ON 29 October 1929 frenzied brokers dumped 16,410,000 shares of stock on New York Stock Exchange. By 1931 Amos could tell Andy about the fellow who registered at a hotel where the clerk asked, 'For sleeping or jumping, sir?'(1) A year later more than thirteen million Americans were unemployed, as were nearly 20 per cent of Danish workers between eighteen and twenty-one years of age. In Sweden, the model Welfare State, 3.5 per cent of the whole population was jobless, with young men and women between sixteen and twenty-five accounting for one third of the unemployed.
Said a young worker from Liverpool:
I have been having a terrible life these last few years, without regular work.... My brother, he's a grown man too, and he's doing nothing; and then there's my two sisters doing nothing, and my father, he's a ship's painter, glad to take half a day's work.... Many times I thought of suicide. There was just no chance to get a start .(2)(3)
The situation in North America, Western and Central Europe was critical. Solutions, whether liberal (like the American New Deal) or extreme (like Germany's open-armed acceptance of National Socialism) were thorough. Among the measures taken figured workcamping, which was used in two ways. SCI, American and British Quakers, and other groups sent volunteers to work with the jobless, while in many countries it was the young unemployed themselves who worked in labour camps.
Schemes of the latter type were usually national or nationalistic, often indifferent to problems of peace or even militaristic, and occasionally obligatory. Although they seem foreign to Pierre Ceresole's 'civilism' it is important to describe and analyse them for it was the first time governments took a large-scale interest and role in youth service. An examination of their successes and failures will suggest courses of action to the newly independent countries of Africa and Asia which today face a similar if not identical scourge of un- and under-employment of youth. But first let us see what the non-governmental schemes were up to.
Volunteers working with British and American unemployed had much the same aims as the Brynmawr project described in Chapter I and tussled with similar, apparently insoluble problems. Between 1932 and 1934 the Springhead Ring, an organization drawing its inspiration from the Scandinavian folk-school movement, organized five workcamps in the Yorkshire village of Cleveland. At these camps students aided unemployed iron miners to plant, cultivate and harvest market gardens designed to provide the villagers with a direct supply of food. More than 330 similar projects were organized throughout Britain, in an internationalist spirit although without many foreign volunteers, under the Quaker Woodbrooke Settlement. In these projects groups of secondary schoolboys and girls spent short periods during their vacations helping jobless families cultivate land allotments, colour-wash their homes and work co-operative farms.
In the late 1930s volunteers from Hungary, Mexico and England joined Americans of varied political, religious, professional and geographical backgrounds in a rehabilitation programme sponsored by the American Friends (Quakers) Service Committee, AFSC, which was set up after Pierre Ceresole's visit to the USA and at his instigation. Near Uniontown, a Pennsylvania coal-mining town where unemployment was rife, the AFSC aided about fifty industrial families to resettle on farms. Campers built dwellings, chicken-coops, a co-operative dairy and roads, laid water mains, developed a quarry and raised vegetables and chickens on an experimental basis.
Typical of the determination and perseverance of volunteers working with the jobless was SCI's Oakengates project in Shropshire, which lasted from 1933 to 1939. There, one task took predominance. At the centre of Oakengates rose Charlton Mount, a miniature mountain of slag that blocked what sun filtered through the smog to reach the windows of the town. Its imposing omnipresence, looming over houses, down streets, into yards, constantly reminded the villagers that human existence in a coal town is subordinated to the mine's exigencies, be they backbreaking toil or enforced idleness.
To attack Charlton Mount would be to strike a blow at Oakengates' despair. But to attack Charlton Mount with shovels and wheelbarrows --- the only tools at hand --- seemed folly. The folly consumed six years of workcamps organized during summer, Easter and Christmas holidays. Towards the end, a lone volunteer, the Swiss Paul Meylan, spent one whole winter 'laconic and obstinate',(4) filling, wheeling, emptying and refilling his barrow.
Volunteers working with the jobless sought first and foremost to stir the unemployed from their lethargy. Like the Brynmawr and other camps mentioned above, Oakengates doubtless achieved this aim, at least in the first stages. According to Pierre Ceresole's friend, Hélène Monastier, 'As the years went by, habit tarnished the earlier enthusiasm. The population was no longer astonished to see the successive teams arrive.'(5) No programme, furthermore, could do more than help the unemployed subsist, wait and hope. Yet they wanted more than subsistence, patience and promises. They wanted jobs.
