Huts in Hell

Many of these men were found to be infected when they reached France. Army discipline, it will be seen, soon produced results. The rate of venereal disease for white men when I left that city was less than one-fourth of one per cent and for colored soldiers, just about one per cent.

Let us think of our army division in terms of a modern American city, a city of men, women, and children. But here are cities of men only, men between twenty-one and thirty-one. Yes, men between seventeen and thirty-one. Young men, red-blooded, far from home, inhabit these war cities. Put such a city into your moral test-tube! Is it not inspiring beyond words that these cities, by the records of the Surgeon-General and from the reports of General Pershing, show a venereal rate far below that of civilian life, and a decreasing rate; that they show little drunkenness? And every statement of the War Department concerning these vital matters has been substantiated by my own investigations.

We shall be helped greatly in our efforts to appreciate the facts if we remember that every soldier before he is a soldier is a man; that the American soldiers in France are our own brothers and our own sons; that we have taken the best from our colleges, our churches, our offices, our homes, our factories and our farms, to feed the god of war who stalks across the fields of Europe. These men have not laid off their American idealism; they have not abandoned their American training and the moral and spiritual instructions absorbed by American firesides and in American churches and schools. We indict ourselves when we believe wholesale charges of evil living, brought against the finest fruit of our tree of democratic culture.

The psychology of such charges is demoralizing. Men falsely accused are inclined to argue, "Well, I have the name; the mark is on me; I'll take the game!" On the other hand, confidence begets confidence. Men are made strong by the knowledge that other men and that women and children believe in them. Our brothers and sons in France have won the right, not only to our love, but to our esteem and faith as well.

There is no room to-day for the quick-spoken, casually informed, and misinformed destructive critic. The constructive critic in the army and out of it, in France and in civilian life at home, will have increasingly much to do; not one iota of service for the soldier and sailor can we afford to abate. They are always in the danger zone.

I found the American in uniform building up about himself a wall of protection in the very attitude he is assuming toward the moral excesses practised by the few. He is resenting the indulgence that causes his country's civilization to be misjudged; he is disciplining his comrade who by taking improper and forbidden liberties endangers the freedom of others; he shows a distinct pride in the fact that American physical and moral standards are high. I believe that for every man in the army that is morally destroyed at least five men are morally born again. We have spent much time in discussing the vast task of keeping our men fit to return to us when the war is over, and it is time well spent. But there is another matter quite as important: America must be made and kept fit for these men to return to.

This is a report on conditions as they exist in the American army, and does not deal directly with circumstances surrounding vice and liquor in England and in France. As to these conditions in England and France, they differ widely. Vice conditions in such cities as London and Liverpool are particularly menacing; strong drink is everywhere a distressing problem. In both of these vital matters the English problem presents difficulties in excess of those confronting the investigator in France. Through diplomatic representations and with the utmost regard for the customs and feelings of our heroic allies certainly the same regulations should be applied to our soldiers overseas that now apply at home.

The results that have been thus far accomplished have been accomplished without conflict with the drinking-customs of our allies. In proportion as it has been found practical for our military authorities to have absolute police control over territory occupied by American soldiers has it been possible to deal effectively with liquor and vice from the standpoint of administering regulations and laws.

What is the attitude of the American military authorities in France toward drink and vice? I find our leaders in France aggressively and successfully promoting the most comprehensive programme ever attempted by a nation at war to keep her soldiers physically competent and morally fit. An official of the British government, a man of many distinctions and high in political life, told me that the eyes of all the nations of Europe were upon the well-nigh revolutionary policies of General Pershing and his staff.

The programme of the military leaders has been effectively supplemented by the Y. M. C. A., the Red Cross, and the Salvation Army. The Y. M. C. A. is responsible for a ministry that cannot be overvalued. With its huts, which range from the commodious double building in the great cities and in the large training-camps to the foul-smelling, dark dugouts at the front, with its canteens and hotels for officers and privates, with its music and its lectures, its classes in French and its Bible classes, with its athletic leadership and its rest-stations high among the quiet mountains, with its religious services and its personal interviews, it is meeting squarely the moral challenge of this stupendous occasion. It is the most potent hope of the church, and God's most fruitful agency, "for such a time as this." A captain of a company of colored stevedores told me that the Y. M. C. A. had increased the morale of his men one hundred per cent.

