Morale and its enemies

Front matter

■ 1 h" Bllni

M aasfl

■ < » ' Jf XTK?V

Preface

Wab carries the minds as well as the bodies of men into strange paths, and so creates an unwonted need for self-understanding. At the same time, the power and the leisure for self -understanding are diminished. Men, as well as nations, must choose their part quickly, discern their friends and their enemies, revise all plans, leap to strange tasks at the call of the moment, though all the questions of politics and of metaphysics are involved in the deed. And while the decision reached may reveal the solvency or insolvency of the soul that issues it, the need to bring together the fragments of one 's mental life remains, and will remain for long after the war is past.

This book is an attempt to help — the soldier first, and also the civilian — in this task of understanding one's own mind, under the special stresses of war. There must be many such attempts, from different angles of experience : one can only contribute from his own angle, that of the student of human nature and of philosophy, aided by certain special opportunities which I owe to the courtesy of the Foreign Offices of Great Britain and France.

The summer of 1917 I spent in Europe. On the evening of the eighth of August, four of us, under conduct of the British War Office, climbed out of Boulogne in army motors, and made our way across

VII

VIII PREFACE

the country-side of Pas de Calais, through villages black as the night itself, except for a stealthy chink of light here and there in the crack of a window, past trains of loaded lorries, detachments of soldiers and workmen, toward the front. At one high point of the road with a clearing toward the north and east we saw the night sky broken by sudden flares and dangling signal-lights faint in the distance : there was the cockpit ; there the man-power of great nations was straining in mud and rain against all the devices the brain of a cunning enemy could bring to crush its life and spirit and endurance. The will-to-live of the nations was in those tortured bodies. If there were any super-men in the world during the first years of the war, they were not among those who went out confident in all the freight of German war-lore and munitions, but among those who withstood them.

During the days that followed, we were with these men, in the billets, in the trenches at Croisilles, at training camp, at hospital. From Kemmel Hill, we followed as best we could, their deadly labors on the earth and in the air, in the region of "Wipers," Westhoek, and Messines. Later on, with another group, we met poilus of France, 'at home,' if you like, in their own war zone, in the devastated regions about Chauny, in the active sectors about Soissons and the Chemin des Dames. They were all men without visible haloes, — for the most part tired, determined, matter-of-fact men, unconscious of either greatness or special virtue other than that of having chosen, in a mortal crisis, as men must.

PREFACE IX

Through these and other experiences one is put on his guard against one illusion that besets the reading of the mind of war, the inglorious exterior of its often glorious inner life. It is not alone the case that in war the pendulum of experience swings between wide, even wild, extremes ; but that the realism and the idealism of the event jostle and seem to belie one another. In the descriptive literature of the war we have vivid human documents for the one and the other side of the picture ; the true picture must include them both, and interpret them.

The idealism of war tends to concentrate about the notion of " morale,' ' a highly practical and specific virtue for the purposes of war. What morale means, the invisible force behind war-making, became an almost tangible fact at the front; and hardly less so in the regions back of the front, in the towns and villages, which had borne a load of suffering, anxiety, and loss such as we in America know nothing about.

Morale is the practical virtue of the will to war. But if we know how to build the morale of the nation and the army for war purposes, we shall have a spiritual asset lasting well into the times after the war. The esprit de corps which war requires, and helps to bring about, need not be evanescent. The military virtues have traditionally stood by themselves, as distinct from the qualities needed in times of peace; my belief is that this is a short-sighted conception, even from the military point of view, and that our new armies made on a different principle will demonstrate that fact.

X PREFACE

And there is a wider element in the psyche of this war which must not be evanescent, and cannot be: I mean the international esprit de corps which has been created among the members of the Allied arms including their junior associate, the discoveries of people by people, brought about by the forced mental excursions of war.

There have been critics of England among us, and critics of France ; but no one who had fairly known the England or the France that bore the brunt of the war could have continued to hold these feelings dominant. England is inwardly the most diverse of all nations : it is not identical with any single party or government; judged by the acts and opinions of fragments here and there, or of Parliaments or of cabinets, it is not faultless, — and I know of no nation that is. But the phrases, "the heart of England," or "the soul of France," are not empty phrases: it is by the quality of its persistent national purposes that a people is to be judged.

