s" on Sunday, the only
day on which most soldiers could leave the Camp--the outcries of the
_unco guid_ to the contrary notwithstanding.

For more than a year the Commission and the welfare organizations were
the only organized forces in this general field, but since last summer
their work has been supplemented by the establishment within the Army
itself of a Morale Branch of the General Staff, in the formation of
which the Department was not too proud to take a leaf--perhaps one
should say a Blatt--from the Germans, who had already developed this
type of organization to a high degree, under the direct supervision of
General Ludendorff.

* * * * *

I have spoken of the work of prevention, of the more important work of
substitution, and I now come to the most important of all--the spirit of
confidence which extended from top to bottom of the huge organization
that the great mass of our men would go straight for the sake of going
straight. We all instinctively couple the two words, "officer" and
"gentleman." In the great Army which is now being disbanded, its work
having been so gloriously done, we find a new and enlarged conception,
that of the soldier and gentleman. It was, I am certain, the preliminary
assumption that an American soldier was also an American gentleman in
all the fundamentals of that much-abused term, which was the great
factor in keeping down the number of those who proved the contrary to so
negligibly small a total.

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