A Jewish Chaplain in France

found that the higher ranking officers invariably approached the chaplains not as officers of inferior rank but as leaders of a different kind, much as a prominent business man treats his ministe

had at the time a slight attack of "flu" brought on from exposure and a touch of gas in the recent St. Mihiel drive. Colonel True had received his promotion from a majority and his transfer before the drive,

re of Central France. The modern part consists of several beautiful hotels and a number of cheap restaurants and curio shops. Of course, the hotels were all used by the British Army as hospitals at this time. I visited Base Hospital 16, a Philadelphia Unit, which was loaned to the British. I had a delightful talk with our Red Cross Chaplain and made a tour of many of the wards. The patients were almost all British with a few Americans from the August campaign in Flanders. Among the rest I met about a do

n on the nerves and sympathies, to see so many sick and mutilated boys-boys in age most of them, certainly boys in spirit-and giving oneself as the need arises. And in a hospital so many men have requests. They are helpless

s showing-we were beginning to feel that we were in the war zone. From Eu to Peronne took from 4:30 A. M. to 9:30 P. M. with three changes of trains and ten additional stops. We got only a short view of the railroad st

de of streets, houses and people; no imagination can quite grasp the reality of war and ruin without its actual experience. And Peronne was much more striking than most cities in the war zone; it had been fought through six different times, and its originally stately public buildings showed only enough to impress

wandered off by then in the direction of their various units. Colonel Sternberger was the highest ranking officer at the time among the thousand Jews in the Twenty-Seventh Division. Lieutenant Colonel Morris Liebman of the 106th Infantry, also a Jew, had been killed in action in Flanders six weeks before, a loss which was very deeply felt in his regiment. Colonel Sternberger wa

mission and the gas officer had their offices during the day and where six of us slept at night. I fell heir to the cot of one of the interpreters then home on leave, Georges Lévy, who afterward became one of my best friends. My baggage had disappeared on the trip, so that I had only my hand bag with the little it could hold. My first need, naturally, was for blankets to cover the cot. I collected these from various places, official and oth

ll-boxes, its enfilading fire from machine guns, its intricate and tremendous system of defenses. I crossed the line many times during the month that followed and never failed to marvel that human beings could ever have forced it. The famous tu

urg Line, so long occupied by the Germans. I used to repay the generous Tommies for their rides on the constant stream of trucks (we called them "l

ually glad to air their views on the war. When one came to a cross road, he jumped off, hailed the M. P. (Military Police) for directions and took the next truck which was going in the proper direction. In that way I have oft

, and when I went over there Corporal Klein and Sergeant Friedlander were quick to repair gaps in my equipment. One night I witnessed the division musical comedy (the "Broadway Boys") in an old barn at Templeux le Fosse, where we walked in the dark, found the place up an alley and witnessed a really excellent performanc

uld already be on the move. The best service I held was at the village of Buire, where about forty boys gathered together under the trees among the ruined houses. They were a deeply devotional group, told me about their holyday services conducted by a British army cha

that hope could not be fulfilled. The intensity of the drive against the entire German line was beginning to tell and every possible unit was needed in the line to push ahead. So the rest of the Twenty-Seventh Division was brief indeed. Every regiment was starting f

villages in any sort of repair. The men lived in cellars without roofs, in rooms without walls or sometimes in barracks which were constructed by either of the opposing armies during the

all Jewish graves in our division similarly marked. I got to know the country about Bellicourt and Bony, where our heaviest fighting had taken place. I heard the story of the eight British tanks, lying helpless at the top of the long ridge near Bony, where they had run upon

ay there; and I had no desire to test its advantages when dry. The next time I came back to headquarters they were in the village of Joncourt, beyond the Hindenburg Line, in territory which we had released from the Germans. The chief attraction of Joncourt was an occasional roof-of course, there were no windows. The cemetery had been used as a "strong point" by the retreating Germans, who had scattered the bodies about and used the little vaults as pill-boxes in which to mount machine guns. And our message center was locate

floor of a house in the village, having grown accustomed enough to the sound of the shells to sleep in spite of it. Like most people I had wondered how one feels under fire, and experienced a queer sensation when I first heard the long whine of a distant shell culminating in a sudden explosion. Now I realized that I was under fire,

n was with the third battalion headquarters and aid post in a big white house set back in a little park in the tiny village of Escaufourt, a mile or so behind the lines. Captain Merrill was in command of the battalion and one could see how the work and responsibility wore on him day by day, reducing

tately dining room at times, though we usually ate and always slept in the crowded cellar where the major and his staff were housed. There eight or nine of us would sit on our brick seats and sleep with our backs against the wall, bein

ing, the rest on stretchers. Their clothing reeked of the sickeningly sweet odor. The room was soon full of it, so that we had to blow out the candles and open the door for a few minutes to avoid being gassed ourselves. There were three ambulances running that night to the Main Dressing Station, and I made it my task to meet each car, notify the doctor and bring the gassed and wounded men out to the ambulance. Most of them were blinded for the time being by the effect of the gas. No light was possible, as that would have drawn fire at once. Every ten minutes through t

