Call to Adventure: The Quaker View
I. THE STORY
CLOSE to the battle-lines in France, from September, 1914, until the Armistice in 1918, a group of adventurous idealists faced the realities and the perils of war among the common people. They maintained maternity and general civilian hospitals, operated milk-stations for babies, ploughed fields, sowed grain, reaped crops, restored devastated farms. They sold and distributed many thousands of dollars’ worth of seeds, of furniture, and of other supplies. Much was sold a little below cost; much they sold for nominal amounts of money, often on long credit, according to the ability of the purchaser to pay. Some goods they gave away. They built hundreds of demountable houses, for this purpose operating two wood-working factories; they cared for many thousands of refugees, especially women and children; they cared for the insane. In places more remote, to obtain adequate supplies for restocking farms, they became large-scale emergency farmers, raising, or buying and shipping to the needy, horses, cows, sheep, goats, chickens, pigs, rabbits, and bees.
They managed the government of besieged Ypres, when the proper forms of authority failed to operate. They found typhoid raging among the neglected populace, and stamped out the epidemic by effectively vaccinating over twenty-six thousand people, treating seven hundred of those already stricken in extemporized hospitals. Wherever they found themselves, they attempted to construct livable ways of living out of lives broken by the warmachine, and neglected by the armies called their protectors. Moreover, they supplied and manned several convoys of motor ambulances at the front, which ultimately carried two hundred and sixty thousand wounded; and manned four or five ambulance trains, of some ten cars each, running to base hospitals; and provided and manned two hospital ships on the sea.
Those who did this work were, for the most part, well-educated idealists, devoted to the cause of humanity, but untrained for such work. Their ideals were despised and rejected by the military mind, and they were called conscientious objectors. They proved to be marvelously efficient in carrying out this work scorned by so-called patriots. No better proof is needed than the success of their maternity hospital at Châlons. Out of 878 babies born there, 838 were born alive and survived the first month. Of the mothers only two died, and one of these was brought in dying. The record of this hospital in the war zone, even though all were living on a narrow and often insufficient diet, and though mothers and babies had to be moved, in emergencies, into and out of bomb-proofs, is equal to the best peace-time records of well-managed hospitals in any city. Its devoted, intelligent attendants, serving without pay, proved as efficient as the highly trained, well-paid staff of the best hospitals in the world.
During the war these adventurers, ever looking toward the brotherhood of man, were in France, Russia, Serbia, and Italy. Besides this, they provided regular visitors or supervisors at prisoncamps and relief-camps in England, Holland, and Corfu. After the Armistice, they went with their helping hands into Belgium, Germany, Austria, Syria, and Siberia, stretching out over Asia until they came to Japan. They operated their own freight trains on a branch railroad in France; when a locomotive failed them, they stripped a heavy motor-truck of its rubber tires, and fitted the iron rims of its wheels to the railroad track, that their operations might not be interrupted. They opened a chain of coöperative general stores. They became the largest milk-dealers in Austria, and they handled millions of dollars’ worth of other supplies. They unexpectedly found they had no bad debts; the refugees paid for all the goods they had received on sales. So these workers endowed a $200,000 hospital with these and some other surplus funds of the French work.
Their uniform came to be so respected, that those who wore it were given free passes on some of the greatest railroads of Europe. Goods in warehouses labeled with their name and insignia, often guarded by only nominal and unarmed watchmen, proved safer from thieving than the military camps and national wellguarded storehouses in either America or France. Their losses by thieving on their far-flung lines of transportation and from their storehouses were less than a New York department store loses within its own walls.
They were more effective peacemakers than armed police. It was unsafe to be out alone at night in the Balkan towns. Two years after these adventurers had established their hospital in Petch, one of the worst of the towns, the spirit of brotherhood had planted itself so firmly that anyone could walk alone at night and find the streets safe. What some psychologists call the ‘hate-complex’ had been cured by the love that suffereth long and is kind, that vaunteth not itself, and is not puffed up.
Those who came to Continental Europe after the Armistice had many surprises. They expected to find the doors of government offices shut in their faces. Instead, government officials welcomed their visits. One worker, who entered late upon the work and for only a short time, thus expresses himself:—
‘It is very strange to be on such intimate terms with ministers of state. Most people find more difficulty in meeting European ministers than in reaching the President at Washington; but with us it was very different. If I wanted to see the Minister of Foreign Affairs, or the Minister of Reconstruction, or the Minister of War, I merely telephoned for an appointment. I was usually told to come at once, and was never put off more than half a day. We always got along very well with the ministers, in spite of our different point of view when it came to war or politics or economics.’
