St. Louis Post-Dispatch
June 10, 1917

Historic newspapers carry the language, views and graphic reporting of their time, including racist content. They are shown to teen and adult profiles.

The text was read from the page scans by machine (OCR), so it has mistakes and its columns may run together. See the pages · About this title · At the Internet Archive

Page 1

2 t 1 2 $ N 5 i wee N * 85 Be 3 ra 138 — — ee oe 2 + ae a 1 ** 1 > 4 e * 2 5 3 tora, por 2 “ * ' = * , ö Coorright, 01. % u A N 1 —— PAYNE. EE 1 ecotH +e D A.HOLT OE ME a a 2 é has ing 3 observer, he says, a 2 A 2 5 1 0 1 . — 2 * 3 „ 8 N. 9 S . 13 D CCC tS ie nn. er ee N aa," VOL. 69. NO. 295, 1 say * Lies ta 8 UNDAY ST ous POST DISPATCH | — Aaa Ail oe Sait . e ee — — — — 26 22 st LOUIS, SUNDAY Spe G, JU NE 10, 1917. jms 2 —2— bil Saloon Nation Wil Sai 22 bens, Says 2 2— Noted Authority), "Bellevue Hospital Superintendent. Prohibition Is a Dangerous Doctrine Who Believes Under Normal Conditions, Says Patriotic Fervor of Pres- ent Crisis Might Offset the Shock of Deprivation of Liquor Its Victims Otherwise Would Suffer— “You Can Only Cure Drink Habit by Providing Some Ecstasy to Take Its Place.“ BV CHARLES W. WOOD. 1 Special Correspondent of the Post-Dispatch. NEW YORK, June 9. RUNKENNESS is a much more deep-seated evil than the pro- hibitionists imagine.” This, from one of the best-known psychologists of the United States, at a time when the Government is, for the first time, se- N considering the abolition of the sale of alcoholic beverages, was a most startling pronouncement, 3 But be sure to say also,” he added, that prohibition is a much more | Mangerous experiment than the liquor men suppose. It was Dr. Menas S. Gregory who spoke, the noted physician at the head of Bellevue’s psychological ward, where the city’s inebriates are treated. No one is more . with the, ever dealing in thoughts. ravages of alcohol than Dr. Gregory. Vo one is in a position to study its effects more closely. i ory has not been But Dr. Greg They for- get that there is something in the human mind more fundamental than -houghts—the elemental impulses . from which content to study its effects. He been study- its causes, Any superficial can see what drink does to people; what we need is a scien- | tific understand- ing of why Gee drink. “When I say,’ he explained. “thet arunkeness is a greater evil than prohibition- physically, uation, some ROHIBITION would not be established by mil- iiary decree there were a national crisis. And, if there were a national crisis of such magnitude, the people's minds would be in a ‘ferment of excitement. is just what they would need, if their alcohol were to be taken away—an emotional storm, a tense sit- happening which would com- pel their attention and call for extraordinary thought and action.—DR. GREGORY, thoughts arise. These elemental unless ther good nor bad; they are simply impulses which may be sat- isfied in good or bad ways. All the sin, all the evil, all the misery in the world is due to man’s attempt to satisfy these desires. But is allthe achieve- ment, all. the That extraordinary ists imagine it to be, I do not mean that its results are worse than their statistics claim. I mean .that the evil is deeper than the question of the presence or ab- sence of the saloon in the commun- ity. To take away the saloon and not provide for the human motives and impulses thut called it into be- * es: * > 8 N say =. 4 4 bom . 3 4 ee 8 care 53 . + * > Z 8 * ing would be a doubtful blessing.” Outspoken Opponent of Drink But He Fears Prohibition “Then,” I asked, “you would nat favor national prohibition decreed as a military necessity?’ “That is about the safest way it could happen,” was the unexpected reply. . It is his frequent assertions of this sort which makes Dr. Gregory one of the most distinctive figures in the medical thought of the day. His statements often seem, at first thought, so contradictory. He is an out-and-out opponent of drink. He is afraid of prohibition. Yet while he is a thorough believer in democ- racy, be thinks that prohibition might work well if it were not es- tablished by popular vote but by military decree. The position seems inconsistent only because few peo- ple understand human psychology a8 does Dr. Gregory. “Prohibition would not be estab- lished by military decree,” he ex- plained, “unless there were a na- tional crisis. And if there were a 3 national crisis of such magnitude 4 the people's minds would be in a i ferment of excitement. That is just What they would need, physically, tf ~ their alcohol were to be taken away Dan emotional storm, a tense situa- = some extraordinary happening mien would compel their attention dad call for extraordinary thought and action. ere Fett Beeause They