Finally our headquarters moved forward, too. I jumped out of a colonel's car one dark night and hunted for an hour and a half among the hills before I found the chalk quarry where they now were hidden from prying air scouts. At last, finding the quarry, I met a boy I knew, who took me to the dugout where the senior chaplain was sleeping. I crawled into a vacant bunk, made myself at home and left the next morning for good. The quarry did not appeal to me when wet; one was too likely to slide from the top to the bottom and stay there; and I had no desire to test its advantages when dry. The next time I came back to headquarters they were in the village of Joncourt, beyond the Hindenburg Line, in territory which we had released from the Germans. The chief attraction of Joncourt was an occasional roof—of course, there were no windows. The cemetery had been used as a "strong point" by the retreating Germans, who had scattered the bodies about and used the little vaults as pill-boxes in which to mount machine guns. And our message center was located in a German dugout fully fifty feet underground; evidently plenty of precautions had been taken against allied air raids. In fact, from this point on every house in every village had a conspicuoussign, telling of theFliegerschutzfor a certain number of men in its cellar. In addition, the placard told the number of officers, men and horses which could be accommodated with billets on the premises. Evidently, the Germans in laying out their permanently occupied territory, went about it in their usual business-like fashion.
But between my glimpses of these various headquarters, I was at the front with the troops going into the trenches and had had a glimpse of war. My first experience under fire was in some woods near Maretz, where I spent part of the night with one battalion, as they paused before going into the trenches. I finished the night on the floor of a house in the village, having grown accustomed enough to the sound of the shells to sleep in spite of it. Like most people I had wondered how one feels under fire, and experienced a queer sensation when I first heard the long whine of a distant shell culminating in a sudden explosion. Now I realized that I was under fire, too. But I speedily found that one feels more curiosity than fear under long-distance fire; real fear comes chiefly when the shells begin to land really near by. I was to experience that, too, a little later. In fact, I found out soon that every soldier is frightened; a good soldier is simply one who does his duty in spite of fear.
Then a report came in that Chaplain John Ward, of the 108th Infantry, had been seriously wounded and I was sent to take his place with the unit. In a push the chaplain works with the wounded; after it, with the dead. Of many sad duties at the front, his is perhaps the saddest of all. My first station was with the third battalion headquarters and aidpost in a big white house set back in a little park in the tiny village of Escaufourt, a mile or so behind the lines. Captain Merrill was in command of the battalion and one could see how the work and responsibility wore on him day by day, reducing the round, cheerful soldier for the time almost to a whispering, tottering old man. But his spirit held him to the task; he slept for only a few minutes at a time, and then was back at work again. A conscientious man can have no more exacting duty than this, to care for the lives of a thousand men.
We were under constant fire there, though not under observation, but the little ambulances ran up to the gate of the château for the wounded, who had to walk or be carried in and out from the house to the gate. We ate upstairs in the stately dining room at times, though we usually ate and always slept in the crowded cellar where the major and his staff were housed. There eight or nine of us would sit on our brick seats and sleep with our backs against the wall, being awakened from time to time by a messenger coming in or by the ringing of the field telephone in the corner. The telephone operator was always testing one or another connection, day and night, for the emergency when it would be needed.
One night companies H and I of the 108th Infantry were almost completely wiped out by gas. They were in low lying trenches by the side of the canal under a constant fire of gas shells, while the damp weather kept the dangerous fumes near the ground. They had no orders to evacuate to a safer post and no human being can live forever in a gas mask, so one after another the men yielded to temptation, tookoff their masks for momentary relief, and inhaled the gas-laden air. All evening and night they kept coming in by twos and threes to our aid post, the stronger ones walking, the rest on stretchers. Their clothing reeked of the sickeningly sweet odor. The room was soon full of it, so that we had to blow out the candles and open the door for a few minutes to avoid being gassed ourselves. There were three ambulances running that night to the Main Dressing Station, and I made it my task to meet each car, notify the doctor and bring the gassed and wounded men out to the ambulance. Most of them were blinded for the time being by the effect of the gas. No light was possible, as that would have drawn fire at once. Every ten minutes through the night our village was shelled, and in walking the forty or fifty yards through the park to the gate, I had to make two detours with my blinded men to avoid fresh shell-holes made that very afternoon. I admit feeling an occasional touch of panic as I led the big helpless fellows around those fresh shell holes and helped them into the ambulances. The final touch came when a youngster of perhaps seventeen entered the aid post alone, walking painfully. "What outfit are you from, sonny?" was my natural greeting. "I am the last man left in Company H," was the proud reply.
This was the sort of fatal blunder which seemed to occur once in every command before the lesson was learned that gas-filled trenches need no defending, and that troops, safely withdrawn a hundred yards or more, can be moved forward again quickly enough the moment the gas lifts. The English had had the same lesson more than once untilthey learned it thoroughly; so had the Germans; now our armies, with their examples before us, had to learn it again through the suffering of our own soldiers. Our division was not the only one in which the same or a similar blunder cost the men so dearly, for I have read the same incident of more than one unit on other parts of the American line, and have had them verified by officers who were present at those other catastrophes. In the art of war the instruction of the generals costs the lives of the soldiers.
We had the peculiar experience of seeing the village which we had entered in good condition crumbling about us under the enemy fire. Even the windows were intact when we reached it; the Germans were just out, and our artillery had been outstripped completely in the forward rush. Under the constant pounding of back area fire, designed to prevent ammunition and supplies coming up to the line unmolested, our little village lost windows, roofs and walls, disintegrating steadily into a heap of ruins.
One evening we were assigned the task of evacuating some old French peasants who had clung to their little homes through all the world-shaking catastrophe. At last they had to leave, as the danger to them was too direct and, in addition, they constituted a hidden menace to our troops in case even one of them had been left behind as a spy. I went with a party of Australians and a few of our men to the houses in the outskirts of the town, where the greatest danger existed. I remember the utterly disconsolate attitude of two old men and a little old woman in one of them, when they were told they had to leave. They seemed numb in the midstof all the rush and roar of warfare. Their little possessions were there, they were of the peasant type and had probably never been out of the district in their lives. The advance of the enemy in 1914 had been accompanied by no fighting near their homes, and now the allied victory, the one hope of their country, was the one thing that bore destruction to their little village and tore them away from the spot where they were rooted.
One evening I joined a ration party going forward and visited the lines and advanced headquarters at St. Souplet, hearing the peculiar whistle of a sniper's bullet pass me as I made my way back after dusk. One of the boys carrying a heavy bag of hardtack had a sore shoulder, not quite well from a previous wound. So I shouldered his bag for a decidedly weary mile of skulking along a sunken road and hurrying across the occasional open spaces. When we came to his unit I was glad to turn the bag over to him; I felt no pleasure in such lumpy burden, and would far rather have worn out my shoulder with something more appreciated by the boys than hardtack,—the one thing which nobody enjoyed but which was eaten only because they were desperately hungry. On the night of October 16th we all moved over, preparatory to the push across the Selle River. We installed ourselves in the large building at the cross roads, where the aid post was stationed. I joined a group of sleepers on the cellar floor, picking my way in the darkness to find a vacant spot. My trench coat on the plank floor made a really luxurious bed.
