Huts in Hell

I heard a first lieutenant from Mississippi say to a young United Presbyterian minister: "I came to talk to you to-day because you are different. I feel myself slipping. At bayonet practice a man loses a lot of the things he doesn't want to forget."

I would not refer to this if it were the only incident of its kind.

I have given my two stories of preachers who got away with a poor start. I saw hundreds of preachers in France, American preachers with the Y. M. C. A. and others serving as chaplains. They are a great lot! Measured by every obligation of their ordination, and by their ability and their willingness to adapt themselves to these unprepared-for and utterly unanticipated conditions, they are a great lot! The American preacher in France is a minister. He is doing a tremendous work now, and he will do a far greater work when he returns.

I wish that every pastor in America could have at least six months in actual service overseas. It would pay any congregation to finance its minister's trip abroad for service with the Y. M. C. A.

As to the programme of the Kingdom itself, these men who have heard the great spiritual voice of Civilization in her rebirth, who have toiled and listened through long and terrifying days that crowded out of their lives the petty and superficial things, who have thrilled with the uncovered cries of men for the answer to their heart questionings, for the realization of their soul quests, will not return to be contented within the ancient walls of ecclesiasticism and sectarian differences. They, with the hundreds of thousands they have ministered to, will strike mightily against the props of outgrown systems. With the re-enforcements already promised from missionary lands, they will save us from ourselves, and together we shall set Christ free in His own temple. These who have seen the folly of a too long divided command on the western front, and who have witnessed the wisdom of a generalissimo there, will call for a United Army under the Divine Generalissimo, to press forward on the spiritual front of the world.

One day I saw six men building a road from a military highway in to a Y. M. C. A. supply warehouse. They were working in the rain, breaking rock and standing ankle-deep in mud. Four of the six men were preachers, preachers to large and distinguished congregations at home. The combined salaries of the six amount to $30,000; one man, a Wall Street broker, draws $12,000; divide $18,000 among the other five men!

In a first-line Y. M. C. A. division fifty-two secretaries were working night and day, doing the work of one hundred and twenty-five men. Twenty-eight of the fifty-two were preachers. Ah, but you say, how well were they doing it? This very question was in my mind, and I asked the divisional secretary to tell me how many of the twenty-eight he would keep if he could secure the secretarial assistance he would consider ideal. He went over his list carefully, and said, "Twelve." Rather disquieting! I then asked him how many of the laymen he would retain by the same test, and after quite as careful consideration he said, "Ten," and added: "O, they are all great fellows. You have asked me an efficiency question, and I have applied my ordinary business standards; but some of these very men may prove to be very efficient."

The two interesting items are these: twenty-eight out of fifty-two secretaries in a zone where thirty-five secretaries are under shell-fire daily, where the most desperate chances are daily taken and the most menial and body-wearying tasks are daily done, were preachers; and the preachers and the laymen stood side by side, and were of the same stature when a business man's efficiency measurements were applied to them.

I found my own pastor directing the affairs of a busy port-of-entry canteen with all the earnestness and success that mark his ministry at home. I saw the pastor of a large New Jersey "First Baptist Church" levelling the floor in a Y. M. C. A. officers' tent. At a brigade headquarters another minister was in charge of a hut on the first line, set out in the woods for the fellows' completer isolation from even the advantages of a ruined village, and at the point where all lights are turned out at night by supply and ammunition trucks creeping up to the line. Another, a graduate of Northwestern University, a strong-bodied, great-hearted, husky saint, was alone in the dugout, the most advanced permanent Y. M. C. A. station in any army. Just 1,600 yards it is from our most advanced trenches, and directly in front of our last batteries of "75's." I saw a young minister, who is the "informal chaplain" in a great seacoast city, marching at the head of a little funeral party that bore three black stevedores to their last resting-place.

But why multiply instances? The American preacher is just short of omnipresent in France, and he is doing the work of the war from Alpha to Omega with two-handed masculine energy and unselfish Christian zeal. His spiritual message may be shoved across a hut counter along with a can of beans or a bar of chocolate, or it may be quietly spoken about a red-hot stove just before closing-time at night, when he gathers those who care to stay, for "family prayers"; it may be whispered in broken sentences to the lad who has been gassed or to the man dying from his wounds. In a thousand ways it may be given, but it is being delivered.

The minister who left America to preach to the boys at the front, who departed with the words of his people, admiringly spoken, ringing in his ears, and a purse of real American money ballasting his trousers, has had some heavy seas in passage; but he has arrived. Rude shocks have awaited him, and his whole plan of campaign has been ruthlessly changed; but he has not turned back. To-day he is carrying on, and he will stay through. I saw no more inspiring figures in the beautiful land where so much of America's future is now shaping, and where so many of her hopes and fears are centred, than the preacher of the gospel of the Son of God.

I have not said anything about the formal religious services. They are not neglected. The number of these increases with the raising of each hut and the arrival of each new chaplain and secretary. The pulpit messages our fighters are listening to in France are the most eloquent and soul-feeding that are heard by Americans anywhere in the world to-day. Their messengers are from the first line of our American congregations, and these men of God are preaching as they never preached before.

I have had one ambition for this very faulty picture of the American preacher overseas—to leave with my readers the impression of the manhood of the ministry in a time when those who are less than men are either pitied or despised.

I reached a Paris hotel one evening utterly tired, dead for rest. I defied the teachings of Horace Fletcher, however, and ate my supper. Before I had finished my meal—I was late—the doors between the dining-room and the parlor were opened, and the programme of the weekly session of the Paris secretaries' club of the Y. M. C. A. began. I gulped my food to get out of the way.

Then a man began to read in a voice that rested me and warmed my heart, a voice of richness and vibrant with personality. He read from "Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush." I stretched my legs far under the table, leaned hard into the chair, and with my back to the speaker drank in the music of his speaking.