English had had the same lesson more than once until they learned it thoroughly; so had the Germans; now our armies, with their examples before us, had to learn it again through the suffering of our own soldiers. Our division was not the only one in which the same or a similar blunde

we reached it; the Germans were just out, and our artillery had been outstripped completely in the forward rush. Under the constant pounding of back area fire, desig

y of Australians and a few of our men to the houses in the outskirts of the town, where the greatest danger existed. I remember the utterly disconsolate attitude of two old men and a little old woman in one of them, when they were told they had to leave. They seemed numb in the midst of all the rush and roar of warfare. Their little possessions were there,

king along a sunken road and hurrying across the occasional open spaces. When we came to his unit I was glad to turn the bag over to him; I felt no pleasure in such lumpy burden, and would far rather have worn out my shoulder with something more appreciated by the boys than hardtack,-the one thing which nobody enjoyed but which was eaten only because they were desperate

the shoulders of German prisoners or occasionally by our own men. As we were at the crossroads, we got most of the wounded, English, German and American, as well as a great deal of the shelling with which back areas are always deluged during an attack. In this case, our post was just beh

nce toward the Sambre Canal. On our left were British troops, while we were supported by Australian artillery and the British Air Service. In our first great battle, that of the Hindenburg Line, the "Ausies" had acted as the second wave, coming

e all volunteers. They had a type of discipline of their own, which included saluting their own officers when they wanted to and never saluting British officers under any circumstances. I took a natural pride

f the 107th Infantry, side by side with our surgeons and doing excellent work for Americans and Germans alike. They picked their own assistants from among their captured medical corpsmen, and were strictly professional in their attitude throughout. One of them was Dr. Beckhard, a Jew from Stuttgart, with whom I had a few snatches of conversation and whom I should certainly like to meet again under more congenial circumstances. I was amused in the midst of it all when the doctor noticed his brother, an artilleryman, coming in as one of the endless file of stretcher bearers, carrying wounded in gray or olive drab. The doctor asked me whether he might take his brother as on

ned to Stuttgart he lectured on his experiences at the front, mentioning among other things that he had met an American Rabbi by the name of Levinger. Some distant relatives of mine living in the cit

ven emergency dressings and told, "The Advanced Dressing Station is two miles down that road, boys. Walk slow and don't miss the sign telling where to turn to the left." Other more serious cases for whom there was no room in ambulances, at the moment were carried on stretchers by prisoners. I would assemble three or four such cases, take a revolver left by some wounded officer or non-com, and give it to a "walking wounded" with instructions to "see that they get safely to the next point." Naturally, these boys with minor wounds of their own were safe g

n release from the hospital, the soldiers did not care to carry heavy rifles or even revolvers and bombs back with them. The result was a pile of weapons at just t

rush them off in the ambulances. The extreme tension of the actual fight and the tremendous pressure of administering to the living callou

ys for Jew and Christian alike. I ministered to a number of Jewish and Christian soldiers who were dying, leading the Jews in the traditional confession of faith, and reading a psalm for the Protestants. One of the surgeons came to me and said, "Captain Connor here is dying, and Chaplain Hoffman our priest is at Bat

e prevented from dropping the stretcher. However, we were too near the explosion to be hurt, as the fragments flew over our heads, killing one boy and wounding four others across the street. One of the wounded was an American runner from the front, who was enjoying a hasty bite at the army field kitchen around the corner. He came over in a hurry to have his cheek tied up and then went calmly back to the field kitchen to finish his interrupted lunch. The man w

ded as soon as I got it because I preferred not to run any unnecessary risks. Being a non-combatant both by orders and inclination, I was afraid it might go off. But my prisoners did not know that and so I had no difficulty in silencing their muttered protests against such a hard and dangerous hike. Working prisoners under fire like this was strictly against international law, but that sort of a provision we violated frankly and cheerfully. On the way back with our wounded across the muddy and shell-pitted fields, we passed German machine

ch time their temporary trenches had been completed orders had come either for a short retreat or a further advance, and now by the middle of the afternoon the boys were digging another at the place where they were to stay till the next morning. Across the ravine in a little wood the Germans were hang

had only 250 rifles in the line instead of the original 3,000. Captain Merrill's battalion consisted on that day of 87 riflemen. Just as we finished our inspection of the guns the enemy artillery started "strafing" again, so we jumped into a

roads and the drivers' habit of trotting over the spots where shell-holes showed that danger might linger. I held on in quite unmilitary fashion and wondered if the horse behind would be careful when I fell. But they

ugh we did not know it, they were not to go into battle again. I lorried back to Joncourt, the temporary division headquarters, for the night, changed my clothes, slept in a borrowed cot, read a very heartening pile of home letters which had accumulated for some wee

h me as orderly and assistant. The order assigning him to this special work was made out before we left the woods at Buire. But our various units were so depleted at the time that I arranged to leave him with his "outfit" for the battle. It was a serious deprivation to me, as Lefkowitz had been through the earlier battle at the Hindenburg Line and could have given me much

ord of their location for the Graves Registration Service. A hundred and fifty-two men were buried there at St. Souplet, the last cemetery of the Twenty-Seventh Division in their battle grounds of France. The last body of all, found after the work had been finished and the men released from duty, was buried by us chaplains and the surgeon, who went out under the leadership of Father Kelley and dug the grave ourselves. Every evening the six of us gathered about our grate fire and relaxed from the grim business of the day. If we h

the Protestant and Father Kelley in the Catholic burial service, and at the end the bugle sounded "taps" for all those men of different faiths lying there together. We could see and hear the shells bursting beyo

o our lost comrades and t