ mess number two
of division headquarters, had an international character
through his presence and that of Captain Jenkins
of the British army, and a special tone of comradeship
through the influence of the president of
the mess, Major Joseph Farrell, the division disbursing
officer. So for once we had the rare treat
of turkey and wine, feeling that the occasion demanded
it.

I felt little pleasure in the jollity of the evening,
however. I had just received a letter that day
telling me of the death of one of my twin babies
of the flu; it had happened almost a month before,
while I was on the lines and quite out of reach of
any kind of word. The war, through its attendant
epidemics, gathered its victims also from among
the innocent, far from the scene of struggle. I
felt then that my grief was but a part of the universal
sacrifice. With all these other parents, whose
older sons died at the front in actual fighting, or
whose younger ones were caught denuded of medical
protection at home, I hoped that all this sacrificial
blood might bring an end to war. To-day that faith
is harder and that consolation seems a mockery,
for we seem to be preparing for another struggle
even while children are dying of hunger in central
Europe and massacres of helpless Jews are still
not yet ended in the east. When I received the
news I took a long walk amid the most peaceful
scene I ever knew, up the tree-lined banks of the[59]
Somme Canal, with the evening slowly coming on
and the sun setting behind the stiff rows of poplars.

At last we were detached from the British Third
Army and received orders to entrain for the American
Embarkation Center (as it was later called)
near Le Mans. Our headquarters there were in the
village of Montfort, where we arrived on Thanksgiving
Day and stayed for three weary months.
Montfort le Routrou is a village of nine hundred
people, with one long street which runs up the hill
and down the other side. The hill is crowned with
a typical village church and a really fine château,
where the General made his headquarters. The
tiny gray houses seemed all to date from the time
of Henry of Navarre; my billet was a low cottage
with stone walls over three feet thick, as though
meant to stand a siege or to uphold a skyscraper.
The floor was of stone, the grate large and fuel
scarce, no artificial light available except candles.
The bed alone was real luxury, a typical French
bed, high, narrow and very soft—an indescribable
treat to a man who had slept on everything from
an army cot to a cellar floor.

The surrounding country was rolling, with charming
little hills and constant knots of woods. The
division, as we had known it on the British front,
was housed in forty villages, widely scattered about
the countryside, and our artillery, which had fought
in the American sector, was contained by ten more,
located near Laval about fifty miles away. The
men lived chiefly in barns, as the houses were occupied
by peasants, who needed their own rooms.
As far as the enlisted men were concerned, living
accommodations were better in partially ruined territory,[60]
where they could at least occupy the houses,
such as they were. Because we were in a populous
region, only smaller units could be billeted in a single
village, which meant less access to places of amusement.
The typical French village has no single
room large enough for even a picture show, except
the one place of assembly, the church; apparently
the farmers and villagers have no amusements
except drinking, dancing (in tiny, crowded
rooms) and church attendance.

Such cheerless lives hardly suited the Americans.
Often the men had to walk a mile or more to the
nearest Y. M. C. A. canteen, and those were improvised
on our arrival by our own divisional Y. M. C. A.
staff, which we had been permitted to bring
with us on the earnest request of the chaplains of
the division. After our long sojourn in the area,
we left a completely equipped series of canteens
and amusement buildings for the following divisions.
The nearest available place for light and warmth,
out of the mud and chill, was usually the French
café, and that was available only when the men had
money.

The greatest handicap on any effort for the morale
of the men at the outset was the uncertainty of our
situation. We were semi-officially informed that our
stay in the area would be for only a few weeks, and
that no formal program of athletics, education or
entertainment could be arranged. When life grows
dreary and monotonous, as in the Embarkation
Center, the chief diet of the soldier is such rumors
of going home. In our case three orders were promulgated
for our troop movement, only to be rescinded[61]
again while the wounded, sick and special
small detachments went ahead.

Another difficult problem was the one of covering
ground. At the front it had been easy because the
division was concentrated for action and because of
the constant stream of trucks with their readiness of
access. Even in the Corbie area the division had
been so crowded together that seven services would
reach every man who wanted to attend one or to meet
me. At the rear the division would be billeted in
villages, scattered about over twenty miles of countryside;
it was impossible to get from place to place
without transportation, and that was very scarce.
The army gave the chaplains more encouragement
and friendship than actual facilities for work; the
chaplains’ corps was just making its position strong
at the end of the war. Fortunately, the Jewish
Welfare Board came to the rescue here. It procured
Ford cars for the Jewish chaplains about the
first of the year 1919, thus doubling their scope for
work and making them the envy of all the chaplains
in France.

My work became a matter of infinite details, with
little opportunity for organization but plenty for
day labor. I arranged as many services as possible,
getting to the various units by train, side-car, or
walking until I obtained my own machine for the
purpose. These services, from one to ten a week,
were arranged through the battalion chaplains as
a rule, though sometimes I established connections
with some of the Jewish boys or with the commanding
officer, especially in cases of detached companies
without any chaplain at hand. Every service had[62]
its share of requests for information, advice, assistance,
even for errands, as the men had difficulty
in getting to the city to have a watch repaired or in
reaching divisional headquarters for information.
Some men would want to know about brothers or
friends who had been wounded. Many had difficulty
with their allotments, in which case I worked
through the army, Red Cross, and Jewish Welfare
Board. Others wanted information about relatives
in Poland or Roumania, or to be mustered out of
service that they might join and assist their parents
in eastern Europe; unfortunately, neither information
nor help was possible during the time we were in
France. Some men wished to remain for the Army
of Occupation or other special service; far more
were afraid they might be ordered to such service
and wanted advice how to avoid it and return home
as soon as possible. Citizenship papers, back pay,
furloughs,—the requests were legion, and the chaplain
had no difficulty in being useful.

Naturally, one of my tasks was to gather accurate
statistics of the 65 Jewish boys in our division who
had been killed, to find exactly where they were
buried, have their graves all marked with the Magen
David, the six-pointed star, and keep the list for
the benefit of their families when I should return.
I even made one trip to Tours to discuss the possibility
of making such a list for the other divisions
which came into the area, though the task was too
complicated to carry out completely in any but my
own. Often men were lost to view entirely when
they went to hospital; sometimes it transpired
months later that a certain man had died or been assigned
to another unit or sent back to the States.[63]
But little by little the facts all came to light. Even
here humorous incidents would occur, such as the
time when I read a list of dead from their unit at one
battalion service, only to have one of the men on
the list speak up: “Why, I’m not dead, Chaplain!”
It transpired that this man had been wounded on
the head in an advance and had been reported as
dead by two comrades who had seen him fall. So
I had him in my records as “killed in action—grave
unknown,” when he was actually in the hospital, recovering
slowly but completely. If he had been returned
from the hospital to another division, as was
often the case, I might never have known his fate.

In spite of such conditions I found the exact
graves of all but three of the men on my list, and in
the entire division, with its almost 2,000 dead, only
fifteen graves were unknown at the time we returned.
This was largely due to the untiring efforts of Lieutenant
Summerfield S. Curtiss, the Division Burial
Officer, who was my room-mate in Corbie and with
whose methods I became familiar at that time.
With the coöperation of the various chaplains and
line officers, he was able to inspect and certify to the
valuables left by men killed in action, to record
every grave, and in the few instances where both
identification tags and personal acquaintances were
lacking, to take the finger-prints of the men before
burial and thus preserve the only remaining traces
of identity.

At this time I had the opportunity of seeing our
division reviewed by General Pershing. The review
was held at the Belgian Camp near Le Mans in
massed formation. The men marched by in heavy
masses; the General bestowed decorations on over[64]
a hundred heroes, including six Jewish boys; at the
end he gave the officers an informal talk, telling us of
the special need that existed for keeping up morale
during the tedious period of waiting to go home.

That very subject had been discussed only a few
days before by the chaplains of the division, meeting
with General O’Ryan for the purpose. Chaplains’
meetings were frequent, under the call of the Senior
Chaplain, Almon A. Jaynes, where we took up not
only details, such as arrangement of services in the
various units, but also the broader moral and educational
problems. The General’s interest in our
work and our aims was evident in every word
spoken at the meeting, especially his searching queries
as to drunkenness, dissatisfaction, and remedies
for such evils as we brought out.

The three months of waiting had been in many
ways harder than the previous months of battle.
Interest in our military purpose was gone; the men
had few amusements and much work to fill in their
time. We had very little athletic or educational
effort; that was prevented by our constant expectation
of an early departure. Mail service was often
bad, especially for the men who had been transferred
repeatedly. Pay was unreliable when a man had
been transferred or sent to hospital and his records
lost or mixed up. And the French winter is a rainy
season, with occasional days of clear cold. No
wonder that the soldiers were disgusted with France,
war, army and everything else. In the midst of
this growing irritation, their pet phrase became,
“Little old U. S. A. is good enough for me.”

The average soldier did not meet the better class
of French people, only the peasants and the prostitutes[65]
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[66]
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[67]
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.[68]
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.

[69]

CHAPTER V

AT THE AMERICAN EMBARKATION CENTER

When I knew for certain that I was to remain
in France I asked for my two weeks’
leave and departed for the Riviera via
Paris. It was my fourth visit to the metropolis,
a city which grows only more wonderful at every
view. Its boulevards and parks, public buildings
and shops were always attractive; in addition, the
art treasures were now beginning to come back to
their places, and the crowds were taking on the
gaiety of peace time in the brilliantly lighted streets,
so different from the sober groups and dismal streets
during the war. This trip carried me beyond to a
land of myriad attractions and surpassing loveliness.
The mediæval monuments of Avignon, the
Roman antiquities of Arles and Nimes, the splendid
modern city of Marseilles, Toulon with its quaint
streets and charming harbor, Hyères of the palm
trees, and on to Cannes, to Nice, that greater Atlantic
City, Grasse with its flowers and perfumes,
and Monte Carlo, garden spot of the whole—all
blended in a mosaic whose brilliant colors can never
fade. Overhanging mountains and sub-tropical sea
together unite all the types of attraction of all beautiful
lands the world over. The palms and flowers
never seemed quite real to me, while one was quite
bewildered by the works of man—ancient monuments,[70]
mediæval art, and the most modern trappings
of contemporary play and luxury.

At Cannes I met Captain Limburger, in charge
of the Motor Transportation Corps there, who
helped me to reach the officers’ convalescent hospital
at Hyères to search for a friend. The trip of
eighty-five miles by side-car was the bright particular
spot in the whole gorgeous festival of the
Coast of Azure, up the heights of the Maritime Alps
into the clouds and down again to the edge of the
blue inland sea, past ruined castles of the Roman
time and through the quaint southern villages of
nowadays; ending finally at the hospital, which
turned out to be the San Salvador, one of the most
splendid winter hotels on the Mediterranean. I
even heard Francis Macmillan, a captain in the intelligence
corps, give a violin concert for the officers
during my one evening there.

Nice and the surrounding territory were crowded
by Americans, as it was the most popular leave
area for the American army. The great casino on
the pier was the Y. M. C. A. for enlisted men, while
the officers had their club on the square. In fact,
all the arrangements by the “Y” in the various
leave areas were magnificent. This, probably its
most successful single piece of work, has hardly
received the attention it deserves. I found the same
to be true of every leave area I visited, including
Grenoble, where I stopped for a day among the
Alps on my return trip. Altogether the brief fourteen
days were one of those unforgettable experiences
which linger in the memory. One of the fine
achievements of the army was that it was able to
give an experience such as this to many thousands[71]
of officers and enlisted men, for their own elevation
and their greater knowledge of France.

I should like to emphasize, if I could, the importance
of the leave areas for the morale of the troops
and their better appreciation of France. During
actual hostilities men were willing to give up their
leave, especially Americans who could not visit their
homes but wanted only a change. After the war,
however, military discipline became constantly more
irksome to the soldiers, and the week or two without
orders, in a real hotel with sheets and tablecloths,
sight-seeing or merely resting, was the one
thing necessary to bring them back to their units
content to work and wait till their turn came to go
back home. It was also a rare opportunity to see
the best side of France and the French, when they
had seen only the worst. No soldier admired the
France of the war zone, with its ruined villages, its
waste stretches, and its shell holes. Neither did
he care for the France of the rest areas, where
he knew only the smallest villages, with the least
attractive people to a young progressive from the
western world. Now he was able to enjoy the
beauty and luxury of that older and more sophisticated
civilization which always considered him either
an amiable savage or a spoiled child.

The trip back to Paris and Le Mans was an experience
in itself. I met three young and congenial
medical officers on the train, with whom I traveled
the rest of the way, stopping off for a half day at
the little known town of Digne in the Basse Alps,
where we saw the ancient church with its crypt, the
art gallery with its painters of local prominence,
and the old Roman sulphur baths, still used to-day.[72]
Another day at Grenoble brought us into the heart
of the French Alps. We reveled in the city with
the snow-caps about. I felt the usual thrill at the
tomb of the Chevalier Bayard, and more than ordinary
pleasure in the beauty of the city itself.

I now settled down at Le Mans for the work of the
Embarkation Center. Le Mans is too well known to
Americans who have recently been in France to require
much description. It is a city of about 75,000
people, with the customary narrow streets in the
heart of the town, the fine parks and boulevards of
every French city, and the very interesting cathedral
overlooking the whole. There are fragments of
the old Roman walls of the third century, and as
an ironic contrast a fine street running through a
tunnel which is named after Wilbur Wright, whose
decisive experiments in aërial navigation were
carried on nearby. My billet was a pleasant home
opposite the very lovely park, the English Gardens,
and my landlady a tiny old gentlewoman, who used
to bring me a French breakfast and a French newspaper
every morning, and indulge in the most formal
compliments, reminding me of a romance of the
Third Empire. And for some time Le Mans was
the center of 200,000 American troops on their way
home!

Instead of one division to cover, I now had from
three to six, varying as units came from their old
locations and departed on their way to America.
And if it had been impossible to cover one division
thoroughly, in a great area such as this a chaplain
could do only day labor. I traveled from one point
to another, had a schedule of services almost every
night of the week in a different camp, visited the[73]
transient divisions as they came in, and thus came
into the intimate contact with the men by which
alone I could be of use to them. The territory was
an immense one, though much of the time I did not
have to cover it alone. The 77th and 26th Divisions
had Jewish chaplains while they were with us;
Chaplain James G. Heller was associated with me
until he was transferred to the Second Army (in
fact, he was in Le Mans while I was still with the
27th), and after his departure Rabbi Reuben Kaufman
of the J. W. B. was assigned to religious work
under my direction. But even so the task was staggering.
So many regiments and companies scattered
over an area eighty miles long and sixty miles
wide was no feasible proposition, even with the best
of cars and a sergeant to drive it for me.

In addition to the billeting accommodations in
every village, the area contained several large camps
of importance. The Classification Camp, within the
city, was an old French barracks turned over to our
use, which housed a constantly changing stream of
casuals and replacements, flowing from hospitals,
camps and schools toward their various units. The
Spur Camp held a large group of construction units,
engineers and bakers. The Forwarding Camp was
a replica of a training camp at home, and contained
a division at a time, at first in training, later in
transit toward the ports. The Belgian Camp,
originally built for Belgian refugees, now had long
rows of wooden barracks for soldiers, a huge and
always busy rifle range, and special camps of various
types, including one for venereal patients, who
underwent a mixture of medical treatment and discipline.[74]

The purpose of the Embarkation Center was to
provide a stopping place on the way to the busy
ports of Brest and St. Nazaire, where the men might
be deloused, have fresh clothing and equipment issued
to them, undergo thorough inspections of every
kind, and in all ways be divested of the effects of
war and prepared to return to America. This task
usually took a month or more, but sometimes a
division had been partially equipped in its former
area and if the ships happened to be ready it might
stay in our area less than a week. On the other
hand, it might not pass the various inspections at
once, or at the time the transportation home might
be lacking, and hence its departure would be delayed
time and again. This uncertainty of tenure
made all work very difficult, especially work such
as the chaplains’ which depended entirely on personal
contact.

The problem of these divisions, as of the 27th,
was chiefly to preserve the splendid morale of the
front while the men were in the dreary tedium of
waiting. This was done by cutting down the drill
to an hour a day, which made enough work in addition
to the delousing, inspecting and other necessary
activities. The rest of the time was devoted
to athletics, an educational program, and a great
amount of entertainment, all three under the Welfare
Officer appointed by the commanding general
of the Embarkation Area, while all the welfare agencies
contributed to these various ends under his
general supervision. My work, of course, was directly
under the Senior Chaplain, according to army
regulation. And as the various units moved toward
their goal more rapidly and more steadily, the need[75]
for special efforts to keep up morale grew less.
Men keep up their own morale when they really
know they are going home; the difficulties had been
largely caused by the complete uncertainty and endless
delays.

Such success as I had was due very largely to the
excellent coöperation of the Jewish Welfare
Board. Sergeant Charles Rivitz, who had charge of
the work in the area, was deeply interested in the
welfare of the boys and shared the resources of the
organization freely with me in my work. I had
always found this same attitude; the J. W. B. furnished
me a car, an allowance for welfare work, an
office in its building, and offered its rooms for
services in the various camps. Where it had no
huts, I was accorded the same privilege by the
Y. M. C. A. Whenever its aid fell short, it was because
it had no more to give. By this time Le Mans
had a large and active group of J. W. B. workers,
both men and girls, with their center in the city and
huts in many surrounding points. I found the
workers’ mess the most friendly and pleasant in
the city, quite as congenial as the one at the Junior
Officers’ Club, which I often frequented.

Even in the stress and turmoil of the Le Mans
area (“the madhouse,” as the boys called it) striking
or humorous personalities appeared from time
to time. There was Abie, the wandering musician,
a little Jew who had a gift for rag-time but no great
intelligence, military or otherwise. Abie had gone
to France with a replacement unit, was located
near Le Mans and spent his spare time playing for
the Y. M. C. A. and the officers’ dances. When his
unit moved toward the front to be incorporated in[76]
some fighting division, he stayed behind, not as a
deserter, but to play the piano for the “outfits”
that followed. He managed even to live at the local
hotel by the tips they gave him. After that time he
reported, giving his full story in detail, to every
commanding officer who entered the village, always
to be given enough to eat, but never accepted into
any unit as he had no transfer from his original
one. At last his story got abroad, he was brought
in by the Criminal Investigation Department and
investigated, only to prove the truth of his every
word. So Abie, happy once more, was stationed in
the Classification Camp and detailed to the Jewish
Welfare Board as a pianist, improvising his rag-time
adaptations of serious music and getting many
privileges and a steady income for doing the work
he enjoyed best.

A different sort of man was the soldier in a famous
fighting division, who sought a private interview
with me. It seems that in the advance on the St.
Mihiel sector he had rescued a Torah, a scroll of
the Law, from a burning synagogue. Throwing
away the contents of his pack, he had wrapped the
scroll up in the pack carrier instead, and carried
it “over the top” three times since. Now he wanted
permission to take it home to give to an orphan
asylum in which his father was active. A soldier
was not ordinarily allowed to take anything with
him besides the regulation equipment and such small
souvenirs as might occupy little room, but in this
case a kindly colonel became interested and the
Torah went to America with the company records.

The great event of my service in Le Mans was
our Passover celebration on April 14th, 15th and[77]
16th, 1919. The general order for Passover furloughs
read:

“Where it will not interfere with the public service,
members of the Jewish faith serving with the American
Expeditionary Forces will be excused from all duty from
noon, April 14th, to midnight, April 16th, 1919, and,
where deemed practicable, granted passes to enable them
to observe the Passover in their customary manner.”

Among the central points designated for Passover
leaves was Le Mans, and the Jewish Welfare
Board and I labored to arrange a full celebration for
the thousand Jewish soldiers who came in from
four different divisions. Quarters were provided
in the Classification Camp for all the men who did
not have the money or the previous arrangements
for hotel rooms, as well as full accommodations for
the Passover feast, the Seder. The Jewish Welfare
Board obtained full supplies of Matzoth, unleavened
bread, as well as Haggadoth, or special prayer books
for the Seder.

The spirit was as strong a contrast as possible
to that of my other great service at the fall holydays.
Among our congregation were two men from the
isolated post of military police at St. Calais, fifty
miles to the east, and five from among the students
at the University of Rennes, a hundred miles west.
We had a number of officers among us, while five
French families, several Jews in the horizon blue
of the French army, and two in the Russian uniform—labor
battalions, since Russia had withdrawn
from the war—worshiped beside us. And
when the crowd began to assemble, the first men
I saw were a group of engineers whom I had not[78]
seen since Atonement Day, seven months before.
They were on the way home now, their presence
emphasizing more strongly than anything else the
change that had come to us and the world in the intervening
time. Again there were the meetings of
friends and brothers, but without the pang of parting
afterward. One of the most touching features
of the Seder was the large number of requests that
I should inquire whether Sergeant Levi or Private
Isaacs was present. Then how the whole gathering
would be electrified when a voice cried out,
“Here,” and cousins or comrades who had not
known even of each other’s safety were able to exchange
festal greetings and rejoice together.

For the two and a half days’ leave the Jewish
Welfare Board and I tried to keep the men busy,
with something for every taste. The full program
included a Seder, four services, a literary program,
a vaudeville show, a boxing exhibition, two dances
and a movie. All were well patronized, for the
soldier had a cultivated taste in diversion, especially
after the armistice. But certainly the most
popular of all was the Seder. The soup with
matzah balls, the fish, in fact the entire menu made
them think of home. We held the dinner in an
army mess hall, standing at the breast-high tables.
The altar with two candles and the symbols of the
feast was at the center of the low-roofed unwalled
structure. Toward evening the rain, so typical of
winter in western France, ceased; the sun came out,
and its last level rays shone directly upon Rabbi
Kaufman and his little altar. It was a scene never
to be forgotten, a feast of deepest joy mingled with
solemnity. Afterward we adjourned to the Theatre[79]
Municipale for a full religious service with a sermon.
Two of the shows of the festival leave were too
big for the hall of the Jewish Welfare Board, so
we were offered the Y. D. Hut, the great auditorium
of the Y. M. C. A., which had been named after
the famous 26th Division. One of these entertainments
was the last performance in France of the
“Liberty Players” of the 77th Division, who were
about to leave for the States that very week.