The reader was "Dr. Freeman," Freeman of Pasadena, one of the best-loved men in France to-day. He is a "corker," a "prince," the "real stuff," a "humdinger," and a hundred other things, by the ringing testimony of those who know him over there. I followed his trail from the sea to the mountains. I saw the division that he "set up" on the line, travelled the roads over which he distributed his equipment, and heard the men he led there tell how by day and by night he filled his own hands with the meanest tasks and spared not his own body. In Brest I found his manly prayer of purity and strength on the wall of a captain's room. In Toul his successor told me of his unfailing resourcefulness and cheer. Had he his own way, he would be on the line still, out in the greater noise and danger. But he is a good soldier. Now the spiritual directorship of the Y. M. C. A. for France is in his firm hands.

We sat through a raid one night after I had "borrowed" a pair of his socks and mussed up his room, and we talked of the great days that are to be when the boys come home.

Ah, one of the compensations for the war is the friendships it has made among Christians and the vocabulary it has given them, in which words of faith and fellowship have crowded out the smaller words of doubt and selfishness.

One of the best-loved men I found in France was Freeman of Pasadena, a preacher.

[Note.—I wish to say that the preacher referred to in the opening of this chapter is Rev. William L. Stidger, pastor of the first Methodist Episcopal Church of San José, California.—D. A. P.]

Chapter XV
THREE NEW GRAVES

Out of a blue and sea-cooled sky the sun looked down upon an ancient city of France. Great ships fantastically camouflaged lay in the harbor; darting to and fro were smaller vessels; the streets of the city were crowded with curious soldiers in khaki stretching their cramped limbs after two weeks in the restricted quarters of a transport.

From a military hospital three army hearses, accompanied by their formal escorts and preceded by officers, slowly climbed a central hill toward a cemetery. Three American flags were draped about the caskets, and several bouquets of flowers supplied by friends of the dead men were carried by the drivers. As the quiet group moved through the street, civilians and the military stood uncovered; a platoon of marching French soldiers brought its guns to attention, and even the small children removed their head-coverings; the populace had long since become accustomed to military funerals, but the heart of France never wearies of honoring the hero dead.

Through the long rows of cross-marked graves the little procession made its way—by the tricolor of France, the Union Jack, and the crescent marking the graves of Algerian soldiers who gave their lives for a cause that had not raised its banner in their own land, but for which they were glad to die by the side of their brothers who spoke a tongue that they did not even understand.

When the three open graves were reached, the caskets were placed upon the supports ready for lowering, and the brief burial service was begun. Quietly surrounding the graves were first the soldiers and then the simple peasants of Brittany, who had come to mourn their own dead and who now remained to honor the memory of those who had journeyed from the great nation beyond the sea to help fight the battles of democracy, of civilization, and of their beloved France.

The chaplain of the occasion read the names of the dead soldiers, and then said: "These men were denied the privilege of dying at the front; with fine ardor they enlisted, and with bounding enthusiasm they stood upon the deck when the ship took the path to the open sea. They were black men, sons of fathers or their grandsons liberated by the emancipation of 1863. In the quest of a larger freedom than was ever won for a single race they turned their faces toward the fields where white and black and yellow mix themselves to blend the colors of a just and lasting peace. They fell beneath the hand of disease that might have stricken them at home. It is the irony of fate that no shells ever moaned above their heads, that no hoarse-voiced command ever sent them charging into the enemy's lines, that no portion of their dream of conflict and triumph ever came true. But they had not fallen short, and their coming has not been in vain. In their own hearts they were soldiers; by their own decision they gave their lives to their country, and in the sum of the contribution America makes to this unparalleled endeavor their gift will not be lost. God measures us by what we are; deeds are not the outward manifestation of character; we fail or we succeed first in our own souls. Into the body of the same earth out of which they came in a far distant land, which holds those who loved them and who had great pride in their setting forth, we lower their bodies. We commit their spirits to Him who was called the Prince of Peace, who is the rewarder of every righteous action; who gives the keys of everlasting life to all who have kept the faith."

A prayer followed, and then an ebony-skinned bugler stood at the head of one of the graves. He turned the bell of his instrument into the sunset, and out toward sea beyond the land-locked harbor the clear notes rang. There is no firing-squad in a French cemetery. Back from the grave-crowded God's half-acre the platoons marched, and then dispersed. The day was drawing to a close; the graves were filled; the earthly record of three humble colored men who died for their country was completed.

Chapter XVI
A TALE OF TWO CHRISTIANS IN FRANCE

He was called the "Count." How he came by the name, and who christened him, I do not know. At home he is a travelling salesman. I saw him first with an odoriferous pipe between his teeth and a week's growth of beard on his face, standing in the doorway of a Y. M. C. A. secretaries' mess at the headquarters city for the First American Division—the first division permanently in the line on the western front. He was short and stocky, with the face of an Irish fishing-smack captain and a cough that sounded like the fog-horn off Nantucket Light.

I liked him instantly—liked him in spite of his pipe. Men who worked with him all swore by him. He was one of the key men of the fifty-two who under the leadership of a great-hearted and tremendously efficient Ohio business man were carrying the work of the Y. M. C. A. through the vital experimental stages, directly behind and within the fighting lines on one of our sectors in France.

His particular job was hut-building, and as superintendent of as nondescript a crew of carpenters as ever drove a nail he had already raised a dozen or more shelters under the menace of constant shell-fire; and when I saw those shelters they were keeping out the weather and housing a thousand comforts for twelve thousand soldiers.

Among those who knew him it was the consensus of opinion that he was a short man because so much material had been used in making his heart. His body was constantly under the whip of his sympathies. Far into the night his "camionette" searched the road for stragglers. Often he tore the blankets from his own bed to supply a man whose experience with French wines had been disastrous, and who would have been put into the guard-house had the "Count" not given him shelter under the cover of his light truck.

