Part 2

Out of this spirit of general helpfulness, there were developed at almost every point the most beautiful and sympathetic adjustments to immediate conditions. For example, take the plan of showing moving pictures upon the ceilings of hospital wards, so that the very ill may enjoy them without the strain even of raising their heads. This small piece of thoughtfulness to me represents the standard of thinking a problem through which we will have to maintain if we are to hold what we have gained, and what we have gained includes, or should include, a realization that active and willing loving-kindness furnishes the keenest of all pleasures.

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Thus far I have spoken mainly of the work of preparation in the United States. Overseas our soldiers and their officers found new conditions and were forced to make new adjustments. We no longer could control the laws and ordinances, and we found different standards of conduct--not necessarily lower standards, but different standards. We could no longer enforce prohibition for example, but we did maintain a high average of temperance. We showed our allies, some of whom I may say were honestly sceptical on the subject, that with our soldiers continence was the rule, and not the exception. When I was in France last year, I asked those who were in a position to know upon this point and was told that, comparatively speaking, very, very few of our men lowered in France the standards of conduct which they held when they came into the Army, that many more greatly improved those standards, either because of the lessons they had learned in our training camps, or because of the wholesome companionship of the women workers with whom they were daily brought in contact, or because, and this was probably the most potent factor of all, they were so desperately keen to get into the fighting line that they were taking no chances of being put out of commission beforehand. Their morality was the morality of the team in training for the big game, and it kept tens of thousands of boys straight. Indeed, until November 11, disciplinary problems may be said to have been practically non-existent among combat troops and almost negligible among the others. After the armistice was signed, there was a let-down, this being after all a very human body of young men, and the first remedy tried by some of the old-time regulars did not help a bit. This was to "give 'em plenty of drill and make 'em so tired they won't have energy to get into mischief," but as one returning artillery officer pointed out to me, when a battery a month before has fired 50,000 rounds of high-explosive at the Boche, and worked its guns over craters and through thickets, a drill with dummy ammunition on a parade ground is almost a justification for mutiny. Wiser counsel soon prevailed and the welfare work, which had slumped with the rest, was again brought up to concert pitch. It was for the first time in France, properly coördinated under Army control. The misfits and the workers who had worn themselves out were returned to this country and their places taken by fresh blood. I remember in this connection a paragraph tucked in the middle of the uncompromising officialdom of the daily departmental cable: "Send over plenty of welfare workers and remember the best men you can send are the women."

Let me take this chance to say a word about the criticisms we have been hearing of this welfare work abroad. In the first place, the success of the work in this country among the men in training set up an expectation which it was humanly impossible to meet under the conditions overseas; in other words, the men who went over assumed standards as to the minimum amount of attention which it was their right to expect, the like of which had never been dreamed in the history of mankind. As a matter of fact, and taken as a whole, the treatment which they received was admirable and the comparatively few who now doubt the truth of this statement will come to realize it as time goes on. They will see that the misfits, the over-wrought, stood out in their minds like men out of alignment at parade, that they simply did not notice the thousands of men and women whose work for them was all that their own mothers could have asked.

The following official cablegram records the state of educational, recreation and welfare work at the end of April, 1919.

"Educational activities: Roughly there are 209,000 students embraced in this scheme. Ten thousand are at A.E.F. University at Beaune, some 7,000 are attending French universities. 3,000 attending British. There are roughly 130,000 men at Post Schools, which correspond to our elementary schools in United States. 55,000 are attending the Divisional Educational Schools, which correspond to our High schools. In addition there are approximately 58,000 men in specialized vocational schools where they have full shop facilities of A.E.F.

"Athletic activities: Athletic activities increasing daily in scope and popularity. Figures for February show 6,500,000 individual participants in games. In addition to mass athletics, unit championships are being played in football, basketball, soccer, boxing, tennis, swimming, tug of war, golf, track and field.

"Entertainment activities: Reports of entertainment officers show monthly attendance for A.E.F. of between eight and ten million. Moving pictures, professional talent from United States and particularly soldier shows being utilized in all parts of army and have done much to take care of leisure hours of troops. Horse shows have been held in nearly every division of A.E.F. and have proved very popular. Amount of all this work now being carried on is little short of stupendous."

