7Ae 
 NEW SPIRIT 
 
 of tHe 
 
 NEWARMT 
 
 ■ II ■■■■■iiiiiw mil ■ 
 
 JOSEPH H. ODELL 
 
Class 
 Book-. 
 
 ^. J-- --y A 
 
 .S 
 
 Copyright };". 
 
 eOPXIUGHT DEPOSIT. 
 
The New Spirit 
 
 of 
 The New Army 
 
The New Spirit 
 
 of 
 
 The New Army 
 
 A MESSAGE TO THE 
 "SERFICE FLAG " HOMES 
 
 By 
 JOSEPH H. ODELL 
 
 With an Introduction by 
 NEWTON D. BAKER 
 
 Secretary of War 
 
 New York Chicago Toronto 
 Fleming H. Revell Company 
 
 London and Edinburgh 
 
Copyright, 1918, by 
 FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY 
 
 
 New York: 158 Fifth Avenue 
 Chicago; 17 North Wabash Ave. 
 Toronto: 25 Richmond Street, W. 
 London: 21 Paternoster Square 
 Edinburgh: 100 Princes Street 
 
 MAR 13 1918 
 ©CI.A494067 
 
To the memory 
 
 of 
 
 Lieutenant W, W. Odell, M. C. 
 
 ptk Sherwood Foresters, B. E. R 
 
 who fell m 
 Flanders, October Fourth, igij 
 
 while gallantly 
 
 leading his men in an attack 
 
 upon the German trenches 
 
The White House, Washington 
 To the Soldiers of the National Army: 
 
 " You are undertaking a great duty. The heart 
 of the whole country is with you. Everything 
 that you do will be watched with the deepest in- 
 terest and with the deepest solicitude not only by 
 those who are near and dear to you, but by the 
 whole nation besides. For this great w^ar draws 
 us all together, makes us all comrades and 
 brothers, as all true Americans felt themselves to 
 be when we first made good our national inde- 
 pendence. The eyes of all the world will be upon 
 you, because you are in some special sense the sol- 
 diers of freedom. 
 
 *' Let it be your pride, therefore, to show all 
 men everywhere not only what good soldiers you 
 are, but also what good men you are, keeping your- 
 selves fit and straight in everything and pure and 
 clean through and through. Let us set for our- 
 selves a standard so high that it will be a glory 
 to live up to it and then let us live up to it and 
 add a new laurel to the crown of America. 
 
 " My affectionate confidence goes with you in 
 every battle and every test. God keep and guide 
 you!" 
 
 WooDBOw Wilson. 
 
Introduction 
 
 WHEN this war is over and the men 
 and women of America have had 
 an opportunity to obtain a per- 
 spective on its conduct and results, there will 
 be an adequate appreciation of Dr. Odell's 
 statement about Camp Hancock : *' I would 
 rather intrust the moral character of my boy 
 to that camp than to any college or uni- 
 versity I know. This does not cast any un- 
 usually dark shadow upon the educational 
 institutions of the country, but they have 
 never possessed the absolute power that is 
 now held by the War Department." 
 
 Camp Hancock is by no means unique in 
 the quality that inspired this expression of 
 praise. The training camps that are fitting 
 our men, both of the army and navy, to fight 
 for the cause of democracy are builders of 
 moral as well as physical stamina. 
 
 These chapters interested me greatly when 
 in part they first appeared in The Outlook, 
 for I found in them a complete understand- 
 ing of the work of the War Department 
 Commission on Training Camp Activities. 
 7 
 
8 INTRODUCTION 
 
 The scope of the Commission's activities is 
 even wider than is indicated here, and its 
 work is growing rapidly. Special library 
 buildings have been built at the camps, and 
 the American Library Association has un- 
 dertaken the work of conducting them. 
 Camp theatres seating audiences of three 
 thousand have been erected, and the men 
 are enjoying the best theatrical performances 
 at prices of from ten to twenty-five cents. 
 Eminent actors and managers are coopera- 
 ting with us in this field. 
 
 Cooperation, indeed, has marked the work 
 of the Commission at every turn. Ameri- 
 cans acknowledge their debt to the soldier ; 
 they believe in him, and in return the soldier 
 believes in his mission. For a succinct 
 statement of the value of this work, I cannot 
 improve on what Dr. Odell says : 
 
 *' If Germany should crumble before these 
 men should get into action, if we have lav- 
 ished billions of dollars to train men for bat- 
 tles they will never fight, yet the money has 
 been well spent, and I consider it the best 
 investment in citizenship the country could 
 have made.'^ 
 
 Newton D. Baker, 
 Secretary of War, 
 
 Washington^ January 14^ igrS, 
 
Foreword 
 
 AMERICA is on trial in the court of 
 the nations. Democracy has set 
 forth to prove its fitness to determine 
 world affairs. For many years Europe has 
 taken us at our own valuation and has con- 
 ceded our efficiency, resourcefulness and de- 
 cisiveness. To a very large degree — perhaps 
 to the point of peril — we have accepted our- 
 selves at our own valuation, and we have 
 been more than content with the audit. This 
 war has been merciless toward illusions. 
 One question is now paramount in every 
 mind : Will America stand the test ? Our 
 allies look to us for the final contribution 
 toward winning the war. There is nothing 
 fictitious in this attitude, nothing of mere 
 courtesy or flattery ; the responsible states- 
 men of Great Britain, France and Italy, 
 frankly acknowledge their dependence upon 
 the United States. We have responded 
 with a solemn pledge to use our utmost re- 
 sources to meet the demand. Three years 
 and a half of heroic and ghastly struggle and 
 9 
 
10 FOEEWORD 
 
 the outpouring of millions of lives will have 
 been in vain unless we can mobilize our 
 moral and material forces and rush them 
 rapidly to the support of our gallant allies. 
 Liberty and justice cannot be preserved to 
 mankind by phraseology. America must be 
 the victor or the victim in this death-grapple 
 with autocracy. 
 
 Our first and greatest asset is the quality 
 of our manhood. Russia has failed, not for 
 lack of quantity in man-power, but because of 
 a flaw in its quality. We are perfectly right 
 in the confidence that the traditions and cus- 
 toms and habits of a normal state of society 
 entitle us to expect victory. But with hun- 
 dreds of thousands of men torn from the 
 normal state of society new perils arise. 
 Military establishments have always been 
 the easy prey of moral vampires. Our prob- 
 lem is : How to keep our splendid one-hun- 
 dred per cent, manhood at the one-hundred 
 per cent, level of efficiency ? No other nation 
 has yet succeeded in doing that. I think we 
 shall succeed, and mainly because of the re- 
 markable work of the Commission on Train- 
 ing Camp Activities. 
 
 During my tour of the training camps and 
 cantonments I gave my attention to the 
 morals and the morale of our army, leaving 
 
FOEEWOEI) 11 
 
 the material equipment and accoutrement for 
 another occasion or for a different investi- 
 gator. I asked no questions about blankets, 
 clothing, small arms or artillery. The fol- 
 lowing chapters are the record of a first hand 
 investigation, made without prejudice or pre- 
 dilection, for the purpose of telling the millions 
 of relatives and friends of the soldiers what 
 camp life and the military regime are doing 
 for the young manhood of the nation. The 
 editors of The Outlook asked me to write im- 
 partially and frankly, condemning things bad 
 as freely as praising things good. I am 
 happy to say that I found very little deserv- 
 ing of condemnation. The marvellous co- 
 operation of the military authorities and the 
 various voluntary agencies has produced a 
 moral and social environment for our troops 
 in training which is unparallelled in history. 
 
 From the time the articles began to appear 
 in The Outlook I have had numerous letters 
 confirming my general conclusions. Parents, 
 brothers, sisters, wives and sweethearts may 
 rest assured that every possible safeguard is 
 being placed around the character of their 
 dear ones. Indeed, more than this, every 
 conceivable incentive is being summoned or 
 created to stimulate a healthy moral life in 
 our citizen-soldiers. Of course, there are 
 
12 FOEEWOED 
 
 isolated details or detachments of men for 
 whom little can be done in an organized 
 way, but in the great camps and canton- 
 ments it is difficult to conceive how anything 
 more could be done. Whatever may be said 
 of our material preparedness, it is certain 
 that the moral resources of the nation have 
 become swiftly and effectively available in 
 this period of crisis. 
 
 Joseph H. Odell. 
 Troy, N. V. 
 

 Contents 
 
 
 I. 
 
 The Soul of the Soldier 
 
 15 
 
 II. 
 
 The Miracle of Democracy . 
 
 35 
 
 III. 
 
 Democratizing the Army to Save 
 Democracy .... 
 
 59 
 
 IV. 
 
 The Men Behind the Men Who 
 
 
 
 Fight the Huns 
 
 75 
 
 V. 
 
 Making Democracy Safe for the 
 
 
 
 Soldier . ; . . . 
 
 95 
 
 VI. 
 
 Will America Fail? 
 
 III 
 
 13 
 
The Soul of the Soldier 
 
THE SOUL OF THE SOLDIER 
 
 OF our present army on foreign serv- 
 ice, or in training at home, more 
 than one million enlisted ; the bal- 
 ance were drafted. In the National Army 
 cantonments there is a spirit of contentment 
 and cooperation just as hearty as that which 
 is evident in the National Guard and Regular 
 Army camps. If we could get a composite 
 picture of the motives which led to the mil- 
 lion or more voluntary enlistments we might 
 have a glimpse of the seed which is growing 
 into the soul of the American soldier. But 
 the men will not answer a questionaire with 
 simplicity and frankness ; perhaps, not being 
 trained psychologists, they cannot. Their 
 answers are humorous, or evasive, or repre- 
 sent the mood of the passing moment, or 
 their powers of composition fail them in try- 
 ing to describe a set of mixed or complex 
 motives. I have questioned them directly 
 and indirectly, and the answers seemed to 
 simmer down to this : they were caught in a 
 17 
 
18 THE SOUL OF THE SOLDIEE 
 
 movement which they did not try to resist. 
 " Everybody was doing it ; " "I didn't want 
 to be left out of the show ; " " Seemed to be 
 the only thing to do ; " " Every decent chap 
 ought to fight when his country is at war ; " 
 ** Thought it would be a fine experience." 
 Among the enlisted men I have not found 
 one who flamed out with righteous indigna- 
 tion, or who proclaimed himself ready to die 
 for civilization, or who professed a passion 
 for making the world safe for democracy, or 
 who posed as a St. George to save Belgium 
 or France from the Hohenzollern dragon. 
 Yet all of this proves nothing except that the 
 seed of the soldier soul, like all other seed, 
 prefers to germinate out of sight. 
 
 Whenever I have talked at any length 
 with individuals or groups of men they have 
 showed an eagerness to know about German 
 atrocities. Was it true that children's hands 
 had been hacked of!, that nuns had been 
 violated, that Canadian soldiers had been 
 crucified, that the girls and women of the 
 Somme district had been carried away by 
 the Huns for unspeakable purposes, that the 
 wounded in the hospitals had been deliber- 
 ately shelled ? They wanted details of these 
 things, I found, to confirm their convictions 
 of horror created by the better known out- 
 
THE SOUL OF THE SOLDIER 19 
 
 rages, such as the sinking of the Lusitania^ 
 the bombing of London and the firing upon 
 the life- boats of torpedoed ships. Then, al- 
 most invariably, they expressed a lurid desire 
 to be introduced to the Kaiser or the chinless 
 Crown Prince. So I have been forced to the 
 conclusion that the motive which they did 
 not or could not express was an instinctive 
 revolt against the brutality of misdirected 
 force. They were dimly conscious that some 
 horrible evil was moving out against every- 
 thing decent and honorable in the world 
 and because the European nations could not 
 defeat the thing alone America must help. 
 It was a hard and dirty piece of work, but it 
 had to be done, and they were willing to lend 
 a hand. But I found very little exaltation of 
 spirit and practically no spread-eagle pa- 
 triotism ; they were calmly bent upon busi- 
 ness. 
 
 Of course this does not mean that they 
 never feel the thrill of a spiritual purpose. 
 It simply means that passionate and con- 
 suming motives were not the original in- 
 centive to their enlistment. In the camps 
 and cantonments there is a well defined plan 
 for lifting the thoughts of the men to a high 
 level. Speakers such as ex- Presidents Roose- 
 velt and Taft, Dr. Henry van Dyke, Henry 
 
20 THE SOUL OF THE SOLDIER 
 
 Morganthau, Newell Dwight Hillis and 
 Harry Lauder unfold the causes and mean- 
 ing of the war to the men and thousands of 
 them are caught as by an inspiration, lifted 
 completely out of the routine drudgery of 
 their training and come from the meetings 
 with their ideas lustred by a holy purpose. 
 Slowly but surely, even the dullest among 
 them are realizing the spiritual significance 
 of the task before them. I saw this illus- 
 trated during an evening of community 
 singing. Hundreds of men sang " Tipper- 
 ary " with mechanical indifference ; they put 
 a little more verve into " Over There," reel- 
 ing off the last two lines of the chorus with 
 a tempo like the snapping of firecrackers ; 
 they sang " Keep the Home Fires Burning '* 
 with the touch of entreaty which it requires ; 
 but when the leader gave out " The Battle 
 Hymn of the Republic," they took it up and 
 carried it through with a reverent enthu- 
 siasm. 
 
 ** Let us sing the last verse again," said 
 the leader. " Listen, boys, while I read it to 
 you ; it is wonderful : " 
 
 ** In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born 
 across the sea. 
 With a glory in His bosom that transfigures 
 you and me : 
 
THE SOUL OF THE SOLDIEE 21 
 
 As He died to make men holy, let us die to 
 make men free, 
 
 While God is marching on." 
 
 A thrill ran through the building as the men 
 sang ; they showed their response in their 
 faces and their voices. 
 
 The note of vicarious sacrifice had been 
 struck. After noticing this among troops 
 who had been less than two months in train- 
 ing camp and three thousand miles from the 
 fighting front, it is not difficult to believe the 
 British chaplain, Thomas Tiplady, when he 
 says that the favorite hymn of the London 
 regiments during the terrific battle of the 
 Somme was : 
 
 ** When I survey the wondrous cross 
 On which the Prince of Glory died, 
 My richest gain I count but loss, 
 And pour contempt on all my pride." 
 
 Such experiences do not negative the ear- 
 lier statement concerning the general stolidity 
 of our men, but they point out that " the 
 hard and dirty piece of work in which they 
 are to lend a hand " may be lighted up occa- 
 sionally by a nobler beam. 
 
 This brings us squarely to the question of 
 the religion of the camps. Is there any? 
 Of course. What is it like ? Well, it is so 
 
22 THE SOUL OF THE SOLDIEE 
 
 much like religion everywhere and yet so un- 
 like religion anywhere that it is peculiarly 
 difficult to define. The first thing that 
 strikes one is that the religion of the camps 
 is more intimately a part of the daily life of 
 the men there than it is in other places. A 
 man can live in a civilian community for 
 months and absolutely avoid any contact 
 with organized and articulate religion ; a 
 soldier cannot live for a day in a camp or 
 cantonment without being in touch with 
 something closely identified with religion. 
 A man can work in a mill or factory for a 
 lifetime and never see an authorized repre- 
 sentative of Christianity about the plant ; in 
 the army the chaplain is one of his officers. 
 And the chaplain, if he is worthy of his of- 
 fice, finds a score of ways of coming into the 
 lives of the men. A real chaplain is as val- 
 uable an asset as the regiment has ; a lazy or 
 incompetent chaplain is worse than an incu- 
 bus. But at any rate the chaplain is as much 
 a part of the organization as the adjutant or 
 the officer of the day. 
 