Finally my work in France drew to a close. On
the first of May, 1919, I received the orders for
which I had been hoping so long. I was to be relieved
and sent home to America. Rabbis in the
uniform of the Jewish Welfare Board were now
at hand, the number of men in France was decreasing,
and my request to be relieved could at last
be granted. A final two days in Paris for a conference
with the heads of the J. W. B., Chaplain Voorsanger
and Colonel Harry Cutler, another day at Le
Mans to turn my records and office over to Rabbis
Kaufman and Leonard Rothstein, and then I was off
to Brest. I had the special good fortune of being
held in that busy and rather uninviting place for only
four days and then finding passage assigned me on
the slow but comfortable Noordam, of the Holland-American
Line. My last duty in Brest was to conduct
a funeral, in the absence of the post chaplain, of
four sailors drowned in an accident just outside the
harbor. We had a guard of honor, a bugler, all
naval, and I had the rare experience of an army
chaplain conducting a navy funeral, as well as of a
rabbi burying four Christian boys.

We were at sea twelve days altogether, being delayed
by a gale of three days and also by a call for[80]
aid, which took us a hundred miles out of our course
without finding the sender of the message. We entered
New York harbor late one evening, and anchored
off Staten Island for the night. There was
little sleep that night; the officers danced with the
cabin passengers, while the men sang on the decks
below. The next morning early every one was at
the rail as we steamed in past the Statue of Liberty,
which stood for so much to us now, for which we had
longed so often, and which some of our company had
never expected to see again. After the customary
half day of formalities at the dock, we were directed
to different camps for discharge according to our
branches of the service. I reported at Camp Dix,
New Jersey, where I was mustered out of service,
receiving my honorable discharge on May 26th, 1919,
eleven months from the date of my commission, nine
of which were spent with the American Expeditionary
Forces.

[81]

CHAPTER VI

THE JEWISH CHAPLAINS OVERSEAS

My experiences, which were fairly typical
throughout, showed clearly the great need
for Jewish chaplains in the army overseas.
Even my trip on leave to the Riviera was
typical, showing the effect of release from discipline
combined with a pleasure trip on thousands of our
soldiers, most of whom needed it far more than I;
for the privileges of a chaplain, just a little greater
than those of most officers, certainly had prevented
my morale falling as low as that of many of the
enlisted men. The Jewish chaplain was not only
a concession to the very considerable body of Jewish
citizens who felt that they should be represented
in the military organization as well as men of other
faiths; he had a definite contribution to make to the
moral and spiritual welfare of the forces. We had
to conduct Jewish religious services for both holydays
and ordinary seasons, to assist the dying Jew,
and to pray for him at his grave. We had to defend
the Jewish boys in the rare cases of prejudice against
them, or, what was just as important, to clear up
such accusations when they were unfounded. We
had to serve the special needs of the Jewish soldier,
whatever they might be, at the same time that we
did the chaplain’s duty toward all soldiers with
whom we might be thrown.[82]

The American Expeditionary Forces never had
sufficient chaplains at any time for the work that was
planned for them. The proportion desired by the
G. H. Q. Chaplains’ Office and approved by the war
department was one chaplain to every thousand men,
or one to an infantry battalion, besides those assigned
to administrative work as senior chaplains
of divisions and areas, and the very large number
detailed to hospitals. The total number of chaplains
who went to France was 1285, just half the number
needed by this program, and from this total we
must subtract a considerable group of deaths,
wounds and other casualties. The chaplains’ corps
was undermanned at all times,—we Jews were
simply the most conspicuous example. Compared
to the general proportion of one chaplain to every
two thousand men, and the ideal one of a chaplain
to every thousand, we had one chaplain to every
eight thousand men, and those tremendous numbers
were not even concentrated in a few units but scattered
through every company, every battery, and
every hospital ward in the army.

The British forces contained one Jewish chaplain
for every army headquarters, or nine in all. I had
the pleasure of meeting Rabbi Barnett, the chief
Jewish chaplain in the B. E. F., although I never
met his predecessor, Major Adler. Through their
long experience and the coöperation of the Chief
Rabbi of England, the English chaplains were well
equipped with suitable prayerbooks and other material,
which I obtained from one of them for the
use of our men while I was on the British front.
Still, even with their larger proportion of chaplains
to the Jews in service, the lack of transportation[83]
facilities and the tremendous rush of war-time,
especially at the front and in the hospitals, made
their actual duties impossible of complete fulfillment.

To cover the enormous field before us was plainly
impossible. The chaplain could only work day by
day, clearing a little pathway ahead of him but never
making an impression on the great jungle about.
When I first reached France, I grew accustomed to
the greeting: “Why, you’re the first Jewish chaplain
I’ve met in France!” That was hard enough
then, but it grew harder when the same words were
addressed me in Brest just before sailing and on
shipboard on the way home. And yet it was inevitable
that twelve chaplains could not meet personally
the hundred thousand Jewish soldiers scattered
through the two millions in the American uniform
through the length and breadth of France.
Under these circumstances we all feel a natural pride
at the work accomplished against adverse conditions.
I for one feel that we did all that twelve men similarly
situated could possibly have done, and I gladly
bring my personal tribute to those others, chaplains,
welfare workers, officers, and enlisted men, whose
coöperation doubled and trebled the actual extent
and effectiveness of our work. This includes especially
the Christian chaplains and welfare
workers; their own field was great enough to take
all their time and energy, but they were always
ready to turn aside for a moment to lend a hand
to us, in order that the labors of twelve men serving
their faith in the great American army might
not be quite futile.

The first of the Jewish chaplains to reach France[84]
was Rabbi Elkan C. Voorsanger, who gave up his
pulpit in St. Louis in April, 1917, to join the St.
Louis Base Hospital as a private in the medical
corps. As his hospital unit was the third to reach
France in May, 1917, Rabbi Voorsanger was one of
the first five hundred American soldiers in the
American Expeditionary Forces. In the medical
corps he rose from private to sergeant, gaining at
the same time an intimate first-hand knowledge of
the problems of the man in the ranks. When the
bill was passed by Congress in November, 1917,
ordering the appointment of chaplains of sects not at
that time represented in the army, Rabbi Voorsanger
was the first Jew commissioned under its provisions.
He was examined by a special board appointed overseas
by General Pershing at the direction of the
Secretary of War; his commission was dated November
24th, 1917. In January 1918 he was assigned
to the 41st Division and in March to Base Hospital
101 at St. Nazaire. While posted there he conducted
his first important service overseas in Passover
1918, the first official Jewish service held in the A. E. F.
He was assigned to the 77th Division in May
1918 on their arrival in France where he served with
a most enviable record, receiving the Croix de
Guerre and being recommended for the D. S. M.
for exceptional courage and devotion to duty in time
of danger. The midnight patrol on the banks of
the Meuse, by which he won these honors, was both
a courageous and a useful exploit. He was promoted
to Senior Chaplain of his division with the
rank of Captain, the only Jew so distinguished.
Finally in April 1919, instead of accompanying his
division home he resigned his commission to become[85]
the head of the overseas work of the Jewish Welfare
Board. He returned to the United States in September
1919, after two and a half years with the American
Expeditionary Forces. Since that time he has
continued his self-sacrifice and his devotion to his
people in the service of the Joint Distribution Committee
for the Relief of Jews in eastern Europe.
In 1920 and 1921 he conducted two relief units to
Poland and carried on their life-saving work.

When I arrived in France, Chaplain Voorsanger
was stationed at Chaumont for the time being, to
take charge of the arrangements for the Jewish
holydays of 1918. I have already described how
these were carried out, by designating central points
for services, getting in touch with the French rabbis
and synagogue authorities and assigning the few
American rabbis at hand to fill in the deficiencies.

I was the fifth Jewish chaplain to reach France.
Those who preceded me were first Voorsanger and
then Chaplains David Tannenbaum of the 82nd Division,
Harry S. Davidowitz of the 78th and Louis
I. Egelson of the 91st. All these men served at the
front, as did also Chaplain Benjamin Friedman of
the 77th Division, who took up the Jewish work of
that unit when Chaplain Voorsanger was promoted
to the Senior Chaplaincy. Chaplain Davidowitz was
the only Jewish chaplain to be wounded, receiving
severe injuries from shrapnel; these put him in the
hospital for several months and occasioned his being
sent back home, invalided, the first of us all. The
others, in order of their arrival, were Chaplains
Jacob Krohngold, of the 87th Division; Israel Bettan
of the 26th Division; Harry Richmond, at the port of
Bordeaux; Elias N. Rabinowitz, at Blois; Solomon[86]
B. Freehof, at First Army Headquarters; and James
G. Heller, at Le Mans. The last two left New York
on the day following the armistice, so that on November
eleventh, 1918, the Jews of America were represented
overseas by just ten chaplains and two representatives
of the Jewish Welfare Board, Rev. Dr.
Hyman G. Enelow and Mr. John Goldhaar.

The twelve of us represented all three Jewish
seminaries in this country, although the majority
were naturally from the oldest, the Hebrew Union
College at Cincinnati, where Rabbi Freehof was even
a member of the faculty. We came from every section
of the country, east, west and south, including
Krohngold and myself from little towns in Kentucky
and Richmond from Trinidad, Colorado. Rabbi
Richmond had the unusual distinction of not claiming
exemption in the draft as a minister. He therefore
entered the service as a private and was promoted
to the chaplaincy just before his division went
overseas.

The chaplains who were commissioned before the
armistice and served in the United States were thirteen
in number; Rabbis Nathan E. Barasch, Harry
W. Etteleson, Max Felshin, Samuel Friedman,
Raphael Goldenstein, Abram Hirschberg, Morris
S. Lazaron, Emil W. Leipziger, Julius A. Liebert,
Abraham Nowak, Jerome Rosen, Leonard W. Rothstein,
Israel J. Sarasohn. Three of them, Rabbis
Rothstein, Felshin and Barasch, soon after resigned
their commissions and came overseas as representatives
of the Jewish Welfare Board. When the great
need for morale agencies was realized after the armistice,
the War Department refused to relax its
prohibition against the transportation of more chaplains[87]
or other special branches of the service, but
favored the passage of large numbers of welfare
workers instead. Rabbi David Goldberg was the
only Jewish chaplain in the navy, with the rank of
Lieutenant, junior grade; he served at sea on the
transport, President Grant.

We were almost all reassigned as our divisions left
for home and as the need grew in various areas,
especially in the base posts and the Army of Occupation.
Chaplain Davidowitz was sent home
wounded, and Friedman accompanied his own division
back. Krohngold, Bettan, Heller and Freehof
joined the Army of Occupation in the order named,
although for a long time Rabbi Krohngold was the
only Jewish chaplain there. Rabbi Egelson left his
division for the port of St. Nazaire, Rabinowitz was
transferred from Blois to St. Aignan, and I was left
behind at Le Mans together with Heller, who shortly
after was transferred to the Third Army in Germany.
Tannenbaum while stationed at Bordeaux
was also, by special arrangement, appointed as
supervisor of the Jewish Welfare Board for that
area; and Voorsanger was mustered out of service
to become executive director of their overseas work.
Rabbi Richmond alone held the same post to the very
end of his overseas service.

As I have mentioned repeatedly in my personal
narrative, so long as a man was assigned to one
division he had some chance of establishing personal
contacts with his men and doing effective work
among them; as soon as he was assigned to an area,
he had to spread himself thin over a wide expanse
of territory and could cover it in only the most cursory
fashion. The problem was larger than the[88]
matter of transportation, although that was serious
enough. The larger aspect lay in the number of
men, the number of companies, the infinite possibility
of individual service if one were only able to
know all these soldiers personally, to understand
their needs, and to minister to them. Every hospital
ward with its forty beds presented forty distinct
individual problems,—often, indeed, more than
forty. Sometimes the same man would need pay,
mail, home allotment, reading matter, and contact
with his original unit and comrades. With the constant
shifting to other hospitals further from the
front and then to convalescent camps, the ward
would always contain a new forty men and the
work was always beginning over again. This situation
was not in the least unique. The hospital
simply represents the extreme case of what was true
in a less degree in every branch of the service and
every unit.

During the post-armistice period I had several
very agreeable reunions with my fellow chaplains,
which were at the same time valuable for our
common information and coöperation. At my very
first visit to Le Mans, on December 6th, I quite
unexpectedly met Chaplains Freehof, Bettan, and
Heller, as well as Rabbi Enelow, who had just come
to the city for the dedication of the J. W. B. headquarters.
I devoured their comparatively fresh
news from home as eagerly as Voorsanger had absorbed
mine several months before, when he was already
entering his second year in France. The
second time was on the last day of the year, when
I met Rabbis Friedman, Egelson and Rabinowitz in
Paris, all coming there as I did for the cars which[89]
the J. W. B. had ready for us. At the same time
Rabbis Martin Meyer of San Francisco and Abram
Simon of Washington were in the city, both captains
in the American Red Cross. Their six months of
duty in France had just expired and they were then
making ready for their return home. We all had dinner
together at one of the famous Parisian restaurants
and discussed war and peace, France, America
and Israel, until the early closing laws of war-time
sent us all out on the boulevards and home. Chaplain
Egelson and I saw the New Year in together,
first hearing “Romeo and Juliet” at the Opéra and
then watching the mad crowds on the streets, headed
always by American or Australian soldiers, the maddest
of them all.

The most important meeting, however, was the
one called by Chaplain Voorsanger for February
24th at the Paris headquarters of the Jewish Welfare
Board. Six chaplains were present, Voorsanger,
Tannenbaum, Richmond, Heller, Bettan and
I, together with Mr. John Goldhaar of the J. W. B.
Our chief object was to work out a program of coöperation
with the J. W. B., our second, to discuss
our personal methods for the benefit of our own
work. Voorsanger was chairman; we decided to
form a Jewish Chaplains’ Association, which never
developed afterward; and planned to hold another
meeting soon, which owing to military exigencies,
we never did. But we did adopt a program of coöperation
with the J. W. B., which indicates the
mutual dependency and the closeness of contact
which were almost uniformly the case. Our program
provided that the J. W. B. should submit to
the chaplain the weekly report of the area in which[90]
he was stationed and should have relations with
the military authorities through him. The chaplain,
on the other hand, was to make suggestions to the
worker in his area, and in exceptional cases to the
Paris office and was to be in complete charge of
all Jewish religious work in his area, although religious
workers were personally responsible to their
superior in the J. W. B. Finally, provision was
made for frequent conferences between the chaplain
and the J. W. B. worker in the same organization.
This program was approved, not only nominally
but also in spirit by all the Jewish chaplains
and welfare workers throughout the A. E. F. I
know that in Le Mans our contact was so close that
Mr. Rivitz instructed his religious workers to report
directly to me for assignment of services and other
division of labor, and I included their work with
mine in my weekly reports to my senior chaplain.

On my final visit to Paris at the end of April I
found a host of Jewish celebrities gathered together
in the interests of the Jewish Welfare Board, the
Joint Distribution Committee for the relief of Jews
in Eastern Europe, the American Jewish Committee,
and the American Jewish Congress. At the office of
the J. W. B., I had a farewell conference with Rabbi
Voorsanger and Colonel Harry Cutler, giving them
a summary of the latest situation in my area.
Colonel Cutler was busy as chairman of the J. W. B.,
one of the American Jewish Congress delegates
to the Peace Conference, and a member of the Joint
Distribution Committee. I met my old friend, Rabbi
Isaac Landman, who was reporting the Peace Conference
for his paper, the American Hebrew, and he
introduced me in turn to Miss Harriet Lowenstein,[91]
at that time the Paris purchasing agent of the Joint
Distribution Committee, especially in the important
work of buying supplies originally sent to Europe
for the use of the American forces. I encountered
also three of the active workers of American Jewry,
sent to represent us before the Peace Conference in
such matters as might concern the Jews; Judge
Julian Mack, representing the American Jewish Congress;
Dr. Cyrus Adler, for the American Jewish
Committee; and Mr. Louis Marshall, a representative
of both organizations. The two last were also
active in the Jewish Welfare Board, and Dr. Adler,
vice-chairman of the Board, took charge as the
representative of the Board after Colonel Cutler’s
departure for the States. Even on the ship going
home I met two Jewish workers, Rabbi B. Levinthal
of the American Jewish Congress delegation and
Mr. Morris Engelman, returning from his work in
Holland for the Joint Distribution Committee. By
that time world Jewry was fully aroused and its
delegates were busy, both at the seat of the Peace
Conference and in the lands of eastern Europe,
where Jewish suffering was becoming daily more
intense.

[92]

CHAPTER VII

THE JEWISH WELFARE BOARD IN THE A. E. F.

The Jewish Welfare Board in the United States
Army and Navy was the great authorized welfare
agency to represent the Jews of America,
as the Young Men’s Christian Association represented
the Protestants and the Knights of Columbus
the Catholics. It was organized on April 9, 1917,
just three days after the declaration of war, and was
acknowledged by the Department of War as the official
welfare body of the Jews in September, 1917.
It was not so much a new organization as a new
activity of a number of the leading Jewish organizations
of the United States: the United Synagogue
of America, the Union of American Hebrew Congregations,
the Central Conference of American Rabbis,
the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations, the
Agudath ha-Rabbonim, the Jewish Publication Society
of America, the council of Y. M. H. and Kindred
Associations, the Council of Jewish Women,
the Independent Order B’nai B’rith, the Jewish
Chautauqua Society, the Order Brith Abraham, the
National Federation of Temple Sisterhoods, the New
York Board of Jewish Ministers, the Independent
Order Brith Sholom, the Independent Order Brith
Abraham, and the Women’s League of the United
Synagogue. In the camps and cantonments at home
it did a large and important piece of work, establishing[93]
490 representatives at 200 different posts and
putting up 48 buildings for its work at various important
points. This great field, however, is outside
the scope of the present study, which can take up
only the overseas activities of the J. W. B.

One home organization must be mentioned in this
place, the Chaplains’ Committee which made recommendations
to the War Department for the appointment
of Jewish chaplains. This was composed of
representatives of the leading religious bodies of
the country: for the Central Conference of American
Rabbis, Dr. William Rosenau and Dr. Louis Grossman;
the United Synagogue of America, Dr. Elias
L. Solomon; Eastern Council of Reform Rabbis, Dr.
Maurice H. Harris; the New York Board of Jewish
Ministers, Dr. David de Sola Pool; the Union of
Orthodox Jewish Congregations, Dr. Bernard
Drachman; the Agudath ha-Rabbonim, Rabbi M. S.
Margolies. Dr. Cyrus Adler, the Acting President
of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America,
was chairman of this committee. They had the task
of reviewing the applications of one hundred and
forty-nine rabbis, of whom thirty-four were recommended
to the War Department and twenty-five were
commissioned by the time the armistice put an end
to more appointments. I have already given in
some detail the story of the twelve of us who served
in the A. E. F., while the other thirteen did their
service in cantonments in the United States.

The Jewish Welfare Board began to take up the
overseas problem as early as August, 1917, when
Rabbi Voorsanger, then Sergeant in the Army Medical
Corps, received a letter from Colonel Harry Cutler,
asking for such information as he had at command[94]
and also how far he might be able to coöperate
personally with the Jewish work. Some months
later, after Voorsanger had been appointed chaplain
he was again asked for information. This time he
was in a position to give a great deal together with
recommendations. A certain amount of supplies
was furnished him at once, but no welfare workers
were sent until the overseas commission had made
its investigation and report.

The overseas commission of the Jewish Welfare
Board, consisting of Congressman Isaac N. Siegel,
chairman, Rabbi H. G. Enelow, Rabbi Jacob Kohn,
and Mr. John Goldhaar, secretary, went to France
in July, 1918, and were the first friends I met when
I reached Paris. Their general work was to study
the nature and scope of the overseas field so as to
make recommendations on their return; incidentally
to this, they were to establish contact with kindred
organizations and with the army, open headquarters,
and coöperate with the chaplains in the field in the
holyday services. They made their surveys during
the summer by constant traveling and numerous
interviews with officers and welfare workers as well
as with Jews in the service. Congressman Siegel
made a trip to General Pershing’s headquarters
and to the sector then occupied by the 77th Division,
where Chaplain Voorsanger was taken into consultation
regarding the problems ahead. The Congressman
then returned to America, while Mr. Goldhaar
was left as executive secretary pro tem of the Paris
office and Rabbis Kohn and Enelow conducted holyday
services at different points. Afterward Dr.
Kohn also returned home, and Dr. Enelow devoted
himself to field work, establishing welfare centers[95]
at various points. Later on, when the army educational
program was undertaken, he became the J. W. B.
representative on the faculty of the Army
University at Beaune. Dr. Enelow was recommended
for a chaplaincy by the J. W. B. Chaplains’
Committee, but was among those prevented by the
armistice from receiving the rank. Meanwhile he
labored in any capacity at hand, for he was determined
not to return to America while work remained
to be done among the soldiers in France.

All this was entirely inadequate for the task at
hand, as we all realized at the time. At that time
the J. W. B. was functioning in the overseas forces,
not as a separate entity, but through the Y. M. C. A.
This naturally prevented the full expansion of
its independent viewpoint or the direct contact with
the army officials which alone could give it standing.
The arrival of the overseas commission made some
difference in this respect, but the J. W. B. was not
fully recognized as one of the responsible overseas
welfare organizations until Colonel Harry Cutler,
its national chairman, had come to France and presented
his case at General Pershing’s headquarters.
There were more than the usual difficulties with
passports and visés, owing to the German or Austrian
ancestry of some of the most desirable
workers; this was finally overcome by the chairman
of the Board vouching personally for the loyalty of
every individual recommended. The selection was
limited, as with all welfare organizations, to men
not subject to draft. With these obstacles the difficulties
proved for the time insuperable.