The second aim of volunteers working with the unemployed was to do a job of work. By turning sod, planting cabbage, colour-washing homes or laying out parks, they at least improved diets and beautified surroundings. The projects were needed and all the more appropriate since they would not otherwise have been executed. It would, for instance, have been easier to demolish Charlton Mount by mechanical means. But Charlton Mount might still be standing had SCI waited for someone to volunteer a steam-shovel. In no sense, then, were the volunteers scab workers; no one, at that time, would have been paid to accomplish their work.(6)
Finally volunteers sought to span social and national differences among themselves as well as between them and the unemployed. To the international team at Oakengates, for instance, the unemployment problem became understandable in terms, of human suffering. To the miners, the students became friendly young fellows with more than an academic interest in social justice.'(7)
The efforts of volunteers working with the jobless to do needed tasks and stimulate social and international understanding were sincere and fruitful. Yet they were intrinsically incapable of getting at the core of the unemployment problem. Paul Meylan's lonely winter siege of Charlton Mount is symbolic of this failing. Little by little, his shovel ate away the houses-high slag heap. Twenty years later, in 1955, a visitor noticed that the people of Oakengates still wondered at the ferocious will-power of their young Swiss friend. Paul's single-handed attack on Charlton Mount relieved the ugliness of unemployment. It did not --- and could not --- alleviate the causes.
Unemployment, in most countries, was a social ill of national proportions for which only governments could hope to provide a comprehensive cure. One of the main sectors of unemployment to be absorbed was the youth of low-income families. Forced for economic reasons to leave school as early as the law permitted, they swelled the ranks of job-seekers. Competing with older, more experienced workers --- the jobless and desperate breadwinners --- the young were hired last. if at all. And since they were seldom hired, they had no way of gaining the skills prerequisite to being hired. For them, as for the young Liverpool worker quoted above, 'there was just no chance to get a start'.
To break the vicious circle, many governments established national youth workcamps. By 1939 schemes of different sizes and with various functions existed in nearly thirty countries, from Sweden to Australia, the United States to Bulgaria, Poland to Japan. Close on three quarters of a million young men and women were involved each year. In America alone 250,000 youngsters were working in some 1,500 Civilian Conservation Corps camps. In Germany, 300,000 young men were spending six months in Hitler's Arbeitsdienst in preparation for military service. Never before in modern history had society felt so threatened by disgruntled out-of-school youth. Never since --- with the exception of some new countries in Africa and Asia --- have governments reacted so vigorously to the needs of that youth.
The youth labour schemes although numerous and diverse, may be divided into two types. The first was liberal-democratic and voluntary. Adapted in the Scandinavian countries, pre-Munich Czechoslovakia, pre-Anschluss Austria, Switzerland, the United States and elsewhere it can be described in terms of the Freiwilliger Arbeitsdienst (Voluntary Labour Service) created in 1931 by the Weimar Republic of Germany.
In Germany, the liberal service scheme grew out of experimentation carried out in the 1920s by a young professor, Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, who organized a number of workcamps to counteract social tensions. Young farmers, workers and students volunteered for these national projects in which work was balanced with study and discussions. The second type of youth camps was authoritarian and more often than not obligatory. Used by Bulgaria as early as 1921, and later by Romania, Poland, Nazi Austria and occupied Czechoslovakia, this kind of youth corps was typified by the Third Reich's Arbeitsdienst. Some features of the two services were similar, others opposed.
A first similarity between the liberal and authoritarian systems was their aim to absorb or prevent youth unemployment, thereby relieving pressure on the glutted labour market. Secondly, both types of camps carried out manual work of social significance, although there was some difference in emphasis. The Weimar projects executed a broad variety of public works (roads, small-scale land drainage, forestry) while the Nazi service concentrated more than two thirds of its manpower to land reclamation.(8)
A third common objective was to strengthen national unity. Here, however, the difference in practice was radical. The Weimar camps were open to all young people of good will and characterized by a generous nationalism that sought to break down class, political and religious animosities and teach youth to co-operate in rebuilding Germany. The Nazi service, on the other hand, excluded certain political and racial undesirables,. such as non-Aryans and those married to non-Aryans, and attempted to inculcate a chauvinistic Nazi line. A prevalent slogan on Arbeitsdienst barrack walls was 'Remember always and constantly that you are a German'.