The next morning, October 17th, I was awakened at 5:20 by the barrage; the boys were going over;the battle of the Selle River had began. By six o'clock the wounded began to flow in, at first by twos and threes, then in a steady stream. They came walking wearily along or were carried on the shoulders of German prisoners or occasionally by our own men. As we were at the crossroads, we got most of the wounded, English, German and American, as well as a great deal of the shelling with which back areas are always deluged during an attack. In this case, our post was just behind the lines at first, but it became a back area within a very few days owing to the dash and brilliancy of our tired troops when the orders came to go over the top. They stormed the heights across the stream after wading it in the first rush, and then went on across the hills and fields.
Our attack was a part of the campaign of the British Third Army and a small element in the great "push" going on at that time over the entire front. Our task with that of the Thirtieth Division on our right was to cross the Selle River and advance toward the Sambre Canal. On our left were British troops, while we were supported by Australian artillery and the British Air Service. In our first great battle, that of the Hindenburg Line, the "Ausies" had acted as the second wave, coming up just in time to save some of the hard pressed units of our Division and to complete the success of our assault. So we knew them well enough and were glad indeed to have their excellent artillery to put over the barrage for our second attack.
The Australians and, in fact, all the British Colonial troops, had much more in common with the American soldiers than had the British troops themselves.They were like our men, young, hardy, dashing. They were all volunteers. They had a type of discipline of their own, which included saluting their own officers when they wanted to and never saluting British officers under any circumstances. I took a natural pride in hearing of their commanding officer, Lieutenant General Sir John Monash, who held the highest rank of any Jew in the war. It was no little honor to be the commander of those magnificent troops from Australia.
Meanwhile we were busy at the first aid post. I found myself the only person at hand who could speak any German, so I took charge of the door, with a group of prisoners to carry the wounded in and out and load them in the ambulances. As soon as my dozen or so prisoners were tired out I would send them on to the "cage" and pick up new men from the constant stream flowing in from the front. Our opponents here were chiefly Wurtembergers, young boys of about twenty, although one regiment of Prussian marines was among them. Among the first prisoners were two German physicians who offered to assist ours in the work. They worked all day, one in our aid post, the other in that of the 107th Infantry, side by side with our surgeons and doing excellent work for Americans and Germans alike. They picked their own assistants from among their captured medical corpsmen, and were strictly professional in their attitude throughout. One of them was Dr. Beckhard, a Jew from Stuttgart, with whom I had a few snatches of conversation and whom I should certainly like to meet again under more congenial circumstances. I was amused in the midst of it all when the doctor noticed his brother, an artilleryman,coming in as one of the endless file of stretcher bearers, carrying wounded in gray or olive drab. The doctor asked me whether he might take his brother as one of his assistants for the day. "Is he any good?" I asked. "Oh, yes," was the answer, "as good as any medical orderly." So I gave permission and the two, together with a real medical orderly and another young prisoner as interpreter, ran one room of the first aid post in their own way. I kept an American soldier on guard there chiefly to be prepared for any eventualities; as a matter of fact the German surgeons treated American wounded and American surgeons treated German wounded with the same impartial spirit. The two physicians joined the other prisoners at the end of the day bearing letters of appreciation written by Captain Miller, the surgeon in charge of our post.
About a year later when communication with Germany was opened again, I found that this chance meeting at the front proved an odd means of communication with my German cousins. When Dr. Beckhard returned to Stuttgart he lectured on his experiences at the front, mentioning among other things that he had met an American Rabbi by the name of Levinger. Some distant relatives of mine living in the city heard the talk and wrote to a nearer branch of the family living in another part of Wurtemberg, so that shortly after the actual experience they knew of my being in the army and serving at the front.
Only the small Ford ambulances could come as near the front as our post, while the larger ones came only to the Advanced Dressing Station atBusigny. These smaller ambulances were unable to accommodate the constant stream of gassed and wounded men coming from the lines. Those who had minor wounds, especially in the arms, had to be directed along the proper road according to that ironical term, "walking wounded." Cases which in civil life would be carried to an ambulance, given full treatment, and then driven gently to the nearest hospital, were here given emergency dressings and told, "The Advanced Dressing Station is two miles down that road, boys. Walk slow and don't miss the sign telling where to turn to the left." Other more serious cases for whom there was no room in ambulances, at the moment were carried on stretchers by prisoners. I would assemble three or four such cases, take a revolver left by some wounded officer or non-com, and give it to a "walking wounded" with instructions to "see that they get safely to the next point." Naturally, these boys with minor wounds of their own were safe guardians to see that the German prisoners did their duty. I can still see their grins as they assured me: "Those fellows are sure going to stick on the job, sir. I'll say they will!" The attitude of the slightly wounded men was often full of grim humor. I remember one Australian carried in on a stretcher who called me to his side with their customary "Here, Yank," and when I responded handed me very gravely a Mills bomb which he had used to overawe his captive bearers, apparently threatening to blow them up with himself should they prove insubordinate.
A constant worry of mine were the weapons which the wounded men dropped in front or within theaid post. Knowing that all army supplies would be reissued to them on release from the hospital, the soldiers did not care to carry heavy rifles or even revolvers and bombs back with them. The result was a pile of weapons at just the point where my prisoner stretcher-bearers could have easy access to them. I kept an M. P. busy much of the time removing these to a place of comparative safety.
Behind the aid post we found a shed which served as temporary morgue for the men who died before we could give them emergency treatment and rush them off in the ambulances. The extreme tension of the actual fight and the tremendous pressure of administering to the living calloused the heart for the moment to these horrible necessities, which come back to memory in later days with the full measure of ghastly detail.
The chaplain is the handy man at the front, one of the few who is not limited by special duties or confined to a particular spot. He works forward or backward as the need exists. He ladles out hot chocolate with the Red Cross, carries a stretcher with the Medical Corps, ties up a bandage when that is needed, and prays for Jew and Christian alike. I ministered to a number of Jewish and Christian soldiers who were dying, leading the Jews in the traditional confession of faith, and reading a psalm for the Protestants. One of the surgeons came to me and said, "Captain Connor here is dying, and Chaplain Hoffman our priest is at Battalion Headquarters acting as interpreter to examine some prisoners. What can we do?" So I borrowed the surgeon's rosary and held the cross to the lips of the dying Catholic. This incident, so impossiblein civil life, is really expected among soldiers,—it has been repeated so many times and in so many different ways.
