This Side the Trenches

Front matter

This Side the Trenches with the American Red CrossBy Karl de Schweinitz

Foreword

This book is addressed chiefly to the members of the young peoples' societies of the churches, and has been written at the request of their representatives. It is designed to present the purposes and ideals of Home Service, which the American Red Cross is extending to the families of thousands of our soldiers and sailors.

Home Service is national in scope. In some parts of the country it has been so thoroughly developed that for them the pages that follow are a record of accomplishment. In other places where the work is new or still in process of organization, 'This Side the Trenches' is rather a statement of ideals to be achieved.

Although Home Service is conducted almost entirely by volunteers, its direction requires a more special training and preparation than other activities of the Red Cross. Its success depends upon the devotion of men and women who are willing to equip themselves through instruction or to work under trained supervision. Home Service is a distinctive enterprise, not duplicating but co-operating with other established agencies.

The writing of this book has been made possible by the generous interest of. The Charity Organization Society of the City of New York, which contributed the services of the author.

This Side the Trenches

From camp, from battleline, from shipboard the soldiers and sailors of the United States are sending a message to the people on this side the trenches. It is a message that is variously expressed. Sometimes it is to be read between the lines of a letter such as this:

Camp................,

December 10, 1917

"To the American Red Cross:

"I wish to extend my sincere thanks to you for going to aid my wife and child whom I asked you to help last week. My wife wrote me that you came to see her. I highly appreciate this. I can soldier better now.

"Yours sincerely,

"............"

Sometimes a sentence or two may carry it. Thus another man in the service writes:

"I have heard how wonderfully the Red Cross has taken care of my family. That alone is enough to spur one on to use the best that's in him."

Again this message from the men in the army and navy is told without words. What letter could convey it more clearly than the act of the sailor who gave to the Red Cross a medal struck off by the Germans in anticipation of their triumphal entry into Paris? He had procured it upon one of his voyages and presented it as the best means of showing how much the friendship and help supplied by the Red Cross to his family had meant to him.

Most vivid of all was the way one of the United States engineers, who subsequently was captured by the Germans in the battle of Cambrai, expressed it:

"Be sure to buy a Red Cross badge for me, yourself, and one for each of the children," he wrote to his wife. "Wear them all the time." The Red Cross had helped his family through legal and financial difficulties and had made it possible for his oldest daughter to extend her education.

Surely this message from the soldiers and sailors of the United States to the people on this side the trenches must be plain to everybody. Certainly he who has followed the history of the great world struggle need not be told it.

This message is that, despite the huge quantities of machinery and munitions, despite the billions of dollars, despite the millions of tons of ships that are being poured into this terrible venture, the real factor in deciding the war will be something that cannot be manufactured, something that cannot be measured, something that cannot even be seen. More vital than aeroplanes, more important than machine guns, tanks, submarine chasers, or high explosives is the quality of the spirit of the men in the trenches and on the ocean. When the French and British were retreating to the Marne in the first weeks of the war, when the French were deluged with the terrific rain of steel that accompanied the German drive toward Verdun, when the British and the Canadians underwent the tortures of the first gas attacks at Ypres, the issue was not how many miles of territory would be yielded or held, but whether the courage and confidence of the troops would endure. The real defeat of the Germans lay in their inability to break the spirit of the defenders of France and Belgium.

Military men call this spirit morale. It has been defined as "the moral pulse of armies," and it is said that since before the days of Julius Cæsar the skill of every great commander has depended chiefly upon his ability to feel and appreciate this intangible thing. It is morale that enables men to endure hardships, hunger, and pain, to face death again and again, and yet to keep on fighting. It springs from the spirit of the individual soldier and sailor. As long as he continues to be cheerful and to feel confident of himself and his officers, so long does the morale of the army and the navy continue to be strong. Let but one man become discouraged, let but one man worry and he will become a drain upon the vitality of all those who are fighting near him. That is why the soldier with a buoyancy of spirit is more valuable to a regiment than a squad of sharpshooters. That, moreover, is why the Red Cross is one of the most important factors in the winning of the war, for it is the knowledge that all is well this side the trenches, in the United States, that will encourage a man to fight with the best that isin him. Failing that knowledge he will know only anxiety, and will lose the spirit of victory. The most vulnerable part of the army or the navy, therefore, is thousands of miles from the submarine zone or the trenches. It is in the homes of our soldiers and sailors.