Oddly enough, it was under the narrowly nationalist Third Reich, and not the more international-minded Republic, that workcamp exchanges were organized with foreign youth. At the instigation of a Hitlerjugend leader five schoolboy camps were organized each year beginning in 1934, alternately in England and Germany, to create a spirit of fellowship between the youth (Aryan only, one supposes) of both countries.
It is difficult to speculate on the outcome of these international camps as no first-hand reports are available. One cannot help wondering, however, whether and to what extent stereotypes could be broken down and understanding achieved in exclusive projects. How much greater their potential would have been had some Russians, Jews, Negroes and other non-Aryans taken part. In any event, one lesson may be learnt from these camps: however basic international participation is to workcamping, it alone cannot guarantee or even encourage the broadening of minds and smashing of shibboleths which international voluntary service projects should foment. We shall return to the importance of composition and quality in service projects between countries of different ideologies and social systems in Chapter 6.
A final similarity between Republican and Nazi labour services in Germany was the stress both laid on the importance of manual labour. In the Weimar camps, students and unemployed of the liberal professions gained respect and enthusiasm for manual work, thus rounding out their intellectual training. The Nazi camps, too, placed a premium on the value of manual work. Indeed their orientation smacked of a decided anti-intellectualism. Hitler himself had written that in Nazi education 'Mental training is a matter of secondary importance.... A people of scientists, psychologically degenerated, weak-willed and cowardly pacifists will not be in a position to ensure its existence on this earth.'(9) Apart from work and games, physical drill along military lines was imparted each day, and all three forms of exercise were meant to toughen the bodies of the Wehrmacht's future soldiers.
The Nazi service's compulsory character constituted the first and principle difference between the two systems. Social-Democratic in inspiration, the Weimar labour corps was voluntary by conviction. By necessity as well, for it was impossible to attract and train rapidly sufficient leaders for what was conceived of as a short-term measure. Youth experts estimated that at the height of unemployment (in 1932) 500,000 young men and women wished to volunteer for labour camps, whose capacity was then only 285,000.
The Nazi Arbeitsdienst, on the other hand, was an obligatory interim step between the Hitlerjugend and military service for boys or Kinder, Küche und Kirche for girls. By 1939 resistance to the camps had grown among German youth. Many could find employment elsewhere as industry revived and tooled for war. But the main reason lay in a revulsion caused by the camps themselves. Refugees alleged that the compulsory nature of the camps and the regimentation have made the labour service unpopular with as high as 60 per cent of the German youth. Undoubtedly, many of them react against the eternal saluting, clicking of heels, 'Heil Hitler'-ing, marching, and propagandizing that goes on in the camps.(10)
Paradoxically, the Hitler Arbeitsdienst's influence on workcamping in later years stemmed less from the repulsion it caused in 'as high as 60 per cent' of German youth than from another factor. What troubled many observers, German and foreign alike, and what European youth leaders remembered most vividly in the post-war era, was that as many as 40 per cent of young Germans were exalted by an experience which, according to liberal canons, should have disgusted them. Those of the civilist persuasion, as well as less radical liberals, believed that it is impossible to find joy without peace, strength without tolerance. The tens of thousands of young Germans whom the Arbeitsdienst elevated from the banal drudgery of economic crisis to the joy of preparing conquest and the strength of hate proved them wrong. That joy and hate can coexist in a young mind, and that their coexistence can lead to creative social action, is a lesson European youth leaders are still mulling over.
The second fundamental difference separating liberal from authoritarian youth labour systems lay in their concept of education. Both Weimar and Nazi labour services included provisions for vocational training and orientation of the young unemployed, but as far as education was concerned the resemblance ended there. The Republican camps aimed to help participants understand their role in and duties to society, and to stimulate and allow them to widen their cultural horizons. Inhabitants of the communities being aided often flocked to the camps to take part in various educational activities, talking, singing, staging plays and recounting folk-tales. In the loosely structured discussion groups as well as cultural performances, an attempt was made to permit each individual, no matter how reticent, to express himself. The camps proved themselves such valuable channels of informal instruction in reaching young people out of school that, in its last months of existence, the Republic came to consider them an important part of its educational system.