He had been on the job for weeks when I met him, but his ardor was as intense as when he began. "Why try to sleep when slumber only brings visions of bedraggled lads who need friendly rooms, warming fires, writing-tables, talking-machines, red-hot drinks, and the comradeship and sympathy of the Y. M. C. A. secretaries?" This was his question for all interested friends who tried to give him advice as to his own welfare. He religiously blasphemed his laryngitis, flagrantly disobeyed his considerate chief, and for hours broke every rule that the American Federation of Labor has ever indorsed.

He celebrated the last Sabbath of my association with him by persuading a United Presbyterian minister to work all day on a Y. M. C. A. hut for four hundred drivers of supply and ammunition trucks, who were quartered in a desolate forest miles from every comfort. By putting in the entire Sunday he gave those men a warm room in the evening. The "Count's" tired face was unusually attractive as he stood eating his late supper that night, and his ministerial friend looked as if he had a fuller understanding of the text, "The Sabbath was made for men."

A few hours before I left this division the "Count" brought me a Testament, and said, "Doc, I'm not in your line; but there's no telling when I will 'get mine' out along the road somewhere. Suppose you mark my book up; hit the places you know that have the stuff, and I'll be obliged." I "marked it up" a bit, and put a line or two on the title-page, and left it for him. He was away before I had finished. I am not sure that we said, "Good-by"; at any rate, we have not separated.

The "Count's" words do not always do him justice. The tobacco he smokes is not of a fancy brand. Theologically he is hard to locate; but he is an unassuming, unequivocating follower of the "Inasmuch," and a two-handed man of the Christ.

"Smith" was altogether different; tall and shallow-chested, thin of face and red-headed, he looked every drop of the Scotch that flowed unmixed in his veins. He was a "graduated" British Tommy. One lung was gone, and the rest of him had been so badly used in the blowing-up of a sap-head that the hospital judges refused to give him another chance to die for his country in the trenches.

He was one of the immortal "First Hundred Thousand," the glorious "Contemptibles" who fought from Mons to the Marne, the mightiest rear-guard action known in the history of wars. He was one of those who suffered the horrors of gas in front of Ypres. But he could not rest in London—rest there with his wife and babies, rest there with his laurels. Across the Channel the cause of his race still trembled in the balance, and it was thither that his heart commanded him.

When the army refused him absolutely, he finally secured a position as an automobile-driver with the American Y. M. C. A.; and so he carried me from an ancient city in Brittany to a great barrack camp established by Napoleon, but now filled with American artillery in training.

The judgment of his associates would warm his kindly heart if he could hear the words with which they told me his story. The hacking, deep-seated cough that racks him is more than the evidence of his torture. To those who have heard it and who know him it is the token of a higher heroism than that with which he tunnelled under the enemy's lines or faced the shock of their attack.

As I watched him disappear among the French soldiers bound for the front, who crowded the station on the night when I took my departure, the words of another soldier came to me: "He that endureth to the end shall be saved."

Chapter XVII
LLOYD GEORGE

I stepped out of the taxi, and found myself in front of three old-fashioned houses. The vicinity was one of distinction; but the houses before me, dwarfed by the Privy Council Building and the Foreign Office, and hard by the Parliament Buildings, were the strays of another century. Westminster Abbey, not far away, gives them an excuse for staying. Looking up, I read, "The First Lord of the Treasury, No. 10," and knew that I was before the portals of historic "10 Downing Street," for a century and a half now, with only a few intervals, the official home of Britain's Prime Ministers, and in reality the "White House" of the United Kingdom.

I lifted the ancient knocker that for perhaps three centuries has announced guests and that for at least a century and a half has called attendants to usher in the statesmen and the politicians of the earth. The door swung open, and a quiet man dressed in a business suit took my card.

About me on the high walls of a small square hall hung the antlered heads of deer. I followed down a long and simple but impressive passage to another hall, where I ran, head on, into a well-set-up gentleman of thirty-nine,—Major Waldorf Astor,—who was coming to meet me. He was delightfully informal. Through another waiting-room one passes into the Council-Chamber of the War Cabinet. Here all the British Cabinets have met since the Prime Minister established himself at "10 Downing Street."

The room is worthy of the greatness it has treasured. There are bookshelves about its long walls, and the lighting is good. The books are scarcely visible now, for they are curtained closely with maps and charts; here the far-flung battle lines of the Empire, which have become the front of civilization, are daily traced by the fingers of the men whose hands hold Democracy's destiny. The eastern end of the chamber is flanked on each side by two chaste Corinthian columns. A great table commands the centre of the room. It is covered with green baize and well set off by heavy, formal chairs. The room was furnished with a larger cabinet in mind; but every session of the War Council is attended by those responsible for the numberless leadership tasks of the struggle, and there are seldom vacant places.

There is only one picture in the room now. Above the mantelpiece which tops the fireplace, on the southern side, and directly behind the chair of David Lloyd George it hangs, a portrait of Francis Bacon. He was Lord Chancellor once, although he is better remembered as a master of human thought.

It is said that the present Prime Minister uses the chamber as his workshop, that it is his favorite room, and that he is more often in it than anywhere else. Perhaps because of its convenience—doors open out from it into the rooms of secretaries; and then, too, it is large enough to receive special deputations without waste of energy or time. Perhaps this convenience of the place attracts the leader in whom are centred now the British Empire's hopes and fears, or is it the associations of the chamber that call him?

Here sat Pitt and his cabinets. Here, when the word came from Austerlitz, Pitt said, as he pointed to the map of Europe that hung then where it hangs now, "Roll it up; it won't be needed for another ten years!" Here they stood with ringing cheers for Trafalgar, and here broke the glory of Waterloo. Here Disraeli won the Suez Canal, and Gladstone's mighty form once filled the chair before the fire. Does the gigantic little Welshman lift his head betimes and listen for the voices of the Past? If he does (and his eyes are not the hard eyes of a man who does not dream), he never fails to hear words prophetic of triumph, for this room is a Chamber of Conquerors.