There are traits in the England of John Bull and Tory tradition, just as there are in the America of dollar- worshipping tradition, which have few lovers in the world, and deserve few. But this is not America; nor are these England. There is a considerate and liberal England, an England that sweareth to its own hurt and changeth not, a chivalrous England, a nobly generous England, eager to give in all ways more than due credit to its associates and neighbors. These are the real England. Let me quote here a few words from a letter that came to me recently:

1 ' And before anything else, I must express to you

PREFACE XI

my intense thankfulness for the wonderful support and defence which your great country has offered to the allied cause and to England. The last week of March was very anxious; I hardly knew at the time, how anxious. I don't say we might not have pulled through unaided, but the certainty and rapidity of the relief were unquestionably due to you. I do not ignore the universality of your motive — to do right . . . but still, the greater involves the less, and we do owe you a debt which you could not realize, without having shared those black weeks with us. What you did will never be forgotten while England is a people.

"By comparison it is a minor matter, and almost humorous after my writing to you last year about our self denial, that my having had plenty of wheat bread this last six months is due, I gather, to your having denied it to yourself. The whole thing is wonderful, and I should think, unprecedented in the world's history."

Think of these as words on the lips of England, and think of what England, her provinces, and her allies, have sacrificed in this cause which from the first was ours. What have we done that we should not proudly have done again and again? Let it stand as a unique fact, if it is such; but only as beginnings are unique. Let it, together with the spirit that answers it, put an end forever to the superstition that nations, as corporate entities, are debarred from the expressions of good-will and gratitude that cement the bonds between man and man. William Ernest Hocking.

New York City, November 6, 1918.

NOTE OF ACKNOWLEDGMENT

Some of the substance of this book has already been presented in the form of lectures to the Training Corps at Williams College in the winter of 1917, and as the Bromley Lectures at Yale in the spring of 1918. I also presented for preliminary criticism by the service a set of psychological theses in The Infantry Journal for April, 1918 ; in the second part of this book I have profited by the comment that has come to me. Three of the chapters have appeared in approximately their present form: the first and second in The Atlantic Monthly current, the fifteenth in the Yale Review for July 1918,

Contents

PAET I— FOUNDATIONS OF MORALE

CHAPTER PAGE

I. WHY MORALE COUNTS, AND HOW MUCH . . 3

Chapter I Why Morale Counts, And How Much

War is no doubt the least human of human relationships. It can begin only when persuasion ends, when arguments fitted to move minds are replaced by the blasting-powder fitted to move rocks and hills. It means that one at least of the national wills concerned has deliberately set aside its human quality, — as only a human will can do, — and has made of itself just such a material obstruction or menace. Hence war seems, and is often called, a contest of brute forces. Certainly, it is the extremest physical effort men make, every resource of vast populations bent to increase the sum of power at the front, where the two lines writhe like wrestlers laboring for the final fall.

Yet it is seldom physical force that decides a long war. For war summons skill against skill, head against head, staying-power against staying-power, as well as numbers and machines against machines and numbers. When an engine "exerts itself" it spends more power, eats more fuel, but uses no nerve: when a man exerts himself, he must bend his will to it. The extremer the physical effort, the greater the strain on the inner or moral powers. Hence the paradox of war: just because it calls for the maximum material performance, it calls out a maximum of moral resource. As long as guns and bayonets have men behind them, the quality of the men, the quality of their minds and wills, must be counted with the power of the weapons.

And as long as men fight in nations and armies, that subtle but mighty influence that passes from man to man, the temper and spirit of the group, must be counted with the quality of the individual citizen and soldier. Every racial group, every army corps, every regiment, has its own distinctive mentality with which it endows its members, and for which it becomes reputed. And every commander accordingly seeks to know not alone what numbers are against him, but who they are. In a paper just now before me I see these words :

"On one occasion prior to an attack, an intelligence officer whose duty it was to interrogate prisoners gleefully remarked to me: 'I've had very good news; the regiments in front of our new line are Saxons and Bavarians.' These soldiers admittedly do not fight as well as the Prussians."

And in another paragraph:

"It was said of a certain foreign contingent whom a Hun officer had captured that he sent them back to their own line with the remark, '"We can take you again at any time ; we have enough mouths to feed already,' — so little did he think of their fighting qualities."

WHY MORALE COUNTS, AND HOW MUCH 5

The story need not be taken as history; yet it is hardly too extreme.

And as we have seen in the case of our own troops, every group of soldiers is an unknown quantity until it has been tried out. We had no doubt that American soldiers would acquit themselves well; but who is there that did not follow the early reports with a tense interest to know how well? What could the great business-loving republic do toward producing a fighting morale? — that was the question. We were aware that mentality as well as armament is a factor in warfare.