Another worker needed more than a thousand horses to enable returning refugees to plough their lands for seeding. Ploughs were available, but everyone said, ‘All the horses are in the army. You can’t get them. Poland refused to reduce her military establishment when the League of Nations asked her, and also when the Supreme Council of the Allies asked her.’ But this adventurous worker refused to be discouraged. She went to the Polish Minister of War; and because she asked nothing for herself or for her organization, but went in the spirit of the prophets of old, the Minister of War listened to her, and gave her all the horses she needed.
Bread cards, and even legal-tender currency, were issued by cities as tributes to the unselfish efficiency of the workers, bearing the name of their church and their insignia. When one of their head workers in Russia asked how much land he could count on controlling for the work, he was taken up into a high place and offered all the land as far as he could see. And they had many other adventures.
II. THE LESSON
Every church that seeks will find adventures. If any church is ready to forsake its property, its houses and lands, and is ready to be brought before rulers and be persecuted for the sake of bringing good news to the poor, for the sake of healing the broken-hearted, for the giving of sight to the blind, and for the breaking of chains, economic or military, it will receive its reward, manifold more, and in the time to come good reputation. Eventually rulers will welcome its messengers, listening to their words as to the words of those who are true prophets.
Adventures like these interest the world; they interest the man in the street, command the respect of the scoffer, open the eyes of the self-satisfied, and teach the needs of the world to the thoughtless. These adventurers for the brotherhood of man awaken sympathy for those who need the very help they have to offer.
In their homelands one adult in every thousand of the population is counted as a member of the Church which gave its name to the work and staked its reputation on the faithfulness and wisdom of the workers. If ten times as many would give their support to such work carried out by their own churches, can anyone doubt that war would be banished from the earth? If one out of every hundred adults were willing to support this kind of work, and their churches were willing to undertake it, wars would be impossible. The common people will gladly hear a physician who will cure the world of war and all its unutterable brutality. They are looking for the church which will be a physician.
The remarkable reverence which grew up in hostile countries in less than two years for the uniform of these adventurous relief workers is in sharp contrast to the mere tolerance for the uniforms worn by some other groups of workers. This reverence and respect, amounting to love, was won in several of the countries by workers from nations recently bitterly hated as enemies. It is evident that patriotism and the emotions of solidarity can be personified and idealized in the uniforms of workers for brotherhood as effectively as has been done in the past by the uniforms of soldiery. The insignia of brotherhood, worn by workers striving against evil in the spirit of Jesus, can be made inspiring, as inspiring as war and hate have made the insignia of war — uniforms and flags and swords and guns.
This war-time adventure of one group has shown the conditions for success. The workers should serve without pay, except for necessary pocket money, and should enlist for short terms only, so that the spirit of adventure is ever fresh. They must be intelligent and devoted to the ideal, wear inconspicuous uniforms, and go unarmed, lest the form of the institution outshine the spirit of the work. They must be willing to accept minor positions, to do their full share of monotonous weary labor, and to undergo some persecution.
The constant endeavor of relief workers must be to make continued work unnecessary. They must avoid pauperizing those they seek to help. Unlike foreign missions, which are most successful in well-tilled fields and succeed only if they build up churches, relief workers must always be ready to abandon their work before it becomes an institution in the eyes of those they help. These workers, for this reason, with the advice and consent of the governments concerned, have withdrawn from France, from Germany, and from Serbia. Like the most forward-looking of the foreign missionaries, who seek to build up self-reliant congregations, relief workers must make self-reliant people out of those they help. Workers must not only be adventurers, but teach others to adventure toward constructive ideals.
The very complexity of modern life gives each church an opportunity to centre the romance of adventure in itself by offering adventurous relief work to its young men and women. The romance of adventure has gone out of everyday modern life. Civilization means institutions, means organization, makes adventure less normal and more difficult to seek out. For an organization to run smoothly on its wheels, men and women must fit the deep ruts worn by travel of the wheels. Whoever leaves his groove, whoever jumps the track, is likely to cause a serious wreck. In adventurous relief work the workers are restoring to usefulness lives wrecked by the selfishness of the economic machinery of civilization or by the war-machine. Such lives are numbered by millions, and all the charitable institutions of the nations fail to lessen their number. Christians must learn again that the spirit of Jesus does not come by outward forms, does not thrive in institutions, but within the soul of the adventurer for the brotherhood of man. When the military machine made its hospital ships institutions in which the spirit of Jesus could not dwell, these workers gave them up, and turned to other work. They were about to give up their ambulance trains for the same reason when the Armistice came.
It is unnecessary, perhaps it is unwise, for a church officially to organize constructive relief work. Small bands of adventurous men and women in England, in August, 1914, assured of the moral support of their church, independently began the work which resulted in the adventures recounted above. All that is needed to start work which may revolutionize the world is the moral support of a church numbering a substantial fraction of the population among its adherents; any church with a million members can supply the leaders and the financial backing adequate to become a leader of the nation toward higher ideals. A central organization is needed for selecting and managing workers and supplies; but financing relief work is the least of its difficulties. Five thousand dollars, together with the vacation-time, free use of a college equipment, and the volunteer services of a few instructors and business men, started the American branch of the work, which soon grew until it was contributing largely to the results.