Only if all is well with the mother, the wife, the children, the sisters, and brothers, can the man in the service go forward with the fullest assurance. "I can soldier better now," said the recruit whose letter is quoted at the beginning of this chapter. With his family under the care of the Red Cross he could devote undivided energy to the task before him.

This also, was the thought of the man who while on his way to camp stopped at the office of the Red Cross in an eastern city. "I want to tell you," he said, "what it means to me to know that if my mother should be lonely, or sick, or if anything should happen to her you will be there to stand by her and set things right." Again, it was the desire to have this same assurance that caused a soldier whose wife was to be operated upon the day after he left for the front to ask the Red Cross to visit her in the hospital and to do for her the many things that he would have liked to do himself.

Relief from anxiety was what was wanted by the private on whose behalf an officer in charge of a camp in the southwest sent a message not long ago to a town in Pennsylvania. The officer asked the Red Cross to reassure the man who, the telegram said, was "worried about the folks at home."

What's happening to the folks at home is indeed the most important thing in the world to the member of the family who is in the army or navy. And things do happen to the folks at home. Things happen to everybody. It is one of the ways by which life is measured for the families of soldiers and sailors as well as for the family of anybody else.

Here, for example, are some of the things which have happened to these families during the absence of their men at the front, in camp, or on the ocean. A few weeks after a certain soldier enlisted, a moving van drew up before the door of his home in order to take from it the furniture he had been buying upon the installment plan. The mother of a man in the ambulance corps found after he had gone to the front that what she had thought to be indigestion was cancer. The sister of another developed tuberculosis. The national guardsman who had expected to be with his wife when their first baby was born was in camp hundreds of miles away at the time that the new mother needed him most. A widow, who had said good-bye to her son apparently cheerfully enough, worried so much about him that her health was endangered. The wife of a sailor who before the days of his enlistment had been chiefly responsible for the family discipline found it so difficult to manage her three young sons that in despair she considered sending them to an institution, One of two young men who had been managing the farm of their aged parents was drafted; two weeks after his departure the remaining son died, just at harvest time. The relatives in whose charge a soldier had left his wife proved to be unscrupulous; they made her a household drudge and forced her to give them all the money her husband sent her.

Things do indeed happen to the folks at home. The soldier or the sailor recognizes that this is inevitable. His real anxiety is not so much that things may happen as that when they do happen he cannot be there to help and advise. It is the thought of how his absence in these emergencies handicaps his family that undermines his morale.

This, moreover, is something that affects the whole army and navy for there is scarcely a recruit or a veteran in either branch of the service who is without 'folks'. "There is no man who does not have dependents," said an army officer. "It is only a question of how many dependents he has and how dependent they are." Few are the persons we know who are not vitally interested in the welfare and happiness of at least one other individual.

The morale of the forces of the United States will, therefore, be determined largely by the manner in which the folks at home are fortified against the things which may happen to them. If the soldier or the sailor is to do his best he must have the assurance that, come what may, his family will have the counsel and the help that, were he at home, he himself would try to provide. And this assurance the men of the army and navy have. It is an assurance that is the more effective because it is given by the same agency which comes to them with relief and healing when they are sick and wounded, the same agency whose emblem they see at the dressing stations on the battlefield, on the ambulances, and at the base hospitals. It is the assurance that is offered to them by the American Red Cross.

The Red Cross has found a way of doing, for the families of soldiers and sailors when trouble or misfortune comes to them, what the men themselves would like to do were they at home instead of at the front or on the sea.

This activity of the Red Cross is called Home Service. Because of it, thousands of men are able to 'soldier better now'. It has been, and is, one of the great factors in maintaining the morale of the army and navy. No more important piece of war work is to be found this side the trenches.

Home Service

Every soldier and sailor would like to leave four things with his family when he enters the service of the country.