As Major Astor greeted me, we turned to the right; and there on the stairway, with his left hand resting lightly on the banister, and a smile lighting his face, stood the Prime Minister. I shall always be glad that I saw him thus. He had just returned from Versailles, where matters of vast and immediate importance to the western front were discussed and settled. England did not yet know that he had arrived. The morrow was to precipitate him into one of the crucial battles of his ministry.

As he stood there he knew of the impending struggle—and he smiled!—not a perfunctory tremor of the lips, but a warming glow that made the great hall a friendly place. The smile was not for me, but for the gentleman at my side. Mr. Astor is a member of the Prime Minister's personal staff, and by his own worth a favorite and close friend of his chief.

David Lloyd George in the moment when I saw him on the stairway answered any question that may have been in my mind as to the personal quality of his leadership; he is virile and magnetic. Square of shoulder and deep-chested, with a straight neck that gives his fine head an erect setting, he has the appearance of added height that few stocky men possess. His color is good; his long hair, which is inclined to curl at the ends, is turning rapidly now; his eyes are clear, and shine; his voice is rich, and sings. He is one of those irresistible personalities, a man who not only dominates and rules by the mastership of his soul as well as by right of his mental genius, but who binds men to himself. His is the complete opposite of the phlegmatic, judicial temperament; his keen calculations in debate, his weighing of an opponent in a political tourney, are the decisions of an almost unerring intuition, and not the conclusions of a cold casuist.

His oratory and his whole leadership are first of the heart. His enemies have assailed him at this point, but they have not found it a vulnerable one. It is the heart of the world that bleeds and fights and triumphs. Only a master of the language of the soul can speak to it and for it, can marshal its forces and inspire them to superhuman activities, can challenge it over a Calvary and lead it to victory.

Perhaps no other man in Europe has been so long familiar to the American people; certainly no other political leader of the Old World has been so popular with the masses in America as Lloyd George. When he risked his life to deliver his soul against the Boer War, the United States cried, "Bravo!" and in his battle with landlordism, his struggle with the House of Lords, his championing of the rights of labor, and his unrelenting efforts to better the conditions surrounding the poor, he had the heart of America with him.

The story of his life is a familiar one and of the kind that brings a mist to the eyes and a tightening to the throat, as do the tales of the boyhood of Lincoln and Hanly and Grant. He was born in a wee house of Manchester, this Welshman; but an uncle, whose pride and joy he never ceased to be, reared the future statesman among the hills of Wales. The childhood of Lloyd George was typical of the simple customs and the religious faith of his people. He was an active boy. His inclinations from the beginning were toward the platform and public life. In Wales, singers and poets and orators are born, not educated; an education follows, an education in which environment looms large; but a true Welshman could not, if he would, bury himself in the books of universities, the sophistries of a profession, or the formalities of a calling. He remains Nature's child.

The activities of Mr. Lloyd George in connection with the temperance reform began in his childhood when he "spoke the pieces" and participated in the programmes of the Band of Hope. The ardor of his youth fired many an audience of his townspeople with an enthusiasm for "teetotalism" and a determination to conquer the traffic in spirits. It was twenty-eight years ago that he said: "I am a simple Welsh lad, taught, ever since I learned to lisp the words of my wild tongue, that 'whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.' This traffic, having sown destruction and death, must reap for itself a fruitful harvest of destruction and crime."

But it has been since the beginning of the war that David Lloyd George has delivered his supreme philippics against the "Trade." As Minister of Munitions and as Chancellor of the Exchequer he had denounced rum as the super-traitor of them all. It is not to be doubted that the words, "We are fighting Germany, Austria, and drink, and so far as I can see the greatest of these three deadly foes is drink," more than any other words spoken in either the Old World or the New have advanced Democracy toward total prohibition. They were the weights that turned the balance in Canada and in a dozen States of the American Union. They brought demoralization to the liquor forces. Their unequivocating charge of disloyalty against drink has been irresistible.

March 25th., 1918.

Dear Dr. Poling,

I am following with great interest the War restrictions on alcohol actually enforced and those under consideration in the United States of America.

We have ourselves not been neglectful of the necessities imposed by War. We have stopped entirely the manufacture of spirits; we have cut down the brewing of beer by more than two-thirds and the hours during which it can be sold to less than one third.

Should the exigencies of War necessitate further restrictions we shall follow with interest your campaign for the enforcement of War Prohibition in the United States of America.

Yours truly,
D. Lloyd George

We must grant that the Prime Minister has not been fortunate in some of his words used to deny the petitions of his temperance constituents; that some of his "explanations" have seemed at least to apologize for these brave declarations of another time, to discredit them because of their age. The heart of the church in Britain, where I found it less than enthusiastically friendly toward the Prime Minister, was a heart more of sorrow than of bitterness, the sorrow of a disappointment, a disappointment that was great because so much had been expected.

But I am yet to be convinced that David Lloyd George has turned away from "the God of his fathers" and the idealism of his youth; and I am able, I think, to appreciate in a small way the circumstances that have made a great man sometimes silent in order that he may have from many discordant voices the one message, "Get on with the war!"

Again it is the war! There can be but one task now. The Prime Minister, with appalling responsibility for the life of the Empire, surrounded by men of all political faiths and representatives of every class, is no longer merely a spokesman, a prophet, a minister, an executive; in him concentrate to such an extent the directing agencies of the country that he has become in fact the administration of the Government.

When I stepped away from "10 Downing Street," I had these words ringing in my ears: "The Prime Minister has not changed." I believe that the words are true. I shall continue to believe in the man about whom they were said. And, when he speaks again, I shall not be surprised.