Ignore Elemental Influences “There is nothing very compli- 4 dated about this,” Dr. Gregory went en. “If the people only understood appeal to his soul—to his elemental es 1 a few simple facts of psychology, the drink problem could be more ration- 2 approached. The real objection 4% alcohol, as everybody knows, iss“ ks effect upon the human mind. But those who see the effects have gen. @rally contented themselves with analyzing they haven't joy of life. When reformers ignore this. second fact, they defeat the very object at which they aim. “You cannot control fundamental human passions by. legislative ‘Thou shalt nots. You may repress them for a time or dam them up—but look out for an explosion.or a breaking of the dam. “The intoxication 1 is one of these fundamental human pas- sions. It is not necessarily the im- pulse to drink, but it is an impulse which calls for drink when there is ho other way of expressing itself. It is the impulse to transcend the hard realities of life, the impulse to expand, to abandon one’s self. com- pletely to something beyond the range of practical necessity. The impulse which leads men to drink is the same impulse which leads them to the higher things in life— to poetry, to prohibition propaganda or to prayer. “The scriptural injunction, ‘Be not drunk with wine but be filled with spirit,“ is in line with the most ad- vanced psychology. Any man who has a tendency to get drunk needs something more than morals to keep him straight. He may need religion—emotional religion—at any rate, he needs an experience of some- thing away be; nd the confines of the practical. “A great love exrtyievce may an- awer the demand. Many a man has been saved from drink by such an experience; but the woman whe sete out to save a man is quite likely to fail. Too often she fancies she can do it by managing his life, by keep- ing track of him, vy making him account for all his time and money. You can't blame her for doing this. but it seldom reforms a drunkard. That is because she appeals to his sense of duty, to his judgment ano to his personal honor. To reform a drunkard you have to appeal to something deeper down in the human nature than that. You must impulses. Merely ee Away Liquer ot Cure for Drunkenness 8 eh the the drunkard always has less ‘honor than the sober citi- zen. He may have more, and be shaken at the same time by turbu- lent, unsatisfied passions that the \ sober, efficient and practical citizen . arte 5 e e ee 4 SRL ee impulses are nei- 80 beauty and all the. hi Valleys Death bc, ps, Only 1 the Heights Co Count ——— You Spot Him From a Chimney, thedral Spire and There Is No Secret Maneuver Possible Where the Heights Reveal Everything to Everybody, Distinguished Author Writes After Visit to Goritzia. By RUDYARD KIPLING. Copyright, 1917, by Rudyard Kipling. 66 E have finished with stones for a little,“ W said the officer. We are going to a mountain of mud. t is dry now, but this winter it never stayed quiet.“ An acre or so of the climbing roadside was still ‘uneasy and had slid face down in a spatter of 0 and tree roots which men were shoveling 0 It's rather a fresh road. All together, we have about 4000 miles of new roads—and old roads im- proved—on a front of 600 kilometers. But, you see, our kilometers are not flat.“ The landscape, picked out in all the greens of spring, was that of early Italian holy pictures— the same isolated, scarred hummocks rising from the enameled meadows or drifts of bloom into the same elaborate entablatures of rock, crowned by a campanile or tufted with dark trees. On the white roads beneath us the lines of mo- tors and mule transport strung out evenly to their various dumps. At one time we must have com- manded 20 full miles, all working at once, but never could we spy a breakdown. The Italian transport system has been tried out by war long ago. The more the road sunk to the plains the more one realized the height of the mountains 1 8 ing us all around. Podgora a Little Gibraltar, One Side Sheer 800 Feet Podgora, the mountain of mud, is a little Gi- braltar about 800 feet” high, almost sheer on one side, overlooking the town of Goritzia, which in civil life used to be a sort of stuffy Cheltenham for retired Austrian officers. Anywhere else Pod- gora Hill might be noticeable, but you could set down half a dozen Gibraltars among this upheaval of hills, and in a month the smooth Italian roads would overrun them ds vine tendrils overrun rub- bish heaps. The lords of the military situation round Goritzia are the four and five thousand foot mountains, crowded one behind the other, 2 angle, upland and valley of each offering or masking death. The mountains are vile ground for aeroplane work, because there is nowhere to alight in com- fort, but none the