The first of these four things is morale, the very same grit and cheerfulness which the man himself needs when he is at the front or on shipboard, the pluck, the courage, the ability to do for oneself, the initiative, the self-reliance that people have in mind when they say that this or that person, this or that family, is made of the right stuff.

Morale is a spiritual quality. It is not a thing to be given in a moment and at will to the folks at home, either by the man himself or by anybody else. It comes down through the generations, is born with the souls of those who have it, and is then nourished and strengthened by a wholesome family life. It exists in nearly everybody, in some in such small degree as scarcely to be recognizable; in others in such abundance that no crisis seems to be great enough to daunt them.

The morale of an individual or a household can be strengthened and protected just as the morale of the army and navy is safeguarded by the Home Service of the Red Cross. Whatever association the Red Cross has with families is influenced by the desire to foster this spirit in them.

The three other things which the soldier or the sailor would like to leave with his family—and which many men are able to leave—are friends, credit, and money. Friends in such number and variety that no matter in what perplexity the family may find itself there will be someone who can supply just the right sort of advice, friends in every profession and business, friends with every kind of ability and skill, friends with unlimited resources. Credit not merely at the grocery store or with the coal dealer, but credit as it has been defined by a great financier, the credit of character, of a good name, of standing in the neighborhood and in the town. Money enough to meet emergencies and to assure the household that it will lack none of the necessities of life. The man, who, confident of the morale of those at home, can also leave with them such friends, such credit, and money, can indeed go to camp with the assurance that his family is prepared to meet whatever fortune may bring. It is such friends, such credit, and money that the Home Service of the Red Cross aims to provide.

Friends were what the woman about to become a mother wanted (See Chapter I), what the lonely widow wanted, what the wife who was mistreated by her relatives wanted. The aged parents whose remaining son died just at harvest time needed both credit and friends. It is difficult enough for a wealthy and able-bodied farmer to arrange for the harvesting of his crops without both; how much more so for an aged man and woman. The Red Cross supplied these as it supplied the friends which the mother, the widow, and the wife required. It supplied also a friend who could advise and help the wife of the sailor who in his absence was finding difficult the management of three unruly boys.

The woman who after her son's departure learned that she had cancer (See Chapter I), was too far advanced both in years and in her disease to hope for a cure. Her need was for that kind of care which during her remaining days would spare her as much pain and inconvenience as possible. The young woman with tuberculosis might expect to recover if she could go away toasanatorium. But what sanatorium, and how could she get there, and how should she prepare herself to go, and what about the household arrangements while she was gone? Surely these two women needed friends not only with medical training, but also with ability to suggest ways of adjusting things at home. These friends the Home Service of the Red Cross provided.

Money or credit was the immediate need of the household before whose door the moving van arrived to claim the furniture upon which several installments were overdue. The Red Cross supplied both. It also gave friendly advice which helped the family so to arrange its affairs that it could meet future demands for payment.

The chief financial responsibility for the families of the men in the service rests upon the government. It pays monthly allowances to them, insures the soldiers and sailors against death, and compensates them on their return to civil life if they are disabled by sickness, wounds, or other injury incurred in the service. In doing this, however, the government is necessarily guided by certain definite rules and regulations. It cannot meet sudden emergencies. It cannot distinguish between the needs of families except in an arbitrary way, as, for example, according to the number of children. Yet we know that sickness, habits of life, place of residence, and a great variety of other things cause families to differ from each other in their financial needs.

Here, then, is where the financial phase of Home Service begins. When the unforeseen happens, when there is delay in the payment of the monthly allowance, or when the allowance needs to be supplemented, the Red Cross is ready to help.

Credit, the credit that goes with a good name and the confidence of the public, this also the Red Cross has without limit. Shortly after the declaration of war with Germany, President Wilson in an official proclamation designated the Red Cross as the one agency with which the government would cooperate in helping the families of soldiers and sailors. It has also the credit that comes from a membership of more than twenty million persons. There is no hamlet so small or so remote that the Red Cross pin is not to be seen there. Nearly every county in every state in the Union has its Red Cross Chapter. Excepting perhaps the postal service, there is no agency in the United States that is so widely organized. The credit of the Red Cross is second only to the credit of the government.

