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often two weeks out of date.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 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 preempted 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 cafe 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.
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 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 "Cafe
de la Cathedral" the following evening, and respond when asked to repeat
it in the main 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 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 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 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 chateau, 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, 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 cafe, 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 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 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. 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 cooeperation
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 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 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 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 chateau 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 Georges Levy, 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. 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.