A Jewish Chaplain in France Part 8

CHAPTER XI

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 gra.s.s of a French pasture. The group was h.o.m.ogeneous 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 circ.u.mstances 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 p.r.i.c.k 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 att.i.tude 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 a.s.sist 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 a.s.sociation was by far the largest war work organization which worked among the ma.s.s 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 Gren.o.ble, 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, n.o.body 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 att.i.tude 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 ill.u.s.trious 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.

CHAPTER XII

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 ma.s.s 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 circ.u.mstances. 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 pa.s.sed 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 const.i.tutes 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 a.s.sistance, 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 sh.e.l.ls 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 "sh.e.l.l 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 a.s.signed 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 s.e.x 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. s.e.xual vice and s.e.xual 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; prost.i.tution 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 s.e.xual 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 amus.e.m.e.nt, we worked from week to week and never inst.i.tuted 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 inst.i.tuted 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 cooperate 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, amus.e.m.e.nts, 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 coa.r.s.e, 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.