THE MORAL GAIN AND LOSS OF THE SOLDIER
The military system, as I have tried to bring out in the last chapter,
had a definite and profound influence on the life and thought of the
individual soldier. It was so radically different from civilian life
that this influence became all the more striking through contrast. The
young man has certain moral standards and habits in civil life, some of
which became intensified, while others altered in the army. The millions
of young men who went through the military regime during the war have
brought this influence back into civilian life with them, even though it
is attenuated by environment and although they have largely returned to
their former, pre-military habits. War and danger brought out certain
characteristics and occasioned others. These new reactions of character
were not, as the pacifists would have it, all bad; neither were they all
good, as was generally proclaimed in patriotic fashion while the war was
going on. Some influences were good and some were bad, while almost
every man in the service would necessarily respond to both kinds. The
military system itself caused or brought to light certain good and bad
traits which appeared clearly enough in the average soldier after he had
been in the army even a few months. It may be worth while to develop
some of these at a little length, not scientifically nor
psychologically, but simply and directly as they strike the soldier
himself.
We saw at the front, as the experience of other armies had indicated,
that the average man has in him the stuff of which heroes are made. Not
merely the farmer or backwoodsman, but the men who followed prosaic city
occupations, were ready to sacrifice themselves for their comrades and
their country. The barber and the shipping clerk were as frequent
winners of the D. S. C. as any others in our huge heterogeneous army.
Heroism was evoked by the need, by the fact that it was the expected
response, the response of thousands of others. The crowd mind produced
heroism out of the most unexpected material. War created some of the
heroism which we saw; it merely evoked some which was already latent,
ready for the call. The stretcher-bearer, exposing himself to the
severest fire to carry his precious burden to safety; the battalion
runner, bearing his message through the barrage and then coming back
again to bring the answer; the machine gunner, carrying his heavy weapon
on his back to an advanced position where he could establish it
effectively; the infantryman, advancing against machine-gun fire, or
digging in under attack from heavy artillery or aeroplanes; the
engineer, digging away debris or laying bridges in plain sight of the
enemy, with his rifle laid near by to use in case of an attack--I might
enumerate hundreds of such duties in which courage, loyalty, and
endurance were exhibited by men who performed exceptional acts of
bravery and devotion, volunteering for difficult service or carrying on
in the face of overwhelming odds. All soldiers were afraid, but in the
performance of their duty practically all soldiers learned to overcome
fear and attend to their jobs in the face of every obstacle and every
danger.
We felt that travel, with its attendant contact with other customs,
language and people, would broaden our soldiers mentally and tend to
break down the provincialism which has been often noticed in America, as
well as in many other countries. Only a small minority of our men were
equipped, either in knowledge or in attitude, to take advantage of the
opportunities offered. Museums meant comparatively little to them,
mediaeval cathedrals not much more, Roman walls or ruins nothing at all.
Scenery did not mean as much as some of us thought it should, forgetting
that scenery looks entirely different to a man who rides past it and
another who walks through it. Altogether, knowledge of France, England
and Germany made, on the whole, not for a greater appreciation of
foreign lands, but instead for a great appreciation of America.
The fact is that the boys grew homesick. Most of them were only boys in
years, and practically all of them were reduced to the boyish level of
thought by the general irresponsibility, thoughtlessness, and dependency
of army life. They were like boys in a military school, very often,
rather than men engaged in the grim business of modern war. To these
boys absence from home brought a higher appreciation of home. This was
often a true evaluation, in the face of previous neglect and
underestimation; sometimes it may have been a sentimentalizing of a home
that had never really meant very much. But in the danger, the monotony,
and the distance, the soldiers grew to higher appreciation of their own
homes and their home-land as well.
Their complaints were often ridiculous enough. They objected to the
backwardness, the lack of sanitation, the absence of bathing facilities
in the French villages. These were true enough, as far as they went,
although I know personally that they can be matched in many details even
in prosperous and enlightened America. They objected to the French
climate, with the damp cold of its winters, not caring to remember that
certain parts of our own Pacific coast suffer from a rainy season, too.
This complaint becomes still more valueless when we remember how the
boys grumbled about the heat of the Texas border, in fact, how soldiers
not in action will always find a source of complaint in the weather,
whatever kind of weather it may be. As General O'Ryan remarked in his
famous definition of a soldier, "A soldier is a man who always wants to
be somewhere else than where he is." This restlessness accounts for some
of the complaints which we are apt to take a bit too seriously. A more
real complaint was the language difficulty. Soldier French was a
wonderful thing, consisting of the names of all ordinary things to eat
and drink, together with a few common expressions, such as "toute de
suite" (always pronounced "toot sweet"), and "combien." This prevented
easy communication, even with such French people as were encountered.
