Some War-time Lessons: The Soldier's Standards of Conduct; The War As a Practical Test of American Scholarship; What Have We Learned?Keppel, Frederick P. (Frederick Paul)
Philosophy
Some War-time Lessons: The Soldier's Standards of Conduct; The War As a Practical Test of American Scholarship; What Have We Learned?
Keppel, Frederick P. (Frederick Paul)
World War, 1914-1918
A few figures from the official records will show what the result of
this all has been. In 1909, for instance, there were in the Army, in
round numbers, 5500 court-martial convictions of enlisted men, out of a
total of 75,000. For the fifteen months ending July 1, 1918, there were
11,500 convictions out of a total of 2,200,000 enlisted men, the
percentage in the twelve months of peace being 7.3 and in the fifteen
months of war, .53, about one-fourteenth as great. The significance of
these later figures cannot be appreciated without some knowledge of the
underlying circumstances. One case I remember was that of a man who got
drunk, spent his money and that of some fellow soldiers, and stayed
absent without leave to earn money enough to repay his fellow soldiers
and then returned to camp to take his medicine. What on the surface
appears to be the cowardly crime of desertion was, in several instances
of which I have personal knowledge, a misguided effort to get to the
front, through enlistment under another name in some branch of the
service which seemed to have an earlier prospect of getting over. In
France there were many cases of desertion, but nearly all were from the
rear to the front. The progressive success of the policy of keeping the
soldier from strong drink, by the way, stands out in the figures, which
show that early in the war one out of every twelve offenses charged
included drunkenness, but that this proportion dropped until the final
figures were less than one in each thirty offenses, this including
soldiers in France, where the soldier had to stand on his own feet
unprotected by prohibition laws.
The welfare program was, from the nature of the case, most effective
among the men of the National Army, where it was possible to take the
soldiers in hand from the first. If we analyze the court-martial
records, we find that the proportion of court-martials was distinctly
lowest in this group. The records as of June 30, 1918, show that the
number of court-martials among the Regular Army was a little less than
one per cent, to be accurate 8/10 of one per cent; in the National Guard
the proportion was about 9/10 of one per cent; and in the National Army
it was less than 2/10 of one per cent, the exact figure being .143 per
cent, one-fiftieth of the percentage ten years ago.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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