This situation made it impossible for the J. W. B.
to undertake any independent work before the armistice.[96]
It could only support and assist the work
already being done by chaplains and by the dozens
of ready volunteers among the officers and enlisted
men themselves. The early history of Jewish welfare
work abroad is that of a scattered band of eager,
self-sacrificing workers who gave up their own time
to labor incessantly for the welfare of the Jewish
men in the service. The first task was to acquaint
the soldiers with the fact that there was a Jewish
Welfare Board, even though its Paris staff consisted
only of Mr. Goldhaar, one stenographer and one
office boy. Advertisements in the Stars and Stripes
and the Paris editions of American newspapers and
correspondence with Jewish and non-Jewish chaplains,
American, French and British, did the work.
Letters began to pour in for supplies, advice, information,
and a great correspondence school of
welfare work began.

The center of this work was naturally the Paris
club rooms, in connection with the office at 41 Boulevarde
Haussman. Mr. John Goldhaar was in immediate
charge of both, with a mountain of mail on
his desk from every part of the A. E. F. and a constant
crowd of doughboys outside in the club rooms.
His indefatigable labors and his profound sympathy
for the boys in the service won him thousands of
friends through the length and breadth of the forces.
He continued in this position, with its constantly
growing duties, until Captain Voorsanger was appointed
Overseas Director of the J. W. B., when Mr.
Goldhaar was made Overseas Field Director and put
in charge of the field work. His Medaille d’Honneur
from the French government was earned by the
hardest and most valuable kind of war work. Mr.[97]
Goldhaar gathered about him in the Paris club
rooms a group of American Jewesses and a few of
their French coreligionists as an entertainment committee
to make the boys feel at home. Every afternoon
they served tea—a little thing in itself, but
a big one to lonesome boys without a friend nearby.
It meant much effort, too, on the part of the ladies
themselves, especially their leaders, Mrs. Ralph
Stern, Mrs. Zacharie Eudlitz, Mrs. Engelman and
Mrs. Hertz. Some of them came from the suburbs
every afternoon, rain or shine, to render this devoted
service. Monsieur and Madame Henri Bodenheimer
opened their hearts and their homes, both in
Paris and Tours, to receive the Americans; every
Friday evening saw their table crowded with lonesome
“buck” privates, especially the ones whom
other people would overlook. With the assistance
of these same people hospital visitation was begun.
A registration book in the office began to fill up with
the names of Jewish soldiers and officers, and letters
sent home recorded the fact of their visits and often
established an important connection for the welfare
of the men themselves.

At the same time, among the hundreds of letter-writers
and visitors eager to do something, anything,
for their fellow-soldiers, a few began to stand out
here and there as effective and central workers.
The soldiers were always ready to coöperate; I
found that out from my first service at Nevers to
my last at Le Mans. So it was only natural that
far more of them volunteered for this work than
I can possibly mention. I shall simply have to
speak of a few outstanding names, and leave it to
the imagination of the reader to multiply these examples[98]
many times. In Chaumont there was Field
Clerk A. S. Weisberger, formerly of Scranton, Pa.
“Sandy” Weisberger mimeographed a little newspaper,
the “Junior Argus,” for his fellow-soldiers
from Scranton; organized the Jewish soldiers at
G. H. Q. for services and sociability; and referred
any number of men to the Jewish Welfare Board
for such advice or assistance as it could give. He
was later mustered out of service to become a J. W. B.
worker and met his death most tragically by an
accident in the Paris headquarters, during the festivities
of Passover week, 1919.

In Dijon there was a group, Major Jacob Jablons,
Medical Corps; Miss Bessie Spanner, a regular army
nurse; and Sergeant J. Howard Lichtenstein, of
Baker Co. 339. They organized hospital visiting in
the many hospital centers in that area, celebration of
the high holydays, Simchath Torah parties, and
group gatherings of all kinds. This work was spontaneous
and needed only supplies of stationery,
prayerbooks and the like to make it completely effective,
furnishing a fertile field for the welfare workers
when they opened their community center there. By
that time the two last were also in the service of the
Welfare Board, Miss Spanner in the unique position
of head of the women workers overseas. In Tours
the outstanding figure was Colonel Max B. Wainer,
at that time a Major. He gathered a group of active
workers among the soldiers, used the local synagogue
as a center, and organized a full welfare program, including
Friday evening services and round table discussions,
hospital visiting, and distribution of stationery
and prayerbooks. I dropped in at Tours for
a day to arrange for the holyday services; the local[99]
committee of soldiers saw that special meals were
provided for the Jewish men; and the bills were paid
by the Jewish Welfare Board.

In the Le Mans area, which before the armistice
was used as a classification camp from which soldiers
were sent as replacements to units in the field, the
first Jewish work was started by Sergeant Charles S.
Rivitz of Army Post Office 762 through the aid and
assistance of his commanding officer, Lieutenant
Willing of Cleveland. Lieutenant (later Captain)
Willing, though a non-Jew, had taken a deep interest
in the Jewish men in his unit while still in
camp in the States and continued this interest to
France. With the approval of Gen. Glenn, in command
of the area, Rivitz was detailed to the Jewish
Welfare Board under the supervision of the senior
chaplain of the area and Capt. Willing. Sergeant
Rivitz was not a social worker at all, but had one
source of strength which made his good will effective.
He was a soldier, had attained his sergeancy through
force of personality; he knew what the soldiers
wanted and insisted on giving it to them. He rented
a château as a club house largely on his own responsibility,
and the Jewish Welfare Board soon found
that both the structure and his method of conducting
it were excellent. His chief assistant was Corporal
George Rooby, who after his discharge from the service
volunteered for the first unit of the Joint Distribution
Committee in Poland, and continued serving
Jewry there.

In fighting units also the Jewish officers and enlisted
men were early active in welfare work. Two
officers occur to me whose work I saw personally; undoubtedly
there were many others with the same sort[100]
of interest. Captain Leon Schwartz of the 123rd Infantry,
31st Division, was active from the outset in
his own division and the Le Mans area. Later, during
the time when the army was trying every means
to keep up the morale of the troops, and the temporary
organization of “Comrades in Service” was being
pushed through the G. H. Q. Chaplains’ Office,
Captain Schwartz was assigned to this work as the
Jewish representative, and addressed hundreds of
gatherings of soldiers, together with the Catholic
and Protestant spokesmen for morale and comradeship.
In the 26th Division, the “Yankee Division,”
Captain Bernard I. Gorfinkle of the Judge Advocate’s
office was one of the first and most effective
Jewish workers in France. Captain Gorfinkle organized
an overseas branch of the New England
Y. M. H. A., deriving his first funds from the Young
Men’s Hebrew Associations of New England. Later,
when the Jewish Welfare Board arrived, he
joined forces with its Paris office for the benefit of
his men. Mr. Goldhaar tells how surprised he was
after the battle of Château Thierry to be highly complimented
for the work of the J. W. B. in marking
the Jewish graves. Of course, at that time no such
work had yet been undertaken. On investigation he
found that the graves of Jews of the 26th Division
who fell in action had been marked with a crude
Magen David by their comrades under the initiative
of Captain Gorfinkle.

Wherever a Jewish chaplain existed the Welfare
Board had a means of contact with the men. And
here and there throughout the A. E. F., volunteers
sprang up, establishing their little groups and doing
their own work, large or small. In the 42nd Division,[101]
to cite only one more example, some of the boys
came together and held holyday services during the
actual campaign, and afterward instituted their own
hospital visiting. But then came the armistice, and
at the same time the passport difficulty was disposed
of. Workers began to come; new plans were being
issued daily by the army authorities; the whole viewpoint
of the work was revolutionized and the facilities
suddenly enlarged.

The determining factor was that troops were no
longer being scattered for training and fighting but
concentrated for their return home. Hence the J. W. B.
centered its work on the American Embarkation
Center and the base ports, established a line of
centers in the chief points of the Service of Supply,
and went with the Army of Occupation to Germany.
The last to be supplied with workers were some of
the combat divisions not in the organized areas.
Thus the work grew. The club-house at Le Mans
was dedicated on November 28, 1918, in the presence
of Major General Glenn, with speeches by Dr. Enelow
and the prefect of the Department of the Sarthe,
and a vaudeville show and refreshments to wind up
the evening. Buildings were rented in the ports of
Brest, St. Nazaire, Bordeaux and Marseilles, and a
line of centers established across France, from Le
Mans on through Tours, St. Aignan, Gievres,
Bourges, Beaune, Is-sur-Tille, Dijon and Chaumont.
The headquarters for the Army of Occupation were
at Coblenz, where the B’nai B’rith Building was employed
and seven huts established through the area.
Finally as workers continued coming, they were
assigned to seven of the combat divisions, staying
with them in their movements through France and[102]
saying farewell only after the troops were embarked
for home. These divisions were the 5th, 6th, 7th,
29th, 33rd, 79th, and 81st. When Antwerp became
an important port for army supplies a center was
established there as well.

Altogether the Jewish Welfare Board employed
102 men and 76 women in 57 different centers in the
American Expeditionary Forces. Of this personnel,
24 men and one woman, Miss Spanner, were mustered
out of the service for this purpose, while the
others were transported from the States. Of the
buildings, 23 were located in towns and were rented;
the other 34 were provided by coöperation of other
organizations, 28 by the U. S. Army, two by the
Knights of Columbus, two by the Red Cross, one by
the Y. M. C. A. and one by the Belgian Government.
In camps rough barracks or tents were usually the
thing; in cities the equipment varied, and in some
places was complete with kitchen, dance hall, writing
room, and offices.

I can speak of the large work in the Le Mans area
through personal acquaintance. There the personality
of Mr. Rivitz was the decisive factor. With
his unerring knowledge of the soldier, he established
at once the policy of everything free, which was soon
adopted by the J. W. B. throughout its overseas
work. Religious services were provided, hot chocolate
and cigarettes served, contact established with
thousands of soldiers for the personal needs which
they brought to the welfare worker. As the needs of
the area grew, other centers were established.
When the 77th Division, with its thousands of Jews,
was in the area, five huts were established in its various
regiments and the men provided with everything[103]
possible right at home. In other units where
the Jews were more scattered, the centers were at
the Division Headquarters. In cases where units
stopped in our area for only a few days or a week, an
automobile load of supplies with two workers was
sent out on an extensive trip, meeting the boys and
giving them as much personal cheer and physical
sustenance as possible under the circumstances.

I have described this type of activity several times
in connection with my own personal story. Here
and there, however, special personalities or incidents
stand out in the constant, exhausting labor to which
the workers subjected themselves in the terrific rush
of the morale agencies during that period of waiting
to go home. In Germany at the head of the work
was Mr. Leo Mielziner, son of the late Professor
Moses Mielziner of the Hebrew Union College, a man
of high reputation as an artist and of commanding
personality. Mr. Mielziner, who had two sons in the
service, conducted the work in the Army of Occupation
with the finest spirit of fellow-feeling for the enlisted
man. Under his direction the Jewish Welfare
Board maintained such a high standard that when
the Red Cross closed its railroad canteens in the occupied
territory the J. W. B. was requested by the
army to take them over.

At Gievres, where the great bakeries of the A. E. F.
were located, the J. W. B. was the center for the
bakery units. So when Purim came both Jews and
non-Jews coöperated in baking a gigantic cake for
the celebration. The cake, which had to be baked in
sections, occupied not only the stage but also an addition
made for the purpose. It was cut into 10,000
portions and every man in that camp received a slice.[104]
As the crowning achievement of the A. E. F. bakeries,
that Purim cake received a reputation of its
own.

The Paris office, and still later the club rooms on
Rue Clement Marot, were the entertainment center
for the Paris district and all its many visitors.
After its formal opening on Simchath Torah, every
Sunday afternoon an entertainment was provided,
with vaudeville, speeches or dancing, concluding with
the famous chocolate layer cake made by volunteer
workers among the American women living in Paris.
The wounded were visited in the nearby hospitals
and usually a group of convalescents was present in
the front seats at the entertainment. The registrations
in the big book served to unite many friends
and brothers who had lost track of each other in the
constantly moving wilderness of the A. E. F. A
family wrote in from Kansas City that their son was
complaining at not hearing from home; when the J. W. B.
wrote him, it was his first news from home in
his six months as a “casual” in France. Through
the Paris office and the workers in the field the whole
immense field of personal service and entertainment
had to be covered, including much of the same work
which was being done by the chaplains and in addition
the furnishing of immense amounts of supplies
which we and others could use up but could not provide.

During the high holydays the Paris clubrooms presented
a remarkable mingling of Jewish soldiers of
all the allied armies. Mixed with the olive drab and
the navy blue of the United States were the Australians
with their hats rakishly turned up on the side,
the gray capes of the Italian, the French troops from[105]
Morocco, the Russian in Cossack uniform, and a few
Belgians. During Chanuka, which coincided with
Thanksgiving in 1918, special services were held at
the synagogue in the Rue de la Victoire, the largest
in France. The synagogue was crowded with
French men and women, all at a high pitch of enthusiasm,
and with 350 American soldiers, the heroes of
the occasion. The impressive service of the French
rabbi was followed by a brilliant Thanksgiving sermon
by Chaplain Voorsanger, who had been invited
to come to Paris for the occasion. After services
turkey and pumpkin pie were served at the club
rooms, and while I was not there that day, I can testify
that the pumpkin pie served at the Jewish Welfare
Board on New Year’s day, 1919, was one of
the most poignant reminders of the United States
during my stay abroad.

Due to the intense pressure of the situation, the
actual volume of work done by the J. W. B. was
surprisingly large. The entertainments and dances
conducted at every center numbered fully 5,000, with
an aggregate attendance of 2,750,000. Among the
conspicuous units which toured the A. E. F. under
Welfare Board auspices, was “Who Can Tell?”
the Second Army show, which was underwritten
by request of the Welfare Officer and was one of
the most elaborate of the army musical comedies,
with a full complement of chorus girls acted by
husky doughboys; this production toured for five
weeks and while in Paris was seen by President
and Mrs. Wilson. There was the “Dovetail
Troupe,” a vaudeville unit which likewise went on
tour. And there was the “Tuneful Trio,” led by
Mr. and Mrs. Henry Gideon of Boston, which came[106]
to France under the Y. M. C. A., and gave many
excellent concerts under J. W. B. auspices; I heard
one of their programs in Le Mans and felt not only
the musical excellence of their work, but also the
special appeal of their program of Yiddish folk
songs to the Jewish men; this troupe delivered 81
concerts to fully 60,000 men. The army educational
work received much support in the various huts,
and two of the best equipped men in the J. W. B.
service were assigned to it, Dr. H. G. Enelow for
the University of Beaune, and Professor David
Blondheim of Johns Hopkins, for a time executive
director of the overseas work, for the Sorbonne in
Paris. The bulk of the daily work in the huts
throughout France appears from the fact that 2,500,000
letterheads were distributed and refreshments
served without charge to a total of 3,000,000 men.

The records of religious work are equally imposing,
as 1,740 services were held, with a total attendance
of 180,000 men. The constant coöperation
with the chaplains meant that far more than these
were indirectly influenced and aided. Eighteen
thousand prayer books were distributed and ten
thousand Bibles. On Passover of 1919 the J. W. B.
provided unleavened bread (matzoth), which had
been furnished through the Quartermaster Corps,
for the Jewish soldiers in the American forces, as
well as for French and Russian soldiers. The J. W. B.
even provided matzoth for six thousand Russian
prisoners in Germany during Passover of 1919.
At the request of the military officials, the Jewish
Welfare Board took charge of welfare work for
the sixty thousand Russian troops in France, who
had come originally as fighting units, but after the[107]
withdrawal of Russia from the war had been transferred
to agricultural labor. No other welfare
agency had provided for them and so they were assigned
to the J. W. B. which had a few workers who
could speak Russian. It was rather ironical that
these men in Cossack uniform, most of whom were
non-Jews, received their only friendly service in
France at the hands of the despised Jew.

The whole work of the J. W. B. abroad culminated
in the Passover of 1919. The most intense moment
for us chaplains had come during the high holydays
when feeling was most profound and suspense
at its deepest and when, in addition, we had
to carry the burden almost unaided. By Passover
the feeling had changed, the war was safely
over, the men were rejoicing at their imminent return
home, and we had the Jewish Welfare Board
to arrange our celebration for us. Fully 30,000 of
the Jews in the A. E. F. ate the Seder dinners furnished
by the Welfare Board. I have already described
our celebration at Le Mans, with its many
features in which the J. W. B. and I worked together.
A similar program was carried out everywhere.
At Dijon Rabbi Schumacher of the local
French synagogue, who had been most active
throughout in the interest of the American soldiers,
led a great congregation of 2,000 men through the
rain to the synagogue for worship and afterward to
the Seder tables. In Germany, the city of Coblenz
became the leave area for soldiers of Jewish faith
and was closed for all other furloughs during the
three days. The Y. M. C. A. and the K. of C. assisted
in giving proper honor to the Jewish festival
and proper pleasures to the Jewish men, and[108]
with their aid boat rides on the Rhine, entertainments
in the Festhalle, and all the features of a full
amusement program were provided.

Most striking of all was the great Seder at Paris,
with its crowd of American, Australian, English,
French and Italian soldiers, some of them former
prisoners in Germany, all of them united in the great
occasion of their faith. Among the speakers and
the guests of honor were some of the great leaders
of Jewry, as well as personal representatives of
Marshall Foch and General Pershing. Colonel
Harry Cutler, Mr. Louis Marshall, Judge Julian
Mack, Dr. Cyrus Adler, and Dr. Chaim Weitzmann
were there, as well as many other celebrities. At
that time and in that place the highest honor for
any man was to worship and eat side by side with
the soldiers, who had carried love of their country
and loyalty to their faith to the last extreme of
service and of sacrifice.

Decoration Day of 1919, which was observed by
all France together with its American visitors, was
another important ceremony for the Jewish Welfare
Board, together with its French hosts at the great
synagogue on the Rue de la Victoire. The sermon
was delivered by Rabbi Voorsanger, the service read
by Rabbi Lévy of Paris; and again the great throng
of Americans in uniform and their French friends
joined in the common worship of their faith and the
common exaltation of their patriotism.

In addition to the overseas commission and the
men in the field, several of the prominent officers of
the Jewish Welfare Board went to France at various
times and took personal part in the work. The first
was Mr. Mortimer L. Schiff, who spent the months[109]
of December 1918 and January 1919 in France as a
member of the commission of eleven of the United
War Work Organization, which had just completed
its great financial drive. In that capacity Mr. Schiff
was equally interested in all the welfare agencies;
naturally, he gave the full benefit of his advice to
the J. W. B. In February 1919 Colonel Harry
Cutler, chairman of the Jewish Welfare Board,
came to France. Although burdened with duties for
other organizations as well, he accomplished
wonders for the work of the J. W. B. during his
four months in France. His enthusiasm and vigor
showed at once, as in any matter he ever undertook.
He traveled throughout the A. E. F., observed conditions
for himself, and then accomplished two important
pieces of work. First he obtained an order
from the General Headquarters releasing the J. W. B.
from its former dependence on the Y. M. C. A.
and allowing it to work directly in coöperation with
the military authorities; this was certainly advisable
under post-armistice conditions, and many others
felt with me that it would have been the preferable
system at all times. Second, he persuaded Chaplain
Elkan C. Voorsanger, then completing his second
year overseas, to allow his division to return home
without him, while he stayed on from April to
September as Overseas Director of the J. W. B.
Together with Chaplain Voorsanger, Colonel Cutler
administered the J. W. B. during the period of
growth, and then left him to carry it on successfully
during the time of retrenchment, until finally he also
returned home with the Paris Staff, and the only
representatives left in France were those working
in coöperation with the Graves Registration Service.[110]

Another important worker for the J. W. B. was
Dr. Cyrus Adler, vice-chairman of the national
organization, who reached France in March, 1919
as a representative of the American Jewish Committee.
On Colonel Cutler’s return in May, Dr.
Adler took over his duties for the Welfare Board,
and worked with Chaplain Voorsanger until the end
of his mission, in July 1919.

One necessary part of the work of the Jewish Welfare
Board, after all its efforts on behalf of the men
in the service had been accomplished, was to care
for the graves of those Jews who gave their all in
the service of America. The Graves Registration
Service, later called the Cemeterial Division of the
War Department, had a great and necessary work.
The Jewish Welfare Board obtained in February,
1918 a War Department order that all graves of
Jews should be marked with the Magen David, the
double triangle.

This order was confirmed by a response from
General Pershing on July 29, 1918. Temporary
Jewish headboards were supplied overseas, together
with the temporary crosses, and whenever we knew
definitely that a particular soldier had been a Jew
they were used. Unfortunately, that information
was not always available. Most units had no religious
census, certainly none was up to date including
the replacements. The order for marking
the identification tag with an additional letter—”P”
for Protestant, “C” for Catholic, and “H”
for Hebrew—was issued after most of us were overseas,
and hardly any of the tags had it; I know I
never had the “H” put on mine. Often a man
would carry a prayerbook in his pocket, but if the[111]
bodies were searched by one detail and buried by
another that did not help. I know that it took me
three months to verify my list of Jewish dead in the
27th Division, so that one can imagine the task for
the entire A. E. F.

In May, 1919, the J. W. B. undertook this duty of
identifying the Jewish graves, so that the War Department
could mark them all properly. They have
thus identified 1,500 altogether and where a cross
had already been put up the headboard was changed.
In this connection, a peculiar situation arose through
the efforts of the Red Cross to photograph all
graves in France for the benefit of the families
at home. Such graves as had not been identified
as Jewish still had the cross, and some families had
their religious sensibilities shocked by the photographs.
Hence the photographs in all such cases
were detained until the changes had been carried
out, and the Jewish Welfare Board had the graves
photographed for the benefit of the families. Naturally,
this work is being continued in the funerals
of such soldiers as are being returned and in the care
of such graves as shall remain permanently where
our heroes fought and fell.