 But with and behind the chaplain there are 
 the Young Men's Christian Association and 
 the Knights of Columbus. The buildings in 
 which these institutions do their work are 
 dotted about the camp, close to barracks or 
 
THE SOUL OF THE SOLDIER 23 
 
 tents, and the soldiers cannot move a hun- 
 dred yards without seeing them. They are 
 not closed nine-tenths of the time as are the 
 churches at home. No one needs to change 
 his clothing to enter them. Moreover, they 
 are so interwoven with the normal life of the 
 soldier that they seem to be his own, as noth- 
 ing else in camp is his own. And they stand 
 for religion. He writes his letters from the 
 same bench as the one he uses in listening to 
 a sermon ; he plays games under the same 
 roof that shelters him in receiving the Sacra- 
 ment or Mass ; he sees a thrilling movie in 
 the same place in which he sings the hymns 
 he learned in childhood ; the same secretary 
 who referees a wrestling match or a boxing 
 bout talks to him later about God. There is 
 nothing remote or separate or esoteric or 
 mythical about this religion ; it fits into the 
 order of the day as naturally as the meals in 
 the mess-room ; it interweaves itself with the 
 common occupations of his leisure hours. 
 The church in the home community never 
 did that ; no man ever thought of dropping 
 into it to smoke and chat, to write a letter to 
 his sweetheart, to laugh at Charlie Chaplin, 
 to see a couple of local champions spar for 
 the honors of the ring. 
 
 Other distinctions fade also. The lines be- 
 
24 THE SOUL OF THE SOLDIER 
 
 tween the Protestant, the Catholic and the 
 Hebrew remain but they are not emphasized 
 and they are never exaggerated. But among 
 Protestants the denominational fences are en- 
 tirely gone. Common sense has done in a 
 month what committees on comity could not 
 have accomplished in a millennium. A strict 
 Baptist mother visited her son in one of the 
 cantonments on a recent Sunday. She was 
 deeply solicitous that her boy should receive 
 proper religious instruction. ** Was there a 
 Baptist preacher in camp ? " He did not 
 know, but he would inquire. Yes, one was 
 to hold a service that afternoon and give an 
 address in a distant Young Men's Christian 
 Association hut. They trudged over together 
 and heard an inspiring address on how Christ 
 is always the Comrade of every man who 
 fights for truth and righteousness and how 
 He is their Companion even when they are 
 not conscious of His presence. " He walked 
 with the two disciples on the road to Em- 
 maus although they did not recognize Him ; 
 He was with Mary by the sepulchre early in 
 the morning when she thought He was only 
 the gardener ; He broke bread with His dis- 
 ciples before they knew it was He." And, 
 the speaker continued, " He is near you 
 and with you even though you do not see 
 
THE SOUL OF THE SOLDIER 25 
 
 Him ; you will find Him on the ocean as you 
 are going over there ; He will creep along 
 with you when you go out on duty over * No 
 Man's Land ' ; He will spring over the top 
 with you when you go into battle ; He will 
 never leave you nor forsake you." The dear 
 old mother was delighted and told the 
 preacher how happy she was that her son 
 could hear such good Baptist doctrine. 
 •* But, Madam/' said the speaker, ** I am not 
 a Baptist but an Episcopalian." Later the 
 son said, ** Mother, I took the Sacrament 
 from that man this morning." " Never 
 mind," she said, " it sounded all right and 
 my heart tells me it must be right. What he 
 said was too good not to be true." 
 
 And the kind of preaching to which the 
 men respond ? Of course, it goes without 
 saying that the " Dear Brethren " sort of sen- 
 timentalists get scant attention. Men who 
 are preparing to meet the machine gun spray 
 and stand up against gas and liquid fire are 
 not interested in spiritual cosmetics. Curi- 
 ously, also, the typical, flamboyant, " Believe 
 or be Damned " kind of evangelist, with his 
 dogmatic theology and his shibboleth tests, 
 makes little impression. Dr. John Timothy 
 Stone, who is doing very effective work in 
 Camp Grant as religious director, writes to me 
 
26 THE SOUL OF THE SOLDIER 
 
 of his experience to this effect : " The soldier 
 must see the man before he sees the religion 
 the man is trying to present. He believes 
 that a man should have breadth of view as 
 to the convictions of others, but must sound 
 no uncertain note as to his own firm belief. 
 Naturalness in a speaker is also an essential. 
 We find that a few earnest words put in ten 
 Vr twelve minutes are of far more value than 
 lengthy expositions or drawn-out addresses." 
 The hundreds of thousands of men in the 
 training camps are elemental : they have 
 broken away or have been torn away from 
 the elaborate artificialities of community life ; 
 they are getting ready for a very elemental 
 thing — killing the other man or being killed 
 by the other man. They are in no mood for 
 the extraneous or the artificial in religion. 
 Speakers like Sherwood Eddy, Harry E. 
 Fosdick, Grenfell, van Dyke, Cadman and 
 Ralph Connor reach them instantly because 
 they deal with the imperative things of the 
 soul and they recognize the kind of soul with 
 which they have to deal. Words that are 
 simple, direct, earnest and freighted with a 
 vivid and vital personal experience grip the 
 men instantly. They are modest also and 
 too busy learning the elements of soldiering, 
 digging trenches and obeying imperative 
 
THE SOUL OF THE SOLDIER 27 
 
 orders, to be moved by mock heroics. They 
 do not want to be magnified and glorified 
 into saviors of humanity ; at least, not yet, 
 not till they have actually come to grips with 
 the Hun. 
 
 Possibly the most obvious feature of camp 
 preaching is its practical application. It is a 
 dynamic intended to produce an ethic. Its 
 aim is not the discussion of a subject but the 
 attaining of an object. If an attempt is made 
 to stir the emotions it is done that the emo- 
 tions may direct the will and issue in char- 
 acter and conduct. Hence one hears nothing 
 about predestination but much about prayer, 
 little about doctrines but a great deal about 
 duty. For instance, there are many ways of 
 defending men from the evils of immorality. 
 The Commission on Training Camp Activities 
 is using all the resources of the Federal Gov- 
 ernment in war time to suppress the tempta- 
 tions in the near-by communities ; the Medical 
 Corps of the army is placing literature in the 
 hands of the men dealing with the physical 
 perils of sexual indiscretion, also the same 
 Department is treating the exposed cases in 
 such a manner that the consequent physical 
 evils are prevented ; the Young Men's Chris- 
 tian Association and the chaplains, while 
 working whole-heartedly with the authorities 
 
28 THE SOUL OF THE SOLDIEE 
 
 in these measures, are taking the highest 
 moral grounds in dealing with the men. I 
 heard the subject dealt with in a religious 
 talk in one of the buildings. The speaker 
 said : " Men, the thing is wrong and you 
 know it is wrong. It is just as wrong if you 
 don't get caught as if you do. It is like 
 stealing or lying or killing — those things are 
 bad whether you are found out or not. 
 Adultery is a breaking of God's law and you 
 never break God's law without breaking 
 your own manhood. You must stand up 
 and fight every evil desire, because to give 
 in is wrong — it is wrong toward God, toward 
 the woman — whether she is a professional or 
 not — it is wrong toward yourself, it is wrong 
 toward the army, it is wrong toward every- 
 thing decent in human society." When we 
 were coming out I heard one enlisted man 
 say, " He's got our number ; but there ain't 
 any use arguing about that, he's dead right." 
 In the matter of liquor the men have realized 
 that their enforced abstinence has produced 
 nothing but beneficial results. There is not 
 much need to preach on that subject. It is 
 amazing how the desire has almost died out 
 with the abolition of temptation. I sat one 
 evening with a group of officers and discussed 
 the subject. Not one of them had been a 
 
THE SOUL OF THE SOLDIER 29 
 
 total abstainer until the Federal Law went 
 into effect ; two of them confessed that they 
 had never missed an opportunity to drink 
 within reasonable limits; they all admitted 
 that since they knew they could not have it 
 they had practically ceased to desire it. Of 
 course, I do not mean that the army is ab- 
 solutely bone-dry, but the drinking is reduced 
 to an unbelievable minimum. What there is 
 of it comes through the mistaken kindness of 
 friends. In the first period of the canton- 
 ments there was considerable boot-legging in 
 Trenton and Lowell, but the authorities have 
 grown vigilant and the scoundrels timid. No, 
 it is friends of the men who are the worst of- 
 fenders. " Poor devils 1 " they argue. ** Can't 
 get much fun in those dreary camps ; let's give 
 them a ray of good cheer." Then they buy 
 a flask and push it into the coat of the soldier. 
 Now, the psychology of the flask is not prop- 
 erly understood. It is usually inferior whiskey ; 
 it contains just too much to drink within a 
 limited time, but not sufficient to share with 
 another; there is likely to be enough left in 
 the bottle, after the soldier has had about as 
 much as he really wants, to put him out of 
 business, but it is too precious to throw away, 
 therefore he drinks it ; its consumption takes 
 him into back alleys and dark places, where 
 
30 THE SOUL OF THE SOLDIEE 
 
 other perils lurk. A man may keep his man- 
 hood standing at a bar and drinking a glass 
 of beer, but the flask rots out his self-respect 
 and honor and courage, leaving him a sneak 
 as well as an offender against military law. 
 If the good-natured friend of the soldier once 
 comes to understand what he is doing, he will 
 cut out this peculiarly vicious form of treating. 
 There are all kinds of men in the training 
 camps as there are everywhere else. There 
 are men with the morals of a mud turtle and 
 the vision of a bat, but there are also multi- 
 tudes who are spreading the contagion of a 
 splendid manhood through the barracks. 
 Some will come back to civil life unimproved, 
 but they are the ones who would go to the 
 devil on a desert island. But many, many 
 thousands will testify in years to come that 
 the first glimpse they ever had of the possible 
 beauty and grandeur of life came from as- 
 sociation with their comrades in camp. For 
 example, in Camp Devens there are numbers 
 of men who came from the textile cities of 
 New England, where socially, economically 
 and morally they were pre-damned ; they 
 have never had a chance to know anything 
 or be anything. But in Camp Devens, not 
 counting the commissioned officers or the 
 personnel of the Depot Brigade, there are 
 
THE SOUL OF THE SOLDIER 31 
 
 six hundred and ninety-five college men rep- 
 resenting twenty-seven New England col- 
 leges and universities. They are the best of 
 our race, the flowering of the purest and 
 sanest homes, men who could found another 
 New England as their forefathers did three 
 hundred years ago. They were drafted into 
 service and their influence upon the thou- 
 sands of other men is already having a 
 marked effect. 
 
 Few people, even among our political and 
 moral economists, realize the influence of tak- 
 ing a million and a half men out of our com- 
 petitive system and placing them under the 
 law of cooperation. When the men under- 
 stand that their messmates are not trying to 
 steal their jobs or get their money they 
 haven't the slightest objection to doing kindly 
 and generous things for one another. The 
 complexion of their world has changed and 
 they change with it. When they see that 
 the best men in camp are not ashamed to be 
 decent they want to be decent too ; when 
 they find that some are not afraid to pray 
 they are willing to pray also. Two men 
 went to the Young Men's Christian Associa- 
 tion director in Camp Devens and said they 
 were in the habit of kneeling down and say- 
 ing their prayers every night at home. 
 
32 THE SOUL OF THE SOLDIER 
 
 What ought they to do here ? " Try it out/' 
 was the advice. They did ; the second night 
 two others in the barracks joined them ; the 
 third night a few more ; gradually the num- 
 ber increased until considerably more than 
 half of the men resumed the habit of child- 
 hood and knelt by their cots in prayer before 
 turning in. A company captain, in one of 
 the cantonments, the first evening his men 
 stood at attention for retreat, said, "Men, this 
 is a serious business we are engaged in ; it is 
 fitting that we should pray about it." There 
 and then, this Plattsburg Reserve officer made 
 a simple and earnest prayer for the Divine 
 Blessing upon their lives and their work. 
 The impression upon the men was described 
 to me as tremendous. Such incidents, al- 
 though not common, indicate the general 
 spirit of the new armies ; the better men and 
 the men of ampler early opportunities are al- 
 ready exercising a refining and an uplifting 
 influence upon their less favored fellows. 
 Old misunderstandings and prejudices are 
 passing away ; social distinctions are giving 
 way to a new solidarity ; individual good- 
 ness, repressed for lack of an encouraging 
 environment, is coming frankly to view. The 
 efTect upon the favorites of fortune is no less 
 marked than upon the men who came from 
 
THE SOUL OF THE SOLDIER 33 
 
 mean streets and stifling tenements. A 
 young millionaire, whose most serious busi- 
 ness in life had been buying automobiles and 
 raising fancy stock on a country estate, was 
 doing manful work as a corporal in a Supply 
 Company. " This is the real thing, after all,'* 
 he said to me. A Princeton graduate of 'i6, 
 now a Reserve officer, said that his company, 
 in six weeks, had gathered more spirit for 
 team work than his college class had genera- 
 ted up to the middle of the Junior year. 
 " How did they do it ? " I asked. *' They all 
 started on the same level and aimed for the 
 same end. There has been nothing to pull 
 them apart in cliques, rather everything binds 
 them together. They have picked up speed 
 and snap ; nothing can stop them now. And 
 I haven't seen any of the little meannesses so 
 common in a college." 
 
 So there are a hundred reciprocal influences 
 playing on the men all the time ; some are 
 being remade, others modified ; many who 
 had never known the impelling force of a 
 great motive or the alluring spell of a high 
 ideal have found both in the purpose and 
 spirit of the new army. When I began my 
 investigation of the camps my proclaimed 
 aim was to discover, not what kind of sol- 
 diers Uncle Sam would send to France, but 
 
34 THE SOUL OF THE SOLDIEE 
 
 what kind of men Uncle Sam would send 
 back to their homes and their communities 
 after the war is over. I have discovered 
 both ; for in making better men we are mak- 
 ing finer soldiers, and in making efficient 
 soldiers we are producing a higher type of 
 men — healthier physically, broader mentally 
 and nobler spiritually. If Germany should 
 crumble before these men can get into action, 
 if we have lavished billions of dollars to train 
 men for batdes they will never fight, yet the 
 money has been well spent and I consider it 
 the best investment in citizenship the country 
 could have made. 
 
II 
 
 The Miracle of Democracy 
 
11 
 
 THE MIRACLE OF DEMOCRACY 
 
 AN old time Regular Army officer 
 stood watching thousands of drafted 
 men straggle into camp. It was 
 pouring a cold, unintermittent rain from 
 leaden skies. The men were cluttered with 
 suit cases and bundles ; they were drenched 
 to the skin and in a stunned and surly 
 mood ; some of them, from the industrial 
 centres, were in the moral and physical 
 reaction of heavy farewell drinking. And 
 the cantonment was scarcely half-finished ; 
 the barracks were bleak and desolate barns ; 
 the roads were ankle deep in mud ; one of 
 the dishevelled batches of men wandered for 
 miles about the camp before it could find 
 quarters ; most of the officers were as remote 
 from orientation as the men. The Regular 
 Army man knitted his brows and there was 
 anxiety in his eyes. '* We shall have to 
 build a barbed wire entanglement twenty 
 feet high and ten feet deep around the camp 
 to keep these men from deserting in a body," 
 he said. 
 
 37 
 
38 THE MIEACLE OF DEMOCEACY 
 
 Undoubtedly the outlook was ominous 
 enough. Forty thousand men torn from 
 their familiar haunts, their accustomed ways, 
 their lifelong environment, and pitched to- 
 gether into a wilderness of unsightly and 
 comfortless shacks, under orders which they 
 could not dispute and from which they could 
 not appeal, to do things they had never done 
 before and which they would never do of 
 their own accord — surely it was a perilous 
 venture for democracy. A callow youth from 
 the farm sat next at mess to the habitue of 
 the Tenderloin, mother's darling from the 
 suburb bunked beside the gunman from the 
 underworld, the e^xclusive fraternity man 
 from the exclusive college stood at attention 
 between two grimy immigrants who could 
 speak no EngHsh, the bootblack and the 
 bartender flanked the immaculate banker. 
 Forty thousand of them and in their midst 
 every centrifugal element of personality 
 known to a complex and experimental social 
 organism, yet with nothing to keep them 
 from flying into forty thousand separate 
 human atoms except an Act of Congress. 
 
