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
chateaux, 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 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 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 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 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 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 reenlist 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 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 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 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 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.