I walked back to my hotel. On the way I lingered by the Thames, where only the swift patrol-boats were stirring. There was no moon, and a deep mist closed the sky channel to the pirate fleet. The city was in darkness and in peace. Up the Strand I walked to Nelson's monument, and in the lee of an old building across from it I stood and studied its shadowy outline. The mighty shaft was a promise from the past in which justice did not fail, in which freedom was not lost. It made me strong. The night became as the day, for in it was opened the window of hope. The sum of the experiences of the past two hours totalled the assurance of victory.

Chapter XVIII
WORTHY OF A GREAT PAST

These are times when it means much to know where some things are whose roots run far back and deep down. Before me as I write is a cathedral-shaped block of age-bevelled and worm-eaten English heart of oak. Its miniature spires rise not at all unlike those of a Gothic cathedral. It came from one of the original roof-beams of Holy Trinity in Hull, the largest parish church in England. As the warden placed it in my hands, his arm swept the high and vaulted nave and he said, "Six hundred and thirty-four years ago it was placed here." Six hundred and thirty-four years ago! Two hundred and eight years before Columbus started on his journey! Six centuries, and nearly a half more, before I stood there that fragment was part of a mighty support lifted by the hands of men and fitted above an altar that even then stood upon the ruins of another altar.

America is very young, but in a new and very vital way she now enters into the brave and worthy things of the past.

Six weeks in England and Scotland during a campaign for wartime prohibition gave me a vivid picture of the motherland and her unrelenting traditions, her customs anchored in the ages, her unyielding might. It was early in the year; but even so the fields had begun to smile, the grass was green, and presently the hedges began to bud. The khaki-colored lanes—for soldiers were on every path—were bursting into song; there were birds everywhere.

I walked by the Humber, down which some of the Pilgrim Fathers sailed; and in Southampton far to the south I stood before the new Pilgrim monument just in front of the ruins of King John's water-palace. Here John Alden, "a youth of the city," joined the immortal company; and from the dock hard by the Mayflower sailed.

I wandered down the streets Dickens has immortalized, and I climbed the "keep" of Conisboro, and stood in the window where Sir Walter Scott placed Rebecca and the wounded Ivanhoe. I heard my footsteps echo through the cathedrals of London, Edinburgh, and Glasgow. That supremely exquisite creation at York, a spectacle of worship, burst upon my enraptured gaze like a palace from heaven.

At dusk I followed Canon Braithwaite through the cathedral at Winchester, England's ancient capital. It was at the close of a vesper service of song and prayer. Here twenty-three of England's kings are buried, and here until Henry VIII. all were crowned. Here the Crusaders came for their parting consecration; across these Norman tiles they tramped ere they turned their faces toward the distant sepulchre; here is "Bloody Mary's" wedding-chair, the gift of a pope; and the great Canute, whose kingly dust reposes somewhere beneath the nave, after he had learned his lesson from the tide that refused to obey his will, left his crown upon the figure of the Christ just above this old altar. In one portion of the cathedral space is an ancient well that was in the temple of Diana erected nineteen hundred years ago upon the spot now covered by the cathedral itself.

While the gray-haired canon talked of the priceless treasures for which he has long been responsible, the choir-boys began their practice. The music filled the mighty building, and rang in a hundred echoes from column to column and from the tiles of the floor to the perfectly joined stones of the vaulted roof. The flare of our torch so lighted the sculptured figures that they seemed alive and moving through the air; the singing became the voices of these men and women, some of whom were good, all of whom were human, and who spoke so long ago.

I found particular satisfaction in treading the stones of Rochdale, the city of John Bright. Here during our Civil War, in spite of "soup-kitchens" and pestilence, the cotton-workers stood against any petition to the English government to demand the lifting of the blockade of the Southern ports. John Bright's influence for freedom was quite as effective at home as it was in Parliament.

Scotland gave me the continuation of the story British men and women are writing in blood around the world, a story of sacrifice and devotion unsurpassed in history. The pages of the story blend with the pages that recite the glory of Wallace at Bannockburn and of Robert the Bruce. From Castle Stirling I looked out across the windings of the firth; from that Gibraltar of Scottish kings my eye followed the massive wanderings of the Grampians. I caught just a glimpse of the Burns country at Dunoon, the home of Highland Mary, where her wonderful bronze memorial looks out across the estuary of the Clyde. Here is the home of another Scottish bard, Harry Lauder. He is a singer of a different sort, but he plays upon the same harp of which his illustrious fellow countryman was such a master. From the depths of a supreme sorrow he has lifted up a new song that has comforted a weeping world. Some day his fellow townsmen will rear another monument where the little city looks out toward the sea. On it will be the name of the gallant "Captain John," Harry Lauder's heroic and only son.

But my wartime journey was not one of aimless wanderings. It brought me to many shrines; it brought me face to face with those who fight the battles of Britain and those who lead them, into the homes of a people whose hospitality, even as their courage and devotion, is unsurpassed throughout the world. But it was a trip seriously intended and with stern business involved.

A representative group of men and women, compelled by what they regarded as immediate necessity, organized a prohibition educational campaign for the purpose of bringing to the British people testimony as to the actual results accomplished by the prohibition of the beverage liquor in Russia, Canada, and the United States. Witnesses were introduced from abroad, and a great series of meetings was arranged. Both prohibitionist and anti-prohibitionist supported the unique effort, which was a gigantic educational clinic. The addresses of the speakers were educational rather than agitational, and an open forum in which questions were freely asked and answered was a prominent part of each programme.

Wide publicity was secured and a vast attendance. Some of the most prominent political leaders, members of the clergy, ministers, professional men, manufacturers, labor executives, and writers, as well as all of the officials of the reform, gave the movement their support. Dr. Sir George Hunter, the distinguished publicist and shipbuilder, was chairman of the central committee.