We were constantly under heavy shell fire, as our place at the cross roads was not only convenient of access, but was also the only route for bringing supplies and ammunition to our part of the front. Once as I was in the middle of the road with several prisoners loading stretchers on an ambulance, a shell burst in a pool about twenty feet away, covering us with a shower of mud. My prisoners, who had a wholesome respect for their own artillery, could hardly be prevented from dropping the stretcher. However, we were too near the explosion to be hurt, as the fragments flew over our heads, killing one boy and wounding four others across the street. One of the wounded was an American runner from the front, who was enjoying a hasty bite at the army field kitchen around the corner. He came over in a hurry to have his cheek tied up and then went calmly back to the field kitchen to finish his interrupted lunch. The man who was killed was standing about seventy-five feet from the spot of the explosion beside the motor-cycle which he drove, waiting for his commanding officer to come and use the side-car. He pitched forward as though falling to avoid the explosion, just as we would have done if we had not been holding a stretcher. When he did not rise, Father Kelley and I went over to him and found that a fatal bit of metal had struck him in the head just below his steel helmet.
And so the work went on. The next day we heard of some wounded who had not yet been brought in from Bandival Farm. Chaplain Burgh of the 107thInfantry and I gathered together a few volunteers of our ambulance men and several prisoners to go out and carry them in. It was about a mile and a half out across the battlefield under intermittent shell fire. I placed my captured Luger revolver, which one of the boys had brought me the day before, in a conspicuous position with the handle projecting from my front pocket. I had had the thing unloaded as soon as I got it because I preferred not to run any unnecessary risks. Being a non-combatant both by orders and inclination, I was afraid it might go off. But my prisoners did not know that and so I had no difficulty in silencing their muttered protests against such a hard and dangerous hike. Working prisoners under fire like this was strictly against international law, but that sort of a provision we violated frankly and cheerfully. On the way back with our wounded across the muddy and shell-pitted fields, we passed German machine gun emplacements with the dead gunners still beside the guns, Americans lying with their faces toward the enemy, and constant heaps of supplies of all kinds strewn about. One of our stretchers was put down for a moment's rest near such a scattered group of German knapsacks. One of the prisoners asked if he might help himself, and when I nodded all four made a wild dash for the supplies and each man came back carrying an army overcoat and a bag of emergency rations, the little sweetish crackers which they carried instead of our hard tack.
On the third day of the attack I joined two men of the Intelligence Department in walking out to the front line, then over five miles from the village. It was a hard hike through the mud and about theshell holes. Finally we found our friends dug in (for the fourth time that day) on a little ridge. Each time their temporary trenches had been completed orders had come either for a short retreat or a further advance, and now by the middle of the afternoon the boys were digging another at the place where they were to stay till the next morning. Across the ravine in a little wood the Germans were hanging on for the time being until their artillery could be saved. I visited the 108th Infantry in reserve and emptied my musette bag of the sacks of Bull Durham which I had brought along from the Red Cross. Then the boys wanted matches, which I had forgotten, and their gratitude was lost in their disgust.
I found Captain Merrill with his staff inspecting two captured German 77's, on which they had just placed the name of their unit. By that time, after three consecutive battles without replacements, our units were so depleted that a regiment had only 250 rifles in the line instead of the original 3,000. Captain Merrill's battalion consisted on that day of 87 riflemen. Just as we finished our inspection of the guns the enemy artillery started "strafing" again, so we jumped into a shell-hole which had been hollowed out into convenient form and finished our conversation there. I then visited some of the 107th Infantry in the front line rifle pits, one hundred yards or so ahead, and turned back again toward the village.
I was just losing my way among the hills with approaching twilight, when I met an Australian artillery train on their way back for supplies, and climbed on a limber to ride into town. It was a wildride, with the rough roads and the drivers' habit of trotting over the spots where shell-holes showed that danger might linger. I held on in quite unmilitary fashion and wondered if the horse behind would be careful when I fell. But they brought me in safely and added one more means of locomotion to the dozens which I had utilized at various times: ammunition "lorries," ambulances, side-cars and even a railway locomotive—everything in fact except a tank.
The next day we breathed more freely again. Our tired boys, reduced in numbers, weakened in physical resistance, but going forward day after day as their orders came, were at last to go out of the lines. Their job was done; they had reached the Sambre Canal; and though we did not know it, they were not to go into battle again. I lorried back to Joncourt, the temporary division headquarters, for the night, changed my clothes, slept in a borrowed cot, read a very heartening pile of home letters which had accumulated for some weeks, and returned to St. Souplet the next day for the burial detail. It was the 21st of October; while the division as a whole marched back to the railhead, five chaplains with a detail of a hundred and fifty men stayed behind for the sad work that remained to be done.
At this time I stopped off at the 108th Infantry for a few minutes, as they halted for a meal after coming out of the lines, and had my orderly, David Lefkowitz, detached from his unit to serve with me for my entire remaining period with the division. I had become acquainted with him during my first few days in the division and found that he would be interested to work with me as orderly and assistant.The order assigning him to this special work was made out before we left the woods at Buire. But our various units were so depleted at the time that I arranged to leave him with his "outfit" for the battle. It was a serious deprivation to me, as Lefkowitz had been through the earlier battle at the Hindenburg Line and could have given me much assistance and advice in the front line work. Now that the fighting was over, he left his company to go with me and enjoy the comparative luxury of division headquarters until he rejoined his company to sail home from France. He was one of the many Jewish soldiers who welcomed the presence of a chaplain and gladly coöperated in every possible way to make my work successful.
Chaplain Francis A. Kelley, in charge of our burial work, laid out the cemetery on a hill overlooking the village and the battlefield. The rest of us searched the field with details of men, brought in the bodies on limbers, searched and identified them as well as possible. In doubtful cases the final identification was made at the cemetery, where men from every regiment were working and where most soldiers would have some one to recognize them. In addition, we buried German dead on the field, marking the graves and keeping a record of their location for the Graves Registration Service. A hundred and fifty-two men were buried there at St. Souplet, the last cemetery of the Twenty-Seventh Division in their battle grounds of France. The last body of all, found after the work had been finished and the men released from duty, was buried by us chaplains and the surgeon, who went out under the leadership of Father Kelley and dug the graveourselves. Every evening the six of us gathered about our grate fire and relaxed from the grim business of the day. If we had allowed ourselves to dwell on it, we would have been incapable of carrying on the work: it was so ghastly, so full of pathetic and horrible details. We sang, played checkers, argued on religion. Imagine us singing the "Darktown Strutters' Ball," or discussing the fundamental principles of Judaism and Christianity for several hours! The five of us were all of different creeds, too—Catholic, Baptist, Christian, Christian Scientist and Jew. Our coöperation and our congeniality were typical of the spirit of the service throughout.
On the last day we held our burial service. We gathered together at the cemetery with a large flag spread out in the middle of the plot. I read a brief Jewish service, followed by Chaplains Bagby and Stewart in the Protestant and Father Kelley in the Catholic burial service, and at the end the bugle sounded "taps" for all those men of different faiths lying there together. We could see and hear the shells bursting beyond the hill, probably a hostile scout had caught sight of us at work. Above floated a British aëroplane. Some English soldiers working on their burial plot nearby stopped their digging and listened to our service.
And so we said farewell to our lost comrades and to the war at the same time.
