"You must believe in Russia:" The Military Service of Reverend Jesse Halsey, Part 1

During WWI, Reverend Jesse Halsey served abroad doing "War Work" as a chaplain, ministering to servicemen “whatever, whenever, and wherever." In my research I've found one account, published in 1940, of his war work written by another YMCA secretary, Ethan T. Colton. The book is called "Forty Years With Russians." My great-grandfather served in Russia at the direct behest of President Wilson, whose student Jesse had been while they were both at Princeton. Apparently, the two had a great affinity for one another for, as one of Jesse's students told me, "They swapped dictionaries." My great-grandfather was granted an indefinite leave of absence, with full salary and expenses, by the trustees of his church in Cincinnati in order to take up work with YMCA. He said, "My church took care of my family, kept my job all during the war—I was gone a year or more—and welcomed me home. They had loaned me to the government without expense and I have always been proud of them." 

For more than 12 months in 1917-1918, Halsey served in Moscow with the YMCA, as American Consul in Murmansk, as a Chaplain in British Navy in the Arctic Circle, and as a representative of American Red Cross. Halsey recalled that President Wilson had directed him to search for a diplomatic contact at Murmansk inside the chaos of the 1918 Russian Civil War. He also spoke frequently of the suffering of the common people in Russia, even the soldiers, saying they were "thinly fed borscht." And "They carried spoons in their boot tops." 

As Colton recounts, “Spaces are wide in European Russia. At its northern extremity, well within the Arctic Circle, Jesse Halsey began activities in Murmansk among the American, British, and Russian crews of the cruisers lying there. Charles Hedden came to reinforce him. Together they fulfilled with distinction not only their appointed mission but that of rendering unofficial government services that drew high tribute from the American consular, military, and naval representatives.” In the forward to the book, General Secretary of the YMCA War Work Council John R. Mott writes, in 1940: “You may not understand Russia, but you must believe in Russia.”

En route back to Washington to advise Wilson, my great-grandfather was briefly stationed at the Eagle Hut, a center operated by the Y.M.C.A. in London for servicemen on furlough. One night he climbed up the observation tower on the base and found a solitary soldier there. Halsey asked the soldier why he was in the watch tower rather than down carousing with the other boys? The soldier said, “My damn mother.” Halsey told him: “One of the things that’s absolutely necessary in life is to have damned mothers who help you understand what you need to be.”

Jesse Halsey on Photography | c1945

I have had spells of photographic zeal. Most of the boys in my high school group had Premo B8x and took good pictures. Finances did not permit such extravagances at our house. In later years, I made up for it. I had a camera most of the time during the First World War when I went round the world, but most of the film was injured in the developing. One excellent picture of a Laplander’s hut with fireplace reindeer and children all in one room remains. Pictures by my friends of our boy-hood camping are not uncommon. In the years of our travel by Ford back and forth from Cincinnati to Long Island, I took innumerable pictures with a big 5x7 that had a Goerz lens and required focusing with a black cloth, real photographer style. And I made some good pictures trying to relate them to persons of note. For example, Wm. Henry Harrison’s tomb is at Great Bend near Cincinnati, one year as we drove east I planned the route to include his birthplace and other places and buildings connected with his life or that of his family.

We visited and photographed many places connected with Stonewall Jackson—his birth place, the Military Academy in or near Lexington where he taught, his monument in the Lexington cemetery, the house where he died at Guinea Station. We drove out to the Chancellorsville battlefield and in and around the Wilderness (much to the disgust of my children), and at the moment where he was mistakenly shot by his own soldiers, we found the monument surrounded by sand piles and tar barrels for road repair. That night I wrote a letter of protest to the Richmond Times-Dispatch and signed it “Damnedyankee.” When we came back in the fall, the tar barrels were gone and the plot neatly seeded.

Often, we camped out on the Gettysburg field. In the Devil’s Den there was a pump and level place where we could pitch our tent. On one July night, a thunder storm came up, blew down our tent and the three children in their undies were herded under the fallen flapping canvas drug shop in Fredericksburg and his monument on Princeton Battlesfield where he was killed. Places and persons very many—all recorded on good film reposing in my study file. In the last minute haste of moving to Chicago, these films, every one of them, went out with a ton of outer papers from my study—to the junk man; never recovered. 

This was the end of any vigorous photographic interest. One time when I was focusing on the old State House in Corodon, Indiana, a gentleman came along and invited me into a second story room opposite the capitol where I could get a better picture. I had an old camera with me and as I set it up in his window, I apologized for it. He remarked, half to himself—“tere’s many a man makes his livin’ with a poorer box than that!” He was the village photographer.

Sure-Enough Pies

Several years after the war, our postman came in one morning saying, “Well, I see they’ve got you written up in the Saturday Evening Post.” He showed me the article—some American soldiers were telling a reporter how a Chaplain had made them pancakes. I have never heard one echo of the sermons I preached (around the world) during the war, but now and then I hear, to this day, about the grub we had here and there. It is most humiliating to one’s professional pride.

There was little at times to be had but black bread and soup and tea, this was the Russian’s regular diet. A few Americans came along one day to my place talking about “pancakes.” I set them chopping out a mill-race; we got some poor barley and ground it. I got a little reindeer milk and let it sour on the back of the stove, then using the bicarbonate of soda from my medicine kit, I got them to rise (a little). We had some poor treakel [sic] for sweetening and then I made a griddle (as I told you) from a locomotive boiler.The cakes stuck to the griddle—until I greased it with a Swedish turnip cut in two—then we had pancakes. Somehow that got into print.

Then there was pie.Thanksgiving and Christmas and some other holidays whenever there were any Americans that came together, someone would say “pie.” I experimented a little in the house (a palace) where we happened to be in Moscow and found that the product was passable. So several times I ventured. In Mourmansk [sic] and along that front it was difficult to get anything to make a crust OR filling. Lard was unobtainable, but I begged a little white flour from the cook on the flag-ship and having lived in Labrador, I knew the value of seal fat (Parenthesis—Labrador skippers have told me that they have sailed for Spain with seal oil and on arrival without changing cargoes have trans-shipped at the Custom House, for New York where they have arrived with a cargo of olive oil. It is likely a sailor’s yarn, but it gave me an idea.) So I made pie crust with seal oil, secured a mess of (wormy) dried apples from a Lapland village and made a batch of pies of flaky crustiness (they were all right—delicious in fact—if you held your nose while swallowing for seal oil has an odor sui generis).

My last venture with pies was at the Eagle hut in London a few weeks before the Armistice. When I landed in London in August of ’18, I had had no word from my family—no mail—since Christmas. I immediately looked around to find, if I could, someone from Cincinnati, and ran across Claude Shafer. He was giving cartoon lectures at the Eagle Hut. I went with him and found the boys all fed upon English Raspberry tarts (and other kinds) so Claude suggested I make a batch of sure-enough pies. There was plenty of good material available there and I made a big batch while Claude drew a cartoon of me, which he sent home to his paper (in those days, The Post). The English cooks caught on to the upper crust business and their tarts thereafter became sure-enough pies. --from Rev. Jesse Halsey's account of his service with the Y.M.C.A. during World War I