This Side the Trenches/Chapter 5
Service in the American army and navy is for many men an educational opportunity. All the ingenuity of modern science is focused upon the battlefront. There is not a form of technical skill that is not useful there. The man in uniform is not merely a soldier or a sailor; he may be also an electrician; a telegrapher; a wireless operator; an aeronautical expert; a mathematician; and so on through all the trades, professions, and businesses in the world.
Men who before the war were unskilled laborers are now apprenticed in occupations requiring knowledge and experience. They will leave the army and the navy as trained artisans. At the great camps where the soldiers are receiving military instruction, and at the naval reserve stations, classes are being conducted in everything from arithmetic to English and French. Entertainments of various kinds are being held and the men are being educated even through their recreation. Then there is the trip to Europe and the many things which, aside from the life in the trenches, the men are seeing and experiencing. Before the war, travel abroad was the privilege only of those who were wealthy enough, or were willing to make sacrifices enough, to obtain the money needed for such a journey. Now this is the opportunity of more than a million American men. Let no one, however, consider all this as a justification for war. Compared with the wreck and havoc that is being wrought to character, life, and property, the educational advantages of the conflict amount to nothing. Nevertheless, many of the soldiers and sailors will, indeed, return to civil life with a wider experience and a far better education than before. Their standards of orderliness and of sanitation, as well as of culture and technical knowledge, will be greatly advanced.
But what of the folks at home? Will the families of these men have fallen so far behind them as to be uncongenial? This question is with the Home Service workers whenever they visit the household of an enlisted man.
One Red Cross worker happened to learn that the husband of a woman whom she was helping had been made a sergeant. The news caused her to realize the difference between his opportunities and those of his wife. He was learning to lead other men; he was taking advantage of the education which the camp was giving him. She, on the other hand, could not speak or write English; the family lived in an undesirable neighborhood; the children were allowed to be irregular in their school attendance; the housekeeping was poor. If the man were to return to such a family he might become discouraged and lose all he had gained. His home life might be a failure.
The Red Cross worker helped the family to move to another neighborhood; she began teaching the mother better standards of housekeeping, and arranged that she should receive lessons in the English language; she saw to it that the children went to school regularly. If the family responds to the efforts of the Red Cross the sergeant will find a congenial household when he returns.
This awakening of the family to wider opportunities is especially important in the homes of people who have come to America from other countries. These newer citizens frequently need to be helped to adapt themselves to American ways of living in order that they may get the best that the United States has to offer, and that the United States may in turn receive the best that they have to give.
In the spring of 1912 Jacques Armot[1] arrived in one of the great cities of the United States. He had left France with the same hope of improving himself that inspired the men who came to America in the days of Captain John Smith and the Pilgrim fathers. He soon discovered, however, that starting a career was not easy in a great metropolis where he had no friends. Making a living in America is no longer the simple matter it was in the days of the first settlers when anyone who could cultivate a plot of ground and handle firearms could make a home for himself and his family. Armot was obliged to take the first kind of work that offered itself—and that was manual labor.
His wages were so low and the cost of living was so high that existence was more difficult for him than it had been in France. The neighborhood in which he could find a home within his means did not have the sort of people who were socially congenial to his wife and to him. Consequently, they withdrew within themselves and remained apart from the life about them.
The children, however, went to school. They learned the English language and they learned American ways. When the two oldest boys reached working age they were able by reason of their greater knowledge of things American to earn almost as much as their father. More and more they saw the difference between the foreign atmosphere of their home and the American tone of the rest of the city. They began to feel superior to their father and mother, and dissatisfied with the family life. When the United States entered the war they enlisted, partly as a means of escape from their home.
Without the wages of the boys the family found it difficult to live. The man sought the advice of the Red Cross. The Home Service worker recognized immediately that the trouble lay largely in the failure of the parents to adapt themselves to the life about them. The man looked very much the foreigner. His hair was long, his moustache trailed down over the corners of his mouth—even the color and cut of his clothes stamped him as being an outlander. The first Home Service remedy was the barber and the clothing store. Then there were talks with the man about his ambitions. He was made to feel that he had the backing of the Red Cross. The Home Service worker learned of a position in a bank. Armot was sent to apply for it. With the new feeling of confidence which the Red Cross had given him, and the consciousness that he was groomed in American style, he obtained the job. He has proved himself to be a valuable worker and is earning twenty-five dollars a week.