AFTER the burial work at St. Souplet was over, great covered lorries took us back the sixty miles or more to Corbie, in the vicinity of Amiens, which was to be our rest area. We greeted its paved streets, its fairly intact houses, its few tiny shops, as the height of luxury. Here and there a roof was destroyed or a wall down, for the enemy had come within three miles of Corbie in their drives earlier in the year. But we were in rest and comparative plenty at last. We saw real civilians again, not merely the few old people and little children left behind in the towns we had liberated. We had regular meals again and a chance to purchase a few luxuries beside, such as French bread at a shop and hard candy at the "Y." We no longer heard the whine of the shell or whistle of the bullet, nor smelled gas, nor slept in cellars. I was even lucky enough to capture a thick spring mattress which, with my blankets, made a bed that even a certain staff colonel envied me. A home-made grate in the fire-place fitted it for a tiny coal fire; the window frames were re-covered with oiled paper; we read the London Daily Mail in its Paris edition only one day late, instead of seeing it every ten days and then often two weeks out of date.
My billet, which I obtained from the British townmajor, was a tall, narrow house just off the principal square, very pleasant indeed in dry weather. Its chief defect was a huge shell-hole in the roof through which the water poured in torrents when it rained, so that we had to cover ourselves with our rubber shelter-halves when we slept at night. The shell-hole, however, was a constant source of fuel, and we burned the laths and wood-work, of which small pieces were lying all about the top floor, until we found means to obtain a small but steady supply of coal. The house afforded room, after I had preëmpted it, for the Senior Chaplain of the Division, the Division Burial Officer and myself, together with our three orderlies.
Even in dry weather there was some excitement about the old house. There was the time when some tipsy soldiers, seeing the light in the Senior Chaplain's room late at night, mistook the place for a café and came stumbling in for a drink. When they saw the chaplain, they suddenly sobered and accepted very gravely the drink of water he offered them from his canteen. On another day the old woman who owned the house came in with her son, a French lieutenant, to take away her furniture. We did not mind losing the pretty inlaid table—we were soldiers and could stand that—but our mattresses and chairs were a different matter. None of us could argue with her torrential flow of French, but Lieutenant Curtiss, the Burial Officer, suddenly felt his real attack of flu redoubled in violence and had to take to his mattress. So the old lady finally relented sufficiently to leave us our beds and a chair or two, while her son became our devoted friend at the price of an American cigar.
I think that I shall never forget Corbie, with its narrow streets, its half-ruined houses, its great ancient church of gray, with one transept a heap of ruins, and the straight rows of poplars on both sides of the Somme Canal,—a bit of Corot in the mist of twilight. I remember the quiet, gray square one day with the American band playing a medley from the "Chocolate Soldier," for all the world like a phonograph at home. I remember the great memorial review of the division by General O'Ryan in honor of our men who had fallen; the staff stood behind the General at the top of a long, gentle slope, with three villages in the distance, the church looming up with its square, ruined tower, and the men spread out before us, a vanishing mass of olive drab against the dull shades of early winter.
I remember the day when three of us chaplains made the long trip back to our division cemeteries at St. Emelie, Bony and Guillemont Farm to read the burial service over those many graves, the result of the terrible battle at the Hindenburg Line. Chaplain Burgh, Protestant, of the 105th Infantry, Chaplain Eilers, Catholic, of the 106th Infantry, and I were sent back the fifty miles or more by automobile for this duty. It happened that it rained that day, as on most days, and the car was an open one. So the few soldiers still about in that deserted region had the rare sight of three cold and dripping chaplains standing out in the mud and rain to read the burial services, one holding his steel helmet as an umbrella over the prayerbook from which the other read, and then accepting the same service in return. There was none of the panoply of war, no bugle, firing party or parade, just theprayer uttered for each man in the faith to which he was born or to which he had clung. We did not even know the religion of every man buried there, but we knew that our prayers would serve for all.
We were lucky to be in Corbie on November 11th when the armistice was signed. Day after day we had stopped at Division Headquarters to inspect the maps and study the color pins which were constantly moving forward across France and Belgium. It was a study that made us all drunk with enthusiasm. We were under orders to move toward the front again on the 9th of November and to enter the lines once more on November 14th. The men had had very little rest and no fresh troops had come up to fill the losses made by wounds, exposure and disease. Our men could never hold a full divisional area now; only the knowledge of the wonders they had already accomplished made us consider it possible that they could fight again so soon. Time after time when their strength and spirit seemed both exhausted they had responded and gone ahead. Now they deserved their rest.
We greeted the good news very calmly; the German prisoners were a little more elated; the French went mad with ecstasy. It was the only time I have ever seen Frenchmen drunk, heard them go home after midnight singing patriotic songs out of key. In Amiens, where several thousand of the inhabitants had returned by that time, the few restaurants were crowded and gaiety was unrestrained. I heard a middle-aged British lieutenant sing the "Marseillaise" with a pretty waitress in the "Café de la Cathédral" the following evening, and respond when asked to repeat it in the maindining room. He returned to our side room decidedly redder than he had gone out. "Why, the whole British general staff's in there!" he gasped. But he received only applause without a reprimand. The war was over and for the moment all France was overcome with joy and all the allied armies with relief and satisfaction.
After the armistice the front line work, with its absorption on the problems of the wounded and the dead, became a thing of the past. The chaplain could now turn to the more normal aspects of his work, to religious ministration, personal service, advice and assistance in the thousands of cases which came before him constantly. In fact, on the whole his work became much the same as it had been in training camp in the States. A few differences persisted; in France the chaplain was without the magnificent backing of the Jewish communities at home, which were always so eager to assist in entertaining and helping the Jewish men in the nearby camps. The Jewish Welfare Board with its excellent workers could never cover the entire field as well as it could at home in America. Then there were special problems because the men were so far away from home, because the mail service was poor, because worries about allotments were more acute than if home had been nearer, and because the alien civilization and language never made the men feel quite comfortable.
In the Corbie area the 27th Division was scattered about in twelve villages, the farthest one eight miles from division headquarters. Transportation was still common on the roads, though often I had to walk and once I made the trip to Amiens in thecab of a locomotive when neither train nor truck was running, and found a ride back in an empty ambulance which had brought patients to the evacuation hospital. The villages were almost deserted, and were in rather bad condition after their nearness to the German advance of 1918, so that the men could be crowded together and were very easy to reach in a body. I began making regular visits to the various units of the division, meeting the men, holding services, receiving their requests and carrying them out as well as possible. And I was constantly making new acquaintances, as the wounded and sick began coming back from the hospitals to rejoin the division.
I had the opportunity of an occasional visit to Amiens, a city built for a hundred thousand, but at the time inhabited by only a few thousand of the more venturesome inhabitants, who had returned to open shops and restaurants for the British, Australian and American troops. On account of lack of competition, prices were extreme even for France in war-time. The great cathedral was piled high with sandbags to protect its precious sculptures, but it stood as always, the sentinel of the city, visible ten miles away as one approached. The Church Army Hut of the British forces afforded separate accommodations for enlisted men and officers, and I had the pleasure of afternoon tea once or twice with some of the latter. Amiens was an unsatisfactory place to shop, but my baggage had not been found and winter was coming on fast, so I had to replace some of my possessions at once at any prices that might be demanded.