 The Regular Army officer is not to be 
 called a fool for thinking that barbed wire 
 would have to supplement legislation. He 
 was wrong, utterly and emphatically wrong, 
 
THE MIRACLE OF DEMOCRACY 39 
 
 and probably no one rejoices more than he 
 over the falsifying of his prophecy. That 
 welter of dissimilar, divergent and dangerous 
 units of humanity has been made to coalesce 
 into an obedient and cheerful army. Within 
 thirty days each regiment and battalion and 
 company had an esprit de corps which was 
 obvious even to the casual observer. At 
 Camp Devens three men from the Depot 
 Brigade, after seven weeks of training, re- 
 vealed their minds to me without reserve. 
 
 "We are moving out next week," they 
 said, ** going to one of the Southern canton- 
 ments." 
 
 I congratulated them, telling them of the 
 warm climate, the blue skies and the beauti- 
 ful scenery. To my surprise they were in a 
 mood of resentment. 
 
 " But we don't want to go," they objected. 
 " It's awfully cold here and no heat in the 
 barracks, but we like it. We know our way 
 around, we've got lots of pals in the camp, 
 the Y always has something good going on, 
 and the officers are white. Why can't they 
 let us stay ? " 
 
 One of them had been a shipping clerk in 
 a wholesale grocery, another was a member 
 of the Typographical Union and the third 
 had worked in an automobile repair shop. 
 
40 THE MIEACLE OF DEMOCEACY 
 
 "What do you like best about the life 
 here?" I asked. 
 
 The answers were dissimilar in form but 
 the substance was the same, translated thus : 
 " We started out to learn to do something 
 and to be something and we can see that we 
 are making progress." 
 
 The shipping clerk made an illuminating 
 contribution : ** Everybody at home sym- 
 pathized with me when I was drafted. They 
 said the officers would grind me down with 
 drills and orders until I was only a mechan- 
 ical number. You bet I hated to come, but 
 the scare tales were all fakes — if a fellow does 
 his duty he's treated like a man, exactly the 
 same as in business." 
 
 But the most important remark came from 
 the linotype man : *' Back home I didn't pay 
 much attention to the war because it seemed 
 so far away. The man who worked on the 
 machine next to mine was a socialist. He 
 was a great reader. He said he had read 
 everything on both sides and that Germany 
 wasn't understood in this country because 
 all our news was doctored by English in- 
 fluence. His conclusion was that the war 
 was a rivalry between competing monopolies 
 and this country sided with England because 
 our monopolists stood to win most if Ger- 
 
THE MIRACLE OF DEMOCRACY 41 
 
 many lost. Well, when I came here I wanted 
 to know what kind of a job I'd got into. 
 I've read everything I could find and I 
 know now what we are up against. We're 
 not fighting the Huns, we're fighting Hell, 
 and if we chaps don't know our business 
 the devils will crucify us as they did the 
 Canadian soldiers and the nuns in Belgium. 
 Lots of fellows here are beginning to under- 
 stand that too and that's why they are put- 
 ting their hearts into the work. But if you 
 are going to write up these camps tell the 
 Government, or the Y, or the folks at home, 
 to send us more war books, books full of the 
 real stuff ; we eat 'em up. The high society 
 novels they send are punk for men in camp." 
 Comparatively few of the men, however, 
 have sensed the seriousness of their job from 
 books. Nor did it come to many of them 
 from the formal drills, the setting-up exercises 
 or the acquisition of military terms and habits. 
 The reality, the grim but thrilling reality, of 
 their business came from the bayonet. Men 
 can stand at attention without paying atten- 
 tion, they can form columns of fours auto- 
 matically, they can salute as a matter of 
 easily acquired habit, they can learn the 
 bugle calls by subconscious absorption. But 
 no man can wield the bayonet without vis- 
 
42 THE MIEACLE OF DEMOCEAOY 
 
 ualizing death. The first and chief duty of 
 the bayonet instructor is to make men vis- 
 ualize death — their own or their foe's. " You 
 must get him before he gets you ; it's him or 
 you, him or you, him or you." Then the 
 ghastly seriousness of the business comes 
 over the recruit ; the dreadful alternative 
 flashes along every nerve and commands the 
 muscles of the eyes, the legs and the arms 
 as they have never been commanded before. 
 It searches his soul and marks him as a 
 coward or a man ; it puts deep lines on his 
 face and galvanizes his will ; it changes him 
 almost instantaneously from a civilian to a 
 soldier. Discipline is comparatively easy for 
 the officers after the men have felt the mean- 
 ing of cold steel. 
 
 When the soldier is once made discipline 
 is simple. One of the most astounding 
 things about the cantonments is the ease 
 with which the heterogeneous mob has 
 setded down into orderly, obedient and 
 cheerful military units. Infractions of mili- 
 tary or civil law have been less in quantity 
 among the National Army men than in- 
 fractions of civil law alone among an equal 
 number of men in civil life. Major-General 
 J. Franklin Bell has made a clear-cut state- 
 ment about Camp Upton which is almost 
 
THE MIRACLE OP DEMOCRACY 43 
 
 incredible but which is indubitably true : 
 ** We have a democratic army. We have an 
 army where no man shirks, but every one 
 does his utmost to help. Do you know that 
 we have had the troops at Camp Upton — 
 there are 30,000 of them — for two months 
 and we have not had a single court-martial. 
 We have had no court-martial because no- 
 body has done wrong. Let me modify that, 
 nobody has done wrong intentionally. We 
 are all learning — beginners as it were, but 
 all of us are doing our best." 
 
 Colonel M. B. Stewart, the Chief-of-Stafif 
 at Camp Devens, could not go as far as 
 General Bell but he was positively enthusi- 
 astic about conditions in his cantonment; 
 ** The temper and spirit of the men could not 
 be better ; the situation here is excellent in 
 every respect ; there is not an officer who 
 is not highly gratified by the results so far 
 obtained," he told me. But I wanted the 
 opinion of some one who was actually com- 
 manding. I chose Colonel A. S. Conklin, of 
 the 303d Field Artillery, a Regular Army 
 man who knows what an army means and 
 what it means to make an army. He glowed 
 with pleasure as he talked about his men. 
 " They are simply wonderful ; fine, clean, 
 sturdy fellows from Maine, New Hampshire, 
 
44 THE MIRACLE OF DEMOCRACY 
 
 Vermont and other parts of New England. 
 They understand why they are here and are 
 putting the best of body, mind and heart 
 into their work. There is no surliness, no 
 reluctance ; indeed, the very opposite ; when 
 an officer has to correct them they actually 
 thank him and say, * It won't occur again, 
 sir.' It is going to be comparatively easy to 
 make first-class soldiers of men with such a 
 spirit." But I think General Kennedy, com- 
 manding at Camp Dix, was the most enthusi- 
 astic officer I saw concerning the drafted 
 men. He confessed that he could not get 
 over his sense of amazement that his division 
 was settling down to its work with such 
 unreproachable spirit. One could see satis- 
 faction and pride in his face and feel it in the 
 timbre of his voice. And yet Camp Dix is 
 probably the most difficult of all our units, 
 with an unusual amount of unlikely and re- 
 calcitrant material drawn from the foreign 
 sections of industrial communities. Officers 
 of various grades and branches of the service 
 in Camp Gordon gave me exactly the same 
 impression about conditions in their canton- 
 ment. 
 
 " Barbed wire twenty feet high and ten 
 feet deep to keep the men from deserting ! " 
 Never was a prediction wider of the mark ; 
 
THE MIRACLE OF DEMOCRACY 45 
 
 never was a fear more completely wiped out. 
 And yet not one of those hundreds of thou- 
 sands of men went into a cantonment on his 
 own initiative ; Uncle Sam stretched out his 
 hand, tore them up by the roots from their 
 familiar and well-loved environment, dropped 
 them into an ugly and comfortless place, 
 abrogated the civil liberties which they had 
 been brought up to look upon as their in- 
 alienable rights, put them to work at rough, 
 unaccustomed and monotonous tasks and 
 jield before their eyes, as the culmination of 
 it all, pain, gas suffocation, mutilation and 
 death in a foreign land at the hands of a 
 brutalized foe. And yet, — this is the miracle 
 of democracy — the cantonments are probably 
 the most contented and cheerful spots in 
 America, where laughter, cheers and songs 
 ripple or ring through the air a hundred 
 times a day. 
 
 What wrought the miracle ? Many things. 
 First and foremost I put the solicitude of the 
 authorities for the welfare of the men. Prob- 
 ably forty per cent, of those drafted had not 
 been the objects of care since infancy. But no 
 sooner did they arrive in camp than all kinds 
 of mysteriously inquisitive officers began 
 to show a persistent interest in them. Were 
 they clean? Some were not. Some had 
 
46 THE MIRACLE OF DEMOCRACY 
 
 never been bathed in their lives, or at least 
 since babyhood. A medical officer at Camp 
 Dix told me of one recruit who was so abso- 
 lutely filthy that no one would touch him ; 
 the hair on his body had grown back into his 
 skin ; he was alive with vermin. They had 
 to put him on the ground and scour him with 
 brooms and soft soap. Following the clean- 
 liness inquisitors came the uniformed dentists 
 who examined every tooth, extracting some, 
 filling others and issuing peremptory com- 
 mands about tooth-brushes. Then another 
 uniformed under-study of Providence insisted 
 upon knowing the condition of the man's 
 feet, showing an incomprehensible concern 
 for ingrowing toe nails. Was not all this 
 enough ? No, it was only the beginning. 
 The recruit could not drink water unless it had 
 been analyzed, he could not eat meals which 
 had not been tested first by scrupulous of- 
 ficial palates, he could not sleep in his bunk 
 unless it were certified to as being correctly 
 made, he could not buy anything at the Post 
 Exchange except what had been allowed on 
 sale as pure, he could not even march or 
 drill with his mouth open for fear of germs. 
 So the men began to realize their value, they 
 were worth Uncle Sam's most constant scien- 
 tific attention. Instead of irritating the men 
 
THE MIEACLE OF DEMOCEACY 47 
 
 it gave them a new sense of self-esteem. 
 Possibly they wondered why they had not 
 been worthy of as much solicitude while they 
 were mere citizens, but at any rate they were 
 now aware that they were valuable assets. 
 The flattery pleased them even though they 
 seemed to chafe under its application. 
 
 Naturally and logically there followed the 
 buoyancy of abounding health. The cleanli- 
 ness, the simple but wholesome fare, the 
 regularity of exercise, the open air, brought 
 something absolutely new to a majority of 
 the men — they felt the surge of a rich vitality 
 in their veins. Thousands and thousands 
 who had only subsisted hitherto began really 
 to live. They had come from the gloomy 
 canyons of our big cities, they had been 
 torn from the cubbyholes of industrial offices, 
 they had left forever the lung-clogging lint 
 of the mill, they had jumped the counter and 
 bade good-bye to the effeminacy of the de- 
 partment store ; yes, I feel certain that a 
 majority of the men in the cantonments had 
 been liberated from haunts or occupations 
 which sapped their health and within a month 
 had felt themselves to be reborn. 
 
 There will doubtless be many National 
 Guard officers who will receive my next 
 statement with incredulity. I believe the in- 
 
48 THE MIRACLE OF DEMOCRACY 
 
 fluence of the Reserve officers has been a 
 most potent factor in the rapid moulding of 
 the drafted men. In the National Guard 
 camps the Reserve officers did not take their 
 places with ease. Plattsburg and Madison 
 had not given them experience in handling 
 men who had just come back from Border 
 service and many of the Non-Coms were 
 more proficient than the wearers of brand 
 new uniforms. But in the National Army 
 cantonments the Reserve officers and the 
 drafted men were beginning together and 
 each knew it. There was mutual tolerance ; 
 when the officer muddled his commands and 
 tangled his men in a hopeless formation, it 
 was received with humor rather than scorn ; 
 hauteur slipped out of the budding officer's 
 bearing. The Regular Army officers in the 
 cantonments spoke much more confidently 
 of the Plattsburg probationer than did the 
 National Guard officers in the camps. Such 
 a psychological situation is possible only in 
 a democracy. And the Reserve officers are 
 keenly anxious to grow just a little faster 
 than their men ; they have a passion for 
 leadership which springs from a genuinely 
 sacrificial motive. They want their units to 
 overtake the National Guard and stand 
 abreast of the Regular Army as quickly as 
 
THE MIEACLE OF DEMOCEACY 49 
 
 possible, that when they lead their men into 
 action no one will be able to make any in- 
 vidious distinctions between the types of 
 troops which face the common foe. 
 
 Still, not all of these military considerations 
 combined could have achieved the happy re- 
 sults so noticeable in the National Army ; 
 something more, something different, was 
 needed. Enforced cleanliness, an accession 
 of health, abundance of wholesome food and 
 a consciousness of duty faithfully performed 
 cannot assuage the pangs of homesickness 
 or compensate for the involuntary break in 
 lifelong habits. There was a chasm to be 
 bridged. Fortunately democracy is the real 
 Pontifex Maximus. The people of America 
 said : ** These boys are ours ; we give them 
 to the great crusade of our own free-will ; 
 we must do everything conceivable and pos- 
 sible to make them feel that the uniform has 
 not lifted them out of the normal life of the 
 nation." So the people immediately set 
 about to normalize the environment of the 
 soldiers and thus head off any drift toward 
 militarism. They fraternized with the men 
 wherever khaki was seen ; they opened their 
 homes on Sundays to total strangers as if 
 the visitors were their own kith and kin ; 
 they hung out service flags and were as 
 
50 THE MIRACLE OF DEMOCEACY 
 
 proud of the star which symbolized the 
 drafted man as of the one which represented 
 the Regular Army officer. 
 
 This response of the people produced im- 
 mediate results. Officers of the Federal 
 Service found state and city officials ready 
 to cooperate in eliminating the grosser temp- 
 tations from the communities adjacent to the 
 camps. Haunts of vice which had flourished 
 under local political protection for decades 
 were effectually closed. Except through the 
 efforts of some degenerate boot-leggers and 
 the mistaken generosity of occasional foolish 
 friends, liquor was made inaccessible to the 
 soldiers. Clubs, lodges, chapters of fraternal 
 organizations and a multitude of benevolent 
 societies held open house for officers and en- 
 listed men. Churches suspended their stereo- 
 typed activities and concentrated upon pro- 
 viding entertainment, comfort and inspiration 
 for the army. Everywhere I have found 
 nothing but respect and affection ; the camps 
 are family affairs upon a national scale. If 
 the Red Cross asked for one hundred million 
 dollars the people insisted upon making it 
 one hundred and twenty-five millions. If 
 the Young Men's Christian Association 
 needed thirty-five million dollars the people 
 poured out more than fifty millions, and said, 
 
THE MIRACLE OF DEMOCRACY 51 
 
 " Come again." Every fund projected for 
 the benefit of the army is oversubscribed. 
 The reflex of this upon the men in the camps 
 is incalculable. It is not a cold storage Con- 
 gress disgorging money reluctantly under 
 executive pressure, but a nation-wide offer- 
 ing of affection — it is largesse de luxe. The 
 spirit of it thrills back through the canton- 
 ments and the men say in their hearts, " We 
 will be worthy.'* That is what makes an 
 army, an instantaneous and an invincible 
 army, in a land where all the traditions of 
 thought and action have hitherto been set 
 against militarism. 
 
 While a vast amount of this national serv- 
 ice for the national army has been spon- 
 taneous and undirected, it is only natural 
 that the larger part of it should be organized 
 in order to function most effectively. Hence 
 the War Department's Commission on Train- 
 ing Camp Activities, Mr. Raymond B. Fos- 
 dick, Chairman. The work of the Commis- 
 sion is to coordinate every available force in 
 American life for the physical, mental and 
 moral benefit of the soldier-body. It aims 
 to fill every spare minute of camp life with 
 occupations which meet the appetites of men 
 accustomed to free, civil life ; to eliminate or 
 reduce to a minimum the evils which have 
 
52 THE MIRACLE OF DEMOCRACY 
 
 always hovered like vampires around mili- 
 tary establishments ; and finally, by a feder- 
 ated pressure of healthy influences, to 
 strengthen and increase the moral health of 
 the hundreds of thousands of men whom 
 the nation has called to specialized citizen 
 service. 
 