But how much does this intangible, psychological factor count? Napoleon in his day reckoned it high : ' ' In war, the moral is to the physical as three to one." But things have changed since Napoleon's day. Then there was still a personal element in the encounter of battle; there was still some truth in the Eoman maxim, ' ' In battle it is the eyes that are first conquered." Now one may spend weeks of fighting and never seen an enemy— much less seen the soul driven from his eyes. Yet there are reasons for believing that the moral factor is not less important to-day than heretofore. For consider:

1. It is still the hand-to-hand fighting, especially the bayonet work, that constitutes the last argument of every engagement.

''Down the ages, from the prehistoric spearman, through the times of the Macedonian phalanx, b MORALE AND ITS ENEMIES

the pikeman, and the halberdier, on to the present day, the spear has been the deciding factor of many battles. And what is the bayonet but the spear of ancient days? At the final stage, the battle of to-day is as the battle of long ago : only the preliminaries are different. And of what use the best artillery preparation, of what avail the fire-supremacy of the finest troops, if the bayonet does not follow them up to make good the advantage they have gained?"*

2. The quality of combat is none the less personal because one cannot see the opponent. The human face is but an organ of expression which we have to learn to read; and any physical thing that can show shades of temper is capable of being read like a face. Thus one learns to read firing as one learns to know the calibers of shells by their whine. There is desultory firing, determined firing, enraged firing, nervous firing, timid firing, and many another variety. In this and a hundred other ways, battle always has its face, whether or not it is a human face ; and experienced men feel as directly when that opposing eye is conquering or being conquered.

3. Perhaps because of the longer intervals of waiting and tension, the spirit of the various units seems sensitive as never before to a thousand shades of feeling, sensitive as a stock-market to the rise and fall of confidence and good-will. Every token from outside, especially the orders and their bearers, are

*Lieut. Col. Paul H. McCook, in The Infantry Journal, April, 1918, page 780.

WHY MORALE COUNTS, AND HOW MUCH 7

scanned, perhaps subconsciously, for the straws that show what wind is blowing. If the officer's stout words come from an apprehensive mind, he will hardly conceal the fact ; and what is outwardly accepted will leave an emptiness, like his own, in the hearts of his hearers. The fighting spirit, farther from pure instinct than in former days, is by so much more canny, sensitive, and shrewd.

4. The strains of war on nerve and courage are not less but more severe than in previous wars. To take but a single indication, the prevalence of ' ' shellshock" means not that human quality has declined, but that it can deliberately expose itself to more inhuman and longer suffering than men have ever before in large numbers been called on to endure.

5. And in one way at least these mental factors are far more weighty than in Napoleon's day. For behind the army lies the nation; and the whole unwieldy mass, army and nation, is much more a mental unit than in any previous war, each dependent on the courage and good-will of the other. When armies were smaller, it was not so serious a matter if any portion of the civil population were disaffected. But now, communication is prompt; and the communication of temper is far prompter than the communication of fact. It is not beyond credence that a strike of coal-workers in Pennsylvania might on the next day lose a battle in Flanders. Men in the field are able to know vastly more of the fortunes of their families than ever before in war; and perhaps for this reason the minor troubles and joys of civilian life loom larger on the firing-line. The entire population behind the fighters becomes a part of the fighting state of mind; and all shades of depression and elation pass with the speed of wireless messages from center to fighting frontier, and back again.

In no war, I judge, has the human quality counted for so much: — ; the endurance, the initiative, the power of sacrifice, the loyalty, the ability to subordinate personal interest and pride, the power of taking the measure of the event, of discounting the unfavorable turn, of responding to frightfulness with redoubled resolution rather than with fear, of appreciating the real emergency and rising instantly to meet it. It is these qualities of mind and character which in the ensemble go by the name of " morale " ; and it is these qualities that hold the balance of power in war.

For war, completely seen, is no mere collision of physical forces : it is a collision of will against will. It is, after all, the mind and will of a nation — a thing intangible and invisible — that assembles the materials of war, the fighting forces, the ordnance, the whole physical array. It is this invisible thing that wages the war; it is this same invisible thing that on one side or other must admit the finish and so end it. As things are now, it is the element of "morale" that controls the outcome.

