THE WELFARE OF THE SOLDIERS
Into the forming and shaping of the American Army for the World
War went something new in the making of armies, something hitherto
unthought of in the history of wars, for its training was based upon
a new idea, a bold innovation upon military traditions. The method of
army training had always been to minimize the individuality of the
fighting man, to lessen it to the disappearing point, and so the more
surely and easily and completely merge the individual in the fighting
mass. Only so, it was believed, could the necessary discipline, unity
and uniformity of an army be secured.
But when the United States entered the war and set about the creation
of a great fighting force its Secretary of War inspired the task with
a new ideal and the whole making of the American Army was based on the
idea of developing and heightening the individuality of the soldier,
of discovering, improving and utilizing his personal qualities. The
unceasing effort was to make of him a better citizen, a better, finer
and more capable man, in the conviction that thus he would be also a
better soldier. Believing that the higher the grade of the individuals
who compose an army the higher will be the grade of the army, all the
training, the environment and the treatment of the soldier, from the
time he entered the service until he was discharged, were calculated
to develop him physically, mentally and morally as an individual,
to inspire him as a person and, in general, to make of him a more
intelligent, resourceful, upright, self-dependent, capable and moral
man than he was before he entered the army. The immediate purpose
was to make a better army, an army of thinking, reasoning units, and
therefore an army so intelligent and alert that it would at once
perceive the fundamental necessity for discipline and instant obedience
and would gain more speedily than by the old method the needful unity
and uniformity, while its composite individuals would be more capable
of efficient action if deprived by the chance of battle of their
accustomed leadership.
That was the first and chief purpose. But behind it lay also the
determination that these millions of American young men, the flower of
the nation, the beloved of their homes, should be, as far as possible,
enabled to preserve themselves from those debasements, corruptions and
blights of army life which the world, ages ago, had grown accustomed
to accept as inevitable. The purpose was that, so far as foresight and
effort could command so unprecedented a result, these young men should
bring back no scars or wounds other than those dealt by the enemy.
The outcome of this bold experiment was a complete vindication of the
vision and the faith of the man who insisted it should be tried.
The preceding pages have shown this purpose of individual development
and betterment at work in the methods of training the soldier, giving
him at least some measure of education when he was deficient in
that respect, instilling in him the principles of good citizenship,
inspiring him with patriotism and enthusiasm for American ideals,
broadening his outlook, appealing to his intelligence and ambition,
discovering and improving his aptitudes and assigning him to work
for which he was fitted. Coöperating with the methods and purposes
of the system of military training was a large and varied program of
recreation designed to fill the soldier’s leisure hours and to work
hand in hand with that training to make him at once a better man and
a better soldier. A part of this program, that of the Commission on
Training Camp Activities, was created by and carried on by the War
Department, but many civilian organizations constantly coöperated with
it and seconded its efforts.
Within the War Department the Commission on Training Camp
Activities--it had its twin in the Navy Department--was appointed
by the Secretary of War to provide for the men in training such a
comprehensive recreational and educational program as would entertain
their leisure hours, stimulate and develop their faculties and better
their morale. The Commission, with its representatives in every camp,
aimed, as one of its purposes, to make the American army a singing
army. Trained musicians and song leaders developed and encouraged vocal
and instrumental ability and aided in the forming and training of bands
and singing groups. As much music as possible was brought into the
daily life and work of all the camps.
An athletic director in each camp organized sports and in consequence
baseball, football, cross-country running and other competitive games
were of frequent occurrence. Skilled instructors in boxing, wrestling
and other such personal sports improved the resourcefulness and the
physique of the men. Every large camp had its Liberty Theater seating
from one thousand to three thousand men, built on modern lines and
equipped for any ordinary performance. Theater managers and dramatic
directors and coaches wearing the khaki of Uncle Sam’s service brought
to the task of entertaining the soldiers and developing dramatic
ability among them the knowledge and the skill gained by years of
study and practical experience. Theatrical attractions of every sort,
vaudeville, drama, moving pictures, musical artists, entertainers of
varied kinds, made the tour of these theaters and plays were given in
them by amateur companies formed among the men in the camps.
Educational work of such varied sort was constantly carried on as part
of the program of the Training Camp Committee as to give to much of the
leisure time of every camp almost an academic atmosphere. The machinery
of the university extension work and of the educational department of
the Y. M. C. A. was utilized to provide for those wishing to take them
a wide variety of college and commercial school courses. English was
taught to those of little education and to those of foreign birth.