The sad death of Colonel Cutler occurred in England
during the summer of 1920, on a trip which
he undertook in the interest of the Graves Registration
work, against the advice of his physicians and
solely through his profound interest in the cause.
His life was a sacrifice to his duty, to the tremendous
efforts he had made for the Jewish Welfare
Board and the other great national movements of
Jewry. He gave, as so many others gave, another
sacrifice for Judaism and America.[112]

On the whole, the field workers of the Jewish Welfare
Board made an enviable record in France. In
this respect a minor organization had the advantage
in being able to choose its representatives so much
more carefully than in the enormous machine of the
Y. M. C. A. The women workers were especially
conspicuous for their steady, uncomplaining service.
Their work was anything but romantic; it was driving,
wearing labor. They tended canteen all day
and danced almost every evening, a régime that
was hard physically and exhausting mentally. Only
those in the larger cities could enjoy the luxuries
which are so commonplace in America—electric
lights, a bath tub, and the other conveniences of
civilization. I have marveled to see them living
for months in tiny French villages or in army camps,
giving devoted service to the men in uniform, without
distinction of rank or creed.

Through these workers the Jewish Welfare Board
was able to render the personal touch which was
missing in much of the war work overseas. This
applied especially to the Jewish man, who felt overjoyed
to meet a Jewish girl from America, to attend
a Seder, to write home on the J. W. B. letterhead.
He had found a touch of home in a foreign
land; his personal needs could be understood and
satisfied so much more easily and directly now. But
many men of many creeds found themselves at home
in the J. W. B. huts. Men learned to know Jews,
to respect Judaism in the army who had been ignorant
of both at home. They often attended a Jewish
service, met a Jewish chaplain, or simply preferred
the home-like atmosphere to that of other welfare
organizations. For one thing, the J. W. B. was run[113]
according to the tastes of the soldiers; there was
no charge for anything, even a nominal one; there
was no condescension and no dictation, none of the
things which the soldiers hated. In the Le Mans
area, which was typical, from 56 to 60 per cent of
the men patronizing the J. W. B. building were non-Jews.
This constituted a return for the thousands
of Jews who patronized Y. M. C. A. and K. of C.
huts, as well as our contribution to the morale of
the forces.

In some areas the Jewish Welfare Board was the
most popular of all the welfare agencies; in all, it
was very popular with the men of all faiths. The
high caliber of the women workers, the personal
touch and home-like spirit of the work, gave it a
hold on the affections of the men. For a long time
the Jewish soldiers had felt neglected by their own,
not knowing the obstacles which had to be overcome.
Then they found their own huts, suddenly springing
up in all the central points, crowded and popular
with all the groups of soldiers in America’s composite
army. The Jewish soldier became proud and
the Christian soldier became appreciative. The
excellence of the work brought forgiveness for everything,
even though the soldier was not used to listening
to reasons but formed his opinions quickly from
the facts nearest at hand. The contribution through
happiness and unity to the morale of the American
Expeditionary Forces was one that did full justice
to the eagerness and good will of the Jews of
America.

[114]

CHAPTER VIII

THE JEW AS A SOLDIER

The Jewish soldier demands no defense and
needs no tribute. His deeds are written large
in the history of every unit in the A. E. F.;
they are preserved in the memory of his comrades
of other races and other faiths. He was one with
all American soldiers, for in the service men of
every type and of every previous standpoint were
much alike, under the same orders, holding the same
ideals, with similar responses and similar accomplishments.
The Jew was an American soldier—that
really covers the story. For historical purposes,
however, a further statement of numbers,
honors, personalities, may be worth while. The Jew
was in the American army, as in all the allied armies,
because he exists among the population of every
land. The studies made in various lands show that
over 900,000 Jews fought in the World War altogether,
of whom over 80,000 were killed in action or
died of wounds. In the British forces casualties included
the names of 8,600 Jews, and in the French
forces, out of less than a hundred thousand Jewish
population in the nation, 2,200 were killed in the
service. These figures, picked practically at random
from enormous masses of similar material, tend to
show the participation of Jews in every army, just
as they participate everywhere in the national life.[115]

In the American forces the Jewish soldier ranked
with the best; he was an American soldier, and there
is no higher praise than that. With all the panegyrics
on the American doughboy during and since
the war, not enough has been said or can ever be said
about him. His good humor, his self sacrifice, his
heroism, won the affection and the admiration of
every one. His officers loved him; his enemies respected
him; his allies regarded him with mingled
enthusiasm and patronage. They loved his youthful
dash and were amused at his youthful unsophistication;
at the same time they were profoundly
grateful for his forgetfulness of self when the time
for action came. I have mentioned some of the
incidents in my own experience, illustrating the
magnificent courage and abandon of Americans at
the front—the youngster who came to the aid post
seriously gassed but proud that he had stayed on
duty the longest of any man in his company; the
weary boys on the brow of a hill, digging in for
the fourth time in a day of advances and fighting;
the little Italian who stood on the edge of the shell
hole that his comrades might advance—but the
number and the variety of them was endless. Reading
a list of the dry, official citations for decorations
is like opening a mediæval romance of the deeds of
knightly heroes. There was Captain Ireland who
came to our aid post to have his wounds dressed and
then started out without waiting for the ambulance.
“Where are you going, Captain?” I asked. “Oh,
back to the boys,” was the answer, “I’m the only
officer left in the battalion, and I don’t want to leave
them.” There was the chaplain’s orderly, himself
a student for the ministry, who voluntarily organized[116]
a stretcher party to bring in some wounded men
out beyond the barbed wire. Every type of heroism
and self sacrifice existed, all carried off with the
good humored bravado of school boys at a football
game.

Among these heroes the Jewish soldiers were
equal to the best, as their comrades and commanders
were quick to recognize. A typical attitude toward
them was that of a lieutenant colonel, telling me a
story of his first battle, when we were on shipboard
coming back home. “I was rather nervous about
that first time under fire,” he told me, “because I
had a number of foreign boys in one company and
didn’t know how they might behave. Among them
was a little Jew who was medical man of the company,
carrying bandages instead of weapons, but
going over the top with the others, a restless fellow,
always breaking orders and getting into trouble of
some kind or another. And when I came to that
company on the front line the first thing I saw was
that little Jew jumping out of a shell hole and starting
for the rear as fast as he could run. I pulled my
revolver, ready to shoot him rather than have an example
of cowardice set for the rest. But I was surprised
to see him turn aside suddenly and jump into
another shell hole, and when I went over there I
found him hard at work bandaging up another
wounded soldier. He was simply doing his duty
under fire, absolutely without sign of fear as he
tended the boys who were hurt. I was sorry I had
misjudged him so badly and watched his work after
that, with the result that I was later able to recommend
him for a decoration.”

Ignorance, suspicion, ripening with knowledge[117]
into understanding and admiration—that was the
usual course of events. I quote Colonel Whittlesey,
commander of the famous “Lost Battalion” of
the 308th Infantry, a New York unit with a
very large proportion of Jews: “As to the Jewish
boys in the Battalion, I cannot recall many of
them by name, but certain figures stand out
simply because they are so unexpected. The ordinary
run of soldiers, whether Jews, Irish, or Americans—the
big, husky chaps who simply do what they
are expected to do—naturally pass from our memory.
It is the odd figures who stick in your mind.
There was one chap for example (Herschkovitz was
his name) who seemed the worst possible material
from which to make soldier-stuff. He was thick-set,
stupid looking, extremely foreign, thoroughly East
Side, and yet, one day when we were holding the
bank of the Vesle, and it became necessary to send
runners to communicate with our commands, Herschkovitz
was the only man who volunteered for the
job. It was a nasty physical job. It would have
been a difficult thing if it had not been under fire, because
it meant cutting through under-brush, up hill
and down hill. Under fire this became almost impossible,
and the boys knew it, so none of them cared
for the job, but Herschkovitz made the trip four
times that day. What was it? Well, just plain
pluck, that’s all. There were a great many fellows
of this type—East Siders of whom the regular army
men expected nothing at all—but the 77th Division
just seemed equal to anything….”

In the same unit was Private Abraham Krotoshinsky,
who was awarded the D. S. C. for bearing
the message which informed the division of the exact
location of the unit, and was instrumental in releasing[118]
them. Krotoshinsky was an immigrant boy, not
yet a citizen, a barber by trade. His own words
give the story simply enough: “We began to be
afraid the division had forgotten us or that they
had given us up for dead. We had to get a messenger
through. It meant almost certain death,
we were all sure, because over a hundred and fifty
men had gone away and never come back. But it
had to be done. The morning of the fifth day they
called for volunteers for courier. I volunteered and
was accepted. I went because I thought I ought to.
First of all I was lucky enough not to be wounded.
Second, after five days of starving, I was stronger
than many of my friends who were twice my size.
You know a Jew finds strength to suffer. Third,
because I would just as soon die trying to help the
others as in the ‘pocket’ of hunger and thirst.

“I got my orders and started. I had to run about
thirty feet in plain view of the Germans before I
got into the forest. They saw me when I got up
and fired everything they had at me. Then I had
to crawl right through their lines. They were looking
for me everywhere. I just moved along on my
stomach, in the direction I was told, keeping my
eyes open for them…. It was almost six o’clock
that night when I saw the American lines. All that
day I had been crawling or running doubled up after
five days and nights without food and practically
nothing to drink. Then my real trouble began.
I was coming from the direction of the German lines
and my English is none too good. I was afraid they
would shoot me for a German before I could explain
who I was…. Then the Captain asked me who I
was. I told him I was from the Lost Battalion.[119]
Then he asked me whether I could lead him back to
the battalion. I said, ‘Yes.’ They gave me a
bite to eat and something to drink and after a little
rest I started back again with the command. I
will never forget the scene when the relief came.
The men were like crazy with joy.”

In high position and in low the same kind of
service came from the American Jew. This is the
official citation of a Colonel, who is in civil life one of
the prominent Jews of Chicago, Illinois:

“Colonel Abel Davis, 132nd Infantry. For extraordinary
heroism in action near Consenvoye, France,
October 9, 1918. Upon reaching its objective, after
a difficult advance, involving two changes of directions,
Colonel Davis’s regiment was subjected to a
determined enemy counterattack. Disregarding the
heavy shell and machine-gun fire, Colonel Davis personally
assumed command and by his fearless leadership
and courage the enemy was driven back.”

Judge Robert S. Marx of Cincinnati, Ohio, is
now national president of the Disabled Veterans of
the World War and a member of the national committee
on hospitalization and vocational education
of the American Legion. But in 1917 and ’18 he
was Captain Marx of the 90th Division, operations
officer of his regiment during the St. Mihiel and Argonne
offensives, and reported dead on the day before
the armistice, when he was struck on the head
and wounded severely. And on the other extreme, I
notice the case of First Sergeant Sam Dreben of
the 141st Infantry, a soldier of fortune in many
revolutions and a member of the Regular Army in
the Philippines several years ago. Discovering a
party of Germans coming to the support of a dangerous[120]
machine-gun nest, Sergeant Dreben with
thirty men charged the German position, killed forty
of the enemy, took several prisoners, and captured
five machine guns, returning to his own lines without
losing a man. For this daring and important act
he was awarded the D. S. C.

Of the various types of distinction emphasized
during the war, all were as true of Jews as of any
other group. Numerous cases exist where four or
more members of a single family were in the service.
There was the Fleshner family, of Springfield,
Mass., from which four sons of an immigrant father
and mother entered the service, the oldest of them
only twenty-three. The oldest of these boys lost an
arm and an eye while carrying ammunition through a
barrage, but exclaimed later in the hospital: “I’m
the luckiest Jew in the army. Any other man in
my place would have been killed.”

The New York Herald during the war described
an indefatigable Red Cross worker, Mrs. Louis
Rosenberg of North Bergen, N. J. This old Jewish
mother had six sons in the service; the two oldest,
each the father of two children, when summoned for
the draft refused to claim exemption, and having
invested their savings in two small notion stores,
they left their wives in charge of them and accepted
the call to military service. Mrs. Liba Goldstein,
of Cambridge Springs, Pa., a woman of eighty-four,
born in Russia, had twenty grandsons in the allied
armies, ten as officers in the British army, eight in
the American forces, and two with the Jewish Legion
in Palestine. And so one might bring out one example
after another, if one desired, all showing the
eagerness of loyal Jews to serve their country.[121]

The Office of Jewish War Records of the American
Jewish Committee has made a remarkably interesting
preliminary study of the number of Jews in the
American forces. The office possesses 150,000 individual
records, gathered by extensive coöperation
with national and local Jewish organizations. The
success of certain local efforts at intensive covering
of the field indicate that the total number of
American Jews in service during the War may
amount to as much as 200,000. Of these about
40,000 came from New York City, 8,000 from Philadelphia
and 5,000 from Chicago. Instead of their
quota of three per cent., according to the proportion
of Jews throughout the nation, the Jews in service
actually constituted fully four per cent. of the men
in the army and navy. The causes of this excess
are not easy to establish. The draft may have been
more fully enforced in cities than in many rural districts,
and the bulk of the Jews are city dwellers.
The proportion of young men among the various
groups of our population would apply only if the
Jews have more than their quota of young men, and
we possess no facts to confirm that. But certainly
the number of volunteers was an element in causing
this large number of Jews in the service. The records
show 40,000 volunteers among the Jewish men,
practically one-fourth of the total Jewish contingent
and a far higher record than that of the army as
a whole.

In certain outstanding cases this record is even
more conspicuous. The little colony of immigrant
Jewish farmers at Woodbine, N. J., not over three
hundred families altogether, contributed forty-three
men to the service, of whom seventeen men, or forty[122]
per cent., were volunteers. Of the students at the
rabbinical seminaries, who were all exempt by law,
a conspicuously large number volunteered for service
in the line, in addition to the chaplains among
the graduates and the large number of both students
and graduates who acted as representatives of the
Jewish Welfare Board, lecturers in the training
camps and similar capacities. In fact, the seminaries
were almost empty for a year. Eleven students
of the Hebrew Union College and four of the
Jewish Theological Seminary waived exemption for
regular service in the army and navy, including a
number of men with very exceptional records.
Jacob Marcus, now Rabbi and Instructor at the Hebrew
Union College, volunteered in the Ohio National
Guard and won his lieutenancy by brilliant
work in the ranks. Three of the students there entered
the Marine Corps during the first weeks of the
war and served for over two years in that branch.
One, Michael Aaronson, serving in the 31st Division
overseas, was completely blinded while helping a
wounded comrade in No Man’s Land; now he is
finishing his studies at the College with the same
spirit which he showed in entering the service and in
his work as a soldier.

The Jewish boys went into the army to fight.
That appears in their proportion in the combatant
branches of the American Expeditionary Forces.
While these branches—Infantry, Artillery, Cavalry,
Engineers, and Signal-Aviation—constituted 60 per
cent. of the total, among the 114,000 records
of Jewish soldiers in the hands of the War Records
Office the distribution among these combatant
branches is fully 75 per cent. The Infantry[123]
constituted 26.6 per cent. of the entire army, while
among the Jewish records it constituted 48 per cent.
Artillery was 14 per cent. of the United States army,
8 per cent. of the Jewish total. In cavalry the rate
for the entire army was 2 per cent., for the Jews only
1.3 per cent. The engineer corps contributed 11 per
cent. of the army strength, and but 3 per cent. among
the Jewish records. The signal and aviation corps
represented 7 per cent. of the United States total,
and 15 per cent. of the Jewish total. The medical
corps was 8 per cent. of the army total, 9 per cent. of
the Jewish total. Ordnance was 1.7 per cent. of the
army total, and 1.5 of the Jewish total. The quartermaster
corps was 6.2 per cent. of the army total
and 5.9 per cent. of the Jewish total.

The Army, Navy and Marine Corps altogether had
nearly 10,000 Jews as commissioned officers, and a
really tremendous number of non-commissioned officers.
The Army records show more than a hundred
colonels and lieutenant colonels of Jewish faith,
including such distinguished officers as Colonel Abel
Davis, whom I have already mentioned in connection
with his D. S. C. for heroism displayed on October 9,
1918; Colonel Nathan Horowitz, of Boston, Mass.
who spent 27 months in France in the heavy artillery;
Colonel Samuel Frankenberger, of Charleston,
W. Va., who commanded the 78th Field Artillery;
Colonel Samuel J. Kopetzky, Medical Corps, of New
York City, who commanded Sanitary Train 396, in
the A. E. F.; and Colonel Max Robert Wainer, Quartermaster
Corps, formerly of Delaware City, Del.,
who was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal
and appointed a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor by
the French government. These honors were but[124]
the climax to a military career that began with enlistment
as a private in 1905, and promotion to the
rank of Second Lieutenant in 1912. In the war
every one of the four battles in which he took part
was the occasion of a further promotion, so that
he concluded the war as a Colonel. I have already
mentioned Colonel Wainer in another connection,
as the first active Jewish worker at Tours; as a
matter of fact, he organized a Seder in his own unit
in 1918, where 500 men celebrated the Passover at
the same time that Chaplain Voorsanger was holding
his Seder at St. Nazaire, and when practically
no other Jewish work was being conducted in the
entire overseas forces.

There were over 500 majors, 1,500 captains, and
more than 6,000 lieutenants in the American army,
with a full share of each in the A. E. F. Over 900
Jews were officers in the navy, the most conspicuous
of them being Rear Admiral Joseph Strauss, in command
of the mine laying work in the North Sea during
the war. In addition there were one captain,
five commanders and twelve lieutenant commanders.
The marine corps included among its personnel over
a hundred Jews as officers, among them three
majors, one colonel, and Brigadier-General Charles
Henry Laucheimer of Baltimore, Md., who died in
January 1920.

The latest estimates of casualties run from 13,000
to 14,000, including about 2,800 who died in the
service of America. This can be inferred easily
from the branches of the service in which our Jewish
boys were found, as well as from the number of
honors they received. After all, for every brave
man whose acts were noted and rewarded, many
others just as heroic fought and bled unseen.[125]

The number of Jews decorated for conspicuous
courage is attested, not only by the Office of War
Records, but also by the Jewish Valor Legion, an
organization of American Jews who received such
awards during the World War. Fully 1,100 citations
for valor are on record. Of these, 723 were
conferred by the American command, 287 by the
French, 33 by the British, and 46 by other allied
commands. The Distinguished Service Cross is
worn by 150 American Jews, the French Medaille
Militaire by four, and the Croix de Guerre by 174.
The Congressional Medal of Honor, the rarest award
in the American or any other service, which was
conferred on only 78 men in the entire service,
is worn by three American Jews, one of them killed
in the act for which he was rewarded. I add their
official citations, not only for their personal interest,
but as an added tribute to these three heroes, a
glory both to Jewry and to America.

“Sydney G. Gumpertz, first sergeant, Company
E, 132nd Infantry. Congressional Medal of Honor
for conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity above
and beyond the call of duty in action with the
enemy in the Bois de Forges, France, September
26, 1918. When the advancing line was held up by
machine-gun fire, Sergeant Gumpertz left the platoon
of which he was in command and started with
two other soldiers through a heavy barrage toward
the machine-gun nest. His two companions soon
became casualties from a bursting shell, but Sergeant
Gumpertz continued on alone in the face of
direct fire from the machine-gun, jumped into the
nest and silenced the gun, capturing nine of the
crew. Awarded January 22, 1919.”[126]

“First Sergeant Benjamin Kaufman, Company
K, 308th Infantry, Congressional Medal of Honor
for conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity above and
beyond the call of duty in action with the enemy in
the Forest of Argonne, France, October 4, 1918.
Sergeant Kaufman took out a patrol for the purpose
of attacking an enemy machine-gun which had
checked the advance of his company. Before reaching
the gun he became separated from his patrol,
and a machine-gun bullet shattered his right arm.
Without hesitation he advanced on the gun alone,
throwing grenades with his left hand and charging
with an empty pistol, taking one prisoner and
scattering the crew, bringing the gun and prisoner
back to the first aid station. Awarded April 8,
1919.”

“Sergeant William Sawelson, deceased, Company
M, 312th Infantry, Congressional Medal of
Honor awarded for conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity
above and beyond the call of duty in action
with the enemy at Grandpré, France, October 26,
1918. Hearing a wounded man in a shell-hole some
distance away calling for water, Sergeant Sawelson
upon his own initiative left shelter and crawled
through heavy machine-gun fire to where the man
lay, giving him what water he had in his own canteen.
He then went back to his own shell-hole, obtained
more water and was returning to the wounded man,
when he was killed by a machine-gun bullet. Posthumously
awarded January 10, 1919.”

The 27th Division, in which I served, was fairly
typical in this respect, as it was a National Guard
unit, composed of volunteers from both the New
York metropolitan district and “up-state.” There[127]
were about a thousand Jews in the entire division
and seven hundred of them were in the infantry,
machine-gun battalions and engineers, which served
together. I did not find a company without from
two to thirty Jewish soldiers, and seldom without
at least one Jew among the non-commissioned officers.
I remember the time I motored over to one
battalion to organize a Jewish service and inquired
for a “Jewish non-com” to take charge of getting
the boys together. I was told that three top sergeants
out of the four companies were named Levi,
Cohen and Pesalovsky, and that I could take my
choice. The same thing occurred time and again
when I visited other divisions. For example, Sergeant
Major Wayne of the 320th Infantry prepared
the Passover passes for the 40 Jews of his regiment,
then in the Le Mans area, but missed the Seder himself,
staying at his post of duty to prepare the regimental
sailing list.