 Undoubtedly many parents, wives, sisters 
 and friends of the men have been seriously 
 disturbed by the wild statements concerning 
 immorality on the part of the soldiers. For 
 six weeks I have made close investigation of 
 such charges and without the slightest hesi- 
 tation I brand them as infernal lies. Here 
 and there, now and then, a soldier trans- 
 gresses ; any one would be a fool and an 
 ignoramus to believe otherwise. But let the 
 reader think out the situation. A camp of 
 foity thousand men between the ages of 
 twenty-one and thirty-one implies the most 
 virile section of a city of more than three 
 hundred thousand inhabitants. But no camp 
 produces in a month a fraction of the im- 
 morality practiced in such a city in a week. 
 Facilities, opportunities and temptations, 
 open to civilians all the while in a large civil 
 population, are not presented to the soldiers. 
 Only the most hardened and desperately in- 
 sistent can find the few and well-hidden run- 
 
THE MIEACLE OP DEMOCRACY 53 
 
 ways of vice. The bulk of the men's time is 
 preempted by rigid military duties ; the larger 
 part of the balance of their time is filled by 
 occupations of the most wholesome nature 
 provided within the camp by the various or- 
 ganizations working together under Mr. Fos- 
 dick's Commission. Occasionally the men 
 go to the near-by communities and there the 
 vigilance of the Government has practically 
 driven away all commercialized vice, and has 
 made it next to impossible for a soldier to 
 obtain a drink of liquor. The communities 
 near the camps are the most vice-free and 
 orderly places I know in America or in any 
 other land. To assert that our American 
 moral sanctities are being violated wholesale 
 by the soldiers is a vile insult to American 
 womanhood and a form of treason toward 
 the Government, and every such accuser 
 should be tried instantly as a public enemy. 
 
 I saw Mr. Fosdick on the subject in his 
 Washington office. He is one of the calmest 
 and keenest men I have ever met, yet he is 
 vibrating with a splendid moral enthusiasm. 
 Here is what he said : 
 
 ** The War Department has three lines of 
 defense against the evils traditionally associ- 
 ated with armies and training camps. The 
 first line consists of the positive, recreational 
 
54 THE MIEACLE OF DEMOCEACY 
 
 activities designed to take the place of the 
 influences we are trying to eliminate. 
 
 " I remember standing in the street of 
 Columbus, N. M., shortly after Villa dev- 
 astated the village. Five thousand troops 
 were encamped near by. There was nothing 
 whatever in town to interest the men in their 
 hours of leisure — no moving picture shows, 
 no reading rooms, no places to read and 
 smoke, no homes in which they would be 
 welcome, not even a place to sit down. In 
 fact, there was nothing at all in town except 
 a few dirty saloons, and a red light district. 
 That these places were liberally patronized 
 was due to the fact that there was nothing to 
 compete with them. 
 
 ** It is not going to do any good merely to 
 set up verboten signs along the road. Mili- 
 tary regulations against these evils can be 
 made ad infinitum, but nothing will be ac- 
 complished unless we can positively create 
 wholesome, red-blooded sources of recreation 
 and entertainment for our troops during their 
 leisure hours. Otherwise, we are not even 
 going to make a dent in the twin problem of 
 alcohol and prostitution. 
 
 ** Obviously, therefore, the Commission on 
 Training Camp Activities is more interested 
 in its positive recreational program, both 
 
THE MIEACLE OF DEMOCRACY 55 
 
 within and without the camps, than it is in 
 anything else. This is our first hne of de- 
 fense. 
 
 " Our second line of defense, in case our 
 first fails, lies in the police measures which 
 we are taking to surround the men with a 
 healthy environment. The powers conferred 
 upon the War Department by Sections 12 
 and 13 of the Military Draft Law have been 
 of great assistance in curbing the evils ; and 
 the machinery of the Department of Justice, 
 of the Intelligence Department of the Army, 
 and of many private organizations, such as 
 the American Social Hygiene Association, 
 the Committee of Fourteen of New York, 
 and the Committee of Fifteen of Chicago, 
 have been enlisted in the fight. Through its 
 own agents in the field, the Commission is 
 keeping in constant touch with the situation 
 surrounding every military camp in the 
 United States. 
 
 " As concrete examples of what has been 
 accomplished may be mentioned the closing 
 of red light districts in the following cities : 
 Deming, N. M., El Paso, Waco, San Antonio, 
 Fort Worth, and Houston, Texas ; Hatties- 
 burg, Miss. ; Spartanburg, S. C. ; Norfolk 
 and Petersburg, Va. ; Jacksonville, Fla. ; 
 Alexandria, La. ; Savannah, Ga. ; Charleston, 
 
56 THE MIRACLE OF DEMOCRACY 
 
 Columbia and Greenville, S. C. ; Douglas, 
 Ariz. ; Louisville, Ky. ; and Montgomery, 
 Ala. New Orleans has passed an ordinance 
 which will wipe out its red light district on 
 or about November 15th. Many cities in 
 which no red light districts were formally 
 tolerated have, at the instance of the Com- 
 mission, abolished their open houses of 
 prostitution. 
 
 " The third line of defense, in case the first 
 two fail, as far as disease is concerned, lies in 
 the very excellent plans for prophylactic work 
 laid out by the Surgeon General's Depart- 
 ment. Not only have we an inescapable 
 responsibility to the families in the com- 
 munities from which our young men are 
 selected, in keeping their environment clean, 
 but from the standpoint of our duty and 
 determination to create an efficient army we 
 are bound as a military necessity to do 
 everything in our power to promote the 
 health and conserve the vitality of the men 
 in the training camps. This war is going to 
 be won on the basis of man power, and we 
 cannot afford to lose a single soldier through 
 any cause with which medical science can 
 successfully grapple. 
 
 •'These, then, are the three lines of defense 
 which the Government is setting up to protect 
 
THE MIEACLE OF DEMOCEACY 57 
 
 the character and efficiency of its troops. In 
 so far as it is humanly possible to accomplish 
 it, we are determined that our young men 
 shall come back from this war with no scars 
 except those won in honorable conflict." 
 
 As a result of visits to many camps, search- 
 ing investigations in the near-by communities, 
 conversations with scores of officers and hun- 
 dreds of enlisted men, and a careful question- 
 ing of various civilians who know the military 
 situation intimately, I believe that Uncle Sam 
 is going to send back to their families and 
 communities hundreds of thousands and pos- 
 sibly millions of men, infinitely better qualified 
 physically, mentally and morally for the duties 
 of citizenship in a democracy than they were 
 when called to the colors. 
 
Ill 
 
 Democratizing the Army to 
 Save Democracy 
 
Ill 
 
 DEMOCRATIZING THE ARMY TO 
 SAVE DEMOCRACY 
 
 ALL my preconceptions went by the 
 board when I settled down for a 
 while with my old regiment, the 
 Thirteenth Pennsylvania Infantry, at Camp 
 Hancock, Augusta, Georgia. I had known 
 the Thirteenth intimately, from ten years of 
 service as chaplain. When I laid down my 
 commission about four years ago, it was a 
 typical National Guard regiment, well of- 
 ficered, proud of its traditions, but always 
 somewhat ragged about the edges. Our an- 
 nual encampments were jolly afiEairs, streaked 
 with conviviality (not to any excess, as Na- 
 tional Guard units then went), and the serious 
 side of soldiering was difficult to sustain. 
 The commissioned officers were wholesome 
 fellows, but civil occupations for fifty weeks 
 of the year precluded the possibility of focus- 
 ing much attention upon their men. 
 
 It so happened that I was with the regi- 
 ment on October 17 of this year, when the 
 higher command moved about seventeen 
 61 
 
62 DEMOCEATIZING THE AEMY 
 
 hundred men with their subalterns over to 
 another regiment. The transfer was a heart- 
 breaking affair — a mutilation which left the 
 remaining officers stunned. One major con- 
 fessed that he had to go to his quarters and 
 blubber. I met the captain of the machine 
 gun company and asked him to take me 
 through his company street, as such a regi- 
 mental unit had been unknown in my day. 
 At first he demurred, then reconsidered. *' I 
 might as well go down there now ; I've got 
 to do it some time." The mess hall was 
 there and the equipment tents and the store- 
 house. Beyond those only four tents stood 
 in the street. Then tears came into the 
 captain's eyes and a lump in his throat. 
 " Only twelve men left out of the com- 
 pany ! *' he gulped. " Oh ! isn't it awful, 
 after the work I've put into those men for 
 fifteen months 1 " 
 
 Such is the new spirit of the army. The 
 officers are brooding over their men like a 
 hen over her fluffy chicks. They know each 
 man intimately, his eccentricities and idio- 
 syncrasies ; they guard him against his weak- 
 nesses and encourage his virtues ; they are as 
 solicitous about a blister on his foot or a cav- 
 ity in a tooth as they used to be about the 
 rating of the spring inspection of the entire 
 
TO SAVE DEMOCEACY 63 
 
 company in the days of old. The commis- 
 sioned officers and even the battalion com- 
 mander eat from the same mess as their men. 
 All are bound together by vital ties, genuinely 
 human affinities, and the result is a miracle 
 in morale. That is the great outstanding 
 feature of the new armies ; if you have had 
 any experience of military life, you feel it the 
 moment you enter the training camp. 
 
 While writing about the old Thirteenth 
 Regiment I may as well make another start- 
 ling statement. Although at war strength, 
 there has not been a new case of venereal 
 disease discovered in the six weeks they have 
 been at Camp Flancock. The statement 
 seemed incredible, so I went to the divisional 
 surgeon. Colonel W. E. Keller, and verified 
 it with my own eyes on the daily health re- 
 ports at headquarters. Such a thing is al- 
 most beyond belief. The Judge Advocate 
 also told me that in six weeks there had been 
 only four cases of " drunk and disorderly " in 
 the entire division of 27,000 men. Naturally 
 I wanted to know what lay behind this almost 
 immaculate condition. 
 
 The little city of Augusta is only four miles 
 from the camp, and I determined to make an 
 investigation. A newspaper man, writing 
 for a syndicate of papers in a Northern city, 
 
64 DEMOCEATIZING THE ARMY 
 
 helped me considerably. "This is a Sunday- 
 school outfit with a vengeance," he said. 
 *' Where can you get a drink? Why, old 
 man, you will have to go back home for it ! 
 I've been here six weeks, and I don't know 
 where you could get a * pony ' to save your 
 life. There was a man here last week who 
 had a bottle in his room, but he's gone now. 
 They tell me that if you make friends with 
 exactly the right native, and he's dead sure 
 you're not a plain-clothes man, he might get 
 a bottle of rye for yoi. , but it would cost 
 from six to ten bucks and be damned poor 
 stuff at that! And women? Why, there 
 isn't a house in town, and I doubt whether 
 there is a professional in the region. The 
 local authorities have cooperated with the 
 Fosdick Commission and cleaned the place 
 up as I never saw a place cleaned up before. 
 I don't mean there's absolutely nothing going 
 on, of course. Soldiers sometimes find what 
 they are looking for, but it is clandestine and 
 occasional. There is no commercialized 
 'jice." Further inquiry about town, interro- 
 gations of hack-drivers and likely loafers, and 
 a more careful questioning of the military 
 police confirmed the correspondent's state- 
 ment. 
 
 I doubt whether any city near a large mill- 
 
TO SAVE DEMOCRACY 65 
 
 tary establishment was ever as clean as 
 Augusta. I found similar conditions in 
 Spartanburg, South Carolina, but that is a 
 much smaller place, and therefore more easily 
 handled. I am now convinced that some- 
 thing more than the climate determined the 
 choice of those Southern States as the sites 
 for the majority of our camps and canton- 
 ments. Where liquor is absolutely banished 
 from a region, the moral problems of the 
 military commanders are reduced almost to 
 the minimum. And I write the following de- 
 liberately about Camp Hancock: That I 
 would rather intrust the moral character of 
 my boy to that camp than to any college or 
 university I know. This does not cast any 
 unusually dark shadow upon the educational 
 institutions of the country, but they have 
 never possessed the absolute power to con- 
 trol their environment that is now held by 
 the War Department. And it does not mean 
 that Camp Hancock is conspicuously better 
 than the other Southern camps. It simply 
 means that I had unusual facilities for discov- 
 ering everything I wanted to know in and 
 about Camp Hancock, through personal con- 
 nections all the way down from the divisional 
 headquarters to the enlisted men in the com- 
 pany street. 
 
66 DEMOCRATIZING THE ARMY 
 
 Soldiers are supposed to be inveterate and 
 irredeemable grumblers. But if you want to 
 see a group of men without grouchiness go 
 to Camp Hancock. Quite naturally, the men 
 of the National Guard camps are more cheer- 
 ful than drafted men ; they enlisted from in- 
 clination or patriotism, after counting the 
 cost. But the cheerfulness is not all native ; 
 it is largely the consequence of satisfactory 
 conditions. A sandy soil gives clean, dry 
 streets and roads ; even the enlisted men 
 have electric light in their tents ; the Post Ex- 
 change sells them all the little luxuries of life 
 at a reasonable price ; the food is good and 
 plentiful, as I found by messing with the 
 privates ; play is liberally interspersed with 
 work ; the officers show a spirit of comradery ; 
 health is far above normal ; and the great 
 adventure looms up as a real experience of 
 the soul. 
 
 The last item above I use after careful re- 
 flection. When the majority of the National 
 Guard enlisted, they knew the issues. But 
 no chances are taken. In one of the vast 
 Chautauqua tents of the Young Men's Chris- 
 tian Association I sat on the back row and 
 listened to a lecture by Frank Dixon, of New 
 York, on " The Causes of the War.'* Three 
 thousand men in khaki also listened and ap- 
 
TO SAVE DEMOCRACY 67 
 
 plauded. The speaker told about little Bel- 
 gium, the men of Louvain and Antwerp, and 
 how they fought and died for the sanctity of 
 international law ; he pictured the raped 
 women and the orphaned children and the 
 desolated homes; he described the ruined 
 churches and demolished universities and 
 razed libraries ; he stated the law of vicarious 
 suffering — how those splendid heroes had 
 borne all and given all to save us from the 
 barbarities of a false principle of self-expres- 
 sion known as Kuliur ; he sketched how 
 England had obeyed the rule of honor when 
 self-interest told her to stand aside ; he la- 
 mented our early dimness of vision concern- 
 ing the issues involved, and our slow enlight- 
 enment and ultimate awakening ; and he fin- 
 ished by proving that everything worth liv- 
 ing for, worth fighting for, worth dying for, 
 was at stake. In conclusion he told the men 
 that their courage, their devotion, their disci- 
 pline, their toll of casualties, were necessary, 
 in the last ditch, to save civilization and 
 Christianity from falling forever under the 
 blighting curse of a triumphantly brutal pa- 
 ganism. When the men left the tent, their 
 shoulders were squarer and their jaws firmer 
 and their eyes brighter — -they were crusaders, 
 and the pride of their consecration was clear. 
 
68 DEMOCRATIZING THE ARMY 
 
 Imagine two square miles of teeming man- 
 hood, firmly organized, and yet bearing every 
 evidence of care-free liberty. Nothing in the 
 camp is left to chance, and yet nowhere and 
 at no time do you feel the taint of militarism. 
 Here is a platoon — as large as a pre-war 
 company — ^just finishing an extended-order 
 drill. It has been hard, grinding work under 
 a peremptory-voiced platoon commander. 
 Suddenly the men come to attention in 
 close formation. An athletic director ap- 
 pears, takes charge from a platform, and 
 gives them fifteen minutes of calisthenics. 
 Then — and you can hardly believe your eyes 
 — the platoon begins to play leapfrog. This 
 goes on for a few moments, and a couple 
 of medicine balls appear and for ten min- 
 utes more these are hurled from man to man 
 with lightning rapidity. Immediately follow- 
 ing there is a game very much like drop-the- 
 handkerchief, in which the participants chase 
 about to find the vacant place. The air is 
 full of laughter, the soldiers are romping 
 children, the drill monotony is forgotten, 
 and when it is over the men rush to their 
 shower-baths and then sit down to mess 
 with the appetites of tigers. Play is organ- 
 ized in all the military establishments. More 
 than thirty games have been invented, suit- 
 
TO SAVE DEMOCRACY 69 
 
 able for company, platoon, or squad partici- 
 pation. 
 