The Red Cross offers the families of men in the service the assurance of friends. Wherever households are found to be in need of help, whether in city, town, or country, there a Home Service Section has been formed as part of the local Red Cross Chapter. The Home Service Section is a committee of men and women representing, when fully organized, every profession, interest, and calling in the county or town which it serves. The lawyer, the doctor, the nurse, the social worker, the teacher, the clergyman, the business man, the business woman, the housekeeper, the woman with an interest in civic affairs, Jew, Catholic, Protestant, rich, and poor, are welcomed to membership. It is made up, especially in the larger towns, of such a variety of people that no matter what happens to a family, no matter what the nature of the difficulty which confronts it, some member of the committee will have the knowledge, the experience, and the acquaintanceship needed for the solution of the problem.

The Red Cross offers to one or more women in each Home Service Section special training for the work of helping the families of soldiers and sailors out of the troubles that may perplex them. This instruction is provided through Home Service Institutes which the Red Cross has established in connection with universities and schools for social work in twenty-five different cities of the United States and through courses in Home Service conducted by many of the Red Cross Chapters. These Institutes and Chapter Courses are under the direction of experienced persons. Those who take this training become the Home Service workers who make available to the families of soldiers and sailors the money, credit, and friends of the Red Cross.

Friends, credit, and money might be called the tools of Home Service. The art of using these tools so as to help families out of trouble, giving them opportunity for self-improvement, and enabling them to advance their ideals and their moral and physical welfare, is the essence of Home Service. Home Service applies to the families of men in all branches of the service, the regular army as well as the national guard and the national army, sailors, marines, men of the aviation corps, engineers, and the families of men and women attached to hospital units as nurses, doctors, orderlies, ambulance drivers. It has to do also with the families of soldiers of any of the allied forces living in this country, and with the families of civilians who have been wounded or killed as the direct result of war activities as, for example, through the torpedoing of a merchant vessel by a submarine.

A majority of these families will be able to live through the anxiety and stress of war times without the assistance of the Home Service of the Red Cross. But, on the other hand, the power of self-helpfulness of a large minority will be strained to the breaking point because of lack of opportunity, ill-health, misfortune, or sudden changes in living conditions brought about by the war.

Home Service is constructive. Its assurance to the men at the front or on the high seas is the greater because its purpose is to enable their families to better themselves. While all the world is turning its energy to the work of destruction or to repairing wounds that more destruction may be accomplished, the Red Cross through its Home Service is trying to build better homes and better people.

This work, moreover, differs from all the other activities of the Red Cross in one respect. Thus, the great enterprise of the Red Cross in restoring the homes which have been devastated by the actual passage of war is necessarily conducted across the ocean in Belgium, Serbia, and France. Again, the making of sweaters and wearing apparel for the soldiers and sailors, the rolling of bandages, the manufacture of hospital material, the mobilizing of doctors, nurses, and supplies, is all intended for, and directed to, the actual battlefront. Home Service, however, whose intimate effect upon the result of the war is shown by its influence upon the morale of the troops, is the one activity of the Red Cross that is concentrated in the United States and that works primarily for the people on this side the trenches.

Mothers and Wives

The very first thing that happens to the folks at home is the going of the man to war. The fact that he is no longer with them is, perhaps, the hardest thing they have to bear.

The members of most families, living together so long and so intimately, having the same blood and the same household traditions, become as much a part of one another as do the various members of the human body. Each one means something to the rest. Thus, the man in the service may have been the business manager and the financier of the home. He may have been the family musician or the artistic member of the household. To him the rest may have looked for the organization of their picnics, parties, and other good times, or he may have been the one who saw the funny side of things and who could be depended upon to bring home the latest jokes or the tales of those amusing adventures that seemingly happen often to some people and seldom or not at all to others.

It is this relationship existing between person and person, between friend and friend, that people have in mind when they say of somebody, "I feel quite lost without him." Would it indeed not be surprising if, on the other hand, the soldier or the sailor did not often wonder, "how are they getting along without me?"