Our mess held its formal celebration on November17th, with Lieutenant Robert Bernstein, the French liaison officer, as the guest of honor because of his exact prediction of the date of the armistice when he had returned from a visit to Paris several weeks previously. Our mess, officers' mess number two of division headquarters, had an international character through his presence and that of Captain Jenkins of the British army, and a special tone of comradeship through the influence of the president of the mess, Major Joseph Farrell, the division disbursing officer. So for once we had the rare treat of turkey and wine, feeling that the occasion demanded it.
I felt little pleasure in the jollity of the evening, however. I had just received a letter that day telling me of the death of one of my twin babies of the flu; it had happened almost a month before, while I was on the lines and quite out of reach of any kind of word. The war, through its attendant epidemics, gathered its victims also from among the innocent, far from the scene of struggle. I felt then that my grief was but a part of the universal sacrifice. With all these other parents, whose older sons died at the front in actual fighting, or whose younger ones were caught denuded of medical protection at home, I hoped that all this sacrificial blood might bring an end to war. To-day that faith is harder and that consolation seems a mockery, for we seem to be preparing for another struggle even while children are dying of hunger in central Europe and massacres of helpless Jews are still not yet ended in the east. When I received the news I took a long walk amid the most peaceful scene I ever knew, up the tree-lined banks of theSomme Canal, with the evening slowly coming on and the sun setting behind the stiff rows of poplars.
At last we were detached from the British Third Army and received orders to entrain for the American Embarkation Center (as it was later called) near Le Mans. Our headquarters there were in the village of Montfort, where we arrived on Thanksgiving Day and stayed for three weary months. Montfort le Routrou is a village of nine hundred people, with one long street which runs up the hill and down the other side. The hill is crowned with a typical village church and a really fine château, where the General made his headquarters. The tiny gray houses seemed all to date from the time of Henry of Navarre; my billet was a low cottage with stone walls over three feet thick, as though meant to stand a siege or to uphold a skyscraper. The floor was of stone, the grate large and fuel scarce, no artificial light available except candles. The bed alone was real luxury, a typical French bed, high, narrow and very soft—an indescribable treat to a man who had slept on everything from an army cot to a cellar floor.
The surrounding country was rolling, with charming little hills and constant knots of woods. The division, as we had known it on the British front, was housed in forty villages, widely scattered about the countryside, and our artillery, which had fought in the American sector, was contained by ten more, located near Laval about fifty miles away. The men lived chiefly in barns, as the houses were occupied by peasants, who needed their own rooms. As far as the enlisted men were concerned, living accommodations were better in partially ruined territory,where they could at least occupy the houses, such as they were. Because we were in a populous region, only smaller units could be billeted in a single village, which meant less access to places of amusement. The typical French village has no single room large enough for even a picture show, except the one place of assembly, the church; apparently the farmers and villagers have no amusements except drinking, dancing (in tiny, crowded rooms) and church attendance.
Such cheerless lives hardly suited the Americans. Often the men had to walk a mile or more to the nearestY. M. C. A.canteen, and those were improvised on our arrival by our own divisionalY. M. C. A.staff, which we had been permitted to bring with us on the earnest request of the chaplains of the division. After our long sojourn in the area, we left a completely equipped series of canteens and amusement buildings for the following divisions. The nearest available place for light and warmth, out of the mud and chill, was usually the French café, and that was available only when the men had money.
The greatest handicap on any effort for the morale of the men at the outset was the uncertainty of our situation. We were semi-officially informed that our stay in the area would be for only a few weeks, and that no formal program of athletics, education or entertainment could be arranged. When life grows dreary and monotonous, as in the Embarkation Center, the chief diet of the soldier is such rumors of going home. In our case three orders were promulgated for our troop movement, only to be rescindedagain while the wounded, sick and special small detachments went ahead.
Another difficult problem was the one of covering ground. At the front it had been easy because the division was concentrated for action and because of the constant stream of trucks with their readiness of access. Even in the Corbie area the division had been so crowded together that seven services would reach every man who wanted to attend one or to meet me. At the rear the division would be billeted in villages, scattered about over twenty miles of countryside; it was impossible to get from place to place without transportation, and that was very scarce. The army gave the chaplains more encouragement and friendship than actual facilities for work; the chaplains' corps was just making its position strong at the end of the war. Fortunately, the Jewish Welfare Board came to the rescue here. It procured Ford cars for the Jewish chaplains about the first of the year 1919, thus doubling their scope for work and making them the envy of all the chaplains in France.
My work became a matter of infinite details, with little opportunity for organization but plenty for day labor. I arranged as many services as possible, getting to the various units by train, side-car, or walking until I obtained my own machine for the purpose. These services, from one to ten a week, were arranged through the battalion chaplains as a rule, though sometimes I established connections with some of the Jewish boys or with the commanding officer, especially in cases of detached companies without any chaplain at hand. Every service hadits share of requests for information, advice, assistance, even for errands, as the men had difficulty in getting to the city to have a watch repaired or in reaching divisional headquarters for information. Some men would want to know about brothers or friends who had been wounded. Many had difficulty with their allotments, in which case I worked through the army, Red Cross, and Jewish Welfare Board. Others wanted information about relatives in Poland or Roumania, or to be mustered out of service that they might join and assist their parents in eastern Europe; unfortunately, neither information nor help was possible during the time we were in France. Some men wished to remain for the Army of Occupation or other special service; far more were afraid they might be ordered to such service and wanted advice how to avoid it and return home as soon as possible. Citizenship papers, back pay, furloughs,—the requests were legion, and the chaplain had no difficulty in being useful.
Naturally, one of my tasks was to gather accurate statistics of the 65 Jewish boys in our division who had been killed, to find exactly where they were buried, have their graves all marked with theMagen David, the six-pointed star, and keep the list for the benefit of their families when I should return. I even made one trip to Tours to discuss the possibility of making such a list for the other divisions which came into the area, though the task was too complicated to carry out completely in any but my own. Often men were lost to view entirely when they went to hospital; sometimes it transpired months later that a certain man had died or been assigned to another unit or sent back to the States.But little by little the facts all came to light. Even here humorous incidents would occur, such as the time when I read a list of dead from their unit at one battalion service, only to have one of the men on the list speak up: "Why, I'm not dead, Chaplain!" It transpired that this man had been wounded on the head in an advance and had been reported as dead by two comrades who had seen him fall. So I had him in my records as "killed in action—grave unknown," when he was actually in the hospital, recovering slowly but completely. If he had been returned from the hospital to another division, as was often the case, I might never have known his fate.
In spite of such conditions I found the exact graves of all but three of the men on my list, and in the entire division, with its almost 2,000 dead, only fifteen graves were unknown at the time we returned. This was largely due to the untiring efforts of Lieutenant Summerfield S. Curtiss, the Division Burial Officer, who was my room-mate in Corbie and with whose methods I became familiar at that time. With the coöperation of the various chaplains and line officers, he was able to inspect and certify to the valuables left by men killed in action, to record every grave, and in the few instances where both identification tags and personal acquaintances were lacking, to take the finger-prints of the men before burial and thus preserve the only remaining traces of identity.