 In Camp Hancock, Walter Camp, Jr., of 
 Yale, is the divisional director, and his quar- 
 ters are with the commanding general's staff. 
 I talked with him about his work. He has 
 organized the division with brigade, battal- 
 ion, regimental, and company directors. Mr. 
 Camp's enthusiasm is sublime. " These rec- 
 reational interludes," he said, "are getting 
 the men into a volitional condition in which 
 they will respond quickly to almost any 
 moral ideal. We are working in closest 
 harmony with the officers, on the one hand, 
 and the Y. M. C. A. physical directors, on 
 the other. We are humanizing soldiering. 
 One regimental commander said to me yes- 
 terday, after a series of company games : 
 ' That's the greatest thing I ever saw in the 
 army. No man can have a grouch after 
 going through those games.' We are laying 
 great stress also upon competitive athletics 
 — baseball, football, basket-ball, and boxing, 
 by companies, regiments, and brigades." 
 
 I happened to be having luncheon with 
 Commanding General Price and his staff 
 when the divisional adjutant gave out a no- 
 tice : " The General expects every member of 
 his staff to report at 5 P. M. for calisthenics." 
 
70 DEMOCEATIZING THE AEMY 
 
 Such a sight was something not to be missed, 
 and I reported also. About thirty men lined 
 up under command of Walter Camp. Now 
 men who are as near the top of the service 
 as the divisional staff are not youngsters, and 
 many of them are by no means slim. For 
 nearly half an hour they were put through 
 their paces — arm and leg and neck exercises, 
 abdominal and back exercises, lung and liver 
 exercises ; they puffed and panted and 
 grunted and groaned, but they went on to 
 the end, even the baldest and the fattest of 
 them. Then they chose sides and played the 
 most riotous game of baseball I have ever 
 seen ; and, as I had been chosen umpire, there 
 was nothing that escaped me. Military titles 
 were dropped entirely, one of the higher kind 
 even calling a ranking ofBcer a *' lobster " ; 
 they united vociferously in a demand to kill 
 the umpire, and far be it from me to tell either 
 the score or the number of errors 1 They 
 were just boys again, with every bit of their 
 healthy human nature unleashed. Those are 
 the men who are making our new armies, 
 who will lead them onto the battle-fields of 
 Europe, who will watch and ward them day 
 and night unt^l they return the men to their 
 communities and families. It is all so Ameri- 
 can, so human — so utterly different from the 
 
TO SAVE DEMOCRACY 71 
 
 horrible Frankenstein monster which the 
 pacifists describe as " the devilish, dehuman- 
 izing military machine which crushes indi- 
 viduality and kills all natural instincts." 
 
 One evening I was sitting under the fly of 
 Brigadier-General Stillwell's tent talking 
 about the old and the new days of the army. 
 I had told him of all the plans unfolded to 
 me in the War Department by Mr. Raymond 
 B. Fosdick for training-camp Activities. The 
 General is a man of few words but of much 
 thought, an ofhcer always loved by the men 
 who have served with and under him. Sud- 
 denly he turned, and, using the title that I 
 bore for ten years on his staff, said : " Cap- 
 tain, Uncle Sam seems to be making a Na- 
 tional University as well as a National Army." 
 That is almost literally true. There are 
 academic subjects taught in the class-rooms 
 of our universities which will not be provided 
 for the soldiers, but if education means " to 
 educe " — to draw out qualities of the mind, 
 heart, and body by legitimate exercise — then 
 the hundreds of thousands of men in our Na- 
 tional armies will receive an education such 
 as not one in a hundred would have obtained 
 in civil life. 
 
 Apparently the Commission on Training 
 Camp Activities has thought of everything 
 
72 DEMOCRATIZING THE ARMY 
 
 and planned for everything. Some of the 
 features are not yet in effect, but enough is 
 in operation to prove that every man in camp 
 and cantonment will be reached ultimately 
 by many influences which make for the type 
 of manhood a democracy demands. There 
 are lectures, plays, movies, and entertain- 
 ments every single night in Camp Hancock. 
 Over a thousand men are studying French 
 under teachers who are instructed by a pro- 
 fessor of modern languages from the Pennsyl- 
 vania State University. Classes in higher 
 mathematics are being held for the engineers. 
 At present the Young Men's Christian As- 
 sociation is doing a number of things which 
 will be taken over by special units of the Fos- 
 dick Commission at a later date. Four thou- 
 sand books per week are being circulated 
 from the five Young Men's Christian Associa- 
 tion centres. Gilbert and Sullivan's opera, 
 ** The Mikado," given by a full professional 
 cast, made a week's stand in the camp, and 
 *'The Old Homestead" was billed for the 
 immediate future. A thrift campaign resulted 
 in $35,000 being sent home in one week by 
 the men through the Young Men's Christian 
 Association, which sells express company 
 checks in each of its buildings. Singing by 
 companies is being taught by Professor 
 
TO SAVE DEMOCEACY 73 
 
 Tebbs, the leader of music in the public 
 schools of Dayton, Ohio, 
 
 Trench and Camp is the name of an eight- 
 page weekly magazine published by the 
 Young Men's Christian Association and dis- 
 tributed gratis. It contains a record of all 
 the athletic events, the educational activities, 
 and the amusement features of the camp, to- 
 gether with inspirational articles and news 
 items of national and international signifi- 
 cance. If a man goes to the dogs intellec- 
 tually or to the devil morally in Camp Han- 
 cock, he will have to do so deliberately by 
 breaking violently out of the environment 
 which has been planned and developed for 
 his well-being. 
 
 Religious work must be left for future dis- 
 cussion. As I have confined my attention in 
 this chapter almost exclusively to Camp Han- 
 cock, it will be sufficient to say that the chap- 
 lains and the Young Men's Christian Associa- 
 tion are working together in the closest har- 
 mony. Pending the completion of the 
 Knights of Columbus building, the facilities 
 of the Young Men's Christian Association 
 were placed freely at the disposal of the Cath- 
 olic workers. Bible classes have been started 
 in many companies, and a regular Sunday- 
 school, studying the International Lessons, is 
 
74 DEMOCRATIZING THE ARMY 
 
 held Sunday afternoon in the Young Men's 
 Christian Association buildings or tents. 
 That religion is neither repressed nor crowded 
 out is shown by the fact that a chaplain in 
 General Logan's brigade baptized seven men 
 from his canteen one morning as they made 
 public confession of faith in Christ. 
 
IV 
 
 The Men Behind the Men Who 
 Fight the Huns 
 
IV 
 
 THE MEN BEHIND THE MEN WHO 
 FIGHT THE HUNS 
 
 IT was in 1906 that the real international- 
 ism of the Young Men's Christian As- 
 sociation dawned upon me. Before that 
 time my experience with the Young Men's 
 Christian Association had not been inspiring ; 
 the representatives I had known were of the 
 cuddle-close order, strong on tear-drawing 
 prayers and suffused with a melodramatic 
 emotionalism. I admit that I had been un- 
 fortunate in the samples I had met. I was 
 fishing for salmon-trout in Lake Chuzenji, 
 in the mountains not far from Nikko, when a 
 belated copy of ^^ Japan Gazette^ published 
 in Tokyo, fell under my eye. It contained 
 the following letter from the Minister of War : 
 
 The Young Men's Christian Association, moved by 
 the desire to minister to the welfare and comfort of 
 our officers and soldiers at the front, carried on its 
 beneficent work throughout the Russo-Japanese War 
 of 1904-1905. Beginning at Chinampho early in 
 September, 1904, it kept pace with the northward 
 progress of the field forces for nearly twenty long 
 77 
 
78 THE MEN BEHIND THE MEN 
 
 months, until March, 1906, establishing its work at 
 eleven posts in Manchuria and Korea. At large ex- 
 pense of money and labor, and by a great variety of 
 means, it filled the leisure of our officers and soldiers, 
 far from home, with wholesome recreation. The 
 completeness of the equipment and the success of the 
 enterprise were universally tested and recognized by 
 our troops in the field. I am fully assured that the 
 recipients of all this generous service are filled with 
 deep and inexpressible gratitude. 
 
 Now, simultaneously with the triumphant return of 
 our armies, as I learn of the successful termination of 
 your enterprise, I take this opportunity to express my 
 heartfelt thanks for your noble services, and at the 
 same time to voice my appreciation of the generosity 
 of all those who have either by gifts or by personal 
 effort supported the work. 
 
 (Signed) M. Terauchi, 
 
 Minister of War. 
 
 Tokyo^ 26th May, sgth Meiji {igo6). 
 To YoiCHi Honda, Esq., 
 
 President, the Japanese Young Men's Christian As- 
 sociation Union. 
 
 Later I talked it over with Messrs. Fisher, 
 Gleason, and Hibbard at the Tokyo Young 
 Men's Christian Association, and they gave 
 me the following account of the work done 
 for the Japanese soldiers. Here is the list : 
 
 1,547,483 sheets of paper used. 26,168 books loaned, 
 
 757,159 envelopes. 18,500 used laundry at Feng- 
 1,053,381 postcards. wangcheng. 
 
 101,229 portions of Bible dis- 764 visits to hospitals. 
 
 tributed. 613 religious meetings held. 
 
WHO FIGHT THE HUNS 
 
 79 
 
 312,033 religious tracts. 
 
 3,385 Testaments. 
 
 877,485 men received letter 
 supplies. 
 
 87,940 men received supplies 
 like buttons, thread, soap, etc. 
 
 152,213 men used barber's out- 
 fit. 
 
 1,752 gramaphone concerts, 
 lantern lectures, and other 
 entertainments. 
 
 1,566,379 men entered the dif- 
 ferent branches. 
 
 At least three-fourths of the 
 entire army was reached by 
 the Association. 
 
 That may be considered the novitiate of 
 the Young Men's Christian Association in 
 war work. Before Port Arthur, at Vladivo- 
 stok and on the bloody battle-fields of 
 Manchuria, the Association gathered the 
 experience which forms a broad and well- 
 tested foundation for the phenomenal work 
 now being accomplished in our train- 
 ing camps at home and for our expe- 
 ditionary force behind the fighting line in 
 France. 
 
 Over against the total of supplies for the 
 entire Russo-Japanese War put the list of a 
 single shipment — only one of many — for our 
 army in France : 
 
 240 cases athletic supplies. 
 
 4,000,000 noteheads and en- 
 velopes. 
 
 1,000 gross pens and pen- 
 holders. 
 
 27 motor cars and trucks, in- 
 cluding Fords, Buicks, Pack- 
 ards, Pierce-Arrov\rs, 
 
 500 cots, mattresses, and pil- 
 lows. 
 
 30,000 folding-chairs. 
 
 Car-load condensed milk. 
 125 talking-machines with 
 
 6,000 records. 
 55 tons of sugar. 
 5 tons biscuits. 
 75 tons of flour. 
 20 tons soap. 
 2 tons of tea. 
 5 tons of coffee. 
 5 tons of cocoa. 
 4,000 rolls rubber roofing. 
 
;80 THE MEN BEHIND THE MEN 
 
 75 motion-picture machines. For soda fountains — 2 tons 
 
 50 Delco lighting plants. lemonade powder, 200 gal- 
 
 50 stereopticons and thousands Ions syrups. 
 
 of slides. 300 stoves for heating huts and 
 
 Over 100 assembly tents. dugouts. 
 
 Car-load of jams, jellies, and 2,000 all-wool blankets. 
 
 marmalades. 114,000 Bible-reading calen- 
 
 Car-load of " hot dogs " in dars. 
 
 pound cans. 10,000 song books. 
 
 Several car-loads California 30,000 copies Scripture por- 
 
 fruit — pears, apricots, peach- tions of Psalms, Proverbs, 
 
 es, cherries, etc. and Gospel of John. 
 
 60 tons sweet chocolate in five- 
 cent bars. 
 
 But to turn to our army camps at home, 
 what kind of men are working" here? In 
 asking for volunteers this is how the Young 
 Men's Christian Association officially de- 
 scribes the type of men needed : 
 
 "This is no call to ninnies and milksops. 
 The Young Men's Christian Association needs 
 real men, preferably men who have had some 
 broad and grueling experience of life ; men 
 of education, yes ; but, above that, men ca- 
 pable of understanding, sympathy, and an 
 infinite deal of hard, exacting work. Men 
 who can turn a Ford inside out ; men who 
 can play the piano and lead five hundred 
 others in singing; men who are trained in 
 athletics; men six feet high and three feet 
 wide and eighteen inches thick; men who 
 understand what Christianity really means ; 
 men with humor and leadership who have 
 been earning a hundred dollars a week and 
 
WHO FIGHT THE HUNS 81 
 
 are willing to live on ten dollars a week. In 
 other words, MEN." 
 
 And in the camps, cantonments, and other 
 training stations the Association has twenty- 
 two hundred such men at work. Among 
 them are some who have given up large 
 incomes, others who have resigned univer- 
 sity professorships, several college coaches, 
 a number of professional musicians, a sprin- 
 kling of ministers of known ability in the 
 handling of men, and the balance made up 
 of the most successful secretaries from the 
 city Associations throughout the country. I 
 have seen many of them in action — healthy, 
 whole-hearted, patient, and generous men 
 who sprang to their task each morning be- 
 fore daybreak with a " Hurrah," and went to 
 their cots at night, dog-tired, but with a song 
 or a joke on their lips. Beside the regular 
 secretaries I found many volunteers. For 
 instance, at Camp Dix there were sixty-four 
 Young Men's Christian Association men at 
 work in the Young Men's Christian Associa- 
 tion buildings, but only three were on full 
 salary, while twenty were entirely on their 
 own charges. 
 
 There are more than four hundred Young 
 Men's Christian Association buildings in the 
 camps, costing between $7,500 and $9,000 
 
82 THE MEN BEHIND THE MEN 
 
 apiece to erect. The buildings alone have 
 eaten up about $3,500,000 of the $5,000,000 
 raised last spring. I have seen more than 
 forty of those buildings, at various hours of 
 the day and in the evenings. They are 
 always thronged with men — writing home, 
 reading, toasting their feet before the open 
 fire, playing games, watching the free movies 
 or other entertainments, singing lustily in a 
 religious service, or listening eagerly to a 
 patriotic speech or to a sex-hygiene address 
 by a medical authority. And here I give 
 some of the things I found the Young Men's 
 Christian Association secretaries doing for 
 the soldiers : writing letters for " illiterates " 
 to their friends, straightening out business 
 difficulties at home for the men who left sud- 
 denly, having quiet chats with individuals 
 about sex matters, giving out Red Cross 
 supplies where the Red Cross agent had not 
 yet arrived, supplying the place of chaplain 
 in regiments which had no chaplain or when 
 he was away, directing the reading or studies 
 of individuals or litde groups of men who 
 were working for transfer to another branch 
 of the service, acting as dramatic director 
 and scene-shifter, praying with men who had 
 received news of family bereavement, arrang- 
 ing preliminaries for Mass to be celebrated 
 
WHO FIGHT THE HUI^S 83 
 
 by a visiting priest in the Young Men's 
 Christian Association hut, refereeing a five- 
 round bout with the mits, attending to bank- 
 ing facilities in near-by communities for those 
 who needed them, reporting to anxious rela- 
 tives about their boys in the camp who did 
 not write regularly, teaching a man how to 
 shave, sending money to a wife to visit her 
 husband almost demented by homesickness 
 — these, and a hundred other things, over 
 and above all the routine work of the hut. 
 