The 27th Division had several Jews among the
officers of high rank—Lieutenant Colonel H. S.
Sternberger, the division quartermaster; Lieutenant
Colonel Morris Liebman, killed in action in Flanders;
Major (later Lieutenant Colonel) Emanuel Goldstein,
Medical Corps, who was awarded the D. S. O.
by the British command, one of four such decorations
given to officers of our division. Captain
Simpson of the 106th Field Artillery, Lieutenant
King of the office of the division chief of staff, 2nd
Lieutenant Samuel A. Brown of the 108th Infantry,
2nd Lieutenant Sternberger of the Interpreters’
Corps and 2nd Lieutenant Florsheim of the division
quartermaster’s office were among the officers of
Jewish origin. In addition, there were a few, such[128]
as Sergeant Schiff of the 102nd Engineers and
Sergeant Struck of division headquarters, who were
recommended for commissions for their excellent
service but were disappointed on account of the
stoppage of all promotions after the armistice.

I mentioned in connection with my own work the
list of sixty-five Jews of the 27th who were killed
in action or died in hospitals in France, their full
proportion of the nearly 2,000 dead of the division.
The first man in the 27th who was killed in action
was a Jew, Private Robert Friedman of the 102nd
Engineers. Most of our losses, like those of the
division as a whole, were incurred in the terrific
fighting at the Hindenburg Line, and most of our
men were buried there in the great divisional cemeteries
of Bony and Guillemont Farm, right at the
furthest point which they reached alive. The
cemetery of Bony is to be one of the permanent
American cemeteries in France, and I can still see
the Magen Davids standing here and there among
the rows of crosses, where I had them placed.

The Jews of the 27th won their full share of
decorations, too. Nine of them wear the Distinguished
Service Cross conferred by the American
command; one, the British honor of the Distinguished
Service Order; one, the British Distinguished
Conduct Medal; seven, the British Military
Medal; one, the French Croix de Guerre with star;
and one, the Belgian Order of the Crown. Eliminating
cases where one man received several such honors,
fifteen Jews of this one division alone were
decorated for unusual courage and initiative in battle.
I add the official citations of four of these men[129]
as further examples of the heroism of the Jewish
soldiers in the American forces.

“Major Emanuel Goldstein, Medical Corps, 102nd
Engineers. D. S. O., Belgian Order of the Crown.
On Sept. 29, 1918, in the vicinity of Lompire and
Guillemont Farm near Ronssoy, France, he remained
in the most exposed positions under heavy
shell fire and machine-gun fire, to render first aid to
several wounded men, displaying exceptional
bravery and courage, and setting a fine example of
devotion to duty to all ranks.”

“Second Lieutenant Samuel A. Brown Jr., 108th
Infantry. D. S. C. awarded for extraordinary heroism
in action near Ronssoy, France, Sept. 29, 1918.
Advancing with his platoon through heavy fog and
dense smoke and in the face of terrific fire which inflicted
heavy casualties on his forces, Lieutenant
Brown reached the wire in front of the main Hindenburg
Line, and, after reconnoitering for gaps, assaulted
the position and effected a foothold. Having
been reënforced by another platoon, he organized
a small force, and by bombing and trench
fighting captured over a hundred prisoners. Repeated
attacks throughout the day were repelled
by his small force. He also succeeded in taking
four field pieces, a large number of machine guns,
anti-tank rifles, and other military property, at the
same time keeping in subjection the prisoners he
had taken.”

“Corporal Abel J. Levine, Company A, 107th
Infantry. For extraordinary heroism in action near
Bony, France, Sept. 29, 1918. After his platoon
had suffered heavy casualties and all the sergeants[130]
had been wounded, Corporal Levine collected the remaining
effectives in his own and other units, formed
a platoon and continued the advance. When his
rifle was rendered useless he killed several of the
enemy with his pistol. He was wounded shortly
afterward, but he refused assistance until his men
had been cared for and evacuated.” Corporal
Levine received the D. S. C. and the British D. C. M.

“Private Morris Silverberg, Company G, 108th
Infantry. For extraordinary heroism in action near
Ronssoy, France, Sept. 29, 1918. Private Silverberg,
a stretcher bearer, displayed extreme courage
by repeatedly leaving shelter and advancing over
an area swept by machine-gun and shell fire to
rescue wounded comrades. Hearing that his company
commander had been wounded, he voluntarily
went forward alone, and upon finding that his officer
had been killed, brought back his body.” Private
Silverberg received both the D. S. C. and the British
M. M.

One more point must be noted with regard to
these Jewish boys who served America so bravely
and so effectively. Many of them showed in their
sacrifices the true Jewish spirit of Kiddush ha-Shem,
sanctification of the name of God. Time and again
have I heard men give such a turn to their speech,
as when I asked a boy from one of our machine gun
battalions why he had led a group of volunteers in
bringing from an exposed position some wounded
men of another regiment, an act in which the only
other Jew in the company had been killed and for
which my friend was later decorated. “Well, chaplain,”
he answered me, “there were only two Jewish
boys in the company and we’d been kidded about it[131]
a little. We just wanted to show those fellows
what a Jew could do.” Dr. Enelow tells a similar
story of a boy dying in a hospital, who gave the
rabbi a last message to his parents, saying: “Tell
them I did my duty as a soldier and brought honor
to the Jewish name.”

Once again, in the American forces during the
World War, the Jew has proved himself a devoted
patriot and a heroic soldier, and this time he has
done so in broad daylight, before the eyes of all the
world.

[132]

CHAPTER IX

JEW AND CHRISTIAN AT THE FRONT

To those of us who served with the United
States Army overseas, religious unity, coöperation
between denominations, is more
than a far-off ideal. We know under what circumstances
and to what extent it is feasible, and just
how it deepens and broadens the religious spirit
in both chaplain and soldier. We have passed beyond
the mutual tolerance of the older liberalism
to the mutual helpfulness of the newer devoutness.
Our common ground is no longer the irreducible
minimum of doctrines which we share; it is the
practical maximum of service which we can render
together. I was in a critical position to experience
this as the only Jewish chaplain in the Twenty-Seventh
Division; my duty was to minister to the
men of the Jewish faith throughout the various units
of our division, with the friendly coöperation of the
twenty other chaplains of various faiths. And I
was able to do my work among the Jews, and to a
certain extent among the Christians also, simply
because these Protestant and Catholic chaplains
were equally friendly and helpful to me and my
scattered flock. Not by mutual tolerance but by
mutual helpfulness we were able to serve together
the thousands of soldiers who needed us all.

It is a commonplace that as men grow acquainted[133]
they naturally learn to respect and to like one another.
When a Jew from the East Side of New
York, who had never known any Christian well except
the corner policeman, and a Kentucky mountaineer,
who had been reared with the idea that
Jews have horns, were put into the same squad both
of them were bound to be broadened by it. And,
provided both of them were normal, average boys,
as they were likely to be, they probably became
“buddies” to the great advantage of both of them.
Often such associations would bring about the sort
of a friendship which death itself could not break.

One of the Jewish chaplains tells an incident of
the first night he spent in the training camp at
Camp Taylor, Ky. The candidate for chaplain in
the cot next to his was a lanky backwoods preacher
from one of the southern States. The two met,
introduced themselves by name and denomination,
and then prepared to “turn in” for the night. The
rabbi noticed that his ministerial neighbor sat about,
hesitated, and played for time generally, even
though it was fully time to turn out the lights.
Finally the matter became so obvious that he could
not resist inquiring the reason for this delay. The
answer came, a bit embarrassed but certainly frank
enough: “I don’t want to go to bed till I see how a
Jew says his prayers.”

On the whole, considering the many individual
differences in an army of two million men, religious
prejudice was not engendered by the army; some
persisted in spite of it, and much was lessened by
the comradeship and enforced intimacy of army
life. In most commands prejudice against the Jew
was a very small item indeed. It was so rare as to[134]
be almost non-existent in places of responsibility.
It was often overcome by the acid test of battle
when men appeared in their true colors and won
respect for themselves alone. It was occasionally
the fault of the man himself, who turned a personal
matter into an accusation of anti-Semitism, and
sometimes without cause. One Jewish corporal
complained to me of discrimination on the part of
his commanding officer, who had recommended his
reduction to the ranks. On investigation, I found
that the officer might have been unfair in his judgment,
but had recommended the same for two non-Jews
at the same time; the case may therefore have
been one of personal dislike but was certainly not
a matter of religious prejudice. When I found
authentic cases of discrimination, they were usually
in the case of some ignorant non-commissioned officer,
who presumed on his scanty authority at the
expense of some Jewish private. Or it might be
a sort of hazing, when a group of “rough necks”
selected a foreigner with a small command of English
as the butt of their jokes. When men complain
of prejudice against Jews in the army, it usually
means that they met there a group of prejudiced
people with whom they would not have come into
contact in civil life. The tendency of the American
army during the World War was definitely against
prejudice of any kind; prejudice made against efficiency,
and the higher one went the more difficult
it became to find any traces of it.

In the army and especially in overseas service
men went naturally to the nearest chaplain or welfare
organization for any benefit except worship,
and sometimes for that also. From my first religious[135]
service in a hospital with the crowd of non-Jews
and sprinkling of Jews in the Red Cross room,
I found that the men went to the entertainment hut
for whatever it might offer. Every large service
afterward, especially if held in a convenient place,
included a proportion of non-Jews, and invariably
they were both respectful and interested.

The burial work of the Twenty-Seventh Division
at St. Souplet was the climax of coöperation among
chaplains, where the five of us represented five different
churches. Our service was a three-fold one,
as was the later one held at the larger cemeteries
at Bony and Guillemont Farm. I have already referred
to the meetings held by the chaplains of our
division to discuss our common work and arrange to
do that work most effectively together. My very
last duty in France was to read the burial service
over four Christian sailors drowned outside Brest
harbor.

Such incidents as these were not exceptional at
the front or among men who have been at the front
and have learned its lesson; I give them especially
because they are typical. The men who were under
fire together grew to overlook differences as barriers
between man and man. They knew the many times
that their lives depended on the courage and loyalty
of the next man in the line—be he rich or poor,
learned or ignorant, pious or infidel, virtuous or
wicked. They grew to respect men for themselves,
to serve them for themselves alone. The men used
any stationery that came to hand, writing home indifferently
on paper labeled Y. M. C. A. or K. of C.,
or Salvation Army, or Red Cross, or Jewish Welfare
Board; they attended a picture show or boxing[136]
match under any auspices and were willing to help
at any of the huts that served them. In the same
way the welfare workers and chaplains overlooked
one distinction after another, at the end serving
all alike and regarding their status as soldiers alone.
Once when I dropped into a strange camp two boys
whom I had never seen crowded through the press
of men in the Y. M. C. A. hut; they had seen the
insignia of the 27th, and being fresh from hospital,
appealed to me to help them back to the division
that they might return home with their own units.
I was never surprised when non-Jews came to me
for advice in ordinary cases, but I have had such extreme
instances as a Jew and non-Jew coming
together, to ask advice in a case where both felt
they had been discriminated against by their commanding
officer. In hospital work, in front line
service, even in the ordinary routine of the rest
area, we came closer to one another than ever in
civil life.

As I said above, the logical climax of friendly
coöperation comes when ministers of different faiths
assist each other in their own work. I shall never
forget a day in that busy October at the front when
I met a Baptist chaplain belonging to our division.
“Hello,” he said, “I’ve just come to headquarters
here to look for you and a priest.” “All right,
what can I do for you?” “Well,” was his reply,
“our battalion goes into the line tonight, and I
wanted the Jewish and Catholic boys to have their
services, too. If you can come over at four o’clock,
I’ll have the priest come at six.” And so I came
there at four, to find the fifteen Jewish soldiers
grouped about a large tree near the battalion headquarters;[137]
the chaplain had notified them all. And,
as the barn was both dirty and crowded, we held
our little service under the tree, even though the
rain began in the middle of it. Two of those boys
did not come back three days later, and one was
cited for heroism, so that I have often remembered
the immeasurable service which the coöperation of
that chaplain meant for his men.

On a minor scale such things took place constantly.
One day, going to a distant battalion in a rest area,
I not only went to the Y. M. C. A. man, who arranged
for my services in the school-house, and to
a Jewish corporal, who passed the word around to
the men of my faith, but I arranged also that the
“Y” man should conduct the Protestant service
the following Sunday, and that the Catholic chaplain
on coming should find arrangements made for his
confessions and mass. A classic incident of the
war is the story of Chief Rabbi Bloch, of Lyons, a
chaplain in the French army, who met his death before
Verdun in the early days of the war while
holding a cross before a dying Catholic lad. The
incident was related by the Catholic chaplain of the
regiment, who saw it from a little distance. But
by the time the gigantic struggle was over such incidents
had become almost matters of everyday. I,
for one, have read psalms at the bedside of dying
Protestant soldiers. I have held the cross before a
dying Catholic. I have recited the traditional confession
with the dying Jew. We were all one in a
very real sense.

A Christian chaplain preached the sermon on the
second day of my Jewish New Year service in
Nevers. Similarly, I was a guest, with the other[138]
members of the divisional staff, at the splendid
midnight mass arranged by Father Kelley in the
little village church of Montfort. For the first time
in its history, the church was electrically lighted by
our signal corps; the villagers and the soldiers were
out in force; colonels assisted as acolytes; and the
brilliant red and gold of the vestments, with the
pink satin and white lace of the little choir boys,
stood out brilliantly from the dark garments of the
French and the olive drab of the Americans. Father
Kelley delivered a sermon of profound inspiration,
as well as a brief address in French to the villagers,
whose guests we were. The staff were seated in
a little chapel, at one side of the altar. The next
day my orderly overheard two of the soldiers arguing
about me. One insisted: “I did see the rabbi
there right on the platform.” “You didn’t,” said
the other, “even if this is the army, they wouldn’t
let him on the platform at a Catholic mass.” It
reminded me of the incident in Paris when I had
visited the Cathédral of Notre Dame, accompanied
by my chauffeur, a Catholic boy, and I had given
him a lecture on the architecture and symbolism of
that splendid structure. It was only afterward that
the humor of the situation struck me—a rabbi explaining
a cathedral to a devoted Catholic.

Every chaplain with whom I have compared notes
has told me of similar experiences. Chaplain Elkan
C. Voorsanger, for example, at the time when he
conducted the first official Jewish service overseas
at Passover 1918, received four other invitations
in various sections of France both from army officials
and Y. M. C. A. secretaries. At one point
the Young Men’s Christian Association even offered[139]
to pay all his expenses if his commanding officer
would release him for the necessary time. I have
mentioned that Rabbi Voorsanger had no regular
services in the 77th Division during the fall holydays
of 1918, due to the military situation. There
was one exception to this, however, a hasty service
arranged at one of the brief stops during the march
by Father Dunne of the 306th Infantry, and that
service arranged by a priest was conducted by the
rabbi in a ruined Catholic church. Chaplain Voorsanger
is full of praise for the thirty chaplains of
various religions who worked under him when he
was Senior Chaplain of the 77th. Their enthusiastic
support as subordinates was fully equal to their
hearty coöperation as equals.

Peculiarly enough, the Christian Science chaplain
in our division was the only one who found it difficult
to become adjusted with the rest. This could
hardly have been personal, as he was generally respected.
It may have been due in part to the general
suspicion of some for the ministers of a new faith
which had lured away a few of their adherents.
But it seemed due chiefly to the ideas and the method
he represented. He was handicapped for the necessary
work of caring for the sick and wounded by
a unique attitude toward physical suffering, different
from the rest of us and different from that of
most of the soldiers themselves. As a consequence
he could serve most of them only as a layman might.
Certainly he could give no religious treatment of
disease, as the medical department was supreme in
its own field. In addition, he could conduct general
services only with difficulty. To the rest of us a
service meant the same thing,—a psalm, a prayer, a[140]
talk, perhaps a song or two. But the Christian
Scientist could not give a prayer. Prevented from
using his ritual by the fact that the service was to
be non-sectarian, he had not the power of personal
prayer to fall back upon. He was not a minister in
the same sense as the rest of us, and the army had
no proper place for either a healer or a reader.

With this single exception, I feel certain that
every chaplain in France had the same sort of experience.
When I first arrived in France I was one
of thirty-five chaplains assembled at the chaplains’
headquarters for instruction and assignment. Our
evening service was conducted in front of the quaint,
angular château on a level lawn surrounded by
straight rows of poplars. One evening Chaplain
Paul Moody, of the Senior Chaplain’s office, gave
us an inspirational appeal derived from his own
experience and his observation of so many successful
chaplains at the front. Afterward, informally,
a Catholic told us briefly what we should do in case
we found a dying Catholic in the hospital or on the
field, with no priest at hand. Then I was asked
how best the others might minister to a Jewish
soldier in extremity. I repeated to them the old
Hebrew confession of faith; Shema Yisroel adonoi
elohenu adonoi echod, “Hear O Israel, the Lord is
our God, the Lord is One.” I told them to lead the
boy in reciting it, or if necessary just to say it for
him, and the next morning when I brought down
copies of the words for them all I was deeply touched
by their eagerness to know them. These men did
not go out to convert others to their own view of
truth and life; they were ready to serve pious souls
and to bring God’s presence near to all. Christian[141]
ministers were eager to help Jews to be better Jews;
rabbis were glad to help Christians to be better
Christians. We learned amid the danger and the
bitterness to serve God and man, not in opposition
and not even in toleration, but in true helpfulness
toward one another. I doubt whether these men,
once so willing to serve men of all creeds at the
risk of their lives, are foremost in the ranks of
Jewish conversionists to-day.

Much of this spirit of genuine religion and of
equal regard for all religions was due to the example
and personal influence of the Senior Chaplain of the
American Expeditionary Forces, Bishop Charles
H. Brent, now the Protestant Episcopal Bishop of
the Diocese of Western New York. Bishop Brent
utilized his great ability, his high spirituality and
his personal acquaintance with the Commander-in-Chief
all for the welfare of the men in the service.
Assiduous in his personal devotions, definite in his
personal preaching, when he turned to his duties as
Senior Chaplain he simply forgot his own affiliations
in the interest of all religions alike. Catholic and
Protestant had equal faith in the impartiality and
justice of his acts. He was especially careful in
behalf of the Jewish men because he knew that they
were a minority and might otherwise be neglected.
The official orders and the detailed arrangements
for the various holydays were a serious consideration
with him. His spirit animated his entire staff.
Chaplain Voorsanger felt it from the outset. Chaplain
Paul D. Moody, Bishop Brent’s assistant in
the chaplains’ office at General Headquarters, was
animated by it equally with his chief. Chaplain
Moody, a son of the great evangelist and now in one[142]
of the important Presbyterian churches in New
York City, was fond of telling how the various commanding
officers would often greet him as “Father”
or “Bishop.”

It is hardly surprising that such coöperation
strengthened men in loyalty to their own faith. As
the soldiers saw the military rank of all the chaplains
and their influence everywhere in the interests
of the men, as they saw men of other faiths coming
to their chaplain because of his loved personality
or his high standing, as they saw the official bulletins
announcing religious services of different
faiths at different hours but under the same auspices,
they grew to respect themselves and their
own faith a little more. A young man is likely to
be defiant or apologetic about being religious unless
he sees religion, including his religion, respected by
his comrades and his commanding officers. Therefore
this mutual service, instead of weakening the
religious consciousness of the various groups, rather
strengthened it. Men grew to respect themselves
more as they respected others more; they became
stronger in their own faith as they became more
understanding of others. The five chaplains at the
burial detail did not give up their own ideas, but
they did learn more about the others’ faiths, and
they certainly learned to respect each other profoundly
as workers, as ministers and as men. Thus
our mutual friendship and our mutual help became
the foundation of all our efforts for the men, religious,
personal and military. We did our work
together as parts of one church, the United States
Army.

This situation was brought out in strong relief[143]
for me when I met in Le Mans a young French
priest, who had served as chaplain in an army hospital
through most of the war. He was overcome
with astonishment when I told him that, while the
majority of the men in our army were Protestant,
the Senior Chaplain of the area at that time was a
Catholic priest. I had to go into considerable detail,
explaining that in some organizations the head
was a Protestant, and in one division a Jew. Finally
he grasped it, with the remark, “C’est la
liberté.” As a Frenchman it was hard for him to
understand the kind of religious liberty which means
coöperation and friendship. In France religious
liberty is based on hostility and intolerance of religion.
Religious liberty there means liberty for
the irreligious and consequent limitation of the
liberty of the religious. On the other hand, religion
there has meant historically, the domination of one
religion and the curtailment of liberty. It is a
peculiar view, which is paralleled among French
Jewry also. Active and interested Jews have little
interest in modernism, even in modern methods of
religious education; French Jews who are interested
in the world to-day have little interest in Judaism.

We who served together in the United States
Army have a different ideal. We think of a religion
which gives equal freedom to all other types
of piety, which works equally with men of every
faith in the double cause of country and morality,
which does not give up its own high faith but sees
equally the common weal of all humanity, to be
served by men of many faiths. We have fixed our
gaze upon religion in action, and have found that
the things which divide us are chiefly matters of[144]
theory, which do not impede our working effectively
together. It needs but the same enthusiasm for the
constant and increasing welfare of all God’s creatures
to carry unity in action of all religious liberals
into the general life of America, to give us not
merely religious toleration, but religious helpfulness.

[145]

CHAPTER X

THE RELIGION OF THE JEWISH SOLDIER

Much has been written of the soldier’s religion,
most of it consisting of theoretical
treatises of how the soldier ought to feel
and act, written by highly philosophic gentlemen in
their studies at home or by journalistic travelers
who had taken a hurried trip to France and enjoyed
a brief view of the trenches. The soldier himself
was inarticulate on the subject of his own soul and
only the soldier really knew. Here and there one
finds a genuine human document, like Donald
Hankey’s “Student in Arms,” which gave the average
reaction of a thinking man subjected to the trials
and indignities of the private soldier in war-time,
in words far above those the average soldier could
have used. Theorizing about the soldier was worse
than useless; it often brought results so directly
opposite to the facts that the soldier himself would
have been immensely amused to see them.