Few of the soldiers had any opportunity to use even their little French
on respectable, middle-class French families, especially not on young
men or girls. All these grievances, real and fancied, put the soldier
out of ease in France and made him appreciate America so much the
better. The sacrifices they were making for America, the service they
were rendering her, united with the home-sickness of a stranger in a
strange land to increase the devotion and respect of Americans for
America.
I need not refer especially to the rather mixed gain in religious
attitude, as I have already devoted a chapter to that subject. I must,
however, repeat one point I mentioned there, the meanings of physical
sacrifice as these men saw it and practised it in the army. It was the
outcome of their courage, their dash, their enthusiasm, that when the
time of stress came ordinary men offered their lives for their friends
and their country. The soldier at the front equaled or exceeded the
forgetfulness of self of the fireman or the life-saver in time of peace.
This lesson of self-forgetfulness, of self-sacrifice, was one of the
great impressions made by the war upon the best men it influenced, and
one which touched in its way even the most thoughtless and careless of
all the soldiers who had their hour at the front.
This brought out the group solidarity of the American army in stronger
relief. The fine thing about morale at the front, as I have outlined it,
was the mutual confidence which it called out in every breast. The pride
in his own company, his regiment, his division, in the American army as
a whole, which held a man to his duty under fire and impelled him to
resist the almost overwhelming influence of a sudden attack of panic,
made for loyalty at the rear as well and formed one basis for the
whole-hearted return of the young men into civilian society after the
war. Pride in one's division meant also pride in one's state; pride in
the United States Army meant pride in the United States. Self-sacrifice,
devotion, heroism,--all these were profound lessons for any man, young
or old, a lesson which American democracy can profitably utilize in the
daily humdrum of American life.
It was surprising how constantly our expectations were disappointed by
the actual facts of the men in the service. Most books and articles
since the war and all of those before the war were written on a
theoretical basis, and every one approached the facts with a theoretical
view. But the theory was proved wrong in so many instances that I am
making the present study entirely empirical, leaving theory out
altogether as more of a pitfall than an advantage. For one thing, I had
expected war to exert a directly brutalizing influence on the soldier.
This was never evident at all except in the actual stress of battle when
killing was a daily necessity, and human life, although the most
valuable asset of the contending forces, was still held cheaply enough
to be used up at a terrific rate. Men could not stop there to pity every
corpse; they had to save their own lives and at the same time to win the
war. But the effect wore off quickly; probably it left no result at all
except on men with a previous tendency to brutality or crime. I remember
the thrill of horror which went through Le Mans and the entire A. E. F.
in April 1919, when a railroad accident occurred near our post and a
group of soldiers and sailors on furlough were injured, some of them
fatally. We forgot all about the fact that these men had risked death in
entering the service, that the few of them in this accident were the
smallest fraction of a day's toll at the front if the war had continued.
We melted in sympathy, and the French population of Le Mans did the
same.
The men were not brutalized, contrary to expectation. Human life was
held cheaply under exceptional circumstances and evidently the men felt
that they were exceptional. But the men did become accustomed to the use
of firearms, and those already brutalized were given the knowledge and
the means for crimes of violence. The carelessness with which men used
and flung about all kinds of deadly weapons shocked those of us with a
sense of responsibility; it was part of their boyish heedlessness in the
midst of the fierce game they were playing. They threw their discarded
rifles in a heap by the first-aid post when they went back to hospital;
they even played catch with hand-grenades, sometimes with most serious
results. Once I met a pair of Australians out hunting rabbits with their
high-powered rifles, in a place where hundreds of men were passing
hourly by the much-traveled road. When I remonstrated with them, they
only replied, "Oh, well, we haven't anything else to do. And we know how
to shoot without hurting anybody."
But with all these real character acquisitions on the part of the men in
the service, and with the lack of that brutalizing which many theorists
had feared, at the same time certain moral losses were occasioned by the
military system. I shall not enter into the question of sexual morality
here, partly because I have discussed it in the previous chapter, and
partly because it was not distinctly the product of the army. The sexual
standards of the young men in the army were much the same as those of
young men everywhere, with some modifications through discipline. But to
the man who has served in any army at any time, the outstanding moral
weakness of the soldier is his entire disregard of the rights of
property. The sense of property, so strong in civilian life, which is
implanted so carefully into the little child, seems lost in the first
month of a man's army life. One brigade headquarters I knew in France
was established in a fine chateau, with large grounds surrounded by a
high wooden fence. At the same time, the men of the nearest unit were
living in barns and attics, with no light or heat of any kind in their
quarters. The result was that the fence disappeared, little by little.