 "You see that man?" a secretary said, 
 pointing to a round-faced, fair-haired man 
 sitting in a Y building. " I had a pathetic 
 but happy experience with him. He is a 
 German. He came to my room a few days 
 after reaching camp, as woebegone a crea- 
 ture as I ever saw. He left Germany to 
 escape military service, because he hates 
 war with an instinctive and reasoned hatred. 
 Then he was drafted. He came to camp in 
 a pouring rain, and soon developed an atro- 
 cious toothache. For two nights he did not 
 sleep. At last he went to the dentist. There 
 was a very bad ulcer at the root of one of 
 his lower teeth. It was lanced, and the poor 
 fellow wandered in here almost out of his 
 mind with physical and mental pain. He 
 told me his story, ending with a threat of 
 
84 THE MEN BEHIND THE MEN 
 
 suicide. Among other things, I learned he 
 was a skilled automobile mechanic. That 
 day, at headquarters' mess, I repeated the 
 story, and before nightfall we had the man 
 transferred to the Motor Transport Service. 
 Now he is contented and positively happy in 
 his new work. He spends every hour of his 
 spare time in this building." 
 
 A good story is told at the expense and to 
 the credit of the Young Men's Christian As- 
 sociation secretaries in one of the South 
 Carolina cantonments. Among the drafted 
 men was a man who seemed not to have 
 known enough to claim exemption under the 
 dependency clause. Not long after reaching 
 camp he received a letter from his wife tell- 
 ing him that the children were sick, there 
 was no food in the house, and the landlord 
 threatened to turn them out unless the rent 
 was paid. The news drove him to the verge 
 of melancholia. Finally he wrote a letter 
 addressed to "Almighty God, Y. M. C. A." 
 In it he told the news he had received from 
 home, how it made him feel bad and was 
 keeping him from being a good soldier, and 
 ended by asking for fifty dollars to send 
 home. When the Young Men's Christian 
 Association secretaries read the letter and 
 had made some investigations, they made up 
 
WHO FIGHT THE HUNS 85 
 
 a purse by personal contributions, amounting 
 to thirty dollars. They sent the amount, 
 three ten dollar bills, in a sealed envelope to 
 the man. He counted the money carefully — 
 one, two, three — thirty dollars. But he had 
 asked for fifty 1 Nevertheless he sat down 
 to acknowledge the providence. He told 
 God that he had received thirty dollars, that 
 he would send it to his wife immediately, 
 that it would do much to help the folks at 
 home, and that he could now do his soldier 
 work better. Then he added : " But, O God, 
 if you send me any more money, don't send 
 it through the Y. M. C. A. men — those dirty 
 skunks took twenty dollars out of the last lot 
 for themselves." 
 
 The Young Men's Christian Association is 
 not working exclusively in its huts or tents. 
 It seems to be a settled principle that the 
 safest and most permanent way to reach the 
 men is to organize each company on a kind 
 of self-sufficiency basis. So, instead of try- 
 ing to centre the Bible teaching in the Y 
 building, the secretaries are starting a Bible- 
 study class or group in each separate com- 
 pany. They are doing the same thing along 
 educational and entertainment lines— devel- 
 oping the talent within the military unit. 
 The value of this is obvious : wherever that 
 
86 THE MEN BEHIND THE MEN 
 
 company goes — to another camp, on detail 
 duty, or to France — it will have tested and 
 developed resources within itself, able to 
 carry on religious work, continue its educa- 
 tional classes, and provide its own entertain- 
 ments. Such a method also aids the esprit 
 de corps of a company and by interchange 
 of talent conduces to a high morale in the 
 regiment. 
 
 Mr. Richard Hooker, of the Springfield Re- 
 publican^ after a very thorough and searching 
 survey of the Young Men's Christian Associ- 
 ation activities at Camp Devens, Ayer, Mas- 
 sachusetts, said, " If, as Wellington averred, 
 the Batde of Waterloo was won on the 
 playing fields of Eton, then it may be safely 
 said that this war will be won in the Young 
 Men's Christian Association buildings." Such 
 a verdict is not surprising. I took with me 
 to Camp Devens Mr. E. Harold Cluett, one 
 of the keen and vigorous young business 
 men of America, a member of the firm of 
 Cluett, Peabody & Co., and educated at 
 Williams College and Oxford. I wanted 
 his opinion from the standpoint of a prac- 
 tical man who knew organization on a large 
 scale. It is no exaggeration to say that he 
 was staggered by the vastness and thor- 
 oughness of the work as we went from one 
 
WHO FIGHT THE HUNS 87 
 
 thronged building to another — fourteen in all 
 — and then closed the evening with the last 
 act of a vaudeville in the Y assembly hall, 
 packed with more than three thousand men. 
 His verdict was simple and direct : •* This is 
 the best example of organization I have ever 
 seen. I would never have believed, if I had 
 not seen it with my own eyes, that such tre- 
 mendously uplifting results could have been 
 obtained at such a moderate cost." Then he 
 concluded, deliberately : *' It is a miracle in 
 manhood-making.' ' 
 
 It was in Camp Devens that I met some of 
 the most remarkable instances of the broad 
 spirit of the Young Men's Christian Asso- 
 ciation. In one of the huts we found a group 
 of New Hampshire boys reading eagerly from 
 New Testaments which had just been pre- 
 sented to them by the Governor of the State, 
 while in a room near by the Hebrew secre- 
 tary was conducting a meeting for Jewish 
 soldiers, and near the door of which a cor- 
 poral was reading a Catholic magazine. One 
 day the wife of one of the soldiers persuaded 
 her husband that he should join the church, 
 but she was anxious that it should be the 
 Presbyterian Church. It happened that one 
 of the Young Men's Christian Association 
 secretaries was a Presbyterian minister, and 
 
88 THE MEl^ BEHIND THE MEN 
 
 he was brought from the distant building to 
 which he was attached. But, alas ! he had 
 no Session. Now, how could a man be re- 
 ceived into the Presbyterian Church without 
 " coming before the Session " ? The min- 
 ister, however, was not to be balked by a 
 mere ecclesiastical canon of a few hundred 
 years' standing. He found an officer of a 
 Methodist Church, a Baptist deacon, a Con- 
 gregational deacon, and an Episcopal vestry- 
 man, and these he improvised into a Session. 
 The candidate was duly examined as to his 
 faith and experience, and there and then en- 
 rolled as a member of the Presbyterian church 
 of Dobb's Ferry, New York — two hundred 
 and fifty miles away. One of the best work- 
 ers of the Young Men's Christian Association 
 staff in Camp Devens is a Unitarian minister, 
 but not even the most rigid sectarian, with a 
 long-range scent for heresy, could question 
 his personal devotion or discount the value 
 of the service he is rendering. These men 
 adapt themselves to every conceivable vicis- 
 situde of the soldier's life. Part of the mili- 
 tary training is in trenches — real trenches, 
 replicas of those on the Aisne front and built 
 under French instructors. Platoons v/ill stay 
 in those trenches for seventy-two hours at a 
 stretch, eating and sleeping there, in the rain 
 
WHO FIGHT THE HUNS 89 
 
 and snow and frost. So the Young- Men's 
 Christian Association is doing what it does 
 on the British front— excavating a Young 
 Men's Christian Association dugout twenty- 
 five feet underground, with a fireplace in it ; 
 and a secretary will always be there to min- 
 ister to the boys when they are doing their 
 bit in the trenches. When the Y follows the 
 men right to the firing line, shares the 
 dangers and hardships of the fighters, pro- 
 vides comfort and cheer at any cost, no 
 wonder the rank and file come to regard it 
 with reverence and affection. The letter Y 
 is carved deep in the hearts of millions of 
 men the world over. 
 
 Finally, it may be said about the Young 
 Men's Christian Association that it is cooper- 
 ating in a splendid way with every other 
 agency that is at work for the betterment of 
 the personnel of the army. The chaplains of 
 every shade of faith or form of polity are 
 given the free use of its buildings. Indeed, 
 it may be said that the Young Men's Chris- 
 tian Association is the clearing-house of the 
 camp, the rendezvous of all the diverse ele- 
 ments of the army, the living, sympathetic 
 link between the rigid military regime and 
 the dear, old free life of civilian days. If the 
 Young Men's Christian Association were ever 
 
90 THE MEN BEHIND THE MEN 
 
 enswathed in sectarianism and coffined in 
 dogma, the organization has certainly had a 
 glorious resurrection. It stands to-day a live 
 man's organization for living men — virile, 
 versatile, flexible, resolute. Whatever is 
 worth while doing for men — physical, men- 
 tal, social, moral, or spiritual — the Young 
 Men's Christian Association is ready to do it, 
 overcoming apparently insurmountable ob- 
 stacles, smashing its determined way through 
 hoary customs and stupid prejudices without 
 hesitation, and seizing every opening for hu- 
 man and humanizing service with the celerity 
 and confidence of the highest opportunism. 
 I have seen these things done and have 
 marvelled. The War Department, the com- 
 manding officers, and the enlisted men have 
 found this out, and whenever there is a gap 
 to be filled, a chasm to be bridged, or a 
 morass to be crossed the man who faces the 
 difficulty turns instinctively to the Young 
 Men's Christian Association for assistance. 
 
 The Knights of Columbus are working in 
 the camps and cantonments, not as a secret 
 society, but on precisely the same basis as the 
 Young Men's Christian Association. Every 
 one I met connected with the Knights of 
 Columbus frankly acknowledged his in- 
 debtedness to the Young Men's Christian 
 
WHO FIGHT THE BJIEB 91 
 
 Association and wished to copy every help- 
 ful feature of the more experienced society. 
 Mr. Cusick, of Camp Gordon, allowed me to 
 see the instructions sent to each Knights of 
 Columbus secretary. They are broad, gen- 
 erous, and strictly humanitarian. Here are 
 some sample sentences : ** Arrange for an 
 address by some prominent non-Catholic 
 man in the community." ** Extend an invi- 
 tation to ezjery man in camp to make use of 
 our buildings at all times, and make it plain 
 that they may call on the secretary for any 
 assistance they may wish." ** Innocent games 
 are to be encouraged and permitted, but 
 gambling of all kinds must be rigidly ex- 
 cluded from our buildings." " Cooperate in 
 a friendly way with the Young Men's Chris- 
 tian Association, make it a point to treat the 
 inquiries of non-Catholics with the greatest 
 respect." ** Put a sign reading, * Write often 
 to Mother ' above the writing-tables." " If 
 there is ever a time that a man needs his re- 
 ligion, it is during the uncertain time of war, 
 and the men may be inclined to forget this 
 unless they are told now and again." " Your 
 building is not to be a church except at such 
 times as religious services are being con- 
 ducted there, but it is a place in charge of 
 Catholic gentlemen and for the benefit of all 
 
92 THE MEN BEHIND THE MEN 
 
 men who will conduct themselves as gentle 
 men. Any violations of the principles of de- 
 cency are not only to be frowned upon, but 
 absolutely forbidden." 
 
 With the exception that Mass is held in the 
 Knights of Columbus buildings, I could see 
 no essential difference between them and the 
 Young Men's Christian Association huts. 
 Each has ample writing facilities, libraries, 
 magazines, phonographs, moving-picture ap- 
 paratus, and games, and alike they give the 
 same cordial welcome to and place their 
 equipment freely at the disposal of all the 
 men in camp without regard to race, creed, 
 or caste. I talked over the possibilities of 
 the work with the Rev. J. A. Horton, Princi- 
 pal of Marist College, Atlanta, Georgia, and a 
 Knights of Columbus chaplain. He was ex- 
 tremely broad in his conception of the work to 
 be done, and it never entered into his thought, 
 even remotely, that the opportunity for hu- 
 man service would be warped by sectarian 
 bias. Father Walsh, a Knights of Columbus 
 chaplain at Camp Dix, was eager to tell me 
 everything about his building and its work. 
 He was gleeful over the way in which the 
 men made use of its facilities, how they ap- 
 preciated the pool table, the entertainments, 
 and the lectures. He told with enthusiasm 
 
WHO FIGHT THE HUNS 93 
 
 of how he was cooperating with the military 
 authorities in encouraging boxing because 
 the exercise aided the bayonet drills. He 
 said they entertained never less than twelve 
 hundred men a day. They had Masses every 
 morning and twice on Sunday, but made no 
 effort to influence non-Catholics to attend 
 the stricdy religious services. Father Walsh 
 was on the ground all through the period of 
 camp construction, and as an appreciation of 
 his faithfulness an automobile was presented 
 to him by the civilian plumbers for use in his 
 work. 
 
 The Hebrew Association has no buildings 
 of its own, but uses the Young Men's Chris- 
 tian Association huts for any specific work it 
 wishes to pursue. It has a paid secretary in 
 every camp — a bright, well-educated, and 
 earnest young man who takes particular care 
 of the Jewish soldiers. The most important 
 phase of the Hebrew Association work is the 
 manner in which it affiliates its soldiers with 
 the Hebrew families and synagogues in the 
 communities adjacent to the camps. All of 
 these men and institutions cooperate in the 
 heartiest manner conceivable with the direct- 
 ors of physical training, recreation, and music 
 within the camps appointed by the Fosdick 
 Commission, with the playground representa- 
 
94 THE MEN BEHIND THE MEN 
 
 tives and the civil authorities in the surround- 
 ing communities, with the regimental chap- 
 lains, and with the regular military authorities. 
 As the result of visits to several camps and 
 cantonments I got the impression that there 
 was a veritable conspiracy of positively good 
 forces, a kind of confederacy of sanely moral 
 agencies, to present to the world, not only a 
 victorious fighting machine, but to create an 
 order of healthy, clean, intelligent, and full- 
 orbed moral manhood such as this country 
 would never have had if the degeneracy of 
 Germany had not forced us into the war. 
 
Making Democracy Safe for the 
 Soldier 
 
MAKING DEMOCRACY SAFE FOR 
 THE SOLDIER 
 
 THE War-Camp Community Service 
 in Atlanta, described in this chapter, 
 gives a good idea of what is being 
 done in all the camp cities. 
 
 An unexpected rain-storm drove me into a 
 corner fruit store for shelter. A man in 
 khaki was shaking the water from his uni- 
 form very much as a dog shakes itself after 
 a plunge. In less than a minute a package 
 of cigarettes put us on a friendly footing. 
 
 " Yah," he said, ** the people of Atlanta 
 treat us white — gosh, but I was lonesome the 
 first week in camp — first time Fd ever been 
 away from home over night — never been in 
 a town as big as this before — never thought 
 that women could be as nice to men they 
 didn't know — never heard so much music in 
 all my life — nobody tries to stick us — don't 
 give a damn for the soldiering part in camp, 
 but the other things that go with it are O. K. 
 — hope I don't go to France, hope the war 
 will be over before we get ready, then I 
 97 
 
98 MAKING DEMOCRACY SAFE 
 
 figure I'll come and live in Atlanta — they're 
 some fine people here, sure." 
 
 A man's environment is anything that en- 
 grosses his mind or engages his affections. 
 The populated areas around our forty or fifty 
 camps, cantonments, and training stations 
 are the physical environment of more than a 
 million of our picked young men ; the men 
 and the women with whom they come into 
 contact within that area are the actual and 
 vital environment. Ideas and ideals are the 
 ultimate realities, the forces that make char- 
 acter and guide conduct. In handling the 
 high-mettled men of a democracy it is not 
 possible to corral them in a camp after the 
 fashion of an autocracy and beat them into 
 military shape. They would not surrender 
 the privileges of democracy at home to fight 
 for democracy abroad. The men of our new 
 armies have the freedom of the towns and 
 cities close to their camps, and the influence 
 of those communities upon the men is by no 
 means the least concern of the War Depart- 
 ment. The Commission on Training Camp 
 Activities, Mr. Raymond B. Fosdick, Chair- 
 man, has asked the Playground and Recre- 
 ation Association of America so to organize 
 the social life of the communities that it will 
 mean a healthy reaction upon the camps. 
 