The principle educational aim of Hitler's system was to strengthen and train the bodies of his future soldiers. The youths' minds were not neglected, however, and National Socialist educators compared the Arbeitsdienst favourably with academic instruction. An English-language propaganda pamphlet indicated that the Arbeitsdienst might 'for many years play a far more important decisive part than the school in training the youth of this country'.(11) Far from seeking the individual flowering aimed at by the Weimar labour service, the Nazi camps' theoretical sessions included Party views on German history, political and racial theory, and culture. It is no wonder that local neighbours did not turn out in great numbers for discussions. Folksinging and theatrical evenings were seen as a means of perpetuating Germanic culture and instilling unquestioning respect for it in the minds of the young performers and spectators.
In some respects, both authoritarian and liberal-democratic labour systems resembled the international voluntary service movement. All three attached great value to manual labour and attempted to challenge and mobilize young people of varied backgrounds in socially useful work projects, thereby providing solutions to the problems of unemployment. The basic aims and nature of the Nazi Arbeitsdienst were, however, alien and repugnant to both the Weimar service and SCI. The former was chauvinistic and racist in ideology, militaristic in spirit, exclusive in composition though compulsory in participation, and propagandist and regimented in educational approach. The latter were humanitarian, concerned with maintaining peace between social groups or nations, open to all, voluntary, conducive to diversity of opinion and informally educational.
The liberal labour corps and international voluntary workcamps shared many values; they differed in emphasis rather than on fundamentals. The former were national (though not chauvinistic), offered a 'chance to get a start' to the unemployed, including some students, and dealt with great numbers of young people. The latter were international, reached primarily idealists (usually but not always intellectuals) and could attract and handle only small numbers of volunteers.
As far-sighted as he was stubborn, Pierre Ceresole early recognized and acted on the need to broaden labour camps' educational role by internationalizing them. At the end of 1933. on his second illegal jaunt to 'meet our German neighbours', he wrote to Hitler asking for a personal interview. At Bern, the Swiss capital, he asked the Department Head (Minister) of Justice and Police to provide him with a letter of introduction to the Swiss Minister at Berlin so that he might 'work no matter how modestly. to give an international and clearly peaceful orientation to the Arbeitsdienst'.(12) The Minister's refusal was none too polite.
The problems involved in internationalizing youth labour corps are numerous and delicate: language differences, international travel costs, special leader training, etc. They are particularly acute in the developing countries, where resources are scanty and service corps long-term rather than stop-gap measures (see Chapter 10). Yet the German experience suggests there is no alternative.
Seen in retrospect civic service corps for the young unemployed must be considered in the history of voluntary youth service. Yet, there seemed to be little in common between them and civilists in the 1930s. There were in fact two distinct uses of workcamping mobilizing two different kinds of volunteers. There were labour projects whose main objective was economic: to put the teeming jobless (mostly young workers) to work. And there were the workcamps whose goal was idealistic: to provide those lucky enough to have jobs (mostly young intellectuals) with an opportunity for social service and international co-operation.
By the late 1930s the second kind of service was no longer the exclusive domain of Service Civil International. At Liechtenstein Pierre Ceresole and his friends went 'to the extreme in making all possible concessions --- without negating any of our principles'(13) to broaden SCI's base. Ten years later, groups who didn't share all Pierre's principles, and had others of their own, were holding regular workcamps. The British and American Quakers, for instance, had made voluntary manual service a permanent part of their activities. They were of the same spiritual family as the 'civilists' --- indeed many civilists were Quakers --- but their camps sprang from a religious rather than a more broadly philosophic inspiration. Other voluntary service projects were organized by groups farther removed from civilism.
One of these was Associated Junior Work Camps, Inc. (AJWC), a secular American agency which aimed to render social service and whose international flavour was furnished by occasional German refugee volunteers.(14). Other bodies with idealistic goals also began workcamping in this period. Though they did not underestimate the value of social service and international co-operation, they laid heavier stress on adapting the mystique of vigorous and selfless labour to the needs of their respective movements. Workcamping was seen as an inexpensive way of refurbishing or extending the material premises of these organizations and, at the same time, as a new pedagogical method of expressing and obtaining allegiance to their ideologies.(15) Thus Boy Scout working parties improved numerous vacation facilities, hacking out woodland trails and building shelters, and renewed the interest of the volunteers, generally boys in their late teens, in Scouting. Among other ideologies served by workcamping in the 1930s were Zionism, 'studentism', and youth hostelling.