As I have written these lines, I have had vividly before me a group of American soldiers. It is three o'clock in the morning, and they have just marched four miles through trenches, shell-obliterated or filled with mud and snow; they have been relieved from the first line. They are men from four companies of a battalion of a division occupying a permanent position on the western front. They have had the distinction of experiencing the first extensive gassing directed against American troops and of repelling the first general raid over an American front. Of one of the companies every commissioned officer has been killed or wounded in the fighting of twenty hours before; its captain, a gallant Southern lad, died on the parapet leading the successful counter-attack. They are covered with mud, dead for sleep, chilled to the bone, but uncomplaining. Some of them have fallen repeatedly on the way out, and their faces are as black as their boots. They lean against the counters and the tables of the Y. M. C. A. hut, and silently drink the red-hot tea and eat the cookies and crackers. These are the men who have given the first clear demonstration of the fighting superiority of American democracy over German autocracy. They have paid a great price; but, counting all the cost, they have found the expenditure justified. They are the very vanguard of the pathfinders of civilization; they are the knights of the twentieth century.

I should be false to these men if, having the evidence of their moral soundness, I did not declare it; and I should be false to those who gave them as a priceless offering upon the altar of freedom.

General Pershing and those who are in authority with him in France deserve not a resolution of inquiry or censure, but a vote of confidence with the assurance of our co-operation and support.

The American soldier is the worthy inheritor of the finest traditions of American arms, a credit to those who bore him, an honor to the nation he represents, and the last and best hope that civilization will not fail in her struggle to establish the might of right.

Chapter XXI
VIVE LA FRANCE!

It was the tenth of May, 1917, in New York. The great city was alive—riotously, gloriously alive. Save for the narrow lane kept for the progress of the hero of the day her main artery flowed from building-line to building-line with a vibrant throng. It was a supreme demonstration of Democracy's melting-pot, a confusion of tongues, a medley of peoples, a human flood fed by every racial fountain of the earth.

I stood that day where the multitude was densest, and at the very edge of the throng, directly in front of the reviewing-platform at Forty-second Street. We had waited, it seemed, for hours when suddenly, as such a silence always comes, a pregnant quiet fell over all the people.

Obedient to the universal spiritual impulse, my eyes turned from the gray walls of the majestic library building, and followed where ten thousand billowing flags rolled back from Fifth Avenue like the parting of another Red Sea. Old Glory was everywhere, and everywhere flanking her were the Tricolor and the Union Jack.

I had scarcely recorded the shock of that emotion when sharp and high-keyed sounded the hoofbeats of horses, and drawing rapidly near were the outriders of a distinguished company.

The eager throng surged against the officers who guarded the open way; the voices of those about me joined the cyclonic thunder of cheers that rolled upon us; there was a bedlam of horns and bugles, and then—Joffre swept by!

Ah, I shall never cease to see him, a heroic portrait in red and white, painted against a great confusion and hung beneath a sun-goldened sky. I was very close to him, and his military cap was lifted; he was slightly smiling, and his eyes were shining islands in seas of tears. His white hair crowned his massive head rather than belied his full and ruddy cheeks; his shoulders were herculean and shaped for the load of a nation; his chest was broad and deep, to hold the heart of France.

In an instant he was gone, but in that instant the Gibraltar of the Marne, the rock against which the flood of absolutism rolled and broke, fixed his eyes upon the place where I stood. While the question, "Is he looking at me?" was shaping in my mind, clear and strong above the shout of the multitude rang the cry, "Vive la France! Vive la France! Vive la France!"

Three times it came, and from a position so close to mine that, when I swung about, I found myself breath to breath with the voice that had lifted it. The man was young and tall; his right arm was bound against his chest; his face was deeply scarred; and he was in the uniform of the French Flying Corps. As he flung up his unmaimed hand and cried, "Vive la France! Vive la France!" he was the incarnation of the chivalry of war.

The mighty Joffre leaned forward, gazed intently, replaced his cap, and then, as warrior to warrior, saluted.

It was a flash, an eternal moment that remains with you and in you and of you. From the souls of the two, the tender, iron hero of the Marne and the young American who had crossed the sea to help pay the debt a young Frenchman left us nearly a hundred and fifty years ago, I caught the gleam of brotherhood that will not die while a grateful Democracy remembers Lafayette and free men bear wreaths to the tomb of Washington.