In the winter of 1921 to 1922 some forty workers were in the faminestricken regions of Russia. A fourth of these fell sick with typhus. New workers have gone to replace those invalided home. The adventure still calls in Russia. It calls in the Pennsylvania and West Virginia coal-fields, all up and down the Appalachian Mountains, in Mexico, in China.
The whole world is calling for adventurers who will do everyday work, ever looking toward the brotherhood of man. The world is profoundly thankful and deeply stirred when the spirit of Jesus shows itself embodied and personified in a group of adventurous workers. In our complex civilization such work can be done only by individuals working in groups and burning with the spirit of idealism. The world should find that spirit in the churches, and is saying to each church, ‘Art thou he that should come, or look we for another?’
III. TOWARD THE OUTLAWRY OF WAR
The causes for which wars are fought — liberty, justice, and peace — are noble and Christian causes. But the method of war is not only unChristian — it is ineffective for these ends. The ‘War to end War’ has failed. Those who have been in the trenches and have seen the fate of the civilian population behind the lines agree with G. A. Studdart-Kennedy, the most popular of the British army chaplains, who said: ‘The brutality of war is literally unutterable. There are no words foul and filthy enough to describe it.’
Just before he died, William Austin Smith, the clear-sighted editor of the Churchman, began a campaign against war. He cried out,‘War is sin.’ Almost his last words named one pole of the compass-needle which he hoped was to guide men toward better ideals. Every compass-needle has two poles. The pole which actually points toward the better ideal is adventurous belief in the brotherhood of man.
More than a compass is needed. A chart is indispensable. Not every chart that is offered can be trusted. Trustworthy charts are based on the experiences of the successful navigators of the past. To learn the dangers which must be avoided, inexperienced navigators must go to such charts, and to the history of voyagers who have come closest to their aim.
Moreover, before prosperous people, living well-ordered lives in comfortable houses, can see war in its true light, as an embodiment of evil, injustice, and hate, they must meet evil, injustice, and hate face to face, in concrete form, and learn the impossibility of overcoming them with weapons made in their own likeness.
An engineer who is typical of the Rotary Club type, genial, optimistic, enterprising, and appearing prosperous, asserts that all progress is due to selfishness. Like so many of his type, he talks about service, meaning the intelligent selfishness which realizes that it can do business only by producing serviceable goods, saying that selfishness is the greatest thing in the world. He believes that he has a moral obligation to be prosperous. But imagination and adventure are really just as important a part of his life as selfishness. They are a part of the successful business mind and of the successful scientific mind. This engineer’s scientific mind can accomplish nothing without adventuring into the unknown, bringing his imagination to bear on the problems that face him. He recently gave up a good position to start out for himself under great handicaps. Preaching love will not reach him now, but telling stories of adventure toward the brotherhood of man will open his eyes. Such stories not only will interest him, but eventually will teach him that there are other things in the world, and that the greatest of these is love — love working through adventure, and imagination working through love.
History is full of the stories of adventurers who had such a clear vision of the brotherhood of man that they refused to take part in war. Some of the stories are almost as old as the books of the New Testament. Many who refused were followers of the saints — of Francis of Assisi. There were great numbers who refused military service in Cromwell’s time. A century ago, the Mennonites refused to serve as soldiers under Bonaparte, but shared the dangers of his campaigns, while succoring those to whom war brought suffering. These, and other groups who have set their faces firmly against war, have been adventurous idealists. The great groups of reformers who gave us free public education, who agitated against slavery until the slaves were free, who reformed the worst of the prisons, were the spiritual ancestors of those whose deeds have been recounted above.
The stable structure of peace and of education for peace has always been founded upon a sympathetic human interest in the sufferings and doings of all mankind; a loving interest that believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things, until it becomes an adventurous following of the Man of Nazareth, an adventurous belief in the brotherhood of man. If a man hate not the spirit which wrongs his neighbor whom he hath seen, how shall he hate the spirit which wrongs the foreigner whom he hath not seen? If a man hate not the selfish economic spirit which wrongs his unfortunate neighbor whom he hath seen and passed by on the street, how shall he hate the military spirit of his own nation, which wrongs foreigners whom he hath not seen? In adventurous relief work, begun in peace-time, with workers devoted enough to withstand the temptations of prosperity, lies the possibility of establishing so firm a tradition of the evils of war, that coming generations will forbid any experimentation with war, even as a means of redressing wrongs.