less the machines beat over them from both sides and the anti-aircraft guns, which are not impressive in the open plains, fill the gorges with multiplied coughings more re- sembling a lion's roar than thunder. The enemy fly high, over the mountains, and show against the blue like bits of whirling ash off a bonfire. They drop their bombs generously and the rest is with fate—either the blind crack on blank rock and the long harmless whirr of silvered stone, or that ripe crash which tells that timber, men and mules have caught it full this time. If all the setting were not so lovely, if the lights, the leafage, the blossom and the butterflies mating on the grassy kips of old trenches were not allowed to insult the living workmen of death, their work would be easier to describe without di- gressions. All Valleys Death Traps, and Only the Heights Count When we had climbed on foot up and up and into the bowels of the mountain of mud, through galleries and cross galleries, to a discreetly veiled observation point, Goritzia, pink, white and bluish, lay to all appearance, asleep beneath us amid her full flowering chestnut trees by the talking Isonzo. She wes in Italian hands—won after furious fights —but the enemy guns from the mountains could still shell her at pleasure, and the next move, said our officer, would be to clear certain heights. “Can you see our trenches creeping up to them —-from their menace?” There and there he pointed, the Italian troops would climb and crawl, while thus and thus would the fire of our guns cover them, till they came to that bare down and must make their rush—which is really a climb—alone. If that rush failed, then they must dig in among rocks. And lie out under the bitter skyline, for this was war among the mountains, where valleys were death traps and only heights counted. Then we turned to the captured hills behind us that had lived so unconsidered since they were made, but now, because of the price paid for them, would stand forth memorable as long as Italy was remembered. The heathen mountain in front had yet to be baptized and entered on the roll of honor, and one could not say at that moment which one of them would be most honorable, or what cluster of herdsmen’s huts would carry the name of a month's battle through the ages. The studied repose that heralds a big push cloaked both lines. No one, except a few pieces who were finishing some private work, was saying penyuuns, . . The Austrians had their ows last * * . 5 ne ites eke Se ee eo ae 7 but He Spots You From a Ca- 8 * 1 * 1 * ve . ca | . 4 ' 4 ‘ 5 Dts 7 1 ot ar 4 ae 12 5 (4 ae * . —— 3 * * 8 Pe 2 * 5 Ryo PS 2 7 Pa” ¥ 5 A 2 7 5 4 * * 2 2 8 a + 5 7 3 An * * oe . 7 on 5 0 « 4 4 Bin : War in he Mount rains 5 Like Fight ‘ing ie on Housetops pecs ö | “2 2 2 . nee 7 dod 8 PR 2 75 23 oe 2 22 25 BAR ) touches to put in, too. They were ranging on a convent up a hillside—one deliberate shell at a time. A big gun beneath us came lazily into the game on our side, shaking the whole moun- ‘ tain of mud, and then asking questions of its observing officer across the valley. A Toboggan Road Takes One ] From Podgora Into Goritzia EERE Suddenly a boy’s voice, that had been taking corrections, spoke quite unofficially at the re- ceiver in the gloom under our feet. “Oh! Con- gratulations,” it cried. “Then you dine with us tonight, and you'll pay for the wine.“ Everyone laughed. “Rather a long walk,“ said our guide and friend. »The observing officer —he is down near Goritzia—- has just telephoned that he has been promoted to aspirant—sub-lieutenant, don’t you say? He'll have to climb up here to the artillery mess tonight and stand drinks on his promotion.”’ “I bet he'll come,“ someone said. There were no takers. So you see, youth is always immortally the same. We dropped from Podgora into Goritzia by a road a little more miraculous than any we had yet found. It was in the nature of a toboggan run, but so perfectly banked at the corners that the traffic could have slid down by itself if it had been allowed. As we entered the town men were 1 the bridge across the river — for a reason. They do a great deal of mending in Goritzia. Austrians use heavy pieces on the place—12-inch stuff some- times—dealt methodically and slowly from far back, out of the high hills. I tried to find a house that did not carry that monotonous stripling of shrapnel, but it was difficult. The guns reach everywhere. There was no air in the still hollow where the place lay—hardly a whisper among the domed horse chestmuts. Troops were marching through to their trenches far up the hillside beyond, and the sound of their feet echoed between the high garden walls where the service wires were looped among pendants of wisteria in fill flower. Hundreds of Civilians