As a matter of fact, the soldier had the average
mind and faith of the young American, with its
grave lapses and its profound sources of power.
He was characterized by inquiry rather than certainty,
by desire rather than belief. His mind was
restless, keen, eager; it had little background or stability.
It was dominated by the mind of the mass, so
that educated men had identical habits of mind with[146]
the ignorant on problems of army life. The moral
standards of the soldier were a direct outgrowth of
the morals of sport and business rather than those of
the church. He had a sense of fair play, of dealing
with men as men, but no feeling whatever of divine
commandments or of universal law.

A significant incident, bringing out the peculiar
ideals of the soldier, is related by Judge Ben Lindsey
in his book, “The Doughboy’s Religion.” He tells
how a number of Y. M. C. A. secretaries conducted
questionnaires at various times as to what three sins
the soldiers considered most serious and what three
virtues the most important, hoping to elicit a reply
that the most reprehensible sins were drink, gambling
and sexual vice. But hardly a soldier mentioned
these three. The men were practically unanimous
in selecting as the most grievous sin, cowardice
and the greatest virtue, courage; as second, selfishness
and its correlative virtue, self-sacrifice; and
as third, pride, the holier-than-thou attitude, with
its virtue, modesty. The result, to one who knew the
soldier, would have been a foregone conclusion.

The soldier was honest, he gave no cut-and-dried
answers but his own full opinion, based upon
the circumstances of his own life. At the front courage
is actually the most important attribute of manhood
and cowardice the unforgivable sin. One coward
can at any moment imperil the lives of his entire
unit by crying out in surprise on a night patrol, by
deserting his post as sentinel or gas guard, by infecting
with the spirit of panic the weaker men who follow
any contagious example. Selfishness likewise
was more than serious; it was vital. The selfish
man was one who ate more than his share of the[147]
scanty rations on the march, who did not carry his
full pack but had to be helped by others, who was
first in line at the canteen but last to volunteer for
disagreeable duty. Pride, on the other hand, was
not dangerous but merely irritating in the extreme
to an army of civilians, of Americans with the spirit
of equal citizens, who felt that they were doing
everything for their country and resented equally the
autocratic and the patronizing manner. Besides the
soldier saw examples of these his highest virtues
about him constantly. Courage became a commonplace;
self-sacrifice an everyday matter. Officers
often shared the discomforts and exceeded the dangers
of their men. When one reads the accounts
of citations for the D. S. C. and Medal of
Honor, one wonders that human beings could do such
things. And when we who were at the front recall
the utter democracy of those days, how salutes and
formality of every kind were forgotten while only
leadership based on personality could prevail, we realize
anew the emphasis of the soldier on modesty
and his resentment of the attitude of many a civilian
and even a few military men in patronizing him
either as a common soldier or as a miserable sinner.

As to religious tendencies, the soldier had, first and
foremost, hope. He looked forward to better things
both for himself and for the world. He had the religious
longing and the religious certainty that the
future will witness the dawning of a better day. He
had a vast respect for manhood, though his democracy
did not go so far as to include other nations,
whom he very largely despised on account of their
“queerness” and his own ignorance. He had an
abiding hatred for anything which smacked in the[148]
slightest degree of hypocrisy or “bluff.” I mention
this in my next chapter in connection with
preaching to soldiers, but preaching was not the
only field in which it applied. The soldier laid an
inordinate value upon personal participation in
front line work, ignoring the orders which necessarily
kept the major part of the A. E. F. in back
area work, in supply, repair, or training duty. I
know of one chaplain, for example, who joined a
famous fighting division shortly after the armistice,
through no fault of his own but because he had been
previously detailed to other duty, and who found
his service there full of obstacles through the suspicion
of the men—because he who was preaching
to them had not been under fire when they were.
Of course, this worked favorably for those of us
whom the boys had personally seen under fire at the
first aid post or in the trenches.

This very respect for deeds and suspicion of
words, especially of polite or eloquent words, made
for suspicion of the churches and churchmen. We
had so pitifully few chaplains to a division, and some
of them were necessarily assigned to hospitals in the
rear. Only here and there did a Y. M. C. A. or
K. of C. secretary go with the men under fire. True,
they had nothing to do there, as there was no canteen
or entertainment hut at the front; true, strict
orders forbade their entering certain territory or
going over the top. The soldier asked not of orders
or duties; he knew only that this man, who in
many cases seemed to consider himself superior,
who preached and taught and organized, had not
slept night after night in the rain, had not fallen
prone in the mud to dodge the flying missiles, had[149]
not lived on one cold meal a day or had to carry rations
on his shoulder that he and his comrades might
enjoy their scanty fare.

Therefore the soldier cared little for creeds of any
kind. He could not apply any particular dogmas to
the unique circumstances in which he found himself—he
had probably never applied them to any great
extent even in the more commonplace circumstances
of peace—and he was suspicious of many of those
who attempted to apply them for him. The soldier
needed religion; he wanted God; he cared very
little for churches, creeds or churchmen.

In most characteristics the Jewish soldier was one
with his Christian brothers. He differed only in
those special facts or ideas which showed a different
home environment or a different tradition. For example,
the usual Christian minister used the word,
“atonement” with a special meaning which was
understood, if not accepted, by every Christian
present, but which meant nothing whatever to the
Jew, except through the very different association
with the Day of Atonement. So any analysis of
the religion of the Christian soldier would begin
with his attitude toward the atonement, but with the
Jewish soldier this must be omitted—he had no attitude
at all. The Jewish soldier was guided by the
same general facts in his attitude toward the Jewish
religion which animated the Christian soldier in
his attitude toward the Christian religion; the difference
was largely that of the religion which they
considered rather than of the men themselves.

Of course, it was hard to be a good Jew in the
army. The dietary laws were impossible of fulfillment,
and the Talmudic permission to violate them[150]
in case of warfare meant less to the average soldier
than the fact that he was breaking them. The Sabbath
could not be kept at all, even in rest areas
where there was no immediate danger to life. No
soldier could disobey an order to work on the Sabbath;
if the work was there, the soldier had to
do it. In many ways Judaism was difficult and
Christianity just as difficult. For example, I know
of one division where the Passover service was
held under difficulties, as the unit was about to
move, and where the Easter service had the same
handicap, as the men had just finished moving and
were not yet established in their new quarters.
Most of the obstacles to religious observance were
common to all religions.

A few Jews denied or concealed their religion in
the army as elsewhere. Some few enlisted under
assumed names; a number denied their Judaism and
avoided association with Jews, perhaps fearing the
anti-Semitism which they had heard was rife in
military circles. Their fear was groundless and
their deception, as a rule, deceived nobody. The
American army as it was organized during the war
had no place for prejudice of any kind. Efficiency
was the watchword; the best man was almost invariably
promoted; in all my experience abroad I
have never seen a clear case of anti-Semitism among
higher officers and only seldom in the ranks. Occasionally
also I met the type of Jew who admitted
his origin but had no interest in his religion. Such
a one—a lieutenant—who was known as a friend of
the enlisted men generally and especially of the Jewish
ones, assisted me greatly in arranging for the
services for the fall holydays, but did not attend[151]
those services himself. He represented the type
now fortunately becoming rarer in our colleges, the
men who have too much pride to deny their origin
but too little Jewish knowledge to benefit by it. It is
noteworthy that this particular man was stationed
in the S. O. S. and had at that time never been
at the front. Most men turn toward religion under
the stress of battle; those who have never been
in battle presented in certain ways a civilian frame
of mind.

Most of the Jews in the army were orthodox in
background, rather than either reform or radical.
Perhaps the orthodox did not have the numerical
superiority they seemed to possess; in that case
I saw them as the most interested group, the ones
who came most gladly to meet the chaplain. Not
that the other two groups were lacking in this army,
which took in practically all the men of twenty-one
to thirty-one years in America. The dominating
group, however, was orthodox in background, though
most of them were not orthodox in conviction.
Causes are not far to seek—they had never studied
orthodoxy; they were young men and had few settled
religious convictions; they were in the midst of
a modern world where other doctrines were more
attractive. The fact is that their convictions were
usually directed toward Zionism rather than toward
one or another form of Judaism itself. Again,
they were without reasons for their interest. Zionism
appealed to them simply as a bold, manly,
Jewish ideal; they did not enter into questions
either of practicability or of desirability. In other
words, they were young men, not especially thoughtful,
who were interested in Jewish questions only[152]
as one of many phases of their lives. They had
their own trend, but were glad to accept leadership
of a certain type, adapted to their own lives and
problems.

All these Jewish soldiers welcomed a Jewish chaplain.
The Catholics and Protestants had chaplains,
and all Jews except the negligible few who denied
their faith were very glad to be represented also,
to have their religion given official recognition in
the army and to see their own chaplain working
under the same authority and along the same lines
as chaplains of other religions. Most of the Jewish
soldiers had personal reasons also to greet a chaplain.
In many of the occasions, small and great,
when a Jewish soldier desired advice, aid or friendship,
he preferred a Jewish chaplain to any other
person. As a chaplain he had the influence to take
up a case anywhere and the information as to procedure,
while only a Jew can feel and respond to
the special circumstances of the Jewish men. On
the other hand, not all Jewish soldiers were eager to
welcome the Jewish Welfare Board although they
all liked it after it had arrived and made good.
Some were afraid of any distinction in these semi-military
welfare organizations, feeling that the two
already in the field, the Y. M. C. A. and K. of C.,
were quite adequate. The Jewish Welfare Board,
however, made such an impression at once on both
Jews and non-Jews that even the doubtful ones
became reconciled and felt that Jewish work in the
army was more than justified by results. As always
among Jews, who lay great emphasis on non-Jewish
opinion, one of the chief causes of the popularity
among Jews of Jewish war work was its popularity[153]
among Christians. When a Jewish boy found
his building overcrowded by non-Jews, when he
had to come early to get a seat at the picture show
among all the Baptists and Catholics, when he saw
Christian boys writing to their parents on J. W. B.
stationery, he thought more of himself and his own
organization. This same fact refuted the argument
against segregation; men of all faiths used the
J. W. B. huts, just as they did those of the other
welfare organizations. They were one more facility
for men of every religion, even though organized
by Jews and conducted from a Jewish point of view.

In their religious services, as in most other things,
the Jewish boys liked practices which reminded them
of home. Just as many of them enjoyed a Yiddish
story at an occasional literary evening, so they all
appreciated the traditional Seder at Passover more
than all the shows and entertainments which were
provided at the Passover leave. They preferred
to have many of the prayers in Hebrew, even though
I seldom had a Jewish congregation in the army
in which more than one third of the men understood
the Hebrew prayers. They liked the home-like and
familiar tone of the Jewish service on both Sabbaths
and festivals. They preferred to wear their caps
at service and to carry out the traditional custom
in all minor matters.

But at the same time they had no objection to
changes in traditional practice. The abbreviated
prayerbook of the Jewish Welfare Board was much
appreciated, even though one or two of the boys
would state proudly that they had also a special
festival prayerbook. The short service was practical
and the boys therefore preferred it to the[154]
longer one of the synagogue. They understood
that, with the large number of non-Jews at our
services and the usual majority of Jews who could
not read Hebrew, it was necessary to read part of
the prayers in English. They liked an English
sermon, too, although the chaplain skilled in army
methods always gave a very informal talk, far from
the formal sermon of the synagogue. And when
interested they asked questions, often interrupting
the even flow of the sermon but assisting the rabbi
and congregation to an understanding of the problem
at issue.

One of the chief characteristics of an army congregation
was its constant desire to participate in
the service. The soldiers liked responsive readings;
they preferred sermons with the open forum
method; they were ready to volunteer to usher,
to announce the service throughout the unit, or for
any job from moving chairs to chanting the
service. At the Passover services at Le Mans,
we had all the volunteers necessary among
the crowd for everything from “K. P.” (kitchen
police) to assist in preparing the dinner to an excellent
reader for the prophetic portion. The services
meant more to the soldiers as they became
their own.

Another characteristic of services in the army was
the large number of non-Jews attending them. I
have come to a Y. M. C. A. on a Sunday morning
directly after the Protestant chaplain, when most of
his congregation joined me, and my group in consequence
was nine-tenths non-Jewish. At first this
factor was a source of embarrassment to many of the
Jewish men. They came to me beforehand to[155]
whisper that a few non-Jews were present, but I
took it as a matter of course, having learned my lesson
with my first service in France. Later even the
most self-conscious of Jews accepted the presence of
non-Jews at a Jewish service just as Christians expect
those of other denominations than their own.
When Jewish services often have from ten to eighty
per cent. of non-Jews in attendance, the Jewish soldiers
are doubly glad to have a partially English service
and a sermon. They want the Christians to respect
their religion as they do their own, an end
usually very easy of attainment. And while a few
Jews would have preferred to drop the special Jewish
characteristics of our service, I have never heard
a critical word from a Christian about our wearing
our hats, our Hebrew prayers, and the rest. Often,
in fact, I have had to answer respectful questions,
giving the sort of information which broadens both
sides and makes for general tolerance.

At the front, even the most thoughtless desired
some sort of a personal religion. In the midst of the
constant danger to life and limb, seeing their comrades
about them dead and wounded, with life reduced
to the minimum of necessities and the few elemental
problems, men were forced to think of the
realities of life and death. With these eternal questions
forced upon them, the great majority must always
turn to religion. The men prayed at the front.
They wanted safety and they felt the need of God.
After a battle they were eager to offer thanks for
their own safety and to say the memorial prayers
for their friends who had just laid down their lives.
Perhaps the most religious congregation I have ever
had was the little group of men who gathered together[156]
under the trees after the great battle at the
Hindenburg Lane. The impressions of the conflict
had not yet worn off. The men were, in a way, uplifted
by their terrific experiences. And the words
they spoke there of their fallen comrades were infinitely
touching. The appeal of a memorial prayer
was so profound in the army that many of the Protestant
chaplains followed the Episcopal and Catholic
custom and prayed for the dead although their
own churches do not generally follow the custom.

But with all this deep yearning for personal religion,
the men adopted fatalism as their prevalent
philosophy. For one thing, it seemed to answer the
immediate facts the best. When five men are together
in a shell hole and a bursting shell kills three
of them and leaves the two unharmed, all our
theories seem worthless. When one man, volunteering
for a dangerous duty, comes back only slightly
gassed, while another left at headquarters is killed
at his dinner by long distance fire, men wonder.
And when they must face conditions like this day
after day, never knowing their own fate from minute
to minute, only sure that they are certain to be killed
if they stay at the front long enough, they become fatalists
sooner or later. As the soldiers used to say,
“If my number isn’t on that shell, it won’t get me.”
I argued against fatalism many times with the soldiers,
but I found when it came my own turn to live
under fire day after day that a fatalistic attitude was
the most convenient for doing one’s duty under the
constantly roaring menace, and I fear that—with
proper philosophic qualifications—for the time
being, I was as much of a fatalist as the rest.

At the rear the personal need for religion was less[157]
in evidence. The men who had gone through the fire
were not untouched by the flame, and gave some evidence
of it from time to time. The men who had not
been at the front, who comprised the majority in
back areas, had no touch of that feeling. They all
shared in the yearning for home and the things of
home and for Judaism as the religion of home, for
the traditional service of the festivals, for the friendship,
ministrations and assistance of the chaplain.
Judaism meant more to them in a strange land, amid
an alien people, living the hard and unlovely life of
the common soldier, than it ever did at home when
the schul was just around the corner and the careless
youth had seldom entered it. The lonely soldier
longed for Judaism as the religion of home just as
under fire he longed for comfort from the living
God. And the military approval of all religions on
the same plane, the recognition by the non-Jewish
authorities of his festivals and his services, gave
Judaism a standing in his eyes which it had lacked
when only the older people of his own family ever
paid much attention to religion. Thus Judaism as
an institution, as the religion of home, had a great
place in the heart of the soldier in France.

Some of the men, especially at the first, felt that
they were being neglected by the Jews of America,
that our effort was not commensurate with that
which the Christian denominations were making to
care for the soldiers of their faiths. We must admit
sadly that they had some justification for such a
view. Our representatives arrived in France late
though not at all too late for splendid results.
American Jewry was almost criminally slow in caring
for our hundred thousand boys in service[158]
abroad. A few of the soldiers carried this complaint
even to the point of bitterness and estrangement
from Judaism. Here and there I met an enlisted
man who challenged Jewry as negligent. Usually
these were not our most loyal or interested
Jews, but they were Jews and should not have been
neglected. The men who entertained real loyalty
to their faith were usually active already in some
minor way and ready to coöperate with the Jewish
Welfare Board when it was in a position to back
them up. Most of the men, however, were eager to
forgive as in a family quarrel as soon as our welfare
workers arrived in France and showed immediate
accomplishment.

Our Jewish boys came back from overseas with
certain new knowledge of life and new valuation
of their religion. Beginning merely as average
young men in their twenties, they acquired the need
and appreciation of their ancestral faith, though
not in a conventional sense. They are not to-day
reform Jews in the sense of adherents of a reform
theology; neither are they orthodox in the sense
of complete and consistent observance. They have
felt the reality of certain truths in Judaism, the comfort
it brings to the dying and the mourner, the
touch of home when one celebrates the festivals
in a foreign land, the real value of Jewish friends,
a Jewish minister, a Jewish club to take the place
of the home they missed over there. That is, Judaism
means more to them both as a longing and an
institution.

But not all the things which we customarily associate
with Judaism have this appeal to them.
Some seem to them matters of complete indifference,[159]
and the usual emphasis on the wrong thing makes
them feel that the synagogue at home is out of
sympathy with their new-found yearning. If we
give them what we consider good for them, they
will take nothing. If we give them what they want—the
religion of God, of home, of service—and
with all three terms defined as they have seen and
felt them, then they will prove the great constructive
force in the synagogue of to-morrow. The Jewish
soldier had religion; if he was at the front, he has
had the personal desire for God; in any case he
has felt the longing for the religion of home. He
was often proud of his fellow Jews, sometimes of his
Judaism. He did heroic acts gladly, feeling the
added impetus to do them because he must not disgrace
the name of Jew. Kiddush ha Shem, sanctification
of the name of God, was the impelling motive
of many a wearer of the D. S. C., though he may
never have heard the term. The recognition by
church and synagogue of the world-shaking events
of the war must be accompanied by an equal
recognition of the influence of war on the minds and
hearts of the men who engaged in it, and for whom
those world-shaking events have become a part of
their very being.

[160]

CHAPTER XI

PREACHING TO SOLDIERS

Preaching to soldiers, as I soon learned, was
a very different thing from addressing a civilian
congregation. The very appearance of the
group and place was odd to a minister from civil
life—young men in olive drab, sitting on the rough
benches of a welfare hut or grouped about in a
comfortable circle on the grass of a French pasture.
The group was homogeneous to an extent elsewhere
impossible, as all were men, all were young, and
all were engaged in the same work and had the
same interests. The congregation and the preaching
became specialized; the work became narrower
but more directly applicable to the individual than
in civil life. The soldiers had unusual experiences
and interests as their common background;
their needs were different from those of any group
of civilians, in or out of a church or synagogue.
They were soldiers and had to be understood and
approached as such.

The circumstances of our services were never
twice the same. I have led groups in worship in
huts of the Y. M. C. A., K. of C., and J. W. B.;
in châteaux, army offices, and barns; yes, and out
of doors in the rain. I have come to a Y. M. C. A.
and found it full, taking my group for an announced
service to the stage and lowering the curtain[161]
for privacy. Once, in a great brick building
used by the “Y,” I found the place occupied by
a miscellaneous crowd of a thousand men, reading,
writing, playing checkers, lined up at the canteen
for candy and cigarettes. My services had been
announced and my fifty men were present, some
of them after a five-mile walk. The secretary in
charge and I walked about to find a vacant spot
and finally found one, the prize ring. So I called
for attention, announced my service, and held it
in the prize ring, with my men seated on benches in
the ring itself. The non-Jews near by stopped their
reading or writing to listen to the little sermon,
so that my actual audience was considerably larger
than my group of worshipers.

I remember one week-day evening when I came
to a J. W. B. hut in a camp near Le Mans for
an announced service only to find the place packed
to the doors. On inquiry, for such a crowd was
unprecedented in this particular camp, I found that
a minstrel show had been unexpectedly obtained
and was to run later in the evening. So, while
the actors were making up behind the curtain, I
held forth in front, and when the show was announced
as ready, a couple of Irish soldiers and a
Swede pushed to one side and made a little room
for me in the front row.

This very informality and friendliness of spirit
meant, first of all, that one could not “preach”
to soldiers in any case. They were intolerant of
preaching. They did not want to be preached to.
They wanted “straight goods, right from the
shoulder.” They wanted deeds more than words,
or at least words which were simple and direct, of[162]
the force of deeds. One who knew soldiers had to
talk to them, not preach. The more informal, the
more direct, the more effective. A good sermon
would often miss fire completely before an audience
of soldiers when a good talk would wake them
up and stir them. Informality, simplicity, knowledge
of the soldier and his needs were the best
qualities with which to approach the enlisted man,
especially when he was or had been in the actual
fighting and thus acquired a new sense of perspective.
The strongest hatred of the fighting man was
directed toward sham of whatever type, and he exerted
that prejudice without any fine sense of discrimination
against anything that seemed to him pretentious
or hollow. The danger of pretense or dishonesty
in the trench or on a patrol seemed to have
entered into the whole mentality of the soldier. He
distrusted the brilliant orator, who found more difficulty
in winning him over than did the simpler
and more direct type of speaker. He was certain
to prick the bubble of a poseur at once, and was
more than suspicious of anything which even hinted
at pose or pretense.