In the meantime, several members of the Home Service Section had called to see Mrs. Armot. She began to feel that at last she had found friends in America and when, after a time, one of her visitors suggested that she study English she readily accepted the suggestion. She began, also, to make excursions about the city in order that she might select a house in a more congenial neighborhood, which her husband's increased salary now made possible. Through the Red Cross the boys learned about the changes that had taken place at home. They began writing to their parents. When they return from the war they will find a family ready to give them the environment they desire.
People welcome the opportunities which the Red Cross offers them to become acquainted with American ways of life. "So many things I want to learn; maybe she teach me more than writing," said one woman for whom a Home Service worker had obtained an instructor in English.
Families of soldiers and sailors need the strengthening influences of the Red Cross in still other ways, for all the men in the service will not have progressed because of their war experiences; some households will have to prepare against a deterioration in the quality of the men who return to them.
The separation, long in time and in distance which the trip to France involves, is a severe strain upon family ties. In the Civil War the soldiers were seldom more than a few days' journey from home. They could usually visit their families during comparatively brief furloughs. This, also, is true of the French and the English soldiers. The Americans, however, will probably be abroad for the duration of the war. Unless the bonds of the home are kept strong, many a soldier and sailor will be likely to drift away from his family.
When, therefore, there is any danger of a household breaking up and its members separating, the Red Cross does its best to hold the family together, for nothing could be more demoralizing to a soldier or a sailor than to return from the front and find no place to call his own.
The home of a certain soldier had almost ceased to exist because of this separation of the members of the family. One of his brothers and one of his sisters were living in one part of town, another brother was living with an aunt, and a sister was staying in still another section of the city.
The Home Service worker helped the oldest daughter to find a flat where the children could live together. There, under the leadership of their sister, they are making a home for themselves and for their brother when he returns. This family will be stronger after the war, because it has been reunited.
The life in the trenches, with all its stretches of monotony, is so different from the routine of business; it is so much more exciting; it relieves a man so completely of the necessity of supporting himself and his family, that when the soldier returns to civil life he is tempted, as the experience of our Allies has shown, not to engage in any form of steady employment. The weak man is likely to yield to this temptation unless he finds at home a bracing atmosphere of industry and ambition.
The Red Cross cannot, of course, make a family industrious and ambitious. All the Home Service worker can hope to do is to give the family opportunities to improve itself and to encourage it to take advantage of these opportunities. Everything depends ultimately upon what, at the beginning of Chapter II, was called the morale of the family. Only if the family is made of the right stuff, only if it has the spirit of self-reliance and self-help, can it hope to succeed.
There is no royal road to success any more than hare is a royal road to learning. One cannot give a household a sound, stimulating family life any more than one can give a man an education. One can only confirm a family in its ideals or show it new ones; one can only see that its desire to do things for itself, the desire of its members to do things for each other, is not weakened by an invitation to depend upon outsiders instead of upon itself. One can only give encouragement in discouragement, opportunity where there is no opportunity, hope where otherwise there might be despair.
This is what the Home Service of the Red Cross tries to do for the families of soldiers and sailors. But after all, could there be found anywhere a more helpful or a more difficult work?
Review of Chapter V
1. What unusual educational opportunities have American soldiers and sailors?
2. How did Home Service help one family to prepare itself for the return of the man?
3. What should be our purpose in helping the new citizens of America, i. e., immigrants, to adapt themselves to American ways of living?
4. What is the lesson of the story of Jacques Armot?
5. Why is it that there is danger of lack of sympathy between immigrant parents and their children?
6. What is there in the conditions under which the present war is fought that tends to be a strain upon family ties?
7. Why did the Red Cross unite a soldier's family which had become separated?
8. Does the maintenance of family life seem to you to be important? Why?
9. What is there in the life of the soldier or the sailor which makes it hard for him to return to everyday life and work?
10. What is the only way in which people are really helped?
- ↑ The name is, of course, fictitious.