At this time I had the opportunity of seeing our division reviewed by General Pershing. The review was held at the Belgian Camp near Le Mans in massed formation. The men marched by in heavy masses; the General bestowed decorations on overa hundred heroes, including six Jewish boys; at the end he gave the officers an informal talk, telling us of the special need that existed for keeping up morale during the tedious period of waiting to go home.
That very subject had been discussed only a few days before by the chaplains of the division, meeting with General O'Ryan for the purpose. Chaplains' meetings were frequent, under the call of the Senior Chaplain, Almon A. Jaynes, where we took up not only details, such as arrangement of services in the various units, but also the broader moral and educational problems. The General's interest in our work and our aims was evident in every word spoken at the meeting, especially his searching queries as to drunkenness, dissatisfaction, and remedies for such evils as we brought out.
The three months of waiting had been in many ways harder than the previous months of battle. Interest in our military purpose was gone; the men had few amusements and much work to fill in their time. We had very little athletic or educational effort; that was prevented by our constant expectation of an early departure. Mail service was often bad, especially for the men who had been transferred repeatedly. Pay was unreliable when a man had been transferred or sent to hospital and his records lost or mixed up. And the French winter is a rainy season, with occasional days of clear cold. No wonder that the soldiers were disgusted with France, war, army and everything else. In the midst of this growing irritation, their pet phrase became, "Little old U. S. A. is good enough for me."
The average soldier did not meet the better class of French people, only the peasants and the prostitutesof the towns. He had little taste for the wonderful architectural and historical treasures of the country; he could not speak the language beyond his elementary needs; and—one of his great objections—the French undeniably have poor plumbing and bathing facilities.
On the other hand, the French country people did not like our soldiers over much. The soldier of any nation was rather noisy, rather rough, and had no idea whatever of property values. He took anything he needed, simply "finding" it, the worst possible trait to thrifty French country people. Then, talking only a few words of French, the American naturally left out phrases like "monsieur" or "s'il vous plait," and he was considered to be ignorant of ordinary politeness, a wild Indian, the brother of the savage still supposed to be thronging our plains. A small minority of our men did penetrate into French life and grew to love it; a minority of the French made the acquaintance of Americans and came to respect them. Unfortunately, the two peoples were introduced to each other under most unfavorable circumstances.
These conditions, together with the constant flood of rumors, had the worst possible influence on the spirit of the men, which went down steadily from its magnificent power at the front, until the news of our actual orders to move toward Brest brought it suddenly up again. As the first division in the American Embarkation Center on the way home, we had to suffer for the later units, all of which had a program of athletics, entertainments and schools ready for them when they arrived. Working to build up the spirit of the men under the mostdiscouraging circumstances, we received a powerful object lesson of the influences most destructive to morale.
The value of my work was at least doubled by the Ford touring car lent me by the Jewish Welfare Board. I received it on New Year's Day, 1919, in Paris and drove back to Le Mans, almost transfigured by the fact. My driver, assigned for the trip only, was splendid; I could stop for a brief view of the château and park at Versailles and the cathedral of Chartres; I knew that from that time on I could go from unit to unit so long as the machine stuck together and the army store of gasoline held out. With this car I was able to visit the artillery in the Laval area, about fifty miles from our headquarters, and conduct one service in each of their regiments. The artillery had not been on the British front at all, but on the American, so they had quite different adventures from ours. They had supported several other American infantry units in the St. Mihiel sector and north of Verdun, and had received mercifully few casualties compared with our infantrymen and engineers. The trip to them by car was unusually delightful, over smooth roads which the great army trucks had not yet ruined, through country where American soldiers were a rarity and the children would crowd the doorways to cheer us as we went by; over the gentle wooded hills of western France, with the trees hung with mistletoe; through the tiny gray villages, with their quaint Romanesque churches, many of them older than the great Gothic cathedrals of the north.
While in Paris on New Year, I enjoyed the rare treat of a family dinner at the home of my friendGeorges Lévy, an interpreter with our division. Through him and Lieutenant Bernstein I reached some sort of an impression of the state of French Jewry to-day. To tell the truth, neither I nor the average Jewish soldier received a very flattering impression. The shadow of the Dreyfus case seemed still to hang over the Jews of France. They feared to speak a word of Yiddish, which was often their only mode of communication with the American Jewish soldiers. One shopkeeper, asked whether he was a Jew, took the visitor far in the rear out of hearing of any possible customers before replying in the affirmative.
For one thing, except in Paris and the cities of eastern France, Jews exist only in very small groups. I have mentioned the four families of Nevers and the little synagogue of Tours, with its seventy-five seats. Le Mans possesses an old street named "Rue de la Juiverie," so that at one time there must have been enough Jews to need a Ghetto, but in 1919 Le Mans had only four resident Jewish families and one or two more of refugees from the occupied territory.
Another menace to the loyalty of Jews is the general difficulty of all religious liberalism in France. Religion to most people in France means orthodoxy, Jewish and Catholic; this naturally suits only those of conservative background or temperament. Almost the only other movement is irreligious in literature, art, government and philosophy. Those large groups of liberals who in America would be adherents of liberal movements, Jewish or Christian, in France are usually entirely alienated from religion. The liberals are intelligent but weak in numbers.As a converse of this, the synagogue is largely content with past glories, making little effort to adjust itself either in thought or organization to the conditions of the time. The American Jews were always interested to hear about the Jews of France, of the greatness of Rashi in former days, and eager to inquire about the present status. They never could quite understand the condition of a country where the government had been divided for years by a pro and anti-Jewish issue, as was the situation at the time of the Dreyfus case. American democracy, even in the young and unskilled mind of the average soldier, had no concept for anti-Semitism.
When we knew finally that the division was on its way home, I preferred a request through General O'Ryan that I should go home with it. But G. H. Q. Chaplains' Office could not grant my wish; there were too few chaplains of all religions overseas; and we Jews in particular needed every worker there. I was detached and assigned to the Le Mans area, under the senior chaplain of the American Embarkation Center. Naturally, I regretted deeply seeing my old comrades go without me. I reported at Le Mans, obtained fourteen days leave to the Riviera, which had been due me for over two months, and said good-by. The Twenty-Seventh was the first division to reach the Embarkation Center, the first to leave for home as a unit, and it finally paraded, without its Jewish chaplain, up Fifth Avenue to a tremendous ovation. I studied the pictures several weeks later in the New York papers, and actually thought I saw the vacant place in the column where I should have been.