While the American Habonim Zionist Labour Movement began workcamping in 1933,(16) secondary schools and university students constituted a prime source of volunteers for both SCI and Quaker workcamps. They, more than most categories of young people, had equally abundant ideals and free time. It is not surprising that the idea of voluntary service appealed to students or that, in some cases, it occurred to them spontaneously. Such was the case. among others, of Czechoslovakia. The prewar Czech workcamping movement grew out of a single project at the Prague German Hochschule where, around 1930, a group of students built an athletics field. In institutionalized form, however, student workcamping goes back even further.
The first international voluntary student service project was held in Switzerland in 1924 and more soon followed in various countries. usually sponsored by national student unions. Student camps were motivated by neither religious nor philosophical considerations. One might say, rather, that they were based on occupational concerns. The participants' objective was 'to work together in entire independence of all political and religious groups or propaganda, to maintain and promote co-operation between students of different countries and to further their educational, social and general interests.'(17)
Though later-comers to international voluntary service than civilists, Quakers, Zionists or students, youth hostellers were not less ardent workcampers. An international group of young people delighting in physical exertion, the tradition of doing community chores voluntarily, simple (sometimes spartan) living conditions, the need for maintenance and construction. work --- these ingredients of a voluntary workcamp are found in most youth hostels around the world. All that was lacking was someone to put them together in the right combination.
'Small work parties of (English) Youth Hostels Association enthusiasts began to undertake little jobs at youth hostels, such as building bicycle sheds. enlarging kitchens and redecorating old buildings, as early as 1932.'(18) But it wasn't until 1936 that the first proper international youth hostel workcamp took place. That Easter, the Secretary of the Youth Hostels Association of England and Wales (YHA), Jack Catchpool, took a team of thirty young Englishmen to Bois-le-Roi, in the Forest of Fontainebleau near Paris, to re-do a dilapidated hunting lodge. joined by members of the Ligue française des Auberges de Jeunesse and a few Scots. Irish and Belgians. the party accomplished in short order the 'Miracle of Bois-le-Roi'.
'The title is not our own,' said one English report, but borrowed from our French friends. There was something slightly miraculous about it: not only the sudden transformation of the Château de Brolles from a damp, dirty, dismantled house, which had been empty for twenty years, into a bright, attractive youth hostel; but still more, in the sudden friendships that sprang up ... among the young people of different countries who did this work together.(19)
Word about the 'miracle' spread and in the following two years international camps were held in Irish and Danish hostels. While a team including civilists and Quakers as well as hostellers worked on a project near Falmouth, England, at Easter and throughout the summer of 1939, some hundred volunteers from seven countries undertook what turned out to be a ten-year task at Mjølfell, Norway. the construction from scratch of a complete youth hostel. Parties began to clear ground for the building in May and work progressed over the summer. Then came September, and the war, and 'the British and German hostellers had to hurry back to their respective homes'.(20)
By the beginning of the Second World War voluntary youth service was a multiple movement. It had two main streams, the economic and the idealistic, and each of these had divided into several rivulets. Labour camps for the unemployed varied from liberal to authoritarian, with many shades of grey between the two extremes. And the civilist concept was but one of several complementary but nonetheless different kinds of idealistic service.(21)
Service Civil International was the first and, in 1939, still the only international body whose only function and central purpose was to hold voluntary service projects. All organizations in the idealistic stream of workcamping considered voluntary service as a way of achieving international understanding and doing social service, but each had goals particular to itself, and all except SCI had other programmes as well. Student unions saw workcamps as one among many activities able to strengthen co-operation and understanding among their members; Quakers conceived of workcamping as a way to express their conception of God's intervention in relations between men; youth hostellers were interested above all in youth hostelling and if they made enthusiastic volunteers, workcamping was at best a minor part of any national association's projects. For these organizations workcamping was a means to ends that varied with their functions and concerns; for Service Civil International, voluntary service was an end in itself.
Although some workcamp sponsors (e.g. the Habonim Zionists) had probably never heard of SCI, most had, and drew inspiration from civilism's methods, if not necessarily its ideology. By concerning itself exclusively with voluntary service SCI became in the late 1930s, recognized as the central current of the multiplying idealistic stream of workcamping.