Remain } In the Shell-Shattered City There are several hundred civilians in the city who have not yet cared to move, for the Italian is as stubborn in these things as the Frenchman. In the main square, ‘where the house fronts are most battered and the big electric light standard bows itself to the earth, for some buttons on a card at a shop door—hands eyes and gesture, all extravagantly employed, and the seller as intently absorbed as she. It must be less distracting than one thinks to live under the knowledge one is always being watched from above—breathed upon in the nape of the neck, so to speak, by invisible mouths. A little fater | was being told confidentially by some English woman among a garden of Irises, | who owned a radiograph installation and a couple of shrapnel dusted cars, that they had been prom- ised, when the push came, that they and their ap- peratus might go into Goritzia itself, to a nice underground room, reasonably free from shells, which disconcert the wcunded and jar the radio- graph and wasn't it kind of the authorities?” The amazing motor lorries were thicker on the more amazing road than they had been. Our companion apologized for them. “You see, we have been taking a few things up te the front this way for the last few days,” he said. “Are all Kallans born driving motors? |! de- ‘ manded, as a ‘procession of high hooded cars flopped down the curve we were breasting, pivot- a, brought up to be lowered there passed imagina- I saw a girl — * He Marvels That Hundreds of Civilians Remain in Place Bombarded Regularly but Leisurely by Gigantic Austri- an Howitzers and Where He Looked in Vain for a Single House That Had Not the Mark of Barapnel Upon It. ed on its outside edge, their bonnets pointing over a 400-foot drop, and slid past us with a three-inch clearance between hub and hub. No,“ he replied. “But we, too, have been at the game a long time. I expect the bad chauffeurs have all been killed. Mules as Stubborn and Hard to Kill There as in Missouri “And bad mules.” One of them was having hys- terics oh what I thought—till I had climbed a few thousand feet higher—was the edge of a preci- pice. “Oh, you can't kill a mule,” and sure enough, when the beast had registered its pro- test, it returned to the dignity of its sires. The muleteer said not a word. We bored up and into the hills by roads not yet mapped, but solid as lavish labor can make them against the rolling load of the lorries and the sharp hoofs of the mule, as well as the wear and tear of winter, who is the real enemy. Our route ran along the folded skirts of a range not more than three or four thousand feet high, more or less parallel with the Isonzo on its way from the north. Rivers that had roared level beside us dropped and shrunk to blue threads half visible through forest. Mountains put forward hard, shady knees, around which we climbed in a thou- sand loops that confused every sense of direction. Then because the enemy, seven miles off, could see, stretches of the crowded road were blinded with reed mats, while torn holes above or below us proved that he had searched closely, af After that the colossal lap of a mountain alive with dripping waters would hide us in greenery and moisture till the sight of a cautious ash tree still in bud—her sister 10 minutes ago had been clothed from head to foot—told us we had risen again to the heights of the naked ridge. Up to the Lofty Ridge of the Waiting Cannon And here were batteries upon batteries of the heaviest pieces, so variously disposed and hidden that finding one gave you no clew to the next. Elevens, eight, fours, sixes and elevens again, on caterpillar wheels, on navy mountings adapted for land work, disconnected from their separate tractors or balanced and buttressed on their own high-speed motors, were repeated for mile after mile, with their ammunition caves, their shops and the necessary barracks for their thousand servants studded or strung out on the steep drop behind them. Obscure pits and hollows hid them, pointing to heaven, and how they had deen tion as they peeped out of the merest slits in green sod. They stood back under ledges and eaves of the ground where no light could outline them, or be- came one with a dung heap behind a stable. They stalled themselves in thick forest growth, like elephants at noon, or, as it were, crawled squat on their bellies to the very bows or crests over- looking seas of mountains. They, like the others down the line, were waiting for the hour and the order. Not a half dozen out of the multitude opened their lips. When we had climbed to a place appointed, the shutter on an observation post opened upon the world below. We saw the Isonzo almost vertically beneath us and on the far side were Italian trenches