For one thing, the material had to be concrete,
the sort of thing the soldier knew. Jew and non-Jew
were very nearly the same in the army, with
certain minor differences of background. And
hardly ever did one have an audience composed
overwhelmingly of Jews; there was always a large
admixture of others in any army audience, even
when a Jewish service had been announced. Now,
as to background and memories, our army was too
mixed to rely on them for much material. When[163]
the chaplain spoke of home, the soldier might think
of a tenement home or a ranch-house or a mountaineer’s
cottage. Certainly, only a few would ever
have the same picture as the chaplain. When he
spoke of foreigners, he might be addressing a
group composed largely of Poles, Italians and Irish,
who entertained very different ideas of what a
foreigner might be, but would all consider our old
Southern population, white and black, as foreign.

The only common ground of all soldiers was the
army. The men knew work, discipline, war. They
did not regard these things as an officer would, and
a wise preacher found out their attitude in detail
whenever he could. But this was concrete material,
common to them all. They all hated to be under
authority, but had nevertheless learned the lesson of
discipline for practical purposes. They were fascinated
by fighting, but feared it and preferred it, on
the whole, to the tedium of peace. They found a
greater monotony in army drill than in any other
one thing in the world. They were brave when
occasion arose. They had seen their friends drop
dead at their side and had mourned and buried
them. They had seen comrades promoted, now by
favoritism, now by ability, and held a mixed feeling
of ambition and of dislike for responsibility and the
drudgery of thinking for themselves. They had
problems of conduct, problems of morale, problems
of vision, and they welcomed any discussion of their
own problems in their own language, while despising
infinitely the man who made a mistake in military
terminology or showed lack of knowledge of
the army. Their knowledge and their interest was[164]
narrow but keen, and one was compelled to meet
the soldier on his own ground to interest or influence
him.

This concrete material of the soldier’s daily life
had to be presented to him in his own language—minus
the profanity which was all too common and
meaningless in the average soldier’s vocabulary.
Here again the soldier proved a unique audience.
With all his quickness to grasp an idea, his lightning
sense of humor, his immediate sense of reality
and recognition of fact, he had in many cases the
vocabulary of a ten-year-old child. Many of our
soldiers were from the mine, the farm, the sweatshop.
Many of them learned English from the daily
papers; many from their semi-literate companions.
A few hundred very simple English words and plenty
of army slang were the chief reliance of the preacher,
and other expressions had to be defined as one went
along. One did not need to “talk down” to the
soldier in ideas—he could leap past a course of
argument to a sure conclusion in any field within
his experience—but the language was necessarily
the language of the soldier for either full comprehension
or complete sympathy.

Of course, the average soldier, Jew or non-Jew,
had no homiletic background; he was not a frequent
listener to sermons in civil life. In many cases
the men admitted that they had never been in a
church in their lives. Many of the Jewish boys had
not been to a synagogue for years, and when they
had gone many of them had attended an orthodox
service where they had not understood a single
word of the Hebrew service. Therefore the language
of the Bible meant literally nothing to them[165]
without paraphrasing, except where it came very
close to modern speech. Therefore also the cant
phrases of the pulpit or of the public speaker
generally had no meaning whatever to their minds,
favorable or the reverse. They left the soldiers
completely untouched. Thus the best civilian
sermon may have been meaningless to a group
of soldiers, while a direct talk, even a sort of conversation
with the audience, was of real benefit to
them. For there was no formality about an army
audience. If one made the mildest joke, the boys
laughed out. If one “paused for a reply,” the reply
was apt to come in loud and unmistakable tones.
In a talk to a group about to return home, for example,
I remarked, “I suppose you’ll all reënlist in
the National Guard when you get mustered out,”
only to be greeted by an immediate chorus of groans.
If the soldiers were interested, they interrupted with
questions; if uninterested, they frankly got up and
left the room. They gave more than the cold decorum
of a church; they gave a living response;
they talked with and thought with the preacher.
But the type of decorum one found in a church or
temple was utterly beyond them. Their response
was better, but different in its very activity.

Certainly, there were different audiences even
among soldiers. I know of one preacher who traveled
about France with a great speech on courage
which fell utterly flat on a certain occasion. He
had made the mistake of speaking on courage to
a group of men from the Service of Supply, whose
chief contribution to the war had been carrying
cases of canned salmon and repairing roads. A
certain chaplain had a battalion of recent immigrants[166]
mustered for a service before going into
battle, only to be privately cursed afterward in the
five languages spoken by the boys he had addressed.
For he had made those boys give up their short
period of rest to talk to them of home and mother,
to make them think of the dear ones they were
trying to forget, to put before them the one thought
that was most likely to unnerve them for the terrible
task ahead!

It was just as great a mistake to preach about
sacrifice after a battle. In battle sacrifice was the
most common thing; ordinary men rose to heights
of heroism to save their “buddies” or to assist
in the advance. The high courage of self-sacrifice
became familiar. Preaching self-sacrifice to these
men was useless—for Christian as well as Jew.
They had seen stretcher bearers shot down while
carrying their precious burdens to the rear. They
had seen officers killed while getting their men
under shelter. They had seen the gas guard, as a
part of his daily duty, risk the most horrible of
deaths in order to give the alarm for his comrades.
Such men responded to an appeal on the divine
in man, on the brotherhood of all those heroes about
them, on Americanism, on a hundred congenial
themes; they did not see the cogency of an appeal
to sacrifice.

The profound friendships and violent dislikes
of the soldier have been often noticed. His fidelity
to his “buddy,” to any popular officer, to his
company and regiment, stand out as part of his
vigorous, boyish outlook. On the other hand, a
swiftly acquired prejudice would go with him forever
in the face of many facts and much argument[167]
to the contrary. The relative standing of the Y. M. C. A.
and the Salvation Army among the men is a
case in point. The Young Men’s Christian Association
was by far the largest war work organization
which worked among the mass of the soldiers,
as the Red Cross confined its activities largely to
hospitals and related fields. It was a wide-spread
organization, covering practically every unit and
almost every type of activity, religious, athletic,
entertainment, canteen. But the soldier, while using
the Y. M. C. A., disliked it. The Salvation Army, a
very small organization in both amount and scope
of work, which I never saw in action because I
did not happen to be in the limited sector it covered,
was, however, popular if only by hearsay in every
part of the great army. Now, the soldier had very
real grievances against the “Y.” It charged him
more for its tobacco than did the quartermaster’s
store; it gave away very little, while other organizations,
not burdened with the canteen, gave away
a great deal; it had a certain proportion of misfits,
men who did not belong in any military work, who
considered themselves better than the common
soldier and did not share his trials or his viewpoint.

These facts were all explained later; some of
them were inevitable. The presence of a board of
inquiry in the army testified that the caliber even
of army officers was not always what it should
have been. The canteen had been undertaken by the
Y. M. C. A. at the request of the army authorities,
who desired to be relieved of the tremendous burden,
and its prices were determined by cost plus transportation,
which latter item was not included by the
quartermaster’s stores. The tremendous rush of[168]
the last six months of the war made the task too
great for any of the organizations in the field, including
sometimes even the quartermaster’s corps. But
after the prejudice had been conceived it could not
be shaken. It persisted in spite of excuses, in spite
of remedies for some of the evils, in spite of the
excellent work which the Y. M. C. A. did in the
leave areas. I have mentioned its activities in Nice,
Monte Carlo, and Grenoble, how it provided the
enlisted man with free entertainment,—excursions,
dances and shows, during his entire period on leave.
This striking contribution to the morale and the
pleasure of the forces was almost overlooked in the
general criticism. On the other hand, nobody ever
heard the enthusiastic doughboy mention a mistake
made by the more limited forces of the Salvation
Army, which therefore received more than adequate
commendation for its really effective work.

A similar violent contrast existed in the soldier’s
attitude toward the British and colonial soldiers, especially
the Australians. The doughboy liked the
“Ausies”; he despised the “Tommie.” The usual
phrase was: “Oh, well, the ‘Tommies’ are all right
to hold the line, but it takes the ‘Ausies’ to make
a push.” This was strictly untrue, according to
the terrific fighting we ourselves witnessed on the
British front. It was simply that the Australians
were all volunteers, young and dashing, like the
pioneers of the western plains, the precursors of
our own men. They were independent, lawless and
aggressive. The British whom we knew were the survivors
of four years of warfare, veterans of many a
campaign in the field and siege in the hospital, or
older men, the last draft of the manhood of Great[169]
Britain. No wonder our boys liked the “Ausies”
and refused to see any good whatever in that very
different species of men, the “Tommies.”

So the soldier was an exacting but a grateful
audience. He emphasized deeds rather than words,
and therefore he was much easier of approach for
his own chaplain, who was under the same regulations
as he, who went with him to the front and
tended the wounded and the dead under fire, than
for the most eloquent or the most illustrious of
civilian preachers. He conceived violent likings and
equally violent prejudices, always based upon some
sort of reason but usually carried beyond a reasonable
degree. He had to be approached on his own
ground, with material from his own experience, with
language which he could understand. And when
that was done, he was the most thankful audience in
the world. He thought with the speaker, responded
to him, aided him. As an audience he was either the
most friendly and helpful in the world or the most
disappointing. But that depended on the speaker
and the audience being in harmony, knowing and
liking each other. A man who knew and loved the
soldier could work with him and help him in achieving
great results, for the American soldier, though
the most terrible enemy, was also the best friend
in the world.

[170]

CHAPTER XII

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[171]
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,[172]
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[173]
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[174]
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.[175]

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[176]
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[177]
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.

The control of the minutiæ of daily life together
with the influence over the minds of men in the
army should have enabled the authorities to suppress
vice almost entirely. Unfortunately, this was never
accomplished. Lectures, severe penalties for disease
“incurred not in line of duty,” and liberal
provision for “early treatment” all together did not
work the miracle. The prophylactic stations for so-called
“early treatment” directly after exposure
were patronized by a number of men, but never
by a very large proportion of the number who were
certainly exposed. The venereal hospitals where
sufferers underwent both treatment and punishment
had their full quota from every division which
remained long in back areas, and most divisions
left behind as many as two hundred and fifty men for
further treatment after the thorough inspections
preceding their departure for home.

Drink was a less serious, though more prevalent
danger. The law had prevented men in uniform
from drinking in the United States; in France it
forbade only their use of spirituous liquors, and
even those were often available. So there was a
good deal of beer and wine drinking, and some of
cognac. The last was apt to result in drunkenness
and disorder, but our military authorities had always
the power to declare certain cafés, which had[178]
violated regulations, “out of bounds” for Americans,
and as a last resort the French police would
close such a place altogether. Gambling was the
most prevalent vice of all, and one which was never,
to my knowledge, controlled anywhere. It lacked
gravity in so far as the soldiers had very little to
gamble, and could incur no great losses. But it was
always an easy resort to break the monotony of
army life in training or rest areas, and always a
menace to the type of manhood which we wanted to
see among our American fighting men.

The reliance on penalties as the chief mode of controlling
young Americans was fundamentally unsound
both in theory and practice. The warnings
against sexual vice lost half their effectiveness because
they were usually given by company officers,
who emphasized the danger of disease and the military
penalties rather than the appeal of loyalty or
self-respect. Medical officers and chaplains were
certainly better equipped for such special work, although
probably no human being and no appeal
can solve the entire problem.

All these facts came slowly to the fore within
the few months following the armistice, and we
were able to observe them very clearly in the
27th Division while in the Montfort area. While
we wintered there, from November 1918 to
February 1919, the morale of our troops, which
had never weakened at the front even under the most
terrible conditions, went down steadily during those
three weary months. For one thing, we were constantly
expecting orders to leave for home and constantly
disappointed. We were inspected and reinspected,
drilled and drilled again. Warned not[179]
to begin an elaborate program of athletics, education
or amusement, we worked from week to week
and never instituted one-third of the work which
we had planned and ready. Meanwhile there was
the café and the danger of vice and drink, so the men
were kept drilling through the winter rains to keep
them busy during the day and make them tired at
night. This attempt was neither humane nor possible
and had only the worst effects.

The failure with our division brought the possibility
of a constructive program before the higher
command of the army, which inaugurated one just
about the time our division left the area. Large
schools were started in each permanent division in
the district, giving both common school and technical
branches, with the army university at Beaune as
the head of the educational structure. Such a school
was established in the Forwarding Camp, near Le
Mans, where I saw it in busy operation. Athletic
meets were arranged in each division, with larger
ones at Le Mans and other central points for the
best men in the separate units. More welfare huts
of different agencies were established, with more
canteen supplies from the States and more women
workers for canteen service and dances. Each division
devoted more attention to its “shows,” usually
a musical comedy troupe, with very clever
female impersonators to make up for the lack of
chorus girls. Some of these shows had tours arranged
by the Y. M. C. A. or other agency, and
a few of them even had gala performances in Paris.
Regular religious services and other appointments
with the chaplains were instituted and advertised,
although we had always done this for ourselves in[180]
our own units. Leave areas were designated in the
most beautiful sections of France, as well as permission
for a few furloughs in Italy and England.
The Stars and Stripes, always a valuable organ as
the soldiers’ newspaper, became the constant instrument
of propaganda to upbuild morale. Finally,
the army took over official control of education,
entertainment and athletics from the civilian agencies,
designated a Welfare Officer to control them
all, and asked the agencies formerly in control to
coöperate with the newly appointed officials. All
these were steps in the right direction, although at
times such work was partially nullified by the choice
of the wrong man as Welfare Officer. This was a
position which only a professional educator could
fill at all; even an expert could hardly influence actively
a hundred thousand minds at once. Hardly
any professional soldier, business man or engineer
could have the breadth of view and technical knowledge
to approach them. Of course, when army
regulations prescribed a major for a particular position
and only a lieutenant was available with the
proper training, an untrained major was appointed
and the lieutenant left in command of a platoon.
Promotions were naturally few after the armistice,
and the table of organization had to be complied
with at all costs.

The Stars and Stripes demands a few words
in itself, both because of its excellent articles and
cartoons and for its unique position as “the soldiers’
newspaper.” It was a well-written weekly publication,
which could command the services of many of
the best of the younger writers and cartoonists in
America. The knowledge that the Stars and[181]
Stripes was semi-official, being published under
military censorship, made its news material very
influential on morale. Men believed anything they
read there about the work of the various divisions,
special distinctions, or the date of the homeward
troop movement. But that very factor made the
articles it published more or less suspected by the
men. They knew they were propaganda, written
for the benefit of morale, and they therefore read
them, but derived much less effect from them than
would otherwise have been the case. Still the
writers, themselves soldiers, expressed the soldiers’
view often enough and clearly enough to lend some
value even to the suspected material from General
Headquarters.

After all, amusements, education and athletics
were only palliatives in a confessedly irksome situation.
They did not touch the heart of that situation
any more than really excellent welfare work satisfies
a group of employees in civil life who consider
themselves underpaid and overworked. The essentials
of morale were the elements which approached
the soldiers’ welfare most nearly—food, pay, mail
and daily military routine. Army food was notoriously
bad, army cooks famous for lack of skill.
Part of this, like other complaints, lay in the chronic
grumbling of the soldiers. Obviously, they did not
receive the kind of meals that “mother used to
make” or the product of a famous hotel. The food
itself was usually of excellent quality but coarse, the
menus well balanced but monotonous. This last was
the chief grievance and one that was largely justified.
Most of our food had to be brought overseas
in cans, and it took a skillful cook to disguise[182]
“corned willie,” “monkeymeat” or “goldfish” day
in and day out. Yet corned beef, stew and salmon,
to use their civilian names, were staples in the army
diet. It became a question among us officers whether
we preferred to drink good coffee, ruined by army
cooks, or the excellently prepared chicory of the
usual French restaurant. I, for one, preferred the
British ration as superior in variety to that we
received after we came into the American area, although
it was normally not as large in amount as
the ration of the American soldier.

Pay and mail were notoriously unreliable in the
A. E. F. Pay was regular for officers, of course,
who could swear to their own pay vouchers, but not
always for enlisted men, who required a service
record to have their names put on the pay roll.
When a man is a patient in nine hospitals within
four months, we cannot expect his mail to follow
him, nor his service record to stay at hand.
These grievances were later remedied, the mail
through the Main Post Office, the pay question by
means of pay books and supplementary service
records. Still, at one time it was by no means uncommon
to meet men just out of the hospital who
had received neither mail nor pay for three months,
or to find a man who had been shifted so often from
one unit to another that his pay was six months
in arrears. When we remember the little money at
hand for any purpose whatever, when we bear in
mind the loneliness of these boys so far from home,
loved ones, even from common sights and familiar
speech, we can imagine what a deprivation such
troubles brought, and how deeply they effected
morale. Of course, as I have mentioned before, the[183]
soldier never made allowances either for the difficulty
of the task or the comparative success with
which it was accomplished. The soldier merely suffered
and complained.

I shall never forget the incessant complaints
about that very necessary institution, the censorship
of letters home. The last hope of the soldier
was for glory in the eyes of the people at home.
At least he would be a hero to them. But here
the censor lifted his terrible shears. Stories of
heroism, true or false, could not be told. Weeks
after an action the soldier’s family might read that
he had taken part in it and even then the censor
might return his letter if he mentioned any details.
For many of the soldiers this was more than annoying;
it was serious. They were often not educated,
had written perhaps three or four letters in
their lives, and could hardly face the task of writing
a second letter if the first was condemned. In
any case no American wanted to submit his personal
letters for his wife or sweetheart to a superior officer
for approval. Add to this the fact that the
officer could sign for his own mail without other
censorship except the possibility that the letter might
be read at the base port, and censorship became another
grievance to the enlisted man.

Finally, the greatest factor in morale, good or bad,
was that intangible but very real entity, military
discipline. The American boy hates to be under
authority; to ask for leave to speak to his captain;
to request permission to go for a few hours’ leave
after his day’s duties are over; to address an officer
in the third person: “Is the captain feeling
well this morning, sir?” Most American officers[184]
were human enough, with little of the class feeling
of the British army. For that reason the soldier
rarely hated his own officers, and often was heard
to boast of “my lieutenant” or “my captain.” The
soldier merely hated authority in general, as represented
largely by the necessity to salute any unknown
officer whom he might meet. He never understood
the lectures about the manliness of saluting or
its military necessity; he knew only that it was the
sign of authority, to which he was subjected.

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[185]
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[186]
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[187]
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[188]
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,[189]
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.

[190]

CHAPTER XIII

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[191]
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[192]
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[193]
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[194]
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[195]
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[196]
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.”

But with all these real character acquisitions on
the part of the men in the service, and with the
lack of that brutalizing which many theorists had
feared, at the same time certain moral losses were
occasioned by the military system. I shall not enter
into the question of sexual morality here, partly
because I have discussed it in the previous chapter,
and partly because it was not distinctly the product
of the army. The sexual standards of the young[197]
men in the army were much the same as those of
young men everywhere, with some modifications
through discipline. But to the man who has served
in any army at any time, the outstanding moral
weakness of the soldier is his entire disregard of
the rights of property. The sense of property, so
strong in civilian life, which is implanted so carefully
into the little child, seems lost in the first month
of a man’s army life. One brigade headquarters I
knew in France was established in a fine château,
with large grounds surrounded by a high wooden
fence. At the same time, the men of the nearest
unit were living in barns and attics, with no light
or heat of any kind in their quarters. The result
was that the fence disappeared, little by little. Nobody
ever saw the culprits, but I had reliable information
that the men billeted in that village had
all the heat they needed. When we left the area,
about half the fence was gone, and I have little
doubt it vanished entirely during the occupancy of
the next division.

I can still hear the indignation of the driver of
my “tin Lizzie” when the precious lamps were
stolen out of our car and we had to drive home ten
miles in the dark. Of course, lamps were scarce,
having to be shipped from the States, and the thief
undoubtedly drove an army car like ours. But a
few days later after a visit to the city my driver
reported back in triumph—he had found another
machine parked in a side street and “salvaged” the
lights. I tried to make him return them, but
for once he proved insubordinate. It was only another
army car; the other fellow had probably got
them the same way; he could not identify the car,[198]
anyway. Then came the finishing stroke when we
tried the lights and found them burned out! The
other driver had left them in as a blind. My driver
felt a sense of personal injury, as though he had
been directly cheated in a legitimate business deal.
And practically any soldier would have agreed with
him.

The men “found” whatever they needed if it was
not issued to them properly, because property had
no meaning to them in the army. They owned
nothing whatever; even their clothes, food and lodging
belonged to Uncle Sam. When their clothes
wore out, they were replaced; when the company’s
weekly supply of food was eaten up, more was
forthcoming. Rifles fallen into disrepair were exchanged
for good ones; shoes were sent to the
salvage depot to be repaired and then issued to another
man. Equipment lost at the front or in the
hospital was reissued without question. Therefore
the enlisted man felt a community sense of ownership
rather than a personal one. At the same time,
he was constantly in need of one thing or another.
He needed fire wood, as in the incident of the fence,
or automobile supplies, as with my driver. The
legend even goes that the Australians, famous in
their ability to care for their own units, have been
known to take an entire field kitchen, with the food
still cooking, from a British unit and make a successful
escape. I know that I have personally seen a
British colonial soldier in a village near the front
taking a large mirror with a gilt frame out of a dwelling
house and making off toward his quarters.
“What are you doing with that?” I asked him.[199]
“Oh, I think we can use it,” was his unembarrassed
answer.