When I knew for certain that I was to remain in France I asked for my two weeks' leave and departed for the Riviera via Paris. It was my fourth visit to the metropolis, a city which grows only more wonderful at every view. Its boulevards and parks, public buildings and shops were always attractive; in addition, the art treasures were now beginning to come back to their places, and the crowds were taking on the gaiety of peace time in the brilliantly lighted streets, so different from the sober groups and dismal streets during the war. This trip carried me beyond to a land of myriad attractions and surpassing loveliness. The mediæval monuments of Avignon, the Roman antiquities of Arles and Nimes, the splendid modern city of Marseilles, Toulon with its quaint streets and charming harbor, Hyères of the palm trees, and on to Cannes, to Nice, that greater Atlantic City, Grasse with its flowers and perfumes, and Monte Carlo, garden spot of the whole—all blended in a mosaic whose brilliant colors can never fade. Overhanging mountains and sub-tropical sea together unite all the types of attraction of all beautiful lands the world over. The palms and flowers never seemed quite real to me, while one was quite bewildered by the works of man—ancient monuments,mediæval art, and the most modern trappings of contemporary play and luxury.
At Cannes I met Captain Limburger, in charge of the Motor Transportation Corps there, who helped me to reach the officers' convalescent hospital at Hyères to search for a friend. The trip of eighty-five miles by side-car was the bright particular spot in the whole gorgeous festival of the Coast of Azure, up the heights of the Maritime Alps into the clouds and down again to the edge of the blue inland sea, past ruined castles of the Roman time and through the quaint southern villages of nowadays; ending finally at the hospital, which turned out to be the San Salvador, one of the most splendid winter hotels on the Mediterranean. I even heard Francis Macmillan, a captain in the intelligence corps, give a violin concert for the officers during my one evening there.
Nice and the surrounding territory were crowded by Americans, as it was the most popular leave area for the American army. The great casino on the pier was the Y. M. C. A. for enlisted men, while the officers had their club on the square. In fact, all the arrangements by the "Y" in the various leave areas were magnificent. This, probably its most successful single piece of work, has hardly received the attention it deserves. I found the same to be true of every leave area I visited, including Grenoble, where I stopped for a day among the Alps on my return trip. Altogether the brief fourteen days were one of those unforgettable experiences which linger in the memory. One of the fine achievements of the army was that it was able to give an experience such as this to many thousandsof officers and enlisted men, for their own elevation and their greater knowledge of France.
I should like to emphasize, if I could, the importance of the leave areas for the morale of the troops and their better appreciation of France. During actual hostilities men were willing to give up their leave, especially Americans who could not visit their homes but wanted only a change. After the war, however, military discipline became constantly more irksome to the soldiers, and the week or two without orders, in a real hotel with sheets and tablecloths, sight-seeing or merely resting, was the one thing necessary to bring them back to their units content to work and wait till their turn came to go back home. It was also a rare opportunity to see the best side of France and the French, when they had seen only the worst. No soldier admired the France of the war zone, with its ruined villages, its waste stretches, and its shell holes. Neither did he care for the France of the rest areas, where he knew only the smallest villages, with the least attractive people to a young progressive from the western world. Now he was able to enjoy the beauty and luxury of that older and more sophisticated civilization which always considered him either an amiable savage or a spoiled child.
The trip back to Paris and Le Mans was an experience in itself. I met three young and congenial medical officers on the train, with whom I traveled the rest of the way, stopping off for a half day at the little known town of Digne in the Basse Alps, where we saw the ancient church with its crypt, the art gallery with its painters of local prominence, and the old Roman sulphur baths, still used to-day.Another day at Grenoble brought us into the heart of the French Alps. We reveled in the city with the snow-caps about. I felt the usual thrill at the tomb of the Chevalier Bayard, and more than ordinary pleasure in the beauty of the city itself.
I now settled down at Le Mans for the work of the Embarkation Center. Le Mans is too well known to Americans who have recently been in France to require much description. It is a city of about 75,000 people, with the customary narrow streets in the heart of the town, the fine parks and boulevards of every French city, and the very interesting cathedral overlooking the whole. There are fragments of the old Roman walls of the third century, and as an ironic contrast a fine street running through a tunnel which is named after Wilbur Wright, whose decisive experiments in aërial navigation were carried on nearby. My billet was a pleasant home opposite the very lovely park, the English Gardens, and my landlady a tiny old gentlewoman, who used to bring me a French breakfast and a French newspaper every morning, and indulge in the most formal compliments, reminding me of a romance of the Third Empire. And for some time Le Mans was the center of 200,000 American troops on their way home!
Instead of one division to cover, I now had from three to six, varying as units came from their old locations and departed on their way to America. And if it had been impossible to cover one division thoroughly, in a great area such as this a chaplain could do only day labor. I traveled from one point to another, had a schedule of services almost every night of the week in a different camp, visited thetransient divisions as they came in, and thus came into the intimate contact with the men by which alone I could be of use to them. The territory was an immense one, though much of the time I did not have to cover it alone. The 77th and 26th Divisions had Jewish chaplains while they were with us; Chaplain James G. Heller was associated with me until he was transferred to the Second Army (in fact, he was in Le Mans while I was still with the 27th), and after his departure Rabbi Reuben Kaufman of the J. W. B. was assigned to religious work under my direction. But even so the task was staggering. So many regiments and companies scattered over an area eighty miles long and sixty miles wide was no feasible proposition, even with the best of cars and a sergeant to drive it for me.
In addition to the billeting accommodations in every village, the area contained several large camps of importance. The Classification Camp, within the city, was an old French barracks turned over to our use, which housed a constantly changing stream of casuals and replacements, flowing from hospitals, camps and schools toward their various units. The Spur Camp held a large group of construction units, engineers and bakers. The Forwarding Camp was a replica of a training camp at home, and contained a division at a time, at first in training, later in transit toward the ports. The Belgian Camp, originally built for Belgian refugees, now had long rows of wooden barracks for soldiers, a huge and always busy rifle range, and special camps of various types, including one for venereal patients, who underwent a mixture of medical treatment and discipline.
The purpose of the Embarkation Center was to provide a stopping place on the way to the busy ports of Brest and St. Nazaire, where the men might be deloused, have fresh clothing and equipment issued to them, undergo thorough inspections of every kind, and in all ways be divested of the effects of war and prepared to return to America. This task usually took a month or more, but sometimes a division had been partially equipped in its former area and if the ships happened to be ready it might stay in our area less than a week. On the other hand, it might not pass the various inspections at once, or at the time the transportation home might be lacking, and hence its departure would be delayed time and again. This uncertainty of tenure made all work very difficult, especially work such as the chaplains' which depended entirely on personal contact.
The problem of these divisions, as of the 27th, was chiefly to preserve the splendid morale of the front while the men were in the dreary tedium of waiting. This was done by cutting down the drill to an hour a day, which made enough work in addition to the delousing, inspecting and other necessary activities. The rest of the time was devoted to athletics, an educational program, and a great amount of entertainment, all three under the Welfare Officer appointed by the commanding general of the Embarkation Area, while all the welfare agencies contributed to these various ends under his general supervision. My work, of course, was directly under the Senior Chaplain, according to army regulation. And as the various units moved toward their goal more rapidly and more steadily, the needfor special efforts to keep up morale grew less. Men keep up their own morale when they really know they are going home; the difficulties had been largely caused by the complete uncertainty and endless delays.