SCI strengthened in the 1930s certain characteristics some of which it shared with the other members of the movement, some of which were specifically its own. Some of these were rooted in Pierre Ceresole's personality and beliefs; others were absorbed from experience; many of them are, in varying degrees, still found in volunteers today.
SCI has a moral approach to the ills of society, but one without moralistic overtones. 'Civilism' is not charity in the grand Victorian manner for it is not characterized by what one modern connoisseur of nineteenth-century England calls 'aggressive puritanism'.(22) Like the Victorian moralists, civilists are concerned with helping people. Unlike them, they do not treat people as objects; they work with, not for, them; and they hope and expect to grow and change as a result of the relations thus established rather than impose a rigid civilist code.
Of SCI's three objectives, one is reformist and two are revolutionary. According to its International Constitution, the organization's immediate aim, which is common to many reform and relief agencies, is 'to give practical assistance without regard to national frontiers and through voluntary helpers from all countries on the occasion of natural catastrophes, in work of public usefulness and in cases of need.' But secondly, the organization seeks 'to spread across barriers which divide men a new spirit which will render morally impossible war between nations. . . .' Socially, this is a revolutionary undertaking for it assumes that wars are not inevitable --- a view not universally shared in the past or present! --- and believes possible a society where peace is inevitable. The third goal of SCI is 'to work for the establishment of an international constructive service which will eventually replace military service.' This political objective --- which includes immediate agitation for the introduction of alternative service for conscientious objectors where there is conscription --- embodies William James's revolutionary moral equivalent of war.
Early and fervent believers in the League of Nations, the civilists watched with dismay and then disillusionment as it faltered, stumbled and collapsed. It had, they felt, talked itself into oblivion leaving precious little in the way of practical accomplishments. Today, the close correlation between the spirit of SCI and that of the United Nations does not reduce civilist suspicions of the high-flown verbiage churned out by the UN. Civilists eschew both moralistic idealism and armchair internationalism for the possibility (and satisfaction) of digging, hammering and painting. Hélène Monastier appropriately titled her brief history of SCI Paix, Pelle et Pioche (Peace, Pick and Shovel). Fittingly, the organization's motto is 'Deeds, not words'.
William James began his essay proposing a moral equivalent to war with the warning that 'The war against war is going to be no holiday excursion or camping party.'(23) Personal commitment to SCI's aims often leads civilists to undergo hardships, not the least of which are primitive living conditions and physical labour. Courage is sometimes required too: Pierre Ceresole has not been alone in going to prison.
On reading the stern admonishment of SCI's recruitment appeal for a Greek workcamp 'Beatniks running away from so-called over-civilization are not required --- holiday campers will be sent home,' a young Englishman recently sensed the civilist spirit. He rightly surmised that his camp would not be 'a gang of international lotus-eaters lounging on Mount Olympus!'(24)
What was the relation of SCI's aims and nature to the broadened movement in the 1930s? Which characteristics were shared? Which specifically civilist?
International voluntary workcamps at that time were a multipurpose means for changing society. They executed manually jobs of social significance, and wrought transformations in the minds of both volunteers and the people with whom volunteers worked. Fundamental among these changes was international understanding and co-operation as matters for hands and guts as well as brains and tongues.
Workcamping was also founded on the recognition of the value of each individual's voluntary contribution. Conversely, each volunteer was expected to respect the, needs of the camp community, and while tolerance of diversity of opinions was developed, self-discipline was required of all.
Workcamps were also a theatre of excitement. A recent study of the workcamps that in the last ten years have spanned Yugoslavia with the Brotherhood and Unity Highway refers to ex-volunteers' idealization of their service experience which they see as 'having the character of an exploit ... including severe privations'.(25)
When in 1958 the world's organizers of workcamps met in New Delhi to agree on a common definition, they found that the general pattern had been set twenty years earlier. Stressing the value of mixing nationalities, races and beliefs, they defined a workcamp as 'A group of people living and learning together in simple conditions and working voluntarily, especially by manual labour, for the benefit of the community.'