The soldier learned to disregard law, just as he
learned to disregard property. Discipline meant
obedience to constant minute surveillance. It meant
getting up at reveille, rolling his blankets in just
such a way, reporting at roll call, lining up for mess,
working at whatever menial tasks he might be detailed
to do by the sergeant, asking for a pass when
he wanted to go to the nearest city, submitting his
mail to censorship, getting a day off for sickness
only after lining up for “sick call,” and finally
going to bed at night as soon as the bugle sounded
“taps.” These men were not trained soldiers, accustomed
to such a system; they were healthy
American boys in whom this constant subjection to
external control meant the immediate seeds of revolt.
Autonomy meant then the evasion of the law.
A man could assert his individuality only in such
ways as going absent without leave, wearing a
serge uniform (not regulation for private soldiers),
or gambling away his last month’s scanty pay.
Add to this his constant contact with officers, who, if
they had to bear a heavy burden of responsibility
and were forced to pay for all the things the enlisted
man received for nothing, still were not subject
to many of the restrictions which he found
most galling. The test of manly independence came
to be simply “getting away with it.” If a man
was caught in an infraction of the rules he had to
take his punishment; if he was not detected or not
convicted he was a successful soldier. This applied,
for example, to a trip to Paris, the golden[200]
dream of every American soldier. For a long time
this was strictly forbidden, although later three-day
leaves to Paris were allowed to a certain number
of men. Yet thousands of Americans saw the lovely
and forbidden city unofficially. They got leave to
Versailles, and rode into Paris daily by street car.
They took the wrong train, ostensibly by accident,
and had to change trains at Paris, dropping out of
sight for a day or two meanwhile. They borrowed
the travel orders of other men and used them over,
risking detection. Neither the extreme harshness
of the Paris military police nor the menace of
their own angry captains could keep them from the
enticing adventure. It was their boyishness, combined
with their lack of respect for the law itself,
that led them into such devious modes of disobedience.
“If you know how, you can get away with
murder,” was the usual apology—further excuse
was not needed.

Among officers a similar tendency showed itself
in a different way. The officer was not limited in
the most petty ways which irritated the men, although
he also could not take a trip to Paris without
proper travel orders and could not absent himself
from duty without special permission. But the
officer likewise grew to disregard the law essentially,
even while he obeyed it most carefully in its minutiæ.
An officer was bound by his signature on written
documents. A request coming from the sergeant
had to be endorsed by the lieutenant, with his reasons
if he did not favor granting it. It would
then pass on to the captain, the major, the colonel,
and if necessary also the brigadier and the major
general. Having passed through military channels[201]
for its consideration, it came back again by the same
route until it reached the originator. This system
made at once for diffusion of responsibility, or, to
use the familiar army term, “passing the buck.”
The first man who approved the request had no responsibility,
as it was approved likewise by his
superiors; the later endorsers had none, as they
had signed it on his recommendation, assuming his
knowledge of the facts. Nobody could be held responsible
and every one was careful to evade responsibility
wherever he could. Naturally, this made for
endless delays, for complications interminable when
a previous order had to be rescinded for any reasons
whatever, for evasion in case of difficulty or doubt.
It meant fundamentally the disregard of law, expressed
by the soldier in disobedience and by the officer
in evasion.

The military régime likewise tended to break down
habits of regular industry. During the war there
was the alternation of short periods of intense
and exhausting activity at the front and longer ones
of as complete rest as the men could obtain at
the rear. It was a reversion to the life of the
savage, busy by spells at hunting or war, with rest
and languor between. The entire exhaustion, physical
and mental, after a “spell in the trenches”
demanded complete relaxation afterward, while
there was always a little necessary work in the way
of drill, reëquipment and inspection. After the war
was over, the drill went on in still larger doses but
without the incentive of returning to the trenches
again afterward. This alternation of work and rest
together with the general rebellion against routine,
broke down the habit of consistent work which[202]
is built up with such effort and such inducements
in civil life. Boys do not want to work until
they are taught to do so and given inducements in
the form of money and the things money will buy.
But the soldiers, so boyish in their life and their
feelings, had few such inducements given them.
Their universal experience after leaving the army
was that it took a tremendous effort of will to
return to the routine and responsibility of a civilian
occupation.

Exceptions existed, of course, to every generalization
in this chapter, as they do to any generalization
of any kind. But the exceptions speedily lifted
themselves out of the ranks by promotion, and
were therefore covered by the different influences
on the officers and the higher ranks of non-commissioned
officers. And I feel that even these exceptional
men who retained their respect for law and
property, their habits of regular industry, did so
only in comparison with the general break-down,
that even they felt a certain loosening of the standards
which they had possessed in civilian life.

Army life developed a new series of moral values
and moral reactions. It brought out virtues which
were latent or non-existent in civil life; it reduced
others to impotence. It produced love of country,
of home, and of God; it brought forth courage,
loyalty, self-sacrifice, the extreme of heroism, in
such numbers and such variety that they seemed
commonplace. It did not brutalize any who were
not very ready for such a process. But at the same
time, it destroyed the citizen’s respect for law and
order, his respect for property, his habit of hard
and persistent work. It made him, for the time[203]
being, a lazy hero; a jovial, careless, and lovable
lawbreaker. It brought out exactly the qualities
which are least necessary in civil life, and injured
those most necessary; it took the student, the workingman,
the farmer, and made of him the doughboy.
Army life was opposed directly to the whole tenor
of democracy, the régime where men control themselves,
where they work through ambition and desire
for success, and where they strive to accumulate
property of their own, at the same time respecting
the law and the property of others. Army life
meant a break in the lives of millions of young
Americans, an interruption of the steady development
of their characters and habits, a reversal of
their tendencies and a postponement of their ambitions.

I feel that it is a great evidence of the essential
soundness of American manhood that these millions
have returned to civil life, in most cases to their
former circles and their former occupations, with
so little difficulty. Society helped them at the
moment by the splendid reception home, by the
plaudits, the speeches, and the parades. It helped
them also to obtain positions and then left them to
find themselves. Fortunately, after a brief transition
most of them did find themselves, and the ex-soldiers
to-day are back in every type of work as
before. The former captain may sell you a suit;
the holder of a D. S. C. may wait on you at the
restaurant. They have overcome the restlessness,
the carelessness, the thrill; they are civilians again.
But here and there the seeds fell on different soil;
here and there a former soldier has not found himself
again. We see him most often among the[204]
wounded and gassed, who cannot fit into industry so
easily, and whose sufferings have often affected their
mentality and always their point of view. America
has wasted criminally precious years of these young
ruined lives, in not bringing to them instantly the
full care and service of a grateful nation. On the
other hand, industry has made little effort to absorb
our soldiers; I have seen men with trades
selling fruit from push-carts because there was no
other work at hand. I have seen a jobless boy,
honestly trying to make a little money by selling
trinkets in the street and driven away by a patriotic
store-keeper, who felt that he had done his duty
by buying Liberty Bonds and need not bother about
the man who had fought his battles for him. The
soldier who cannot return to civil life is a rare exception,
but he is an exception caused in an unstable
youth by our military or our industrial system.
Our nation, which profited by that army, must
remember for good every weakest individual whose
sweat and blood poured forth to make that army
great.

[205]

CHAPTER XIV

THE JEWISH SOLDIER AND JUDAISM

During the war we were so stunned by its
suddenness and vastness that we felt it would
shatter all former systems of philosophy,
that men would need a new philosophy of life after
the war, just as they did after the Renaissance or the
epoch-making discoveries of Darwin. This opinion,
natural enough at the time, was certainly exaggerated.
The war did not shatter all ideals; it
did not create any new ones except the wave of
spiritualism at present so wide-spread. But it did
shift emphases, exposed the hollowness of many
easy beliefs, and implanted new ideas in minds
which otherwise might not have been ready for
them. The soldier really presents the typical reaction
to the war, while the civilian shows a milder
type of influence and a smaller degree of change.
The revaluation of values which is really demanded
to-day is nothing so fundamental as we thought
at the time. It is chiefly psychological, that we
shall understand what is in the mind of the soldier,
and by that means reach an understanding of the effect
of the war on society as a whole. The world
contains in diluted form those same influences which
show so distinctly on these young men. The problem
of evil is neither greater nor less than it was before
the war; the problem of life and death is no different;[206]
the problem of conduct has not changed.
But certain phases of each of these problems have
come very strongly to the attention of the world;
some of them have been branded into the consciousness
of the soldier. Just as the soldier has a viewpoint
toward American ideals, which America would
do well to heed in working out her programs for the
era after the war, so the Jewish soldier has his own
viewpoint toward Judaism, which all who are interested
in our people and our religion need to
understand and utilize for the best development of
our religious programs in the days that are just
ahead.

It is hard to call the soldier a progressive in
religion when he had so few theories about the
matter. But he was certainly not a traditionalist.
Religious ideas and practices had to satisfy his immediate
needs or they had no meaning to him at
all. This covered all cant words, all ready-made
formulas, whether as ancient as the Talmud or as
comparatively recent as reform Judaism. The answer
of a twelfth century Jew of Spain or a nineteenth
century Jew of Germany were on an equality
to him; if either solved the problems of a young
American at war it was acceptable. The soldier
was willing to accept old answers to new questions
if they were cogent; on the other hand, he was quite
as willing to consider a new and revolutionary
theory. He possessed that rare attribute, the open
mind; on the narrow but keen basis of his own mental
experience he grasped and estimated soundly the
new ideas and the old.

The soldier enjoyed ceremonies that reminded him
of home and childhood, but he regarded them largely[207]
as pleasant memories. However deep a meaning
the symbols might possess, the soldier had not the
background to grasp it. The symbols did not stand
for enough to solve the problems of his immediate
life. In the same way, theological concepts, however
liberal, meant nothing to him practically. The
liberal theology of reform Judaism might have appealed
to the mass of the Jewish soldiers if they
had been interested in it and had made an effort
to understand it. As it was, liberalism in theology
meant exactly nothing to them. They were not interested
in theological problems; they did not care
what one’s opinion might be about the literal inspiration
of the Bible or about the coming of the
Messiah. The liberalism which expressed itself constantly
among the soldiers, and which they brought
back with them into civil life, was different from
all this. Granting your liberalism or your conservatism
in regard to beliefs and ceremonies, the
soldier wanted to know your attitude toward other
human beings. The liberalism he wanted was social
and humanitarian. On this plane he had his being.
This was the type of problem which interested him
and which he could understand. The soldier felt
too often that the churches and synagogues were
dominated by capital, by a narrow social class which
discriminated against him. Among Jewish soldiers,
many felt that the religious ideas they might accept
were expressed in rich reform temples, where they
themselves would not be acceptable or would not
feel at home. On the other hand, they did not feel
at home in the little orthodox synagogues where
their fathers offered up their daily prayers. They
did not understand the Hebrew ritual uttered there,[208]
nor the devotional attitude which was there expressed.

But all this is not reaching directly the synagogue
itself. The young men, the former soldiers, are not
the trustees of our temples and synagogues; they
are not a majority of our members; they are not
often to be found in the pews, where we might see
their response to a particular service or a particular
sermon. If we are not very careful, the churches
and synagogues will lose entirely the inspiration of
their youthful vigor and find themselves tied entirely
to the generation which has passed into middle
age and is becoming old. We must call to the
young men in the voice of youth, with the viewpoint
and on the plane which they understand and
on which they may respond. That means that we
must be willing to accept new conclusions to new
problems if these conclusions seem to fit the new
times. That means also that we must have an
aggressive attitude toward social and economic
problems. This alone can make liberalism religious
and make religion concrete, applicable to
the needs of the latest era, the era after the world
war. Without it, religion will remain moribund,
liberalism irreligious. Religious bodies must give
an equal hearing to both the conservative and the
radical, must show a definite platform of religious
and moral work on which the two can unite. That
was done during the war. All groups in American
Jewry, orthodox, conservative and reform, were associated
in the Jewish Welfare Board and still work
together on the Joint Distribution Committee for
the relief of Jewish war sufferers. All groups in
American life, Jew and non-Jew alike, met and[209]
worked together in the United War Work campaign,
to care for the soldiers in our emergency. But the
young men, no longer soldiers, need us as badly
now, while we, the churches and the synagogues,
need them more than ever, with their new experience
and their new-found manhood. What they need
and what we need, too, is that we learn to coöperate
on a common platform of action for their benefit
now. If we want them, if we want to be at one with
them, we must have a social program, a liberal
attitude to life and especially to its most immediate
economic problems, a willingness to sink differences
of opinion that we may meet for practical effort
and genuine progress.

The boys in the service became largely socialized
through the tremendous, constant work of the
welfare agencies. They felt the value of the Y. M. C. A.
or other welfare hut, not only for the entertainments,
dances and canteen, but just as much
as a center for the soldier community, a place to
write, to read, to play games, to meet their friends.
Since their return they have turned to such institutions
as the Y. M. C. A., the Y. M. H. A. and the
rest, to find the club life, the community spirit,
which they had in the welfare hut in camp or city
at home and abroad. This need of the young men
for a social center and a social life is a common
need of all America. Every village needs a social
center to further its growth into a finer culture and
a more united citizenship. Every Jewish community
large enough to have a little social life of its own
needs a community center where that life can flourish
and be guided in desirable and constructive
channels. The expansion of the Jewish Welfare[210]
Board to join and assist the activities of the National
Council of Young Men’s Hebrew and Kindred Associations
is a logical one, growing out of the similar
needs of the same young men in war and peace. The
furtherance of social centers for Jewish communities,
for other groups of citizens who possess a
common heritage or common background, and for a
whole town where the town is not too large, is a piece
of work in which the soldiers will participate and
which their very existence among us should suggest
to the rest of the community. The return of the
soldier may assist us more than we expect in socializing
the Jewish community. The social spirit we
once showed in his behalf, the social education we
gave him while in the service, will return to benefit
us all if we convert the two into Jewish social
life. Such a socializing will cut across congregational
or sectional lines, across lines of birth and
wealth, and unite the Jewish community in America,
just as the same process will eventually, if carried
far enough, weld together all the divergent social
forces of America itself.

The need for personal religion at the front was a
temporary need, or rather a temporary expression
of a universal human yearning. It is now almost
forgotten by the boys themselves, certainly by
the church and the synagogue. Beside the
liberal and the social demands of the day, there
exists this mystical longing to be sure of God,
to know for a certainty that He will protect
His dear ones. This universal and eternal need
was felt for the time by our men in immediate
danger, in thankfulness, in mourning. Having discovered
it once, they still feel it when the occasion[211]
comes. Here, however, there seems little likelihood
of their contribution being accepted. The union of
the social and mystical elements, even at different
times and for different occasions, seems more than
any human institution can accomplish. If the soldier,
in tune with the urge of the age, demands a
social and a liberal response from the synagogue,
he may get it in a large number of cases. The
mystical element he will not ask for, and his inarticulate
mood, now hardly evident, will certainly
evoke no response.

One thing certainly the young men feel, which
American Judaism is accepting from them. While
the young Jew is wholly sympathetic to Zionism, he
hardly ever feels that Zionism is the center or the
conclusion of the Jewish problem. Zionism, as a
movement, has brought to fruition much of the
latent love of the young Jew for his people and
his religion. But the Jewish soldier, or the same
boy as a civilian, is not interested chiefly in solving
the economic or the cultural problems of Palestine.
He responds also to the similar problems among the
Jews of America. Zionism is not enough for him;
he must have Judaism as well. He and all
of us are compelled to confront the spiritual and
moral problems of the new world after the war.

The young man does not know, and the synagogue
does not always show him, that the very things
he demands most urgently are inherent in Judaism,
especially in those great prophets whose words still
ring forth with a youthful fervor. The unfaltering
search for new truth, the recognition of the poor
and the weak, the unity of all groups in the community,
the triumphant search for God and finding[212]
of God—all these the young Jew wants and the
prophets have given us. This aspect of the problem,
then, becomes one of leadership, to interpret our
Judaism in terms which express the life of the new
day and to show the young men that their dearest
longings are part of the ancient Jewish heritage.
The antiquity of the prophetic summons is no disadvantage
to the young men if it answers their personal
need. It is of the greatest advantage to the
synagogue in responding to the call of the great days
after the war. Those ancient responses to the
errors and crimes of mobs and despots in the Orient
contain principles whose vitality is not impaired by
the passage of time. It needs but the skill and the
courage to apply them again, as in prophetic times,
to the western world in the twentieth century.

War gave the world a new angle of vision on
life and death, on good and bad. The deepest impress
of this new viewpoint is on those men who
were themselves at the front, who underwent the
most extreme phase of it in their own persons, but
some traces have spread throughout the entire western
civilization. America must realize it as Europe
does; Judaism and Christianity alike are entering,
for good or bad, a new period. The world has
changed in some respects; we who see the world have
changed far more. In facing the future, with its
political, its social, its moral problems, we need
a new fullness of insight into the young men whose
lives have changed and whose souls expanded overnight,
even though they remain in externals the
boys they were. We need a new intellectual content,
covering not only the new map of Europe and Asia,
but also the new ideas and ideals which swept the[213]
world for a time, as though they were to be eternal.
Above all, we must have complete honesty in facing
the thrilling challenge of the immediate future. We
do not need a new form of Judaism any more than
we need a new type of government in America.
We are confronted by the demand to adapt Americanism
and Judaism to the changing demands of a
changing era, to find among the temporary and
evanescent elements in both those things which have
permanent usefulness for any demand and any era.
We need ideals of the past, indeed, but only such
ideals as have survived the past, as apply fully to
the present, as will aid in building up a future of
promise and achievement for the Jew. Judaism is
on trial to-day. If we answer the need of the young
man, he will be the loyal, active Jew for to-day and
to-morrow. If we ignore him, whether through uncertainty,
ignorance or pride, he will not come to
us and we shall not be going after him. Judaism
needs the young man; it needs equally his great
ideals, social and mystical as well. The test will result
in a finer and more effective faith only if
we respond to it bravely and honestly, in the very
spirit of the soldier himself.

[214]

CHAPTER XV

THE JEWISH SOLDIER AND ANTI-SEMITISM

During the war we felt that prejudice between
men of different groups and different faiths
was lessening day by day, that our common
enthusiasm in our common cause had brought Catholics,
Protestants and Jews nearer together on a
basis of their ardent Americanism. Especially we
who were at the front felt this in the first flush
of our coöperation, our mutual interest and our
mutual helpfulness. After you have stood beside a
man in the stress of front-line work, have shared
a blanket with him, have seen him suffer like a hero
or die like a martyr, his origin, his family and his
faith become less important than the manhood of
the man himself. More than once I have said,
talking to soldier audiences of Jewish or of mixed
faith: “After this war no man can knowingly call
the Jew a coward again. If you ever hear such
a statement, you can be sure that our detractor is
not an honest bigot, as may have been the case in
the past; he is either ignorant or malicious.”

We knew that and our comrades knew it. The
men at the front knew very little about the whole-hearted
participation of every section of our vast
population, Jew and non-Jew together, in the campaigns
for production, Liberty Bonds, the United
War Work campaign, and all the rest. That record[215]
is a permanent one and is known to every man who
did his duty in “the rear lines” back in the United
States during the war. But those who served overseas
know the record the Jew made for himself at
the front, his promotions, his decorations, his woundings
and his deaths. They know that differences
of religion and race counted not at all in the American
army, that our heroes and our effective, able
soldiers came from all religions and all races. With
what high hopes we entered the war; with what fine
fervor we saw it end! We felt that our efforts had
insured something more of liberty for the oppressed
of all the world, for Czech and Armenian, Alsatian
and Belgian, Pole and Jew.

Perhaps the greatest disappointment of all to
the fighters and the sufferers has been the survival
and the occasional revival of the old hatreds in a
more intense form. I am thinking of the many
national and group hatreds and antagonisms which
have tormented the world in the last years, and
especially of one of them, that against the Jews.
The oppression of the autocratic régime of the Czar
has been carried on by the free nation of Poland;
the pogroms of the Black Hundred have been revived
in the Ukraine, where the slaughter of war
was doubled by the slaughter of peace. Hungary
has seen its “white terror,” where Jews were
murdered as Bolshevists and Bolshevists as Jews.
Austria and Germany have seen a strengthening
of the political anti-Semitism of pre-war
times, here blaming the Jews for beginning the
war, and there for ending it. Finally the movement
has been carried over into the freest and most
intelligent of nations, and some apologists for it[216]
have appeared even in England and America. Here
the Anti-Semites can work by neither political nor
legal means, but through a campaign of slander
they strive to weaken the morale of the Jew and
injure his standing before the mass of his fellow
citizens.

I shall not turn aside to deal, even for a moment,
with the mass of accusations against the Jew, trivial
or grave as the case may be. They have been adequately
answered by Jew and non-Jew, especially in
the address on “The ‘Protocols,’ Bolshevism and the
Jews,” by ten national organizations of American
Jews on December 1, 1920, and the subsequent protests
against anti-Semitism by a distinguished
group of non-Jewish Americans, notably President
Woodrow Wilson, former President William
Howard Taft and William Cardinal O’Connell. The
only one of these accusations with which I can
properly deal in this place, and one on which my fellow-soldiers
will agree with me in every detail, is the
revival of the ancient slander against the patriotism
and courage of the Jew. We are reading, not
for the first time in history, but for almost the first
time in the English language, that the Jews are
not patriots in their respective nations, that they
all have a super-national allegiance to a Jewish
international conspiracy, that their real loyalty is
to this other group within and above the state, even
to the extent of treachery or anarchy against their
own governments. We feel the disgrace, the pathos
of such a charge just after the war when Jews died
with non-Jews that America might be safe, at a time
when Jews even more than non-Jews are enduring
the dread aftermath of war, the famine, the poverty[217]
and the epidemics, in Eastern and Central Europe.
It is the sort of charge which only facts can answer,
the kind of facts which are present in this book,
as in every official or personal story of the war by
men who took a personal part in the war. Prejudice
is too largely the product of those who gained by
the war but did not personally enter the ranks.
The men who know, the men who fought together
and bled together, have a different story.

America has, in fact, too much fairness as well as
too much humanity, to listen to any such movement
of partisan hatred or bigotry. I quote the
statement of over a hundred distinguished “citizens
of Gentile birth and Christian faith,” referred to
above:

“The loyalty and patriotism of our fellow citizens
of the Jewish faith is equal to that of any part
of our people, and requires no defense at our hands.
From the foundations of this Republic down to
the recent World War, men and women of Jewish
ancestry and faith have taken an honorable part in
building up this great nation and maintaining its
prestige and honor among the nations of the world.
There is not the slightest justification, therefore, for
a campaign of anti-Semitism in this country.”