FOR THE SOLDIER 99 
 
 To discover what had been done and what 
 could be done I went to Adanta, Georgia. 
 Camp Gordon is fourteen miles distant from 
 the city, Fort McPherson four miles, and the 
 Aviation School is upon the campus of the 
 Georgia Insdtute of Technology, within the 
 city limits. Atlanta is a proud city and con- 
 templates itself with a marked degree of sat- 
 isfaction. Has it not done several big things 
 in a big way within recent years? When 
 has Adanta failed to see and to seize an 
 opportunity? The questions are answered 
 fluently and frankly in the literature of the 
 Chamber of Commerce and in the confident 
 speech and bearing of the citizens. But I 
 was in a skeptical mood ; perhaps the proc- 
 lamation of Mayor Asa G. Candler prej- 
 udiced me : 
 
 " Atlanta sought and secured the establishment here 
 of one of the army cantonments, into which will be 
 entered for military training thousands of American 
 young men coming from every section of the country 
 and from every walk of life. With them it is reason- 
 able to suppose that almost an equal number of peo- 
 ple will come and temporarily be citizens of Atlanta. 
 . . . When we asked for these army camps, we 
 did it for two reasons : 
 
 "First, that we might contribute as a community 
 toward furnishing to the country men properly pre- 
 
100 MAKING DEMOCRACY SAFE 
 
 pared to represent us on the great battle-fields of 
 Europe to which they are going to be sent. 
 
 " Second, that in doing so we might also benefit in 
 every possible way Atlanta and her people." 
 
 Undoubtedly in the majority of minds the 
 second consideration was paramount. Other 
 communities were moved by a similar mo- 
 tive. Wherever a camp was established the 
 residents of the adjacent communities began 
 to estimate their profits and to plan how it 
 •* might benefit in every possible way Adanta 
 and her people." Then, behold I Every- 
 thing inverted, the foreseen order topsyturvy, 
 the grasping fist changed to the open hand 
 of giving. What did it? Not a fiat from 
 the War Department, for moral resolutions 
 do not come by ukase. When tens of thou- 
 sands of homesick boys, torn from their fa- 
 miliar setting, with eyes eager to serve their 
 country in spite of heavy hearts, began to 
 pour into the camp and overflow into the 
 streets of the city, every decent American 
 citizen subordinated personal profit to the in- 
 stincts of brotherhood and began to ask, 
 *' What can we do for these fellows ? " At- 
 lanta set itself to answer that question with a 
 combination of intelligence and enthusiasm 
 almost beyond praise. Under the best lead- 
 ership the city could furnish, Atlanta mobil- 
 
FOR THE SOLDIER 101 
 
 ized and organized its resources for the bene- 
 fit of the soldiers. 
 
 Everything is organized under a Commis- 
 sion consisting of twelve representative citi- 
 zens, five of whom are ex-Presidents of the 
 Chamber of Commerce and one the present 
 acting President. The ex officio members 
 are the Mayor, the Major-General command- 
 ing the Eighty-second Division at Camp 
 Gordon, the colonel in charge of the field 
 base hospital at Fort McPherson, the District 
 Attorney, the United States Internal Revenue 
 Collector, and the president of the Atlanta 
 Chapter of the Red Cross. Presiding over 
 the Commission is Mr. V. H. Kriegshaber, 
 one of the most vigorous and successful of 
 Atlanta's business men. 
 
 "What is your Commission doing?" I 
 asked Mr. Kriegshaber, as we sat in his office. 
 
 His answer was in measured sentences, but 
 suffused with enthusiasm : 
 
 " We are organizing and using all the 
 helpful and recreational resources of our city 
 for the welfare and benefit of the soldiers at 
 Camp Gordon and Fort McPherson ; we are 
 creating normal relations between the sol- 
 diers and the community by establishing 
 social intercourse and surrounding them with 
 a safe environment ; we are trying to help 
 
102 MAKING DEMOCEACY SAFE 
 
 Uncle Sam make the soldiers into the most 
 efficient military unit the world has ever 
 seen." 
 
 ** How are you doing it ? " 
 
 "If you will come with me to the meeting 
 of the Executive Committee, you will see and 
 hear." 
 
 The members of the Committee, which 
 meets every Thursday at 1 1 A. M., discussed 
 policies and problems in the light ot the past 
 week's experience, created new sub-commit- 
 tees for special purposes or filled vacancies 
 in existing ones, considered ways and means 
 of putting into effect suggestions from the 
 National Committee on Training Camp Ac- 
 tivities, and then formally adopted the fol- 
 lowing monthly budget after its approval by 
 the Safety Committee : 
 
 Expenses of Atlanta Commission, including secretary, 
 stenographer, other ofi&ce help, stationery, rent, 
 
 postage, etc ^450 
 
 Travelling and transportation expenses of employees 
 
 to camp, etc c . . . . 200 
 
 Expenses of free Sunday movies, with organ and other 
 concerts at Auditorium, cooperating with Atlanta 
 
 Festival Association 500 
 
 Expenses in connection with colored soldiers' recreation 
 
 and rest rooms 500 
 
 Balance needed by Y. M. C. A 500 
 
 Travellers' Aid Society 200 
 
 National League of Women's Service 250 
 
 Anti-Tuberculosis Association 650 
 
 Total per month $3,250 
 
FOR THE SOLDIER 103 
 
 This amount is subscribed by Atlanta citi- 
 zens for the duration of the war. 
 
 At twelve o'clock we adjourned to another 
 room for luncheon and for a round table con- 
 ference with the committee chairmen of the 
 city and representatives of the various 
 branches of non-military activities within the 
 camp. Each in turn made a report, men 
 from the camp telling what was needed 
 during the coming week and the city workers 
 stating what material was available for those 
 needs. In many ways it was the most re- 
 markable meeting I ever attended, marked 
 by a unique spirit of cooperation. Mrs. B. M. 
 Boykin reported for the Federated Women's 
 Clubs of Atlanta — several in number — sketch- 
 ing briefly the salient features of their work. 
 For example : the women of the city were 
 going out to Camp Gordon in the afternoons 
 to mend the men's clothing and to teach 
 them how to do their own sewing ; the 
 Daughters of the American Revolution had 
 organized to teach the colored women to knit 
 for their own soldiers ; the School of Oratory 
 had organized a glee and mandolin club ; 
 Mrs. E. S. Jackson promised a huge Christ- 
 mas pageant to be given both in the city and 
 the camp, etc. 
 
 The Transportation Committee reported 
 
104 MAKING DEMOCRACY SAFE 
 
 the number of automobiles lent by citizens to 
 take convalescent soldiers for a ride in the 
 afternoons and to carry volunteer entertainers 
 back and forth to the camps. The Entertain- 
 ment Committee told of so many concerts, 
 shows, readings, impersonations, etc., that I 
 could not tabulate them ; a representative of 
 the local Drama League said that the needs of 
 the camp had revived his society, and they 
 had a repertoire of plays which would last 
 all winter ; the secretary of the Hebrew 
 Association in the camp described how the 
 people of Jewish faith in Atlanta had brought 
 about a hundred Hebrew soldiers in to a 
 dance where they met young ladies of their 
 own race, and how it had been arranged that 
 Hebrew soldiers should have furlough on 
 their sacred days and come into the city to 
 live with Jewish families and celebrate their 
 religious rites. He spoke generously of the 
 splendid manner in which the Young Men's 
 Christian Association placed all the facilities 
 of its buildings at his disposal. At that point 
 the secretary of the Knights of Columbus 
 sprang to his feet and added his testimony to 
 the fine spirit of the Young Men's Christian 
 Association, for, pending the completion of 
 his building, he had the free use of all or any 
 of the Young Men's Christian Association 
 
FOE THE SOLDIER 105 
 
 buildings for his Knights of Columbus activ- 
 ities among the Catholic soldiers. 
 
 Although I was only a guest, I was so 
 moved by this evidence of religious comity 
 that I asked permission to tell an incident 
 which came to my notice in an English 
 paper. At the battle of Messines Ridge a 
 Catholic soldier lay dying, blown almost to 
 pieces by a bomb. No Catholic chaplain 
 happened to be near, and no Protestant 
 chaplain was available ; but a Hebrew rabbi, 
 acting as chaplain to the Jewish troops, bent 
 over the dying Catholic and held the crucifix 
 to his lips while he breathed his last. For a 
 moment the story was received with reverent 
 silence, and then every one in the room 
 broke into applause. Some of the by-prod- 
 ucts of this war may be worth all the sacrifices 
 of men, money, and strength we are making 
 so freely. 
 
 Another illustration of the above remark 
 may be found in what the next speaker — the 
 camp educational director — said. Among 
 drafted men in Camp Gordon were large 
 numbers of sturdy Southern mountaineers, 
 English-speaking but illiterate. In some 
 companies the number ran as high as fifteen 
 per cent. These were being taught to read 
 and write, and rapid progress was reported. 
 
106 MAKING DEMOCEACY SAFE 
 
 But a few of these men were found who did 
 not know why we were at war or the nation 
 against which we were fighting. Neither 
 did they seem to care ; Uncle Sam wanted 
 them to fight, and they didn't mind much 
 who it was — EngHsh, French, Germans, or 
 Russians. Uncle Sam wanted them, and 
 that was enough. A few months of camp 
 life will send those men back to their moun- 
 tain homes with a vision of possibilities 
 which will change the character of all suc- 
 ceeding generations. Besides the English 
 work the director mentioned that seventy- five 
 volunteer teachers were going out from the 
 city regularly to conduct classes in French. 
 
 The Camp Director of Singing thanked 
 the Committee for the book of songs which 
 had been distributed gratuitously to each 
 soldier, the cost of publishing the book hav- 
 ing been met by paid advertisements. Al- 
 though the librarian had nothing to tell of 
 the American Library Association, he ac- 
 knowledged the receipt of ample quantities 
 of good books and recent magazines. The 
 Library Association has met the immediate 
 demand for reading by an arrangement with 
 the Atlanta laundries. The following notice 
 sent to every home in the city tells its own 
 story : 
 
FOR THE SOLDIER 107 
 
 TO THE ATLANTA PUBLIC 
 
 The Laundrymen's Association have very kindly 
 tendered the free use of their delivery wagons to 
 collect any magazines and books that you may care to 
 give to the Carnegie Library for use of our Soldier 
 Boys at Camp Gordon and Fort McPherson. Every 
 home has some books or magazines that can be spared 
 for this patriotic purpose. Please "do your bit " and 
 hand these to your laundryman. The Carnegie Li- 
 brary will see that they are properly delivered to the 
 Soldiers. 
 
 Atlanta Commission on Training Camp 
 Activities. 
 
 Atlanta has an auditorium which will seat 
 sixty-five hundred, and which contains one 
 of the best organs in the world. Every Sun- 
 day a " continuous performance " is given 
 for the soldiers from 2 : 30 till 10 P. M. It is 
 absolutely free, and consists of organ recitals, 
 movies, popular singing, and entertaining 
 features of various kinds— but all refined and 
 elevating. 
 
 The Young Men's Christian Association 
 secretary reported the multiform work being 
 carried on, not only in the buildings, but in 
 the companies, and testified to the splendid 
 encouragement given by all the officers, from 
 the general in command to the most recent 
 reserve subaltern. He also commended the 
 churches heartily for their cooperation in all 
 
108 MAKING DEMOCEAOY SAFE 
 
 good work for the soldiers. Mr. Kriegshaber 
 assured us that the local city authorities and 
 police were working with the Federal au- 
 thorities and the representatives of Mr. 
 Fosdick's Committee for the control, and, 
 finally, for the suppression of vice in and 
 around the city. As such measures have to 
 be taken with discretion and secrecy, he 
 could not go into the subject exhaustively. 
 But he told how the Travellers* Aid Society, 
 through its representatives at the railway 
 stations and on the streets, and the Young 
 Women's Christian Association, by means of 
 hostess houses and the formation of clubs and 
 guilds among the girls and young women of 
 the city, were making a marked contribution 
 toward the solution of the problem by positive 
 and educational methods. 
 
 The men in uniform, as I saw them on the 
 streets and in public places, were orderly and 
 of exceptionally good behavior. I walked 
 about the city for more than two hours after 
 nightfall, and, although khaki was in evidence 
 everywhere, I never saw or heard a semblance 
 of rowdyism. I believe the soldier will almost 
 invariably meet the community in the spirit 
 in which the community meets him. I was 
 assured by the ladies present that not a single 
 instance had been reported of a rude act or 
 
FOR THE SOLDIER 109 
 
 word by a soldier toward the ladies and girls 
 who have been interesting themselves in the 
 camp. 
 
 The story of Atlanta's relationship to the 
 new army, how the city is meeting its obliga- 
 tion, more intent upon serving than upon 
 the gains of commerce, is merely etched. I 
 do not know whether any community near a 
 camp or cantonment is doing more or better 
 work than Atlanta, but what I saw made me 
 proud of the men and women who are ex- 
 emplifying democracy at its best. 
 
 Augusta, near Camp Hancock, and Spar- 
 tanburg, near Camp Wadsworth, are perhaps 
 doing all that the facilities of smaller com- 
 munities can offer. Baltimore and Washing- 
 ton, near Camp Meade, and Philadelphia, 
 which is easily accessible from Camp Dix, 
 have more serious problems, caused partly 
 by the largeness of the cities and partly by 
 the difficulties of handling the liquor situa- 
 tion. Perhaps the efforts being made by 
 the representatives of the Playground and 
 Recreation Association in smaller places near 
 Camp Dix — New Egypt, Bordentown, Mount 
 Holly, and Wrightstown — will soon over- 
 come the temptations of Trenton and Phila- 
 delphia by providing sufficient entertainment 
 for the men on the very confines of the 
 
110 MAKING DEMOCRACY SAFE 
 
 cantonment. At any rate, the positive in- 
 fluence of the Playground and Recreation 
 Association will make a wholesome environ- 
 ment near at hand if the men will avail them- 
 selves of it ; and this, linked to the vigorous 
 activities of the Training Camp Commission 
 within the cantonment, will lift thousands of 
 men much higher in the scale of a healthy 
 mental, moral, and physical manhood. The 
 opportunities of such work are so great and 
 its satisfactions so splendid that the various 
 organizations of a social or humanitarian or 
 religious kind are amply justified in with- 
 drawing their best and wisest workers from 
 the normal communities and concentrating 
 them in and around the training camps. 
 
 While the men fight to make the world 
 safe for democracy, we must fight to make 
 democracy safe for the men. 
 
VI 
 
 Will America Fail? 
 
VI 
 WILL AMERICA FAIL? 
 
 WRITING from one of the canton- 
 ments, a soldier said : *' I wish the 
 people at home could get their 
 minds on this war business as we have ours 
 fixed on it here." Evidently there is too 
 much complaint reaching the camps ; the 
 folks back home are dwelling unduly upon 
 the little deprivations and dislocations caused 
 by the absence of their loved ones ; perhaps, 
 with a false psychology, they are exaggerat- 
 ing the hardships caused by high prices and 
 limited commodities to let the soldiers know 
 that they too are sacrificing. Democracy is 
 a highly sensitive organism, and what is felt 
 in one part is quickly experienced through 
 the whole body. The drill master can make 
 a man into an automaton of autocracy but 
 something more is needed to make a cham- 
 pion of democracy. Our soldiers now in 
 training will be just what the people of 
 America expect them to be, will them to be. 
 They feed their individual souls on the aspir- 
 113 
 
114 WILL AMEEICA FAIL! 
 
 ations and inspirations and determinations 
 of the national soul. That larger life, upon 
 which their separate lives depend for exist- 
 ence, comes to them in letters through the 
 mail, in daily papers and weekly or monthly 
 magazines. And, being something spiritual, 
 it also finds its way into the camps along 
 channels no one can trace. They respond 
 to it and embody it, yet all the while not 
 knowing what is molding them. The mind 
 of the nation reaches the men through the 
 military command, the War Department, the 
 munition factories ; the soul of the nation 
 reaches the men through continued contact 
 with the old civil life. Efficiency in the army 
 reflects the mental vigor of America but the 
 morale of the army will reflect the spiritual 
 quality of America. 
 
