For WWI Notes: Louis Sheehan 12 ??

For WWI Notes:   Louis Sheehan  12  ??

CHAPTER V

LIFE IN A BASE CAMP

The man who inaugurated Y M C A army work in France was Joseph Callan. In 1903 he became a secretary of the International Committee in Allahabad, North India, and later in Colombo. Ten years ago in Bangalore he began his wonderful work for soldiers, which, in time, was to set the pace and furnish the standard for the Association work of the present war.

When the British troops were out in camp, Callan opened his big Y M C A tent and beat the army canteen in open competition, so that at the end of the maneuvers the contractors had to haul back much of the liquor unsold. While the canteen was being drained of men, Callan was running a full show almost every evening. He had powerful arc lights placed over the athletic field, and night after night tournaments were played off, company against company, regiment against regiment, until the closing hour of the canteen had passed. Lectures, moving pictures, and concerts were followed by straight religious meetings, with lasting results. The cooperation of the Bishop, clergy, and chaplains, helped to relate permanently these results to the Church.

As soon as the commanding officers saw the value of this work, they began to cooperate and insisted upon its being carried on in every camp. In the great maneuvers at Dacca, Callan was invited to Bengal to run the institutional work for the troops at the expense of the government, which he did with striking results. Each success made the work known to a widening circle of officers and men.

When the war broke out, Callan and Carter approached the Viceroy and Commander-in-Chief to ask if they could serve the Indian Army as it was to start as an expeditionary force to France. Since the Mutiny of 1857, with its religious superstition and prejudice about the greased cartridges, etc., no Christian work had been permitted in the Indian Army. Finally, however, permission was given to the Association to begin work with the troops before embarkation. Upon arrival in Bombay, our secretaries called upon the Commanding Officer, who had wired to the General at Headquarters to know what he could do to hold his discontented troops together in the flooded and crowded quarters about the docks. The general had just wired, "Consult the Y M C A and ask them to send for their army department." He had known of Callan's work at Bangalore, Dacca, and other centers, and believed it would supply just the missing link with the dissatisfied men. When our secretaries called, the Colonel had just received the telegram and was prepared to give them a chance to see what they could do for the troops.

Within twenty-four hours a work was organized which kept the sepoys occupied for all their leisure time. Football and hockey and outdoor athletics, excursions down the harbor, sea bathing, lectures, and entertainments were soon in full swing. This was the first work of the kind ever done for the Indian Army. So instantly and obviously invaluable did it become that the Commanding Officer insisted that the secretaries should accompany the troops on the long and much dreaded trip to France, which was a bold and untried venture for Indian soldiers.

It was a historic event when that great fleet of some seventy-five ships, the largest assembled since the Spanish Armada, freighted with about 25,000 troops bound for France, East Africa, and Persia, weighed anchor, and sailed out of Bombay harbor with the first twelve Y M C A secretaries on board. Arrived in France, permission was finally obtained from the Commander-in-Chief to land and begin work on French soil.

Here the moral problem made the work of the Association a crying necessity. Soon there were some 25,000 Indian troops concentrated around Marseilles. These men could neither safely be let out of bounds nor kept contented within bounds. A cordon of troops around the camp could not keep vice out. The Y M C A was needed as a counter attraction. Upon an outbreak of drinking and immorality on the part of a group of Sikh soldiers, the whole garrison was called out to witness these men stripped and flogged in exemplary punishment. The Sikhs felt this to be such a public disgrace that they asked for the use of the Y M C A hut in which to hold a council meeting. They finally decided to ask one of the secretaries to address the whole body of Sikhs on the subject of intemperance and impurity, for the Association was already tacitly recognized by all as the dominant moral force in the camp.

One of the Indian secretaries, Mr. Roy, addressed the soldiers at their own request for an hour and a half, and a remarkable scene of repentance was witnessed. Men arose on all hands, confessing their sins in respect to these two special failings and requested that penalties be imposed upon them by their own priest in accordance with the custom of their religion, as a punishment for the past and as a guarantee for the future. For nearly two hours the men filed by their priest receiving penalties. Later on they held a service of their own in the Y M C A hut on Christmas day and took up a large collection of copper coins as a thank-offering to the Association. They felt that it had been their one friend in a strange land.

It should be clearly understood, however, that of necessity, in the very nature of the case, the Government of India imposed upon the secretaries the strict obligation of silence regarding the propagation of Christianity. They entered the work on the understanding that the men could live out the spirit of Christ and express it in silent ministry under the motive of Christian love.

It was striking to see how much real Christianity could be packed into life when speech was forbidden. The pent-up prayer and love and sympathy of the workers was forced into the single channel of silent service. It reminded one of those thirty years in our Lord's life, in simple secular toil, which could only minister to the needs of men over a carpenter's bench.