Nobody ever saw the culprits, but I had reliable information that the
men billeted in that village had all the heat they needed. When we left
the area, about half the fence was gone, and I have little doubt it
vanished entirely during the occupancy of the next division.
I can still hear the indignation of the driver of my "tin Lizzie" when
the precious lamps were stolen out of our car and we had to drive home
ten miles in the dark. Of course, lamps were scarce, having to be
shipped from the States, and the thief undoubtedly drove an army car
like ours. But a few days later after a visit to the city my driver
reported back in triumph--he had found another machine parked in a side
street and "salvaged" the lights. I tried to make him return them, but
for once he proved insubordinate. It was only another army car; the
other fellow had probably got them the same way; he could not identify
the car, anyway. Then came the finishing stroke when we tried the
lights and found them burned out! The other driver had left them in as a
blind. My driver felt a sense of personal injury, as though he had been
directly cheated in a legitimate business deal. And practically any
soldier would have agreed with him.
The men "found" whatever they needed if it was not issued to them
properly, because property had no meaning to them in the army. They
owned nothing whatever; even their clothes, food and lodging belonged to
Uncle Sam. When their clothes wore out, they were replaced; when the
company's weekly supply of food was eaten up, more was forthcoming.
Rifles fallen into disrepair were exchanged for good ones; shoes were
sent to the salvage depot to be repaired and then issued to another man.
Equipment lost at the front or in the hospital was reissued without
question. Therefore the enlisted man felt a community sense of ownership
rather than a personal one. At the same time, he was constantly in need
of one thing or another. He needed fire wood, as in the incident of the
fence, or automobile supplies, as with my driver. The legend even goes
that the Australians, famous in their ability to care for their own
units, have been known to take an entire field kitchen, with the food
still cooking, from a British unit and make a successful escape. I know
that I have personally seen a British colonial soldier in a village near
the front taking a large mirror with a gilt frame out of a dwelling
house and making off toward his quarters. "What are you doing with
that?" I asked him. "Oh, I think we can use it," was his unembarrassed
answer.
The soldier learned to disregard law, just as he learned to disregard
property. Discipline meant obedience to constant minute surveillance. It
meant getting up at reveille, rolling his blankets in just such a way,
reporting at roll call, lining up for mess, working at whatever menial
tasks he might be detailed to do by the sergeant, asking for a pass when
he wanted to go to the nearest city, submitting his mail to censorship,
getting a day off for sickness only after lining up for "sick call," and
finally going to bed at night as soon as the bugle sounded "taps." These
men were not trained soldiers, accustomed to such a system; they were
healthy American boys in whom this constant subjection to external
control meant the immediate seeds of revolt. Autonomy meant then the
evasion of the law. A man could assert his individuality only in such
ways as going absent without leave, wearing a serge uniform (not
regulation for private soldiers), or gambling away his last month's
scanty pay. Add to this his constant contact with officers, who, if they
had to bear a heavy burden of responsibility and were forced to pay for
all the things the enlisted man received for nothing, still were not
subject to many of the restrictions which he found most galling. The
test of manly independence came to be simply "getting away with it." If
a man was caught in an infraction of the rules he had to take his
punishment; if he was not detected or not convicted he was a successful
soldier. This applied, for example, to a trip to Paris, the golden
dream of every American soldier. For a long time this was strictly
forbidden, although later three-day leaves to Paris were allowed to a
certain number of men. Yet thousands of Americans saw the lovely and
forbidden city unofficially. They got leave to Versailles, and rode into
Paris daily by street car. They took the wrong train, ostensibly by
accident, and had to change trains at Paris, dropping out of sight for a
day or two meanwhile. They borrowed the travel orders of other men and
used them over, risking detection. Neither the extreme harshness of the
Paris military police nor the menace of their own angry captains could
keep them from the enticing adventure. It was their boyishness, combined
with their lack of respect for the law itself, that led them into such
devious modes of disobedience. "If you know how, you can get away with
murder," was the usual apology--further excuse was not needed.