When a man becomes blind his sense of touch and his sense of hearing are said to develop abnormally as if to compensate for his lost sight. The cripple usually is exceptionally dexterous in the use of his other limbs. Precisely this sort of adaptation must take place in the family of the man who has gone to war. Each member must do his or her best to make up to the others the loss that they have all sustained.

Each member by reason of the absence of the man has, therefore, a more difficult rôle to play. It is the work of the Red Cross through its Home Service to try to understand the peculiar difficulties which this involves for each person in the household, and to help that person to meet them.

The heaviest burdens fall almost invariably upon the mother or the wife.

"It is not merely the work that I have to do, it is not merely that I have to be alone responsible for the care of the children, but there is no one who comes home at night." A woman whose husband had recently died thus expressed what perhaps is the hardest of all that the wives and mothers of the men in the service must undergo. Again and again the Home Service worker is called upon to help some lonely woman struggle against her home-sickness for the absent man.

The only son of a widow was drafted. Until then every act of the mother's life had centered about the boy. His health and well-being had been her one concern, while he, giving up all recreation outside the home, had devoted himself to her. His absence seemed to take all purpose from the mother and leave only anxiety. She began to lose her health. She was distraught with worry.

The Home Service worker discovered that the widow did not know how to knit; so she taught her how to make socks, sweaters, and other articles for her son, then to make things for boys who had no mothers to do this for them. At the same time the woman was helped to see how important encouraging letters were in stimulating her son to be successful as a soldier. With this as a beginning, the Home Service worker gradually gave her new opportunities for service and new interests. It became possible for the widow to meet her anxieties with cheerfulness, and ultimately she regained her health.

This same trouble of loneliness brought a young woman to the office of the Red Cross in a certain city. She and her husband had been married only a few months when he enlisted, and she had been unable to endure the empty, friendless hours in the little flat which they had rented.

The Home Service worker introduced her to a pleasant, motherly woman who, she happened to know, wanted a boarder. Home Service involves being acquainted with the right opportunity at the right time! This woman, having been told about the loneliness of the soldier's wife, took her to church with her. A class of girls in the Sunday school was without a teacher, and the young woman was asked if she would fill the vacancy. It was just what she needed. She accepted the responsibility and with a friend at home and work which she enjoys she has begun to feel that she belongs somewhere and to somebody. While the war lasts it cannot be hoped that she will cease to worry, but because of Home Service she has become better able to bear the absence of her husband.

Many of the women who seek through the Red Cross an escape from loneliness have never lived long enough in any one neighborhood to make friends. They have no one whom they have known for years and to whom they can turn for comfort. This is true largely because people in the United States are constantly moving about from place to place. In many parts of the country it is unusual to find a family which has lived in the same locality for a generation. In a study of thirteen-year-old boys in the city schools of seventy-eight American cities of between 25,000 and 200,000 inhabitants, it was found that only one in six of the fathers of these boys was living in the city of his birth, and that among the boys themselves only a few more than half were living where they were born.

The feeling of loneliness and helplessness which comes to many women after the departure of the man is increased by the very complexity and vastness of the war and the many different departments and branches of the service. The mother knows that her son has become part of the army or the navy; she believes that he is in camp, or somewhere in France, or somewhere on the Atlantic. But it is all vague. She does not understand how to obtain word about him when, perhaps, no letter has come to her for several months. It is through the Home Service Section of the Red Cross that she learns how she can communicate with her son, and how, if he is reported sick or wounded, she can obtain particulars about his condition.

Here also she learns about the government allowance to which she may be entitled. She is advised to write to her son and to urge him to insure himself with the government and she is informed about the compensation to which her boy is entitled in case of wounds, sickness, or injury. When there is delay in the payment of the allowance or any other difficulty of this kind, the Red Cross acts as her agent and makes the necessary adjustments.

This and other matters of business furnish some of the most perplexing problems which the mother or the wife has to solve. Hitherto the overhead expenditures of the household—the payment of rent and insurance, the purchase of furniture, and so forth—have been attended to by the husband or, perhaps, by the oldest son. Now when the mortgage falls due—and this has happened frequently—the woman turns to the Red Cross for advice. Shall she renew the mortgage? Is the property worth holding? Can she meet future interest charges? To such questions the Home Service worker must help her to find the answer.