Lee J. Levinger

“ I have seen men with trades selling fruit from push-carts because there was no other work at hand. I have seen a jobless boy, honestly trying to make a little money by selling trinkets in the street and driven away by a patriotic store-keeper, who felt that he had done his duty by buying Liberty Bonds and need not bother about the man who had fought his battles for him. The soldier who cannot return to civil life is a rare exception, but he is an exception caused in an unstable youth by our military or our industrial system. ”

“ Pride in one's division meant also pride in one's state; pride in the United States Army meant pride in the United States. Self-sacrifice, devotion, heroism,—all these were profound lessons for any man, young or old, a lesson which American democracy can profitably utilize in the daily humdrum of American life.
It was surprising how constantly our expectations were disappointed by the actual facts of the men in the service. Most books and articles since the war and all of those before the war were written on a theoretical basis, and every one approached the facts with a theoretical view. ”

“ When one reads the accounts of citations for the D. S. C. and Medal of Honor, one wonders that human beings could do such things. And when we who were at the front recall the utter democracy of those days, how salutes and formality of every kind were forgotten while only leadership based on personality could prevail, we realize anew the emphasis of the soldier on modesty and his resentment of the attitude of many a civilian and even a few military men in patronizing him either as a common soldier or as a miserable sinner. ”

“ In France, however, one is struck chiefly by the profusion and arrangement of trees. They are everywhere, alone or in clumps, and of all kinds, with often a formal row of poplars or a little wood of beeches to make the sky-line more impressive. In northern France the houses and barns are all of stone, peaked and windowless, with gardens that seem bent on contrasting as strongly as possible with the grayness of the walls. It seems as though tiny villages are every few feet, and always with a church steeple in the middle. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Especially we who were at the front felt this in the first flush of our coöperation, our mutual interest and our mutual helpfulness. After you have stood beside a man in the stress of front-line work, have shared a blanket with him, have seen him suffer like a hero or die like a martyr, his origin, his family and his faith become less important than the manhood of the man himself. More than once I have said, talking to soldier audiences of Jewish or of mixed faith: "After this war no man can knowingly call the Jew a coward again. ”

“ In the Civil War ten thousand Jewish soldiers of whom we to-day possess the records served in the Union and Confederate armies. Each generation of immigrants has been most eager to learn the English language and American ways, to take advantage to the full of American liberty [219] and opportunity, to make a home for their families in a free land and to help that land maintain its freedom. The World War was for the Jews, as for all Americans, simply the culmination, bringing out most strongly the high lights in American life. ”

“ But the young men, no longer soldiers, need us as badly now, while we, the churches and the synagogues, need them more than ever, with their new experience and their new-found manhood. What they need and what we need, too, is that we learn to coöperate on a common platform of action for their benefit now. If we want them, if we want to be at one with them, we must have a social program, a liberal attitude to life and especially to its most immediate economic problems, a willingness to sink differences of opinion that we may meet for practical effort and genuine progress. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Our division was then in the British area on the Somme sector, and at the time of our arrival they had just come out of the great victory at the Hindenburg Line.
Our first ruined city was Peronne, which will never leave my memory. The feeling of a ruined town is absolutely indescribable, for how can one imagine a town with neither houses nor people, where the very streets have often been destroyed? This situation contradicts our very definition of a town, for a town is made of streets, houses and people; no imagination can quite grasp the reality of war and ruin without its actual experience. ”

“ All that I want to bring out here is the important and usually misunderstood fact that American boys are restive under authority. They object vigorously to the domination of another's mind over theirs. And this objection too often took the form of bitter resentment against their officers. Therefore the final and most delicate work of the chaplain was to befriend the enlisted men against the oppression of their natural enemies and tyrants, the line officers. The army often reminds one of a school, the men are so boyish. ”

“ Army life was opposed directly to the whole tenor of democracy, the régime where men control themselves, where they work through ambition and desire for success, and where they strive to accumulate property of their own, at the same time respecting the law and the property of others. Army life meant a break in the lives of millions of young Americans, an interruption of the steady development of their characters and habits, a reversal of their tendencies and a postponement of their ambitions. ”

“ They did what we all considered impossible because they had the morale of good fighting men. They bore the ever-present danger of bursting shells and the sniper's bullet with boyish daring and constant success. They labored harder than any worker in civilian life, sleeping in the rain, marching, carrying their heavy rifles and packs made mercifully light for the occasion, digging in the clinging clay of the Somme valley. ”

“ The means of this type of morale is confidence. The good soldier thinks that he belongs to the best company in the best division in any army in the world; that his officers are the ablest, his comrades the most loyal, his own soldierly qualities at least on a par with the best. Each division was firmly convinced that its own battles won the war, while the others merely helped. None of them would give the French and British credit for more than adequate assistance, ignoring completely their years of struggle before we even entered the conflict. ”

“ In the military as in the civil field the religious message can come only by personality, never by command.
The chaplain appealed for the men whenever he felt that the appeal was justified and had some chance of success, but never when it would be subversive of military discipline. He remembered always that he was in the army, a part of a great military machine, and that his presence and his work were to make the men better, not worse soldiers. ”