 The front Ime of battle in this struggle is 
 somewhere in France, Flanders and Italy ; 
 the field of war stretches back into every 
 home, workshop, lodge room, club house and 
 church in America. Liberty Loans are im- 
 portant because they furnish the government 
 with money ; Young Men's Christian Asso- 
 ciation and Knights of Columbus and Com- 
 munity Recreation campaigns are necessary 
 because they guarantee a normal environ- 
 ment for the troops during an abnormal 
 
WILL AMEEICA FAIL? 115 
 
 experience ; Red Cross drives are indispen- 
 sable because they bring the Angel of Mercy 
 into the hell of conflict; but these laudable 
 enterprises have a value even beyond those 
 described — they proclaim to a million and a 
 half men in uniform that they have the confi- 
 dence and backing and affection of the people 
 who remain at home. When they know that 
 the busy and influential men and women in 
 the old home village or city are giving freely 
 of their time and strength and wealth on their 
 behalf, and that the obscure and the poor also 
 are contributing proportionately to the same 
 cause, there comes an accession of pride and 
 courage to the men in the training camps 
 and trenches and out upon the high seas. 
 Not enough of our civilian population realize 
 the significance of this. 
 
 There is a sense in which this war has not 
 yet gripped the generality of people. In al- 
 most every community there is a shamefully 
 large proportion of men and women whose 
 thoughts and habits have remained un- 
 changed ; the world cataclysm has made no 
 difference to their self-absorbing method of 
 living. And they seem to intend that it shall 
 make no difference. This has been partly 
 due to the failure of the press and the pulpit 
 to understand that vicariousness can be upon 
 
116 WILL AMEEICA FAIL? 
 
 an international scale. During the past three 
 years our provincial minds have thought of 
 the Belgians as fighting for Belgium, the 
 French for France, the British for Britain and 
 the Italians for Italy. Slowly, very slowly, 
 it is breaking in upon our reluctant minds 
 that every man who has been blinded or 
 broken or killed in Europe has suffered for 
 us. If every American would ask his con- 
 science: "When the war has made such a 
 tragic difference to Belgium, France, Britain, 
 Serbia, Roumania and Italy, while they were 
 standing between barbarity and the sanctity 
 of my home and the security of my nation, 
 is it not time that it began to make some 
 difference to me?" then we should see the 
 entire nation spring into sacrificial activity. 
 
 Our citizens ought to endeavor to visual- 
 ize the difference the war has made to the 
 hundreds of thousands of men now wearing 
 the American uniform. They have sacrificed 
 their financial prospects, many of them be- 
 yond recovery ; thousands have left college 
 in the midst of their studies, never to return ; 
 nearly all have foregone the comforts of 
 homes as dear to them as to the rest of us ; 
 they must all spend months of drastic train- 
 ing in camps or on ships; before them — 
 how many we dare not compute — there are 
 
WILL AMEEICA FAIL? 117 
 
 ghastly wounds and painful deaths upon a 
 foreign batde-field, or devilish tortures in 
 barbaric prisons ; to all of them there will be 
 cold, hunger, thirst, weariness and the sur- 
 rounding horrors of war. If service means 
 all that and even more to our men-in-arms, 
 what right have we, in the peace and security 
 of our homes, to refuse to conform our lives 
 to the new conditions? 
 
 Neither can any civilian say he has done 
 his share while anything more remains that 
 he may do. If the men and women of cap- 
 ital give one-half of their accumulations in 
 order to save the other half, they may con- 
 sider that they have gotten off very cheaply ; 
 if the business man allots a third of his time 
 to war work in his community he is well off 
 compared with his neighbor whom the draft 
 took ; if it be necessary to go to bed dead 
 tired every night, before any one grumbles 
 he should picture the man in the trenches 
 with no bed at all but the muddy floor of a 
 dugout and no covering but his wet, cold 
 clothing ; if a woman has to abandon social 
 functions to make surgical dressings she 
 ought to remember that the fairest and 
 noblest women of other lands have been 
 slaving in the hospitals at the front for many 
 weary months without respite or reward ; if 
 
118 WILL AMEEICA FAIL? 
 
 the laboring man is called upon to exceed the 
 usual hours of work he may thank his stars 
 that he still has a chance to work as a free 
 man for freedom ; if the industrial economist 
 is inclined to carp at narrowed profits he 
 should consider that production for the whole 
 must overrule profits for the few, because if 
 we lose the war we shall have to pay indem- 
 nities for all the nations into the coffers of 
 Germany — which will eat up all our profits 
 for many generations to come ; if we are 
 prone to chafe because of a sugarless, or 
 meatless, or wheatless menu we bow our 
 heads in reverence at the thought of the 
 father and mother who will sorrow for the 
 son who rests in an unmarked grave across 
 the sea. No one understands the spiritual 
 and universal significance of this war who 
 talks of having done " his share." 
 
 No war in which our nation has ever been 
 engaged is like this war. The Revolution 
 was a conflict for rights, but they were our 
 rights. The Civil War was a struggle to 
 preserve this nation as a nation, and it con- 
 cerned ourselves almost exclusively. But 
 we are fighting now for the future of human- 
 ity, for those universal sanctities which mark 
 us as higher than the beasts, for the spiritual 
 prerequisites of progress and peace — honor, 
 
WILL AMERICA FAIL? 119 
 
 truth, righteousness and justice. To say 
 that we battle for democracy is an under- 
 statement, to say that we fight for civilization 
 falls below the issue ; we are at war for all 
 the slowly and painfully accumulated funda- 
 mental virtues and graces which we call 
 Christianity. 
 
 If we fail now, and the world comes under 
 the domination of that Germany which vio- 
 lated every treaty and plighted honor, which 
 dragged the villainous Turk down to its own 
 viler level, which raped and poisoned and 
 mutilated women and children and called its 
 preachers and professors to justify the ghastly 
 outrages, which made all the perfidies and 
 passions and butcheries of the Moguls seem 
 almost like the incidents of mere misguided 
 virtue : — if that Germany wins the war then 
 mankind, which had climbed so nearly to the 
 sublime stature of Christ, will fall back to the 
 unspeakable wallowings of Calaban. 
 
 These considerations concern us all and at 
 all times. They should glow in the letters 
 written to the men in camp, they should 
 regulate the program of every day's activi- 
 ties, they should write the figures in the 
 check book when demand is made upon our 
 patriotism, they should determine the mood 
 in which the appeals of various war-work 
 
120 WILL AMEBIC A FAIL! 
 
 activities are received. The churches back 
 in the home towns and villages ought to 
 treat their men in the camps as exemplars of 
 the sacrificial spirit of the Master-Lord and 
 send messages, letters and tokens of com- 
 radeship to them ; public officials should be 
 enthusiastic and eager to minimize the temp- 
 tations wherever men in uniform are found ; 
 every agency for the physical, social, moral 
 or spiritual benefit of the soldiers should have 
 proud and joyful volunteers in superabun- 
 dance to provide whatever is required ; each 
 community, large or small, should imme- 
 diately organize its resources upon a scien- 
 tific basis for the period of the war in order 
 instantly to meet emergency calls, and not 
 depend upon a haphazard, ill-arranged 
 campaign in which many of the most val- 
 uable human and financial factors are missed ; 
 every man or woman, whether lay or clerical, 
 who sees the spiritual issues of the struggle 
 and has the gift of clear interpretation, 
 should be used in school and church and on 
 the public platform to create the high temper 
 needed by the nation in such a crisis ; all 
 political party distinctions and sectarian dif- 
 ferences should be minimized, while together 
 and as one men gird themselves to guard 
 and establish the everlasting essentials. The 
 
WILL AMEEICA FAIL? 121 
 
 battles will be lost or won by the soldiers 
 and sailors now in training ; the war will be 
 lost or won by the ordinary American men 
 and women. The last reserve of democracy, 
 civilization and Christianity is now on trial. 
 Will America fail ? Not if we realize that 
 this is the last and most holy of the Crusades ; 
 not if we understand that as a nation we have 
 one and only one business now — to win the 
 war ; not if we feel that our hundreds of 
 thousands of fighting men are carrying for- 
 ward and completing the work begun on 
 Calvary ; not if we plain citizens of to-day 
 can foresee that all future generations in all 
 lands will look back upon our sacrifices as 
 the most glorious contribution to human 
 welfare. Will America fail ? Not unless 
 America first becomes a vassal of Germany 
 on a parity with Turkey, Bulgaria and the 
 subsidized elements of the Russian Bolshe- 
 viki — a level to which our Pacifists and pro- 
 Germans would gladly drag us. So long as 
 the spirit of Washington and Lincoln beats 
 clearly and strongly in our souls America 
 cannot fail. 
 
 Printed in the United States of America 
 
A Book that Radiates Faith, Hope, and Courage 
 
 FOURTH EDITION 
 
 The Cross at the Front 
 
 FRAGMENTS FROM THE TRENCHES 
 
 By 
 CHAPLAIN THOMAS TIPLADY, B.E.F. 
 
 12mo. Cloth. Net $1.00 
 
 ^ Shows US the soldier at the front, as the 
 author knows and loves him, " not scarlet — 
 nor yet white — but just Khaki." 
 
 C " Sincere faith, unflagging courage, thorough man- 
 liness — an interesting book by a chaplain greatly 
 loved." — Providence Journal, 
 
 C " One of the best of the war books. The author, 
 a field chaplain, was in Flanders in the thick of the 
 fight for many months. He pictures the real soldier 
 at the front — his heroism, his sacrifice, his reverence 
 for all sacred things as few writers have been able 
 to picture him." — The Pittsburgh Post. 
 
 CL * It is a first-hand account of heroism and self 
 sacrifice. Here are stories which none can read dry- 
 eyed, but, nevertheless, are contagious of hope and 
 honor and courage. Of all the war literature issued in 
 the last three years none follows the lines or parallels 
 the purpose of THE CROSS AT THE FRONT." 
 
 — The Nashville Banner. 
 
 C *' * Vivid * is too dim a word to express the living 
 pictures which this chaplain has seen in France. Some 
 of the chapters are among the finest pieces of pathos 
 we have read anywhere. Read the book and you will 
 be a better man for all your tasks."— CA/ca^o Standard. 
 
 C ** Marked by a vividness which shows it to have 
 been written within range or sound of the guns, full 
 of that humanness which will cause answering echo in 
 the heart of every reader." — Episcopal Recorder^ 
 
Former Head of Press Bureau Serbian 'Foreign Office 
 
 South-Eastern Europe 
 
 The Main Problem of the Present World Struggle 
 By VLADISLAV R. SAVIC 
 
 Introduction by NICHOLAS MURRAY BUTLER, 
 ;0f Columbia University 
 12mo, cloth, net $1.50 
 " A book which makes appeal to every intelligent reader 
 who wishes to have the knowledge necessary to form an inde- 
 pendent opinion as to the conditions on which durable peace 
 shall rest. M. Savic is a native Serb, who, through service 
 as correspondent of the English press, has been brought in 
 close touch with British public opinion." 
 
 — Pres. Nicholas Murray Butler. 
 
 ARMENIA: A Martyr Nation 
 
 By M. C. GABRIELIAN 
 12mo, cloth, net $1.75 
 An exceptionally informative history of the Armenian nation 
 from its earliest days to recent tragic days. Himself an 
 Armenian, the author has brought together the salient features 
 in his country's tragic story in able fashion throughout. The 
 book is one of extraordinary interest. 
 
 In the Land of Ararat 
 
 A Sketch of the Life of Mrs. Elizabeth Barrows Ussher 
 
 a Martyr of the Turkish Massacre at Van 
 
 By JOHN OTIS BARROWS 
 
 Illustrated. 12mo, cloth, net $1.00 
 
 " In these days of world conflict, the readers who have been 
 
 in the hair-breadth escapes and wonderful experiences of 
 
 Dr. Clarence D. Ussher, cannot but be interested in this story 
 
 of the life of his wife, who crowned a career of remarkable 
 
 usefulness by giving in sacrifice all that was naturally dearest 
 
 to her, in her effort to save from suffering and death the 
 
 families of those who had tried to kill herself and her children." 
 
 —The Chronicle. 
 
 Russia in Transformation 
 
 By ARTHUR J. BROWN, D.D. 
 12mo, cloth, net $1.00 
 " We have more reason to be interested in Russia just now 
 than in any other country except our own. Doctor Brown 
 writes with discrimination and brings into its proper relation 
 with the story those spiritual features which are so important 
 and so little understood." — The Advance. 
 
 " A timely book full of just the questions that everybody is 
 asking about Russia." — Congregationalist, 
 
How Would Jesus Regard a "Slacker "? 
 
 What Did Jesus Really Teach 
 About War 
 
 By EDWARD LEIGH PELL 
 
 12nio, cloth, net $1.00 
 
 C " Capital," says Colonel Theodore Roosevelt. " I 
 
 wish every religious man could read it." 
 
 " A book to stir the sluggish, to wake the sleepers, to right- 
 about everyone toward the righteousness of the present war 
 in behalf of a larger liberalism, a truer freedom." 
 
 — Washington Star. 
 
 " Not merely frank, but vigorous and such as to lead one 
 to see Christ's teaching in a clearer light." 
 
 —N. Y. Evening Post. 
 
 TAPS: A Book IZ Boys in Khaki 
 
 By J. GREGORY MANTLE, D.D. 
 
 12mo, cloth, net $1.25 
 
 C A soldier's ** book of information " and help not in 
 
 the " Manual." A work of great interest and value in 
 
 the fight for Christ and Freedom. 
 
 A book written expressly for Uncle Sam's boys. It deals 
 with the salient evils and temptations which await the young 
 soldier just joining the colors. The author's son is among 
 the boys in the National army for whom this book sounds the 
 alarm and points out the road to victory. 
 
 What tlie War is Teaching 
 
 By CHARLES E. JEFFERSON. D.D. 
 12mo, cloth, net $1.00 
 C " The words of Dr. Charles E. Jefferson ought to 
 be nailed to the doorposts of every Christiem mem- 
 ory." — Harry Emerson Fosdic\. 
 
 " The nature of war, its effect upon man, its effect upon 
 the moral law, the part religion has to play, is written with a 
 passion and a wealth of information which holds the interest, 
 A challenging note which men ought to hear." , 
 
 — Congregationalism ! 
 
Over Five Million copies of a Pamphlet containing striking 
 portions of this book are being distributed to the soldiers of 
 America and Britain. 
 
 German Atrocities 
 
 HOW A NATION LOST ITS SOUL 
 
 By NEWELL DWIGHT HILLIS 
 Many Phttographs of Reproductions of Affidavits, Diaries, Scenes, etc. 
 
 12mo» cloth, net $1.00 
 Theodore Roosevelt says: ** I wish every one in this 
 nation could hear this indictment." The conditions 
 thus described by an unimpeachable witness should 
 wake every man and woman in America. 
 
 " Dr. Hillis tells of the cold-blooded murder of babies, little 
 girls and boys and their mothers, by German soldiers and 
 officers; of the mutilation of dead bodies; the devilish in- 
 genuity of the German War Staff, in directing the complete 
 devastation of whole districts; of the torture of French 
 soldiers and Red Cross workers." — Indianapolis News. 
 
 Studies of the Great War 
 
 WHAT EACH NATION HAS AT STAKE 
 
 By NEWELL DWIGHT HILLIS 
 12mo, cloth, net $1.20 
 " A true index of American sentiment and a brilliant 
 statement of facts." — N. Y. Times, 
 
 Facing the Hindenburg Line 
 
 Being Personal Observations at the Fronts and in the Camps 
 
 of the British, French, Americans, and Italians, 
 
 During the Campaigns of 1917 
 
 By BURRIS A. JENKINS 
 12mo, cloth, net $1.25 
 C In the dual capacity of war-correspondent and 
 Y. M. C. A. lecturer, Mr. Jenkins has had exceptional 
 opportunities for seeing things at close range on the 
 battle-fronts of Europe. In bright, telling fashion he 
 has set down what he saw and heard among the 
 Frenchmen at Verdun, on the British Front, in Northern 
 France and Flanders, with the Italian Armies around 
 Gorizia. Mr. Jenkins* book is marked throughout by 
 a deep sincerity and descriptive powers away above 
 the ordinary. A live, stirring account of life in the 
 European war zone. 
 
Deacidified using the Bookkeeper proce 
 Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
 Treatment Date: y^ 2001 
 
 PreservationTechnologu 
 
 A WORLD LEADER IN PAPER PRESERVATI 
 
 111 Thomson Park Drive 
 
 Hranhprru Tnuunchin PA IfiflKfi 
 
:!"^''^°^ CONGRESS 
 
 007 690 990 8