This situation was brought out in strong relief for me when I met in Le Mans a young French priest, who had served as chaplain in an army hospital through most of the war. He was overcome with astonishment when I told him that, while the majority of the men in our army were Protestant, the Senior Chaplain of the area at that time was a Catholic priest. I had to go into considerable detail, explaining that in some organizations the head was a Protestant, and in one division a Jew. Finally he grasped it, with the remark, "_C'est la liberte_." As a Frenchman it was hard for him to understand the kind of religious liberty which means cooeperation and friendship. In France religious liberty is based on hostility and intolerance of religion. Religious liberty there means liberty for the irreligious and consequent limitation of the liberty of the religious. On the other hand, religion there has meant historically, the domination of one religion and the curtailment of liberty. It is a peculiar view, which is paralleled among French Jewry also. Active and interested Jews have little interest in modernism, even in modern methods of religious education; French Jews who are interested in the world to-day have little interest in Judaism. We who served together in the United States Army have a different ideal. We think of a religion which gives equal freedom to all other types of piety, which works equally with men of every faith in the double cause of country and morality, which does not give up its own high faith but sees equally the common weal of all humanity, to be served by men of many faiths. We have fixed our gaze upon religion in action, and have found that the things which divide us are chiefly matters of theory, which do not impede our working effectively together. It needs but the same enthusiasm for the constant and increasing welfare of all God's creatures to carry unity in action of all religious liberals into the general life of America, to give us not merely religious toleration, but religious helpfulness. CHAPTER X THE RELIGION OF THE JEWISH SOLDIER Much has been written of the soldier's religion, most of it consisting of theoretical treatises of how the soldier ought to feel and act, written by highly philosophic gentlemen in their studies at home or by journalistic travelers who had taken a hurried trip to France and enjoyed a brief view of the trenches. The soldier himself was inarticulate on the subject of his own soul and only the soldier really knew. Here and there one finds a genuine human document, like Donald Hankey's "Student in Arms," which gave the average reaction of a thinking man subjected to the trials and indignities of the private soldier in war-time, in words far above those the average soldier could have used. Theorizing about the soldier was worse than useless; it often brought results so directly opposite to the facts that the soldier himself would have been immensely amused to see them.