“ He stayed with a group of men for the last terrible task of burying the dead. And when, that sad duty over, he returned to the troops in rest, he could not yield for a time like the others, to delicious languor after the ordeal of the battle field, hospital and cemetery. Then the chaplain must take up his round of duties, knowing that after the battle there is many a prayer to be said, many a hospital to be visited, many a soldier to be befriended. His task has just begun.
The military object of the chaplain is clear, to stimulate the morale of the men. ”

“ We know that our soldier comrades are loyal still, that America is still America, that as we have once defended her we need not now muster our arguments or records to defend ourselves against her. If the Jew ever needed justification, he surely needs it no longer to-day. The Jewish soldier has once for all made anti-Semitism impossible among the men who served America in arms, and who still in days of quiet continue to serve and save their country. ”

“ The high caliber of the women workers, the personal touch and home-like spirit of the work, gave it a hold on the affections of the men. For a long time the Jewish soldiers had felt neglected by their own, not knowing the obstacles which had to be overcome. Then they found their own huts, suddenly springing up in all the central points, crowded and popular with all the groups of soldiers in America's composite army. The Jewish soldier became proud and the Christian soldier became appreciative. ”

“ We do not need a new form of Judaism any more than we need a new type of government in America. We are confronted by the demand to adapt Americanism and Judaism to the changing demands of a changing era, to find among the temporary and evanescent elements in both those things which have permanent usefulness for any demand and any era. We need ideals of the past, indeed, but only such ideals as have survived the past, as apply fully to the present, as will aid in building up a future of promise and achievement for the Jew. Judaism is on trial to-day. ”

“ Morale in the army represented two distinct problems, the front line and the rear. The former demanded high tension, the necessity of unified and instantaneous action. The latter demanded steadiness in daily duties, training, drill and study, the same qualities needed by the worker in civil life but under unusual circumstances. And between the two there was a gap, because the let-down from the one type of morale might result, not in the other type, but in no morale at all. The good soldier in camp might be a very poor soldier at the front, where different qualities were required ”

“ Pride, on the other hand, was not dangerous but merely irritating in the extreme to an army of civilians, of Americans with the spirit of equal citizens, who felt that they were doing everything for their country and resented equally the autocratic and the patronizing manner. Besides the soldier saw examples of these his highest virtues about him constantly. Courage became a commonplace; self-sacrifice an everyday matter. Officers often shared the discomforts and exceeded the dangers of their men. ”

“ I quote Colonel Whittlesey, commander of the famous "Lost Battalion" of the 308th Infantry, a New York unit with a very large proportion of Jews: "As to the Jewish boys in the Battalion, I cannot recall many of them by name, but certain figures stand out simply because they are so unexpected. The ordinary run of soldiers, whether Jews, Irish, or Americans—the big, husky chaps who simply do what they are expected to do—naturally pass from our memory. It is the odd figures who stick in your mind. ”

“ The chaplain is in the army as the physician is, as the thousands of other non-combatants are, for a strictly military purpose. It happens that the non-combatants may use non-military methods. One may drive a locomotive, another carry a stretcher, another sit in an office and make out papers. All are essential to the military machine; none is in the service for any special humanitarian purpose; none is present as a survival of mediævalism, but all to take part in the grim conflict of the twentieth century. ”

“ In the army overseas we felt that prejudice was a thing of the past, that only in ignorance or malice could the old serpent lift its head again. To-day, with all the newer bitterness, we feel the same. ”

“ This fact was both the cause and the result of military discipline, which made duty an external matter of obedience to a million trivial and arbitrary rules, rather than to a few definite and outstanding principles. The young man has a morality of his own in civil life; he had a slightly different, but related morality in the army. It was not the conventional morality of society, which rests upon the historical standards of the middle-aged. It was a type of morality which we must learn to recognize and understand for both his benefit and that of society as a whole. ”

“ Still, at one time it was by no means uncommon to meet men just out of the hospital who had received neither mail nor pay for three months, or to find a man who had been shifted so often from one unit to another that his pay was six months in arrears. When we remember the little money at hand for any purpose whatever, when we bear in mind the loneliness of these boys so far from home, loved ones, even from common sights and familiar speech, we can imagine what a deprivation such troubles brought, and how deeply they effected morale. ”

“ Like most people I had wondered how one feels under fire, and experienced a queer sensation when I first heard the long whine of a distant shell culminating in a sudden explosion. Now I realized that I was under fire, too. But I speedily found that one feels more curiosity than fear under long-distance fire; real fear comes chiefly when the shells begin to land really near by. ”

“ We have fixed our gaze upon religion in action, and have found that the things which divide us are chiefly matters of [144] theory, which do not impede our working effectively together. It needs but the same enthusiasm for the constant and increasing welfare of all God's creatures to carry unity in action of all religious liberals into the general life of America, to give us not merely religious toleration, but religious helpfulness. ”

“ One thing certainly the young men feel, which American Judaism is accepting from them. While the young Jew is wholly sympathetic to Zionism, he hardly ever feels that Zionism is the center or the conclusion of the Jewish problem. Zionism, as a movement, has brought to fruition much of the latent love of the young Jew for his people and his religion. But the Jewish soldier, or the same boy as a civilian, is not interested chiefly in solving the economic or the cultural problems of Palestine. He responds also to the similar problems among the Jews of America. Zionism is not enough for him ”