The executive genius of the campaign was a brilliant young Canadian who led the amazing drive that made the Province of Ontario dry, Mr. Newton Wylie of Toronto. Wylie is a wonder! A broken back keeps him out of the army, but in spite of virtually constant suffering, he is a human dynamo, virile and indefatigable, with the double personality of an inspirational leader and an executive. The campaign he generalled in Great Britain was a great success. It addressed one million people from the platform and millions more through the daily and religious press, arrested the attention of political leaders, destroyed the sophistries of the trade, answered the questions of honest doubters, and overwhelmed the arguments of the opposition. As to the supporters of prohibition and the leaders of the many temperance groups, it brought them close together, and gave them unity for final action. As the result of the campaign war prohibition was brought perceptibly nearer. When it is brought about, Great Britain will have taken one more step in her age-long history of progress, a mighty step toward the victory which means peace and freedom for mankind.

Chapter XIX
RUM RATION RUINOUS

"I served at Gallipoli; I was wounded on the western front. It is my earnest opinion that the rum ration is utterly bad."

The speaker turned now so that he faced the larger portion of the audience that crowded the hall to its utmost capacity, and with which he had been seated. He then continued,

"I believe that there are thousands of glorious British lads who would be alive to-day, recovered from wounds and disease, restored to their country, their loved ones, and their friends, had this rum ration not undermined their strength and destroyed their resistance."

The speaker was a wounded surgeon of the Royal Medical Corps. The writer had just finished an address in Weymouth, England. The date was Wednesday, January 30, 1918. The presiding officer of the evening was the mayor of the city. Following the address an hour was given to the asking and answering of questions under the direction of the chairman. It was during this time that the surgeon made his remarkable statement. The rum ration had been debated, and some apparently earnest temperance people had gone on record in favor of it.

The writer finds absolutely nothing abroad to cause him to change his opinion that Sir Victor Horsley, Lord Roberts, and Lord Kitchener were correct in their opposition to the serving of rum as a ration to the soldiers. There was a time when a single hour of "Dutch courage" won a battle, and when a battle won a war; but that time is past forever. If we were to grant the desirability of the temporary effects resulting from the ration, we should be bound in the light of evidence produced to insist that the final results leave the soldier less able to resist disease, less competent to take care of himself if wounded. The argument that rum should be given to drown the sensibilities, to deaden the terror of men about to go over the top, is not valid. Rum enough to accomplish this makes a soldier unfit to go over the top at all into the situations where every order must be obeyed promptly and where every faculty must be supremely alert.

Principal Paton of the greatest public school of Manchester, England, said to the writer that at a certain aviation camp six young men were dashed to the ground and killed because, owing to the fact that they had taken liquor just before their flights, liquor to which they were unaccustomed, their machines in the higher altitude got out of control.

I have found it quite difficult to show any tolerance at all for the opinions of certain public men of Great Britain, clergymen included, who have asked for the wet canteen in the training-camps set aside for boys of eighteen.

The effect of the rum ration upon the teetotaler should have more attention than it has yet received. The son of a personal friend of mine wrote home to England that it was impossible for him to secure water for several days while in the trenches, and that the tea supplied him had the rum put into it before it was served. This lad had never tasted liquor before he left home.

In that very remarkable book, "Letters from Flanders," written by Second Lieutenant A. D. (Bey) Gillespie, who died at the head of his troops on September 25, 1915, I find the following:

"Also I had my first taste of rum, for I have to stand by and see a lot of that served out to men as soon as it gets dark.... I think that they should arrange that men who do not want it could get chocolate or some other small thing instead."

While in Scotland the writer received from a British lady the following portion of a letter written by her "godson," a Belgian soldier:

"If the war is the cause of many disasters, it has also its benefits. Among them we concede the destruction, if I may say so, of alcoholism. In our northern countries alcohol was a necessity, so to speak. Alcohol did one good; that was the idea firmly fixed in the minds of the people. To-day the governments have abolished the sale of alcohol in all the cafés. It is forbidden to sell it to soldiers, the soldiers cannot carry it with them, etc.; and a man is not the worse for that, but far better off. I know many soldiers who every day 'needed' their drop of spirits, and I myself was not free from the habit; yet for three and one-half years now I have done without it, and really my health is better. The bad habit is uprooted. The war has forced me to temperance, as it has forced many others. This must have happened also to civilians, for alcohol has become dear and scarce. So much the better."

Much has been said about the "impossible" water of France. I crossed and recrossed France without being at any time so situated that I could not secure pure or purified water in ample quantity. The American military administration deserves great credit for the way in which it has solved this problem for our overseas forces. From the port of entry to the last mess-kitchen at the front I found that where the local water-supply was inadequate or questionable the great canvas bags were kept constantly filled with the wholesome beverage that to-day makes America famous from the Mediterranean Sea to the Vosges Mountains. The great water-main laid through the French city in which the general headquarters of the American army was for months located was an inspiring sight and a ringing testimony to America's scientific attitude and her war efficiency.

As to the basis for the British rum ration, Sir Victor Horsley refers to it as the "old pernicious rum ration" which is given to the soldier as a deceptive substitute for food, which decreases his efficiency and reduces his strength. Sir Victor was one of the most distinguished surgeons of his time, the recognized medical authority of the British army for a generation, and a scientist who in his profession commanded a hearing through the world. He has referred to the system of supplying rum to British soldiers as having been established by the command in Flanders during Marlborough's campaign at the beginning of the eighteenth century. He also says, "It must be remembered, for the sake of our honor as a profession, that the army medical service, though an absolutely essential part of His Majesty's forces, has not only never been granted a proper place in the administration of military affairs, but even now [early in 1917] has no representative on the Army Council."

The medical profession cannot be held primarily responsible to the British nation for errors in the vital question of the rum ration and the medical and surgical care of soldiers.