Every camp had its classes in French. There was instruction in subjects
which would prepare men to transfer from one branch of the service to
another. And always and everywhere there were schools or classes or
courses of study for intensive training in one or another phase of
military affairs--training for those who would have to undertake these
specific and varied duties, training for those who would instruct
others in them, training for officers. Every camp and cantonment
buzzed with these activities by which the men of a nation unused to
military affairs and hating war zealously trained themselves for battle
and schooled themselves in new methods of warfare.
The Commission on Training Camp Activities went vigorously into the
work of education in social hygiene and the enforcement of law in
order to make and keep the camp environment, the camps and the men
themselves morally wholesome, to the end that the army should be of
the best fighting material and that the men who composed it should
return to their homes as fine and clean as when they left. A determined
and unceasing effort was made to keep alcohol and the prostitute away
from the cantonments. Wide zones in which the sale or gift of alcohol
to soldiers was forbidden surrounded each training area. One section
of the Commission dealt directly with the problem of woman and girl
camp followers and sought to lessen this evil by work among the women
themselves, by securing better enforcement of local police regulations
and by educational and reformatory work in camp communities. A
great educational program was carried on by the Government by which
instruction in sex hygiene was given in the training camps. During
the first six months of cantonment training more than a million men
were reached in this way, and the work was continued with equal energy
throughout the war period.
A system of government insurance, provided by act of Congress and
taking the place of the old-time pension system, enabled any member
of the fighting forces of the United States to insure himself against
death or total permanent disability at a low premium, which was taken
from his monthly pay. At the end of hostilities 4,000,000 of these
insurance policies had been taken out by officers and men of the Army
and Navy, totaling over $37,000,000,000. Most of them were for the
maximum amount of $10,000. Arrangements were made that would enable
each holder of a policy to continue it, if he so desired, after
leaving the service. Allotments of pay which could be made directly to
dependents and allowances paid by the United States to the families of
men in service, if such allowance was necessary, helped to relieve the
mind of the soldier of worry as to the welfare of his loved ones.
Unique in all history and an integral part of the War Department’s
purpose to make army service become a means of personal development and
betterment for every individual soldier was the extensive educational
scheme for the Expeditionary Forces in France. The War Department and
the Army Educational Commission of the Y. M. C. A. coöperated in the
devising and carrying out of this plan, which enabled the officers and
men of the American Army in France to continue their school, academic,
technical or professional training while in camp. Worked out and put
into operation in the summer of 1918, when the armistice was signed
some 200,000 men, chiefly in the Service of Supply, had already begun
studies of various kinds, but the scheme did not reach full development
until some weeks later.
[Illustration: INTERIOR OF A CANTONMENT LIBRARY]
As finally established in the winter of 1919, this educational plan
ran the whole gamut of mental training, from learning to spell to
post-graduate work in science, art and the professions. In the Army
of Occupation there were compulsory schools for all illiterates, but
otherwise the work was optional, and took the place of part of the
hours of daily drill. Post schools were established for units of 500
or more men, and generally there were forty such schools for each
division. Enrollment at the post schools ran as high as 2,000 and more.
Correspondence courses were arranged for men with smaller isolated
units. In each army division a high school gave both regular and
vocational courses.
Located at Beaune, in the Cote d’Or region, where the huge base
hospital had been built, in the great series of buildings no longer
needed for trainloads of wounded men was the “Khaki University,” at
which were given academic, agricultural, professional, commercial and
technical courses of three months each. Of its many buildings four
hundred were used for class room purposes and others were converted
into laboratories, dormitories, libraries and recreation halls.
Fourteen colleges comprised this Khaki University which, including the
agricultural college associated with it but located elsewhere, became
for the time of its existence the largest educational institution in
the world. Its colleges gave instruction in language, literature,
philosophy, science, fine and applied arts, journalism, education,
engineering, music, business, medicine, and all other subjects
usually provided for at educational institutions of every sort,
whether technical, academic, commercial or professional. Especial
attention was paid to agriculture. The engineering school offered a
full variety of courses in civil, electrical, mining, mechanical and
sanitary engineering. The college of arts, with an art training center
near Paris, had 1,000 students and gave instruction in architecture,
sculpture, painting, interior decoration, town planning, industrial
art, landscape gardening, and furnished guidance for the study of art
museums and structures of esthetic value. In the libraries of the Khaki
University were 500,000 volumes. Its faculty numbered 500 members and
15,000 men, all of them privates and officers of the A. E. F., enrolled
when the institution opened. The Y. M. C. A., whose Army Educational
Commission had devised and organized the entire huge educational
scheme, turned it all over to the War Department in the spring of 1919.