WHY MOKALE COUNTS, AND HOW MUCH 9

I say, as things are now; for it is certainly not true as a rule of history that will-power is enough to win a war, even when supported by high fighting spirit, brains, and a good conscience. Belgium had all this, and yet was bound to fall before Germany had she stood alone. Her spirit worked miracles at Liege, delayed by ten days the marching program of the German armies, and thereby saved — perhaps Paris, perhaps Europe. But the day was saved because the issue raised in Serbia and in Belgium drew to their side material support until their forces could compare with the physical advantages of the enemy. Morale wins, not by itself, but by turning scales: it has a value like the power of a minority or of a mobile reserve. It adds to one side or the other the last ounce of force which is to its opponent the last straw that breaks its back.

Differences in morale, however, are cumulative. Psychologically, as applied to armies, there is an obvious rough truth in the adage that nothing succeeds like success. Depression, on the other hand, relaxes the grip, and so begets failure and further depression ; — fear reduces control and tends to grow toward panic. Where such gigantic numbers are engaged it is more nearly true than ever that an army which does not know itself beaten is not beaten: a decisive victory in the field will probably be preceded by a victory over morale. A general crumbling of confidence among the vanquished will usher in the debacle.

I do not wish to convey the impression that the advantages in morale are all on our side. Morale is not identical with the morals of the case. Confidence, determination, endurance, and discipline mayexist in a perfectly bad cause: for four years all these qualities were present in the Austro-German command. The professional status of their armies, their knowledge of their own power, their early successes in carrying the fighting into the countries of their victims, — all these were heavy assets, mental assets, whose value has not wholly vanished. The officers of the British and American armies, taken in the large, are relatively new to their work: for some time they must be reckoned in the amateur class in comparison with the long-trained minds and bodies of the enemy. And this is a circumstance which makes itself felt all the way to the rank and file : for ability to rely on the experience as well as the sagacity of the officer is one of the prime elements in the morale of private soldiers. We have advantages of our own; we need not belittle those of the enemy.

The building-materials of morale must be taken from the general qualities of the will of a people, — its virility, its integrity, its spiritedness, its endurance ; and among these qualities justice is not least in weight. But given the materials, morale itself — a virtue for the occasion — requires building: it cannot be simply distilled from the atmosphere.

We see, then, why it is that after providing for

WHY MOBALE COUNTS, AND HOW MUCH 11

the number of fighters and their equipment there still remains a great question, How much fight is there in each one and in the mass ? And we see that there are always two ways to increase our fighting strength : by increasing the number of our units, or by increasing the fighting power of each unit. Whatever could double the morale of a million men, — if that were possible, — would add the equivalent of a million such men to the force.

And the thing is not impossible. For the amount of fight per man can vary through a far wider range than the Napoleonic ratio of three to one. This is true even of the minor ups and downs of the daily rhythm. Ten men at their top notch of condition might easily handle a hundred similar men at their ebb of hunger, pain, and fatigue. And there are other variable elements that count quite as much, such as buoyancy and humor. Humor is a symptom of margin: a man who has it can do more than fight when he is fighting, — he can look about and find a trick to spring, with the result that we have sergeants who with a handful of men bring in a battalion of prisoners. Or he can make the passing misery dwindle in magnitude for an entire company, as with the Irish corporal in the Philippines, who, as General Shanks narrates, after a hot day's marching and a loss of the trail, was sent to the top of a ridge to reconnoitre. When a comrade called up, "I say, Shorty, is this the last hill?" he shouted back, "Yes, the last hill it is: — the next one is a mountain."*

•The following episode of the great retreat in the Fall of 1914 is one of a thousand instances of a trait of the British Tommy with which the war has made us familiar, — he is never quite "all in" so long as it is possible to find a comical angle in the situation, or rather, a comical route to its underlying philosophy:

Major Tom Bridges, of the 4th Dragoon Guards, had been sent into St. Quentin on Friday afternoon to see if more stragglers could be found. In the square near the Mairie he found a couple of hundred or more men of various detachments, who were seated on the pavement in complete exhaustion and utter resignation to what appeared their inability to rejoin the army which had retreated far to the southward. . . . Bridges needed but a moment to see how far gone they were, how utterly and hopelessly fatigued. No peremptory order, no gentle request, no clever cajolery would suffice. With most of them the power to move seemed to themselves to have gone with ceaseless tramping without food or sleep for the thirtysix hours past.