The following paragraphs from a personal letter are particularly significant as coming from an officer of the regular army, who when he was in command of one of the cantonments in the United States was genuinely alarmed lest the War Department had not lost its sense of proportion, and was creating parlor ornaments instead of fighting men:

"I served in the Army of Occupation in the Philippines and in China after the Boxer campaign, and I want to tell you that the discipline and _ésprit de corps_ of these troops in Germany is incomparably better than anything I saw there.

"I think nothing has so contributed to this result as the welfare work and the educational work undertaken. We have every reason to be proud of the fact that we had people in command of the army who had the vision to see what result this work would bring.

"I took command of the --th Division in the Army of Occupation in December, and up until the present time I never worked with a happier or more contented lot of men. Of course they all want to go home, and we wouldn't have much use for them if they didn't, but an intensified military course of training in the morning, schools and athletics in the afternoon, and study and entertainment in the evening have made their days so full that they have been perfectly contented to stay until their boat comes in June.

"This has been the experience of all the divisions up here in Germany, and their enthusiasm, I fear, when they get home, may be taken for pro-Germanism."

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The War Department has learned so much in this great laboratory experiment in human conduct that the impious wish sometimes arises in one's mind that we might promptly try it all over again for the chance of profiting by our mistakes. Thank God we can't do that, but in our daily contact with these same men restored to their communities we can to a certain degree carry on the work, and in so doing we can learn much from the successes and failures of the Army.

In planning for the immediate future, there are some things which we mustn't forget. In the first place, we mustn't expect these young men (or any humans for that matter) to be capable of remaining at concert pitch indefinitely.

For a while, in dealing with the soldier who has returned from overseas, real ingenuity will be required to make much impression upon his mind. Not only will ordinary life seem tame but, frankly, he is likely to have been overhandled and overwelfared. If, however, we have erred in this regard, it has been on the right side.

May I venture still another suggestion, and that is to be careful and considerate of the soldier who, despite his earnest desire, failed to get across, and for the matter of that, of the young man who didn't get into the Army at all. The morale of these two groups will need our particular care.

In closing, however, we should not end upon a note of warning, but rather upon one of exultation; for the war has taught us, if it has taught nothing else, that, given a great cause and a cross-section of our heterogeneous American population, the resulting revelation of the power of human endurance, human courage and human accomplishment comes pretty near to proving objectively the divinity of man.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: An address delivered at the one hundredth anniversary of the General Theological Seminary, New York, April 30, 1919.]

THE WAR AS A PRACTICAL TEST OF AMERICAN SCHOLARSHIP[2]

It is a difficult task to attempt to define the American scholar of to-day. If any of you doubt it, let him try it as I have tried. Scholarship, like many another broad term, has no sharply marked edges. It is hard to define anything that lacks definiteness; and, after all, the task is relatively profitless, because we all of us recognize what is at the center of the concept. I think we all recognize that the scholar is an expert in some particular field or fields; but he is more than the expert as such, in that he knows enough of other matters to see his particular specialty in its relation to things in general. He must, to this degree at least, be a philosopher. This very general conception of scholarship is fairly constant, but the fields which the conception includes are broadening day by day and almost hour by hour. We cannot to-day limit scholarship to the polite branches which were all that it embodied when this Society was founded or even when this Chapter was established. The scholar of the old-fashioned type must now accept as his fellow the man who has helped to flatten the trajectory of the 16-inch shell, or to control the birth rate of the cootie. Later on I shall suggest one other element which, in the light of the test which American scholarship has undergone in the past two years, it seems to me should now be included in our idea of the typical American scholar.

We Americans are proud of being called a nation of inventors; and most of us have made, or almost made, private discoveries of an inventional nature which, for some reason, have never come to fruition. The scientific boards in Washington during the war received more than sixty thousand suggestions in some mechanical field; and I am told by those who ought to know that of all these not more than five of those coming from untrained minds were of any practical value. Even from the trained minds there came, I am told, no fundamental discovery in science as a direct result of the war conditions. Suggestions of improvements in detail and valuable suggestions there were in plenty, new applications of known principles, but application of a fundamentally new idea, no. That is only to say what we already know, that discovery is not made to order. In each case the idea had already been born in the mind of some intellectual pioneer and worked out by him, and some man who had the idea in the front of his mind was at hand to apply it to the new condition. And that means, I think, that if we met the test, we met it with our scholars.