The most salient difference between SCI and other pre-war workcamp sponsors was the extent of SCI's commitment to overhauling society. Civilists were not satisfied with improving social conditions; they sought to establish relations among men so new as to render useless and replace one of society's oldest institutions: the army. 'Civilism' was more extreme and civilists more militant than the ideologies and supporters of most other organizations sponsoring international workcamps. Furthermore, while organizations adhered to their particular constellation of coherent but general ideas --- e.g. 'outdoorism', 'studentism' or a given religion --- SCI was the only body in the idealistic stream to use workcamping for a well defined political purpose. Civilists did not have to be pacifists but volunteers in SCI camps agreed explicitly to demonstrate the feasibility of alternative service for conscientious objectors. As a result, SCI has over the years played an important, sometimes decisive, part in obtaining the recognition of conscientious objection and implementing conscientious objector civilian service provisions in Britain, West Germany, France and Italy.
In some cases this political activity posed hard choices. During the Algerian conflict SCI's French branch was sorely tempted to go beyond the issue of conscientious objection in France (which has only been legalized since the Evian Peace Agreements in 1962) and join the country's political left by taking a stand against the war itself. After much soul-searching it was decided that although civilists as individuals could take such a stand, the organisation would limit itself to the struggle against military service. Generally SCI, like the Red Cross, has made every attempt to remain neutral, while pursuing its own political objective. During the Spanish Civil War, for example, civilist relief services were offered to populations on both Republican and Fascist sides of the battle lines (General Franco refused).
SCI launched workcamping and, before the war, spread the concept in Europe and to the United States. Since the war it has been instrumental in initiating and aiding indigenous workcamp groups in West and North Africa and in Asia. It has pioneered new types of camps (which we shall return to in later chapters), such as East-West projects and the emergency action scheme. And, twenty-four years and eight months before the first Peace Corpsmen took up their posts, SCI sent to India the original team of intercontinental, long-term volunteers.
In 1934 the British Parliament prepared a Government of India Act advertised as ceding to the sub-continent a long-awaited and hard-won measure of autonomy. When it was passed a year later the bill was interwoven with 'so many restrictions and checks,' railed an exasperated Nehru, 'that both political and economic power continued to be concentrated in the hands of the British Government.'(26) Enraged by this travesty, which contained 'not even any seeds of self-growth', the future Prime Minister predicted darkly that no other course was left open to the patient Congress Party than to resume its temporarily suspended 'revolutionary action '.(27)
In Switzerland, Pierre Ceresole was alive to and concerned by India's struggle for independence, as the prelude to social 'self-growth'. And he was especially intrigued by the personality and non-violent methods of the nationalist leader, Mahatma Gandhi. Returning from the stalemate London Round Table Conference Of 1931, Gandhi spent several days with Pierre at the home of their mutual acquaintance, the writer Romain Rolland. Pierre and other civilists who met Gandhi were left with an extraordinary impression. 'I don't remember ever meeting anyone like him,' wrote Pierre afterwards. 'He is so simple, so solid ... we shall continually have to remember and discuss this visit from the Orient.'(28)
SCI remembered the 'visit from the Orient' three years later when, as the unsatisfactory Government of India Act was being drafted at Westminster, a violent earthquake followed by floods devastated northern Bihar Province in the Himalayan foot-hills. Many disasters --- natural and human --- ravaged the world in the 1930s without workcamps being able to help. But this catastrophe touched the civilists personally. Was not India the land where Gandhi was making the peaceful revolution SCI urged? And yet the idea of sending a team seemed foolhardy. Civilist projects had never been organized on another continent before, nor even thought of in a poor country. To be effective, volunteers would have to leave jobs and homes for many months, perhaps even years. The enterprise would draw heavily on the meagre resources of SCI and its friends.
The civilists hesitated. Then, at the insistence of Gandhi's English friend Charles Andrews, they sent Pierre on an exploratory trip to Bihar. 'The call to service is clear', wrote Pierre to the Mahatma, who was 'overjoyed' to learn of S C I's resolution to help.(29) Two months later, in June 1934, Pierre came home, a plan of action in mind, and set off around Europe on a whirlwind fund-raising campaign. That autumn, a team of four --- Paul Schenker, Pierre and two English Quakers --- was at work rebuilding flood and earthquake-stricken villages. In their three years of service, the volunteers withstood many of the hardships and met many of the dilemmas that are familiar now to long-term intercontinental volunteers working in Asia, Africa and Latin America. This was twenty years before 'development' and 'technical assistance' became household words, a quarter of a century before the Peace Corps was created.