Sir James McGregor, at one time the principal medical officer of the army, issued one of the earliest statements against the rum ration. He says in his memoirs that on a trying desert march down the Nile "the men had no spirits delivered out to them, and not only did they not suffer by this, but it contributed to the uncommon degree of health which they had this time enjoyed." This was written in 1801. Medical men in the United States are familiar with the experience of McClellan on the banks of the Potomac in 1862 when a spirit ration was issued in the belief that it would help stop bowel complaints. After one month the ration was withdrawn because drunkenness and dysentery had increased.

The experiences of Lord Roberts in the Boer War in South Africa and in India, and similar experiences of General Kitchener, caused these men to become unequivocally opposed to a ration of rum.

The army authorities of Great Britain have never answered Sir Victor's following contentions, which had the fullest indorsement of Lord Roberts and Lord Kitchener:

The rum ration is responsible for

1. Decadence of morale. Causation of "grousing," friction, and disorder.

2. Drunkenness, punishments, degradations in rank.

3. Decadence of observation and judgment. Causation of errors and accidents.

4. Loss of endurance and diminution of physical vigor. Causation of fatigue, falling out, and slackness.

5. Loss of resistance to cold. Causation of chilliness, misery, and frost-bite.

6. Loss of resistance to disease (particularly diseases occurring under conditions of wet and cold), namely, pneumonia, dysentery, typhoid fever.

7. Loss of efficiency in shooting. (Half the rum ration causes a loss of 40 to 50 per cent in rifle-shooting. The navy rum ration causes a loss of 30 per cent in gunnery.)

In Sir Victor Horsley's last letter to Mr. Guy Hayler of London he spoke of the great riot that occurred in Cairo,—a riot not set on foot, as had been reported, because the men wanted more drink for themselves, but because they would not stand quietly by and see the officers drinking heavily in the hotels after the time appointed for closing canteens to the privates. He also stated that the enormous loss of men crippled and dead from frost-bite and cold at Gallipoli was due to several factors, in which alcohol played a part not only directly, but indirectly as well, owing to the neglect of the personal care and treatment of the men due to the satisfaction and complacency which whiskey-drinking produces. "Men allowed things to drift," the great surgeon wrote.

I was privileged to be in the front line with the American forces when they experienced their first general gassing and their first raid from German shock troops. I was with them in water- and mud-filled trenches; I saw them when for five and even seven days they had been constantly in the tense expectancy of men who await a raid; I slept with them and messed with them; I saw them in the agonies of the gas and soaked in the blood of their wounds; I saw them so completely exhausted that they fell asleep in their snow- and water-soaked garments upon the hard floor of a Y. M. C. A. hut, resting there without protection only as we found newspapers and canvas strips with which to cover them—their own blankets had been buried by shell-fire, and they had just come from the more advanced positions after being relieved.

These men had borne all without a rum ration. The hot coffee and tea with which the Y. M. C. A. and Red Cross and their own cooks provided them did for them all that the rum ration could have done, and with none of rum's evil after-effects. I did not hear a single soldier ask for rum. As to the insistence of some that it is impossible to supply our forces with coffee and tea under extreme front-line conditions, I was witness to the fact that under the most extreme conditions hot drinks were constantly furnished.

It will be kept in mind that by the term "rum ration" we refer to the regular and daily supply of spirits as a recognized part of the dietary of the soldier, and not to the possible use of alcohol in special instances by order of medical officers. As to this latter, I have not seen rum or spirits used. The men have themselves informed me that it has not been prescribed for them. I imagine that its introduction for medicinal purposes will depend very much upon the personal attitude of individual medical men toward alcohol as an internal medicine, just as it does in the United States. The fact that the medical profession is represented in the councils of the American army, and by some of its most distinguished leaders, and the further fact that medical authority in America has banished alcohol from the American pharmacopœia, are re-assuring. In having such men as Dr. Haven Emerson, formerly chief health officer of New York City, now a major in the medical service in France, to counsel those in supreme authority overseas, we are most fortunate.

Peculiarly difficult will be the problem arising where American soldiers are brigaded with English and French regiments. But it is a problem that must and will be solved.

Under no circumstances will this nation consent to the establishing of the rum system that now works injury in the armies of her splendid allies. That it does work injury, I know.

It is certainly true that the vast majority of men now receiving the ration of rum, if asked to express an opinion, would heartily vote for it. It is equally true that the soldiers of our allies are not a drunken mob, that they do not fall under the influence of drink menasse. But the weakening and deteriorating effect of this pernicious narcotic, water-absorbing, depressant drug poison is unmistakable.

What the surgeon of the Royal Medical Corps said at Weymouth, and all that he said, is true. Canada does well to be aroused; her hurt is deep. There is tragedy in the situation that ties the hands of a people who have sent armies of men clean of alcohol to fight for our common cause under the flag of their motherland. These armies, as soon as they leave the three-mile zone that guards the shores of Canada, pass under an authority that thrusts upon them the curse which their own government has destroyed.

The fact that the immediate and noticeable sensations and effects of rum deceive men into accepting it as a benefactor instead of a curse does not relieve a government of responsibility for finding and following the truth. With my own eyes I have seen the demonstration of the truth which science establishes—alcohol gives to the armies of democracy trembling limbs, blinded eyes, deafened ears, dulled sensibilities, hearts too frail to pump the blood of mightiest deeds, poverty of soul in times when richest treasures alone suffice to pay the price of justice and of freedom.

Chapter XX
PHYSICALLY COMPETENT AND MORALLY FIT

"I must keep clean for them, and I'm going to do it."

A captain of the American Expeditionary Force spoke the words. We were standing together in front of a mantel in an old-fashioned room in an ancient seacoast city of France. On the mantel were the pictures of a woman and four beautiful children. The captain was not a saint; he was entirely too profane to be really good company; but, as he looked into the faces of his wife and babies, he was very intense and determined.

There is a question of vital interest to all Americans and particularly to those who have sons in the Expeditionary Forces of the United States, and I went abroad to find the answer to it. Rather, there are two such questions: first, What is the moral character of the American soldier abroad? and, second, What are the American military authorities in France doing to keep the soldier physically competent and morally fit?