When the test came, certain fields of scholarship naturally afforded a better chance for immediate service than others. The chemist, for example, had a better chance a thousand-fold than the archæologist. It is extraordinary, however, how many of the gifts which burned bright on the national altar came from men with some out-of-the-way specialty. Take archæology itself, if you will. The best trench helmet developed during the war was designed by the expert in armor from our own academic fellowship. I am told that a very important element in the length of time which it took to control the submarine menace was the fact that when war broke out the science of oceanography was almost wholly in the hands of the Germans. When the world's supply of cocoanut husks was taken up for gas masks and we still needed charcoal, we had to turn for additional sources to the tropical botanist, who might have been expected to remain reasonably undisturbed. It remained for a scholar in perhaps the purest branch of pure science, astronomy, to recognize the well known fact that it is the shape of the tail of any and every moving object, motor car or boat or what you will, and not the shape of the head, which is the factor of chief importance in design, and to apply this recognition to artillery problems. The re-designing of our artillery shells under the direction of this astronomer added miles to their range. Another astronomer applied his experience in studying the movement of comets to solving certain problems of long-range artillery fire where the projectile in its flight rises into the circumambient ether.

In proving the case for the American scholar, as I think we can prove it, we should not be beguiled into the pleasant task of recording the deeds of scholars and gentlemen when the deeds were those of the gallant gentleman rather than of the scholar _per se_. We have one here in our own academic family whose lieutenant's bars I should be as proud to wear as the stars of any of our generals. Nor need we, I think, cite the instances where the rigorous training of the scholar clearly laid the foundation for great accomplishment in some general field of administration. The man whom we can thank perhaps more than any other for the brilliant conduct of our war finance was seventeen years ago editor-in-chief of the _Columbia Law Review_. We may well turn with pride, but we don't need him to prove our point, to the scholar of this university, formerly president of this Chapter, who, from his own talents and experience and his alert sense of scholarship in others, has earned the place which he now holds as educational director of the largest university in the world, the A.E.F. University at Beaune.

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Our case rests, as I say, upon the direct applications of scholarship, and not only upon their quality, but on their range. A single division of the National Research Council, in its report for 1918, showed work of national significance by the scholars in physics, mathematics, and allied fields toward the solution of no fewer than sixty-eight different problems, every one of which needed for its solution men with training and knowledge and vision. At the outset, who among us had the slightest conception of the complexity of the adaptations to warfare of what was known to modern scholarship? We knew that the war was mounting into the air, but who had any realization of the adjustments which this involved? Fifteen fundamental problems based on pure physics promptly arose with reference to instruments for airplane operation. For example, at night and in the clouds, the aviator must have before his eyes a dial which will indicate the slightest deviation from his course. Seven problems had to do with airplane photography. As the art of camouflage advanced, for instance, color filters had to be devised for its detection from above. Seven additional problems had to do with factors of construction and maintenance, as fuel efficiency. Nine others affected ballooning; and the balloon, as the war developed, came to be of greater and greater importance. Eleven studies were in signalling: one, for example, a device for secret daylight signalling, with a range of five miles or more. And please remember that all these were the task of one branch of one organization within the field of pure science. By common consent, the dullest branch of physics was held to be acoustics, but since 1914 the whole question of sound-ranging has been in the hands of experts in acoustics. A device developed by American physicists gave our men nineteen seconds in which to take cover from cannon fired four miles away. The most brilliant work in this field was that of a former student of the Columbia School of Mines.

If I were to pick out one field in which the scholarly attitude has been most brilliantly rewarded, it is that of medicine. If our army surgeons and sanitarians had been confined to the practical family doctors, who cannot be bothered with all this new-fangled stuff, our men would have died like flies from disease, as they did in the Spanish-American War. It was the laboratory man, the theorist, the highbrow if you like, who made our health record a matter of national pride and congratulation. It was the knowledge of a scholar, coupled with his instinctive understanding of the human heart--neither could have accomplished the purpose alone--which sent hundreds of shell-shocks, as they came to be called (people used to call the condition by an uglier, if not a shorter, term) back into the lines with self-respect and nerve renewed.

To turn to another field, it was a real scholar, even if he were also a dean, who, in spite of the best efforts of his practical associates to deter him, brought order out of chaos in the most important of our war boards through the collection and skillful presentation of statistical data.