Many of the faculty members of important universities and colleges
in the United States aided in the working out of this comprehensive
educational plan and, under the direction of the Army Educational
Commission of the Y. M. C. A. and army officers, coöperated with them
in the immediate supervision of the schools. Nearly 50,000 officers
and men whose record cards showed them to have been school teachers
or university or college professors before they were soldiers were
detailed from the army for the work of teaching this huge body of
pupils in the post schools and at Beaune.
French and British universities and colleges threw open their doors for
those who were prepared to undertake collegiate and post-graduate work.
With the Sorbonne leading the list, thirty French institutions offered
lectures and courses of study, while at Oxford, Cambridge, Dublin,
Liverpool, Manchester, St. Andrews, and elsewhere in the British Isles
a welcome awaited the American army man. Furloughs were granted to
officers and enlisted men for this work and during the latter part of
the winter and the spring of 1919 2,000 worked at British universities,
filling to the last one the possibility for their accommodation,
although four times as many had applied for the privilege. As many
more attended the Sorbonne and other institutions in Paris, while the
provincial universities and colleges of France had also their quota.
Solicitous for the welfare of the Expeditionary Force and determined
that its members should not fall below the high standard it had
established of individual worth and soldierly quality, the War
Department met the problem of leaves of absence in a strange land
by establishing “leave areas” in especially interesting sections of
France wherein was offered a varied program of rest, change, recreation
and entertainment. More than a dozen famous resorts in the Alps, the
Pyrenees, along the Riviera and elsewhere were leased in whole or in
part and put in charge of the Y. M. C. A., which saw to it that the men
on leave had a thoroughly good time. Once in four months each soldier
in service was entitled to a week’s outing at whichever one of these
leave areas he preferred to visit. Beginning in the winter of 1918,
during the first year of the operation of this system 220,000 soldiers
were thus given an opportunity for recreation and sent back to their
duties wholesomely refreshed.
Several civil organizations coöperated with the War Department in
work for the welfare of the soldier in training and overseas and very
greatly aided the Government in its effort to enable the men who
composed the army to return to their homes better and more capable
men than they were when they left upon their country’s service. These
and their activities are described in more detail in the chapter on
“Big Brothering the Army.” But here the Young Men’s and Young Women’s
Christian Associations, the War Camp Community Service, the Jewish
Welfare Board, the Knights of Columbus, the Salvation Army and the
American Library Association must be referred to briefly because of the
very great importance of what they did for the welfare of the American
soldiers and because of their influence upon the character of the
American Army.
More than five hundred service buildings were operated by these
organizations in the various camps and cantonments in this country
alone, and many hundreds more overseas. They furnished to the men
wholesome club life, in comfortable houses, with music, games,
lectures, reading and writing facilities and athletic equipment. The
Young Women’s Christian Association built, furnished and officered at
least one hostess house in every camp, wherein the women relatives and
friends of the soldiers could meet them in homelike surroundings. The
American Library Association installed in the camps specially designed
buildings, manned them with trained workers and provided many thousands
of volumes which were kept in constant circulation.
The War Camp Community Service worked in the localities surrounding
the camp, where it aided the citizens in efficient expression of their
universal spirit of hospitality and friendliness toward the troops,
maintained clubs for soldiers on leave, provided information bureaus,
recreation and entertainment, and, in general, helped to create and
preserve between the men in training and the community in which they
were located a normal and helpful social relationship.
So, in a year and a half, America expanded her army of 212,000 into
an army of 2,000,000 men overseas, a million and a half in training,
and two million more preparing, as these latter were sent across
the ocean, to take their places in the cantonments. She turned this
democratically chosen material from raw civilians of peace-loving
traditions into gallant fighters and fused a heterogeneous mass of
nationalities into a solid body inspired by and fighting for American
ideals. It was an army so eager to get into the struggle for liberty
and justice against militarism and autocracy and its spirit was so
high and unanimous that every regiment leaving a cantonment for
overseas service celebrated the coming of its orders with enthusiasm
and was envied by all those not yet chosen. It was an army that,
above everything else, was the expression of the mind, the heart and
the soul of the American people. Almost every home in the nation had
some part in it and it went upon its war adventure with the prayers,
the blessings, the love and the ardent wish to serve its needs of
the whole people. Never was an army sent to war so fathered and
mothered, so big-sistered and big-brothered, so loved and cheered by
an entire nation and provided for by its Government with such care and
far-seeing vision as this that sailed from the ports of America for the
battlefields of France.