It is no small task to undertake to occupy all the leisure time of 25,000 men far from home, shut up in irksome camps, easily aroused by rumor or superstition. The numbers increased until there were finally some 50,000 men to be cared for. Athletic fields were secured and games were started. Football and hockey were more played by the Indians than by the British troops. Badminton and volley ball, races and track events, were also useful. Indoor games, the gramophone, cinemas and concerts, and especially Indian dramas, were popular in the evening. Lectures on geography, history, and moral subjects were well attended, and French classes were of practical benefit.

An incalculable service has also been rendered in writing letters for the great mass of ignorant soldiers to their families in the far-off Indian villages, miles away from a railway. Illiteracy, superstition, and false rumors existed at both ends of the line. Here is a man who has had no word from home since he left a year or more ago. He hears a baseless rumor or heeds some inborn fear that his child is sick, or his wife unfaithful, or that he has been cheated out of his property. Hundreds of homesick men whose whole lives have been bound up in the family circle pour in upon the secretaries, begging that they will write letters home for them. Here you may see six or eight secretaries writing for hours each day, as fast as the men can dictate their messages and tell their stories.

Then there arose the problem of how to keep these men in touch with their households in isolated and illiterate villages in India. Mr. Hume, one of the secretaries in Lahore, devised a far-reaching plan whereby every letter was forwarded through missionaries or Christian workers or officials to the distant home of the soldier. The whole community gathers to hear the news from the Indian regiment on the other side of the world, and a shout goes up from the village street when they learn that their brave Sepoy is not dead, as rumor had whispered. A message is sent back in eager gratitude from the wife, children, and neighbors, and from the united heart of the little village to the distant soldier and his fighting comrades. The Red Triangle has spanned the gulf from the winter cold and the dreary trenches in France to the little village on the plains of sunny India, and the grateful hearts at both ends somehow dimly know that all this silent ministry is in the name of the White Comrade who is the Friend of man.

Here in France the hut must stand as the friendly home that gathers up all the best traditions of Indian life. It takes the place of the banyan tree in the heat of the day, the village well, and the meeting place for the men in the cool of the evening. Even beyond all hopes it has proved a potent factor for unity, harmony, and peace in a time of unrest. It draws the British officers and the Indian men closer together, and the Indian secretaries have served time and again as the mediators between the two, who could so easily have misunderstood each other. It provides a common meeting place between the caste-ridden and divided Indians themselves, who had no other ground of unity.

Here are men of different languages and races and traditions, from the Gurkhas, the brave little hill men, to the stalwart Pathans, who come as fighting men from far beyond the borders of India for the sheer joy of battle. The chances for supposed loot in the fabled wealth of the West and the accumulation of merit by slaying the "unbelievers" of the enemy, prove an added attraction to men born and bred in border warfare. Here also are men of three separate creeds, who have often fought with one another over the issues of their faiths—the big bearded Sikhs, with a soldier's religion, the warlike Mohammedans, who fight according to their Koran, and the caste-ridden Hindus.

As you walk among the tents the smoke of the fires hangs heavy over the camp; there is the familiar sound of the bubbling rice pots, the smell of pungent curry, the babel of many oriental tongues, and you seem to be back in the very heart of India itself. We gather with the reverent Sikhs for their religious worship. They meet morning and evening for their prayer service, and turn out almost in a body for the weekly Sunday meeting. The service consists principally of singing and the reading of their sacred scripture, the Granth. Seated on the ground, the men show deep reverence, and seem to have a sense of the presence of God in their midst. Their religion has a real restraining influence and there is at present little immorality amongst them.

A little further on in the camp one comes upon an improvised Mohammedan mosque. Five times a day a devout soldier calls the faithful to prayer, and on Friday about three-fourths of them come out to their voluntary service. The Hindus, on the other hand, dependent upon ceremonial rites, without their temple or priest and with no organized public worship, have not a religion which holds them in such a vital grip in this distant land.

As you pass down the camp, the band is playing for the draft that is marching off to take its place in the trenches. The last good-bys are being said and little groups are round the secretaries. The stalwart Sikhs are wringing their hands or kneeling down to wipe the dust from their shoes, or thanking them with tears of gratitude. They are great child-like men, simple of heart, affectionate, but lonely and homesick in a distant land. Here is a man who was once a hard drinker, living an immoral life, but today he is keeping straight. Here is another who has resolved to go back to India to lead a different life. There were tears in the eyes of the secretaries themselves as they came back after bidding good-by to the draft, and there was compensation after long months of service in the gratitude of the men and in that inner voice which says, "I was a stranger and ye took me in."

For WWI Notes:   Louis Sheehan  12  ??