A brilliant idea came to the big genial major. Entering a toy shop he bought a toy drum and a penny whistle. He strapped the little drum to his belt.

"Can you play 'The British Grenadiers'?" he asked his trumpeter.

"Sure, sir," was the reply.

In a twinkling the pair were marching round the square, the high treble of the tiny toy whistle rising clear and shrill: But of all the world's brave heroes There's none that can compare With a tow, row, roio, With a tow, row, row, To the British Grenadiers.

Round they came, the trumpeter, caught on the wings of the Major's enthusiasm, putting his very heart and soul into every inspiring note. Bridges, supplying the comic relief with the small sticks in his big hands, banged away on the drum like mad.

They reached the recumbent group. They passed its tired length. Now they came to the last man. Will they feel the spirit of the straining notes, rich with the tradition of the grand old air ? Will they catch the spirit of the big-hearted Major, who knows so well just how the poor lads feel, and seeks that spot of humour in Tommy's make-up that has so often proved his very salvation?

The spark has caught! Some with tears in their eyes, some with a roar of laughter, jump to their feet and fall in. Stiffened limbs answer to call of newly awakened wills. "With a tow, row, row, to the British Grenadiers." They are singing it now, as they file in long column down the street after the big form hammering the toy drum, and his panting trumpeter.

"Go on, Colonel. We'll follow you to hell," sings out a brawny Irishman behind, who can just hobble along on his torn feet.

Never a man of all the lot was left behind. — Frederic Coleman, From Mom to Ypres, page 65.

WHY MOKALE COUNTS, AND HOW MUCH 13

But beneath these minor variations are the fundamental differences in the set of the will, the longtime qualities that make the tenacious and undefeatable fighting man or the reverse.

The most important distinction affecting morale among our people, in or out of the army, is not that between the loyal and disloyal, but that between the whole-hearted and the half-hearted or three-quarters-hearted, — those who are in the war, but with reservations conscious or unconscious, with insufficient, cloudy, dazed, or socially-fabricated motive power, not enough to carry them well over the threshold into the new and harsher outlook on their own fortunes and personalities that war requires, somewhere shrinking and unreconciled, — in brief, with inadequate foundation for the lasting elements of morale. It is this foundation that we have especial need to understand.

Chapter II What Ib A Good Mobale?

Perhaps the simplest way of explaining the meaning of morale is to say that what " condition" is to the athlete's body, morale is to the mind. Morale is condition; good morale is good condition of the inner man: it is the state of will in which you can get most from the machinery, deliver blows with the greatest effect, take blows with the least depression, and hold out for the longest time. It is both fighting-power and staying-power and strength to resist the mental infections which fear, discouragement, and fatigue bring with them, such as eagerness for any kind of peace if only it gives momentary relief, or the irritability that sees large the defects in one's own side until they seem more important than the need of defeating the enemy. And it is the perpetual ability to come back.

From this it follows that good morale is not the same as good spirits or enthusiasm. It is anything but the cheerful optimism of early morning, or the tendency to be jubilant at every victory. It has nothing in common with the emotionalism dwelt on by psychologists of the ' ' crowd. " It is hardly to be discovered in the early stages of war. Its most

WHAT IS A GOOD MORALE? 15

searching test is found in the question, How does war- weariness affect yout

No one going from America to Europe in the last year could fail to notice the wide difference between the mind of nations long at war and that of a nation just entering. Over there, " crowd psychology" had spent itself. There was little flag-waving; the common purveyors of music were not everywhere playing (or allowed to play) the national airs. If in some Parisian cinema the Marseillaise was given, nobody stood or sang. The reports of atrocities roused little visible anger or even talk, — they were taken for granted. In short, the simpler emotions had been worn out, — or rather, had resolved them selves into clear connections between knowledge and action. The people had found the mental gait that can be held indefinitely. Even a great advance finds them on their guard against too much joy. As the news from the second victory of the Marne begins to come in, we find this despatch :

"Paris refrains from exultation."

And in the trenches the same is true in even greater degree. All the bravado and illusion of war are gone, also all the nervous revulsion ; and in their places a grimly reliable resource of energy held in instant, almost mechanical readiness to do what is necessary. The hazards which it is useless to speculate about, the miseries, delays, tediums, casualties, have lost their exclamatory value and have fallen into the sullen routine of the day's work. Here it is that morale begins to show in its more vital dimensions. Here the substantial differences between man and man, and between side and side, begin to appear as they can never appear in training camp.