In many cases it was the scholar whom we must thank for the pointing out of the obvious. The early drafts rejected thousands of excellent potential soldiers because our existing height regulations were drawn for men of the northern European races; and the minimum height limit was well within the normal variation of the men of southern European ancestry, which has been so large an element in our recent immigration. Similarly, men of science have pointed out that the length of the marching step depends not alone on the length of the legs, but even more on the width of the hips, a simple fact which is of real military significance. The scholars in the Forest Products laboratories knew how to make boxes that would not break and spill their contents on the wharves at Hoboken or St. Nazaire, and, equally important, they knew how to educate the quartermasters to use them.

The fact that in many fields we reached the limits of available man-power meant a wonderful stimulation to the study of certain problems affecting human welfare. Take for example the physiological aspects of industrial fatigue. In this field an excellent theoretical start had been made before the war, but the appeal was limited to those interested in the individual worker. With the war, however, and the shortage of labor, came a new and, I fear, a more potent appeal--the interest in the product and its prompt production. The worker who collapsed could not be replaced. Long hours or unsanitary surroundings meant spoiled material and broken-down machinery and resultant delay. And when there was a scholar at hand to show why this was so, you may be sure he had his day in court.

The work of the scholar has not wholly been in getting things done. Perhaps an equally important side was in keeping impossible or unprofitable things from being attempted. When time was of the very essence of the whole program, the man who could say "No" and prove the validity of his objection, performed a positive work of great value. One of our associates at Columbia had a leading share in devising tests for candidates for the flying school, which, by rejecting the unfit at the outset, saved many lives from the time of their adoption and many, many thousands of dollars; for the training of a flyer who cannot be used when the time comes is a very costly piece of national extravagance in both money and men.

Our scholars did not confine their activities to the battle of Washington. Not only as engineers and doctors, but as geologists and geographers, as meteorologists and sanitarians, they went with the troops to the front, and their counsel as to actual military operations was welcomed and followed. One of them, a bachelor and doctor of this University, died in the service in France. The scholar, like the soldier, stood ready to step forward to fill the gap in the ranks as he saw it, regardless of whether something more dignified might be found for him to do. Our own Barnard, Professor of Education, took what he was pleased to call his vacation in applying his scholarship to organizing an educational program for the wounded men in our hospitals, as a therapeutic measure. Being a scholar and not merely an expert, he saw the broad human aspect of his specialty; that the first thing to do with the man who is blinded, or otherwise maimed, is to make him realize that it is worth while to get well; that he can have a life which is worth living; that if his old job is no longer possible, there are others for which he can be trained. One of America's most distinguished philosophical chemists settled down to the humble but very essential problem of making mixed flours rise and bake with a crust--and solved it. The war services of a past President of this Chapter, now, alas, no longer with us, and those of our present President have been as useful as they have been inconspicuous.

The need for the scholar was not only qualitative, but quantitative. But for the general distribution of chemical knowledge in France and England, and the presence of men capable of promptly applying that knowledge to combat the gas attacks launched by the Germans, the war would have been lost before we could possibly have rendered the slightest assistance; and on our side of the Atlantic when the armistice was signed, there were two thousand trained chemists engaged in the problems of gas warfare alone. Our country, in a word, needed not only to have some men with the requisite training, but men enough to meet simultaneously many needs in many fields, and these men were drawn in large measure from our academic faculties. While one must not press the identity between the scholar and the professor too hard--for a number of reasons--the fact remains that the teaching profession provided the main reservoir from which the country drew. One of my friends in the Chemical Warfare Service has summarized the relation between the academic scholar and that branch of the army activity. Both chiefs of the Chemical Service Station were college professors, one of them a member of this Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa. Of the fourteen heads of the Research Division, eight were college professors. It was the college professors who made fundamental improvements in gas masks on the one hand, and who devised new gases to test the German masks on the other.

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As a nation, we did not realize at the outset, as Germany did, the importance of the man who knows, and of knowing who he is and where he is; and here, perhaps, lay our most fundamental unpreparedness. What this cost us may be judged from a single instance. A code message from Germany directing the dismantling of the German ships lying in our ports was intercepted. If we had known that there was a professor of English in the University of Chicago who, in the pursuit of his medieval researches, had developed the power of reading ciphers almost at sight, that cable from Germany could have been promptly deciphered, we could have forestalled the sabotage, and something like six months in the use of these ships for the transport of our troops and munitions could have been gained.