that painfully climbed from the bank to the crest of the bare ridges where the infantry ‘live, who must be fed under cover of night until the Austrians are driven out of their heights above. No Strategy Possible Where N the Heights Reveal Everything “It is just like fighting a burglar across house- tops,” said the officer. “You can spot him from a factory chimney, but he can spot you from the spire of the cathedral—and so on.” “Who sees trenches?” I asked. “Everybody on both sides, but our guns cover them. That is the way in our war. Height is everything.” He said nothing of the terrific labor of it all, before a man or a gun can come into position nothing of the battle that was fought in the gorge below when the Isonzo was crossed and the Ita ian trenches clawed and sawed their red way up the hillside, and very little of the blood-drenched snout of the height called the Sabotino that was carried, lost and recarried most gloriously in the old days of the war, and now lay out below as innocent seeming as a mountain pasture. They are a hard people, these Latins, who have had to fight the mountains and all that is In them, masher enen Uefields do not slope at more ma 45 degrems, — * 3 ae h them. those men down yonder in the ( e* -, Pershing a Fighting «j—- Han With a Record of | sonra “Victories for Peace | Firmness, Discretion, Mastery of Detail and a Know!- 1 edge That, When Killing Is Necessary, It Must e Done With Dispatch and on an Adequate Scale, His Distinguishing Characteristics. By ROWLAND THOMAS. he Author of ‘The Little Gods. « Fatima," ‘‘Felicidad”’ and other 3 T HE recent selection of Major-General Pershing as commander of the: 2 . 4 first expedition of American troops to France called up in my mine the picture of a restaurant in Manila, close by the Bridge of Spain, and of a fit-looking six-foot man who sat across a lunchéon table | brown with the triple tan of field service in the tropics, jean and hard with: 5 5 the exertions and deprivations of a year's campaigning. For that was beck. ö in 1903, and Capt. Pershing. as he was then, had just come up to * 5 from Moroland and the picturesque exploits around Lake Lanao which Pe ee led to his being jumped to a brigadier generalship over the Heads of 862 of his seniors, the record promotion for a West Pointer. * He spoke very grudgingly of his adventures and himself, but out of the | few words emerged the impression of a man who for twenty years had been doing what came to him to do without carelessness or impatience r 5 mistake, without any selfish grasping after opportunity and equally sit. > out weak failure to make the most of every opportunity that came. i de Firmness, discretion, dash, mas- tery of detail and comprehensive) that look men through and through, a silent, with frank unprying ener breadth of vision, complete patience | gentle of voice, chary of mere words, 8 and relentless determination — those laughing but seldom. smiling a slow’ : contradictory qualities I seemed to{ quiet m more of the eyes | tha: somehow in John When, tort ies, find united Pershing in his still only a cap- tain, he got bis iq first real chance to display his powers. And those, I believe, are the qualities which make him & today, in the ‘opinion of many. one of the most brilliant and tue in our army. From the out- set of his mili- tary career he has had a qutet way of attracting £3 distinctions to himself and say- ing nothing about At the start he won the highest honor West Point can grant her sons ne when in 1886, 26 Senior Cadet Captain. No “grind” or military athlete can hope to win that place, which betekens at the same time scholarly excellence and soldierly distinction, a sound and well-trained mind in a body expert in the management of arms and horses and, above all. the self-control which warrants the responsibility of commanding others. He left the academy for a more rigid training school, the Southwest, where he was plunged at once into the closing campaign against Ger- onimo and his Apaches as a Second Lieutenant in the old Sixth Cavalry, and in August, 1887, scarcely a year from school, won special commenda- tion from that tough old Indian fighter, Gen. Nelson Miles, for “marching his troop. with pack train over rough country, 140 miles in 46 hours, and bringing in every man and coolest man under fire I over saw in my life.” * Then came 12 months at s in Washington, spent “solving cult and vexatious problems” - head of the division of Customs and Insular Affaire, whereupon he | plied for duty in the Philippines and in September, 1899, was sent to the Department of Mindanao and Jolo, and made Adjutant There began his study of the “Moro ee tas the ee found himself in need of a proved — 8 4 * ast. „ n . * 3 — Pd 8 a os ‘aaa * * — wee