There have been black rumors abroad. Stories have been told that reflect seriously upon the man in uniform. Leaders in high places have been accused of protecting vice, of allowing what amounts to a segregated district directly behind the lines. The charge was widely circulated in December, 1917, by certain publications, that more than one thousand Americans from a suburban community of the northeastern section of the United States were under guard for drunkenness after their first pay-day in France. Alarming statements have been made concerning venereal diseases.

I have found the answers to the questions already stated.

1. I have studied conditions in England, in landing-ports and embarkation-ports, in London and in rest-camps.

2. I have lived in constant contact with five hundred American officers for a period of ten days.

3. I have watched the American soldier in Paris on the street, in the hotel, and in the café.

4. I have conferred with those who have special responsibility for investigating social diseases among men with the colors and for conducting a comprehensive educational campaign to fortify these men against sexual temptations.

5. I have visited hospitals under virtually all conditions as to location and the nature of the diseases treated.

6. I have had interviews with surgeons and other regular army officers.

7. The whole matter has been discussed with a distinguished physician who until recently was the chief health officer of a great American city and a recognized authority on the relation of liquor to vice. This physician is now in the government service in France and is giving special attention to sanitation and hygiene.

8. I have had interviews with General Pershing and several of his staff.

9. I have given particular attention to the French ports where American soldiers disembark, spending several days in each of these cities. On two occasions while I was on the ground as many as fifteen thousand men came ashore from convoys in a single day. These men had their first shore experience after a long and nerve-racking voyage.

10. I have been closely associated with more than five hundred Y. M. C. A. secretaries who served under all conditions of army life. Among these secretaries have been some of America's most prominent business men, ministers, lawyers, athletes, physicians, nurses, and teachers.

11. I have talked with leaders in the civilian and political life of France.

12. For four days I have studied conditions in our general headquarters in France and in a divisional headquarters at the front.

13. For six days I have messed with private soldiers under fire; I was with them day and night.

14. For six days I served within the front line as a regular Y. M. C. A. secretary; three additional days were spent somewhat farther back, but within the immediate war zone. For three of the six days I was entirely in charge of the dugout which is the most advanced permanent Y. M. C. A. station in any army, being located within less than sixteen hundred yards of our most advanced trench. Directly connected with this dugout are a room of the Signal Corps, a Red Cross first-aid station, and billets for forty-seven men. Three other days were spent assisting in a hut farther back, but situated above ground and in the zone of constant shell-fire. During these days I was brought face to face with men confronted by the most trying conditions of modern warfare. I saw them caked with mud, chilled with snow and ice-cold water, sick and wounded. I witnessed the treatment that they received; I inspected what they ate and drank.

15. I have visited our front-line trenches, meeting the men and officers and conversing with them. I have seen the American soldier under direct fire. I have measured him after the most extensive raid the Germans had until that time directed against him, and the one in which the American army really came into its own. I have been with the American soldier in a barrage, and later when he carried back his dead and wounded and the wounded of his enemy.

16. I have studied the American soldier after he had marched four miles through mud-filled, shell-scattered trenches to his billet, relieved after eight days of trench life during which he had suffered everything from rain and snow to gas, machine-gun fire, bayonet, and shrapnel. I have seen him in repose and in action. I have seen him before, and I have seen him after, a charge.

I believe that I not only know what the American soldier does in France, but that I begin to know what he is.

He is a representative American. And he is living on a moral plane which is above the moral plane of civilian life at home.

I have found soldiers who are a disgrace to the uniform; there are individual cases and there are groups of cases that give me keen regret. I wish that the army had a "Botany Bay," that those who insist upon practising the indecencies could be segregated. However few these men are,—and they are indeed the small minority,—they constitute a menace to morale, and exert a demoralizing influence upon those with whom they are associated. Then, too, there are a few officers who represent the old idea that the soldier is necessarily a victim of his passions, and must be allowed, even encouraged, to gratify them. But such officers are in a decreasing ratio to the whole, and privates who bring an unfavorable judgment upon their country are the exceptions, that assist in proving the rule.

On one occasion two hundred men from just-arrived transports began their self-appointed task of painting a certain French city a livelier hue. Very quickly they discovered that "decorators" of their class were not in demand. The naval patrol sent them back to the ships with battered heads and wiser minds. Two hundred men out of more than fifteen thousand tried to be naughty, and failed! I can imagine a lurid head-line, "Recently Arrived Soldiers Paint City Red." Such a head-line would have been unfair and untrue. That story of a thousand men from the rural community of northeastern America is absolutely false. I have investigated it in every French port where American troops land and in in every other place where any considerable number of our men have been quartered. My inquiries have followed three lines, the military, the Y. M. C. A., and civilians. While conditions were worse at the beginning, before our military authorities had their own police programme operating, nothing at all approaching this condition ever existed.

Our leaders in France have not conquered the vices that society has battled against from the first organized beginnings of civilization; but, if the American Expeditionary Force is not setting an example in moral idealism to American civilian life, then I have walked through France with my eyes closed and my ears stopped.

When you see one soldier under the influence of liquor, do not conclude that the army is drunk! It is at least suggestive that in three months spent in England and France, associated with tens of thousands of soldiers, I did not see a single soldier, officer or private, under the influence of liquor on the street, in a public conveyance, or in a public building.

When you hear of one syphilitic, or a hundred, do not traduce en masse the flower of American manhood now transported to the richly watered fields of France. An investigation made by a prominent jurist of the United States, who is also a leading layman of the Methodist Church, revealed the following conditions in a certain port of landing. This city has long borne the reputation of being among the most immoral of Europe. The survey covered both white and black troops, and was made in areas personally inspected by the writer.

The record for venereal diseases for four months preceding my visit was: