_PHYSICALLY COMPETENT AND MORALLY FIT_
"I must keep clean for them, and I'm going to do it."
A captain of the American Expeditionary Force spoke the words. We were
standing together in front of a mantel in an old-fashioned room in an
ancient seacoast city of France. On the mantel were the pictures of a
woman and four beautiful children. The captain was not a saint; he was
entirely too profane to be really good company; but, as he looked into
the faces of his wife and babies, he was very intense and determined.
There is a question of vital interest to all Americans and particularly
to those who have sons in the Expeditionary Forces of the United
States, and I went abroad to find the answer to it. Rather, there are
two such questions: first, What is the moral character of the American
soldier abroad? and, second, What are the American military authorities
in France doing to keep the soldier physically competent and morally
fit?
There have been black rumors abroad. Stories have been told that
reflect seriously upon the man in uniform. Leaders in high places
have been accused of protecting vice, of allowing what amounts to a
segregated district directly behind the lines. The charge was widely
circulated in December, 1917, by certain publications, that more than
one thousand Americans from a suburban community of the northeastern
section of the United States were under guard for drunkenness after
their first pay-day in France. Alarming statements have been made
concerning venereal diseases.
I have found the answers to the questions already stated.
1. I have studied conditions in England, in landing-ports and
embarkation-ports, in London and in rest-camps.
2. I have lived in constant contact with five hundred American officers
for a period of ten days.
3. I have watched the American soldier in Paris on the street, in the
hotel, and in the café.
4. I have conferred with those who have special responsibility for
investigating social diseases among men with the colors and for
conducting a comprehensive educational campaign to fortify these men
against sexual temptations.
5. I have visited hospitals under virtually all conditions as to
location and the nature of the diseases treated.
6. I have had interviews with surgeons and other regular army officers.
7. The whole matter has been discussed with a distinguished physician
who until recently was the chief health officer of a great American
city and a recognized authority on the relation of liquor to vice. This
physician is now in the government service in France and is giving
special attention to sanitation and hygiene.
8. I have had interviews with General Pershing and several of his staff.
9. I have given particular attention to the French ports where American
soldiers disembark, spending several days in each of these cities. On
two occasions while I was on the ground as many as fifteen thousand men
came ashore from convoys in a single day. These men had their first
shore experience after a long and nerve-racking voyage.
10. I have been closely associated with more than five hundred Y. M.
C. A. secretaries who served under all conditions of army life. Among
these secretaries have been some of America's most prominent business
men, ministers, lawyers, athletes, physicians, nurses, and teachers.
11. I have talked with leaders in the civilian and political life of
France.
12. For four days I have studied conditions in our general headquarters
in France and in a divisional headquarters at the front.
13. For six days I have messed with private soldiers under fire; I was
with them day and night.
14. For six days I served within the front line as a regular Y. M. C.
A. secretary; three additional days were spent somewhat farther back,
but within the immediate war zone. For three of the six days I was
entirely in charge of the dugout which is the most advanced permanent
Y. M. C. A. station in any army, being located within less than sixteen
hundred yards of our most advanced trench. Directly connected with this
dugout are a room of the Signal Corps, a Red Cross first-aid station,
and billets for forty-seven men. Three other days were spent assisting
in a hut farther back, but situated above ground and in the zone of
constant shell-fire. During these days I was brought face to face with
men confronted by the most trying conditions of modern warfare. I saw
them caked with mud, chilled with snow and ice-cold water, sick and
wounded. I witnessed the treatment that they received; I inspected what
they ate and drank.
15. I have visited our front-line trenches, meeting the men and
officers and conversing with them. I have seen the American soldier
under direct fire. I have measured him after the most extensive raid
the Germans had until that time directed against him, and the one in
which the American army really came into its own. I have been with the
American soldier in a barrage, and later when he carried back his dead
and wounded and the wounded of his enemy.
16. I have studied the American soldier after he had marched four miles
through mud-filled, shell-scattered trenches to his billet, relieved
after eight days of trench life during which he had suffered everything
from rain and snow to gas, machine-gun fire, bayonet, and shrapnel. I
have seen him in repose and in action. I have seen him before, and I
have seen him after, a charge.
I believe that I not only know what the American soldier does in
France, but that I begin to know what _he is_.
_He is a representative American._ And he is living on a moral plane
which is _above the moral plane of civilian life at home_.
I have found soldiers who are a disgrace to the uniform; there are
individual cases and there are groups of cases that give me keen
regret. I wish that the army had a "Botany Bay," that those who insist
upon practising the indecencies could be segregated. However few these
men are,--and they are indeed the small minority,--they constitute a
menace to morale, and exert a demoralizing influence upon those with
whom they are associated. Then, too, there are a few officers who
represent the old idea that the soldier is necessarily a victim of his
passions, and must be allowed, even encouraged, to gratify them. But
such officers are in a decreasing ratio to the whole, and privates who
bring an unfavorable judgment upon their country are the exceptions,
that assist in proving the rule.
On one occasion two hundred men from just-arrived transports began
their self-appointed task of painting a certain French city a livelier
hue. Very quickly they discovered that "decorators" of their class
were not in demand. The naval patrol sent them back to the ships with
battered heads and wiser minds. Two hundred men out of more than
_fifteen thousand_ tried to be naughty, and failed! I can imagine a
lurid head-line, "_Recently Arrived Soldiers Paint City Red_." Such a
head-line would have been unfair and untrue. That story of a thousand
men from the rural community of northeastern America is absolutely
false. I have investigated it in every French port where American
troops land and in in every other place where any considerable number
of our men have been quartered. My inquiries have followed three lines,
the military, the Y. M. C. A., and civilians. While conditions were
worse at the beginning, before our military authorities had their own
police programme operating, nothing at all approaching this condition
_ever_ existed.
Our leaders in France have not conquered the vices that society has
battled against from the first organized beginnings of civilization;
but, if the American Expeditionary Force is not setting an example in
moral idealism to American civilian life, then I have walked through
France with my eyes closed and my ears stopped.
When you see one soldier under the influence of liquor, do not conclude
that the army is drunk! It is at least suggestive that in three months
spent in England and France, associated with tens of thousands of
soldiers, I did not see a single soldier, officer or private, under
the influence of liquor on the street, in a public conveyance, or in a
public building.
When you hear of one syphilitic, or a hundred, do not traduce _en
masse_ the flower of American manhood now transported to the richly
watered fields of France. An investigation made by a prominent jurist
of the United States, who is also a leading layman of the Methodist
Church, revealed the following conditions in a certain port of landing.
This city has long borne the reputation of being among the most immoral
of Europe. The survey covered both white and black troops, and was made
in areas personally inspected by the writer.
The record for venereal diseases for four months preceding my visit
was:
_Colored Troops_ _White Troops_
First Month,
108.7 men in each thousand. 16.89 men in each thousand.
Second Month,
30.9 " " " " 12.5 " " " "
Third Month,
21.2 " " " " 8.7 " " " "
Fourth Month,
11 " " " " 2.11 " " " "
Many of these men were found to be infected when they reached France.
Army discipline, it will be seen, soon produced results. The rate of
venereal disease for white men when I left that city was less than
one-fourth of one per cent and for colored soldiers, just about one per
cent.
Let us think of our army division in terms of a modern American city,
a city of men, women, and children. But here are cities of men only,
men between twenty-one and thirty-one. Yes, men between seventeen and
thirty-one. Young men, red-blooded, far from home, inhabit these war
cities. Put such a city into your moral test-tube! Is it not inspiring
beyond words that these cities, by the records of the Surgeon-General
and from the reports of General Pershing, show a venereal rate
far below that of civilian life, and a decreasing rate; that they
show little drunkenness? And every statement of the War Department
concerning these vital matters has been substantiated by my own
investigations.
We shall be helped greatly in our efforts to appreciate the facts
if we remember that every soldier before he is a soldier is a _man_;
that the American soldiers in France are our own brothers and our own
sons; that we have taken the best from our colleges, our churches, our
offices, our homes, our factories and our farms, to feed the god of
war who stalks across the fields of Europe. These men have not laid
off their American idealism; they have not abandoned their American
training and the moral and spiritual instructions absorbed by American
firesides and in American churches and schools. We indict ourselves
when we believe wholesale charges of evil living, brought against the
finest fruit of our tree of democratic culture.
The psychology of such charges is demoralizing. Men falsely accused are
inclined to argue, "Well, I have the name; the mark is on me; I'll take
the game!" On the other hand, confidence begets confidence. Men are
made strong by the knowledge that other men and that women and children
believe in them. Our brothers and sons in France have won the right,
not only to our love, but to our esteem and faith as well.