Among officers a similar tendency showed itself in a different way. The
officer was not limited in the most petty ways which irritated the men,
although he also could not take a trip to Paris without proper travel
orders and could not absent himself from duty without special
permission. But the officer likewise grew to disregard the law
essentially, even while he obeyed it most carefully in its minutiae. An
officer was bound by his signature on written documents. A request
coming from the sergeant had to be endorsed by the lieutenant, with his
reasons if he did not favor granting it. It would then pass on to the
captain, the major, the colonel, and if necessary also the brigadier and
the major general. Having passed through military channels for its
consideration, it came back again by the same route until it reached the
originator. This system made at once for diffusion of responsibility,
or, to use the familiar army term, "passing the buck." The first man who
approved the request had no responsibility, as it was approved likewise
by his superiors; the later endorsers had none, as they had signed it on
his recommendation, assuming his knowledge of the facts. Nobody could be
held responsible and every one was careful to evade responsibility
wherever he could. Naturally, this made for endless delays, for
complications interminable when a previous order had to be rescinded for
any reasons whatever, for evasion in case of difficulty or doubt. It
meant fundamentally the disregard of law, expressed by the soldier in
disobedience and by the officer in evasion.
The military regime likewise tended to break down habits of regular
industry. During the war there was the alternation of short periods of
intense and exhausting activity at the front and longer ones of as
complete rest as the men could obtain at the rear. It was a reversion to
the life of the savage, busy by spells at hunting or war, with rest and
languor between. The entire exhaustion, physical and mental, after a
"spell in the trenches" demanded complete relaxation afterward, while
there was always a little necessary work in the way of drill,
reequipment and inspection. After the war was over, the drill went on in
still larger doses but without the incentive of returning to the
trenches again afterward. This alternation of work and rest together
with the general rebellion against routine, broke down the habit of
consistent work which is built up with such effort and such inducements
in civil life. Boys do not want to work until they are taught to do so
and given inducements in the form of money and the things money will
buy. But the soldiers, so boyish in their life and their feelings, had
few such inducements given them. Their universal experience after
leaving the army was that it took a tremendous effort of will to return
to the routine and responsibility of a civilian occupation.
Exceptions existed, of course, to every generalization in this chapter,
as they do to any generalization of any kind. But the exceptions
speedily lifted themselves out of the ranks by promotion, and were
therefore covered by the different influences on the officers and the
higher ranks of non-commissioned officers. And I feel that even these
exceptional men who retained their respect for law and property, their
habits of regular industry, did so only in comparison with the general
break-down, that even they felt a certain loosening of the standards
which they had possessed in civilian life.
Army life developed a new series of moral values and moral reactions. It
brought out virtues which were latent or non-existent in civil life; it
reduced others to impotence. It produced love of country, of home, and
of God; it brought forth courage, loyalty, self-sacrifice, the extreme
of heroism, in such numbers and such variety that they seemed
commonplace. It did not brutalize any who were not very ready for such a
process. But at the same time, it destroyed the citizen's respect for
law and order, his respect for property, his habit of hard and
persistent work. It made him, for the time being, a lazy hero; a
jovial, careless, and lovable lawbreaker. It brought out exactly the
qualities which are least necessary in civil life, and injured those
most necessary; it took the student, the workingman, the farmer, and
made of him the doughboy. Army life was opposed directly to the whole
tenor of democracy, the regime where men control themselves, where they
work through ambition and desire for success, and where they strive to
accumulate property of their own, at the same time respecting the law
and the property of others. Army life meant a break in the lives of
millions of young Americans, an interruption of the steady development
of their characters and habits, a reversal of their tendencies and a
postponement of their ambitions.
I feel that it is a great evidence of the essential soundness of
American manhood that these millions have returned to civil life, in
most cases to their former circles and their former occupations, with so
little difficulty. Society helped them at the moment by the splendid
reception home, by the plaudits, the speeches, and the parades. It
helped them also to obtain positions and then left them to find
themselves. Fortunately, after a brief transition most of them did find
themselves, and the ex-soldiers to-day are back in every type of work as
before. The former captain may sell you a suit; the holder of a D. S. C.
may wait on you at the restaurant. They have overcome the restlessness,
the carelessness, the thrill; they are civilians again. But here and
there the seeds fell on different soil; here and there a former soldier
has not found himself again. We see him most often among the wounded
and gassed, who cannot fit into industry so easily, and whose sufferings
have often affected their mentality and always their point of view.
America has wasted criminally precious years of these young ruined
lives, in not bringing to them instantly the full care and service of a
grateful nation. On the other hand, industry has made little effort to
absorb our soldiers; I have seen men with trades selling fruit from
push-carts because there was no other work at hand. I have seen a
jobless boy, honestly trying to make a little money by selling trinkets
in the street and driven away by a patriotic store-keeper, who felt that
he had done his duty by buying Liberty Bonds and need not bother about
the man who had fought his battles for him. The soldier who cannot
return to civil life is a rare exception, but he is an exception caused
in an unstable youth by our military or our industrial system. Our
nation, which profited by that army, must remember for good every
weakest individual whose sweat and blood poured forth to make that army
great.