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 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, 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 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 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.
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 regime 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 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 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 minutiae 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
cafes, which had 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 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 cafe
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 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 cooeperate 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_
_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 "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 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 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 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 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 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 regime 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 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,
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.