There is no room to-day for the quick-spoken, casually informed, and
misinformed destructive critic. The constructive critic in the army
and out of it, in France and in civilian life at home, will have
increasingly much to do; not one iota of service for the soldier and
sailor can we afford to abate. They are always in the danger zone.
I found the American in uniform building up about himself a wall
of protection in the very attitude he is assuming toward the moral
excesses practised by the few. He is resenting the indulgence that
causes his country's civilization to be misjudged; he is disciplining
his comrade who by taking improper and forbidden liberties endangers
the freedom of others; he shows a distinct pride in the fact that
American physical and moral standards are high. _I believe that for
every man in the army that is morally destroyed at least five men are
morally born again._ We have spent much time in discussing the vast
task of keeping our men fit to return to us when the war is over, and
it is time well spent. But there is another matter quite as important:
_America must be made and kept fit for these men to return to_.
This is a report on conditions as they exist in the American army,
and does not deal directly with circumstances surrounding vice and
liquor in England and in France. As to these conditions in England and
France, they differ widely. Vice conditions in such cities as London
and Liverpool are particularly menacing; strong drink is everywhere a
distressing problem. In both of these vital matters the English problem
presents difficulties in excess of those confronting the investigator
in France. Through diplomatic representations and with the utmost
regard for the customs and feelings of our heroic allies _certainly the
same regulations should be applied to our soldiers overseas that now
apply at home_.
The results that have been thus far accomplished have been accomplished
without conflict with the drinking-customs of our allies. In proportion
as it has been found practical for our military authorities to have
absolute police control over territory occupied by American soldiers
has it been possible to deal effectively with liquor and vice from the
standpoint of administering regulations and laws.
What is the attitude of the American military authorities in France
toward drink and vice? I find our leaders in France aggressively and
successfully promoting the most comprehensive programme ever attempted
by a nation at war to keep her soldiers physically competent and
morally fit. An official of the British government, a man of many
distinctions and high in political life, told me that the eyes of all
the nations of Europe were upon the well-nigh revolutionary policies of
General Pershing and his staff.
The programme of the military leaders has been effectively supplemented
by the Y. M. C. A., the Red Cross, and the Salvation Army. The Y. M. C.
A. is responsible for a ministry that cannot be overvalued. With its
huts, which range from the commodious double building in the great
cities and in the large training-camps to the foul-smelling, dark
dugouts at the front, with its canteens and hotels for officers and
privates, with its music and its lectures, its classes in French and
its Bible classes, with its athletic leadership and its rest-stations
high among the quiet mountains, with its religious services and its
personal interviews, it is meeting squarely the moral challenge of
this stupendous occasion. It is the most potent hope of the church,
and God's most fruitful agency, "for such a time as this." A captain
of a company of colored stevedores told me that the Y. M. C. A. had
increased the morale of his men one hundred per cent.
As I have written these lines, I have had vividly before me a group of
American soldiers. It is three o'clock in the morning, and they have
just marched four miles through trenches, shell-obliterated or filled
with mud and snow; they have been relieved from the first line. They
are men from four companies of a battalion of a division occupying a
permanent position on the western front. They have had the distinction
of experiencing the first extensive gassing directed against American
troops and of repelling the first general raid over an American front.
Of one of the companies every commissioned officer has been killed
or wounded in the fighting of twenty hours before; its captain, a
gallant Southern lad, died on the parapet leading the successful
counter-attack. They are covered with mud, dead for sleep, chilled to
the bone, but uncomplaining. Some of them have fallen repeatedly on the
way out, and their faces are as black as their boots. They lean against
the counters and the tables of the Y. M. C. A. hut, and silently drink
the red-hot tea and eat the cookies and crackers. These are the men who
have given the first clear demonstration of the fighting superiority of
American democracy over German autocracy. They have paid a great price;
but, counting all the cost, they have found the expenditure justified.
They are the very vanguard of the pathfinders of civilization; they are
the knights of the twentieth century.
I should be false to these men if, having the evidence of their moral
soundness, I did not declare it; and I should be false to those who
gave them as a priceless offering upon the altar of freedom.
General Pershing and those who are in authority with him in France
deserve not a resolution of inquiry or censure, but a vote of
confidence with the assurance of our co-operation and support.
The American soldier is the worthy inheritor of the finest traditions
of American arms, a credit to those who bore him, an honor to the
nation he represents, and the last and best hope that civilization will
not fail in her struggle to establish the might of right.