Such success as I had was due very largely to the excellent coöperation of the Jewish Welfare Board. Sergeant Charles Rivitz, who had charge of the work in the area, was deeply interested in the welfare of the boys and shared the resources of the organization freely with me in my work. I had always found this same attitude; the J. W. B. furnished me a car, an allowance for welfare work, an office in its building, and offered its rooms for services in the various camps. Where it had no huts, I was accorded the same privilege by the Y. M. C. A. Whenever its aid fell short, it was because it had no more to give. By this time Le Mans had a large and active group of J. W. B. workers, both men and girls, with their center in the city and huts in many surrounding points. I found the workers' mess the most friendly and pleasant in the city, quite as congenial as the one at the Junior Officers' Club, which I often frequented.
Even in the stress and turmoil of the Le Mans area ("the madhouse," as the boys called it) striking or humorous personalities appeared from time to time. There was Abie, the wandering musician, a little Jew who had a gift for rag-time but no great intelligence, military or otherwise. Abie had gone to France with a replacement unit, was located near Le Mans and spent his spare time playing for the Y. M. C. A. and the officers' dances. When his unit moved toward the front to be incorporated insome fighting division, he stayed behind, not as a deserter, but to play the piano for the "outfits" that followed. He managed even to live at the local hotel by the tips they gave him. After that time he reported, giving his full story in detail, to every commanding officer who entered the village, always to be given enough to eat, but never accepted into any unit as he had no transfer from his original one. At last his story got abroad, he was brought in by the Criminal Investigation Department and investigated, only to prove the truth of his every word. So Abie, happy once more, was stationed in the Classification Camp and detailed to the Jewish Welfare Board as a pianist, improvising his rag-time adaptations of serious music and getting many privileges and a steady income for doing the work he enjoyed best.
A different sort of man was the soldier in a famous fighting division, who sought a private interview with me. It seems that in the advance on the St. Mihiel sector he had rescued a Torah, a scroll of the Law, from a burning synagogue. Throwing away the contents of his pack, he had wrapped the scroll up in the pack carrier instead, and carried it "over the top" three times since. Now he wanted permission to take it home to give to an orphan asylum in which his father was active. A soldier was not ordinarily allowed to take anything with him besides the regulation equipment and such small souvenirs as might occupy little room, but in this case a kindly colonel became interested and the Torah went to America with the company records.
The great event of my service in Le Mans was our Passover celebration on April 14th, 15th and16th, 1919. The general order for Passover furloughs read:
"Where it will not interfere with the public service, members of the Jewish faith serving with the American Expeditionary Forces will be excused from all duty from noon, April 14th, to midnight, April 16th, 1919, and, where deemed practicable, granted passes to enable them to observe the Passover in their customary manner."
"Where it will not interfere with the public service, members of the Jewish faith serving with the American Expeditionary Forces will be excused from all duty from noon, April 14th, to midnight, April 16th, 1919, and, where deemed practicable, granted passes to enable them to observe the Passover in their customary manner."
Among the central points designated for Passover leaves was Le Mans, and the Jewish Welfare Board and I labored to arrange a full celebration for the thousand Jewish soldiers who came in from four different divisions. Quarters were provided in the Classification Camp for all the men who did not have the money or the previous arrangements for hotel rooms, as well as full accommodations for the Passover feast, the Seder. The Jewish Welfare Board obtained full supplies of Matzoth, unleavened bread, as well as Haggadoth, or special prayer books for the Seder.
The spirit was as strong a contrast as possible to that of my other great service at the fall holydays. Among our congregation were two men from the isolated post of military police at St. Calais, fifty miles to the east, and five from among the students at the University of Rennes, a hundred miles west. We had a number of officers among us, while five French families, several Jews in the horizon blue of the French army, and two in the Russian uniform—labor battalions, since Russia had withdrawn from the war—worshiped beside us. And when the crowd began to assemble, the first men I saw were a group of engineers whom I had notseen since Atonement Day, seven months before. They were on the way home now, their presence emphasizing more strongly than anything else the change that had come to us and the world in the intervening time. Again there were the meetings of friends and brothers, but without the pang of parting afterward. One of the most touching features of the Seder was the large number of requests that I should inquire whether Sergeant Levi or Private Isaacs was present. Then how the whole gathering would be electrified when a voice cried out, "Here," and cousins or comrades who had not known even of each other's safety were able to exchange festal greetings and rejoice together.
For the two and a half days' leave the Jewish Welfare Board and I tried to keep the men busy, with something for every taste. The full program included a Seder, four services, a literary program, a vaudeville show, a boxing exhibition, two dances and a movie. All were well patronized, for the soldier had a cultivated taste in diversion, especially after the armistice. But certainly the most popular of all was the Seder. The soup with matzah balls, the fish, in fact the entire menu made them think of home. We held the dinner in an army mess hall, standing at the breast-high tables. The altar with two candles and the symbols of the feast was at the center of the low-roofed unwalled structure. Toward evening the rain, so typical of winter in western France, ceased; the sun came out, and its last level rays shone directly upon Rabbi Kaufman and his little altar. It was a scene never to be forgotten, a feast of deepest joy mingled with solemnity. Afterward we adjourned to the TheatreMunicipale for a full religious service with a sermon. Two of the shows of the festival leave were too big for the hall of the Jewish Welfare Board, so we were offered the Y. D. Hut, the great auditorium of the Y. M. C. A., which had been named after the famous 26th Division. One of these entertainments was the last performance in France of the "Liberty Players" of the 77th Division, who were about to leave for the States that very week.
Finally my work in France drew to a close. On the first of May, 1919, I received the orders for which I had been hoping so long. I was to be relieved and sent home to America. Rabbis in the uniform of the Jewish Welfare Board were now at hand, the number of men in France was decreasing, and my request to be relieved could at last be granted. A final two days in Paris for a conference with the heads of the J. W. B., Chaplain Voorsanger and Colonel Harry Cutler, another day at Le Mans to turn my records and office over to Rabbis Kaufman and Leonard Rothstein, and then I was off to Brest. I had the special good fortune of being held in that busy and rather uninviting place for only four days and then finding passage assigned me on the slow but comfortableNoordam, of the Holland-American Line. My last duty in Brest was to conduct a funeral, in the absence of the post chaplain, of four sailors drowned in an accident just outside the harbor. We had a guard of honor, a bugler, all naval, and I had the rare experience of an army chaplain conducting a navy funeral, as well as of a rabbi burying four Christian boys.
We were at sea twelve days altogether, being delayed by a gale of three days and also by a call foraid, which took us a hundred miles out of our course without finding the sender of the message. We entered New York harbor late one evening, and anchored off Staten Island for the night. There was little sleep that night; the officers danced with the cabin passengers, while the men sang on the decks below. The next morning early every one was at the rail as we steamed in past the Statue of Liberty, which stood for so much to us now, for which we had longed so often, and which some of our company had never expected to see again. After the customary half day of formalities at the dock, we were directed to different camps for discharge according to our branches of the service. I reported at Camp Dix, New Jersey, where I was mustered out of service, receiving my honorable discharge on May 26th, 1919, eleven months from the date of my commission, nine of which were spent with the American Expeditionary Forces.