The first problem was the very definition of the word 'volunteer'. In Europe or North America, the workcamper's sacrifice is clear. He is housed and fed simply, receives no salary, is lucky to get minimal pocket money and pays his own travelling expenses. From a European point of view, the Bihar team fell into this category. But the peasants, who were fed in exchange for their work, could hardly see themselves as volunteers. They were only too happy to receive regularly--- probably for the first time in their lives --- four mugs of rice a day. To them, subsistence seemed a good salary. Perhaps the more perceptive among them at least appreciated the difference between the civilist team's daily rations and the living standard normally observed by Europeans in India. And perhaps if they did they thought Pierre and his friends a bit odd.
In any event, the civilist group made every effort not to erect a barrier of what the peasants would consider luxurious and typically colonial comforts. In early 1935. Pierre wrote to his sister..
Unfortunately, the digestive troubles from which Frazer Hoyland [one of the English volunteers] has been suffering, and which seemed to be letting up since Joe [the other young Englishman] deployed his European cooking talents, have not disappeared ... we have all been affected. Experience shows that more European food would be reasonable another time. For this first project ... I had hoped we could get along like Charlie Andrews, living à l'indienne --- with a few extras. Everyone has shown great good will. We must do everything we can to remain within the limits of the very simple standard of our Indian friends. But gradually helping them to accept certain of our European habits would seem to me advantageous for them too.(30)
Work caused problems too. The civilists had come to toil with, not for, the Bihar villagers. They expected that the peasants themselves would turn out to work, and they did. But Pierre was perplexed by their lack of organization, and to his displeasure soon found himself taking on increased administrative and leadership responsibilities. 'The people here find me a hard taskmaster,' he complained to his sister, 'as people usually do in all our camps. It is true that I do not believe in ... the sentimental search for brotherhood. If we succeed in serving well here, brotherhood will be given us.... My preoccupation is to get this village built.'(31) While getting on with the project, which involved much paper-work and red-tape, Pierre made sure that he and the other Europeans did a good share of the physical labour. What an impact it made on villagers and passers-by, used to the refinements of colonial Europeans, to see the sahibs digging ditches and carrying earth!
The civilists' dealings with local zamindari (landlords) and British planters and officials were, like their relations with the peasants, far from unruffled. After an irritatingly unsuccessful interview with a planter from whom he was attempting to acquire land to resettle a village, Pierre wrote home:
Throughout recent weeks my 'diplomatic action' has been particularly necessary. I have chalked up with exemplary serenity kicks in the behind that it would be abnormal not to expect when one is working in the neighbourhood of English planters and officials. The kicks have conferred on me ... the keys to the kingdom in this country.(32)
British officials and wealthy Indians derided the SCI team for going native. The civilists had, it was true, tried to meet the villagers on as equal a footing as possible. In a deeper sense, they were inspired by certain Indian values, both directly (through Gandhi) and indirectly (through the Thoreau-Emerson school, which in its turn had drawn inspiration from Hinduism). But in no way did they lose perspective of or reject their European roots.
They withstood what modern volunteers call 'culture shock' superbly. Pierre, a man of Western science, explained the problem in a group letter written to his friends in Switzerland a year after the Bihar project began.
Although --- or because --- I am an engineer, calculating, dry and cold, I am with all my heart for serving rather than exploiting these peasants. That does not prevent me from being passionately attached to the heritage of prodigious works accomplished by our civilization. Let us help the Indians, but without losing sight of the best of our own background.... One day, in its proper place, immediately after moral values, all this scientific and technical splendour will be of great use .(33)
When after three years' service the volunteers returned home, they left behind: an ambitious but successfully completed project; bonds of friendship with Bihar peasants, nationalist Politicians and at least some British officials; and the seeds of further Indian workcamping. Students from Patna, who spent vacation time working alongside the civilists and peasants, carried back to their classrooms the idea of voluntary service, which had also struck a sympathetic chord among Congress policy-makers already planning post-Independence reconstruction.
At the closing celebration of the project, Rajendra Prasad, nationalist leader and later first president of free India, addressed an audience composed (in spite of heightening political tension) of several British Commissioners as well as Congress party members. Sri Prasad said: 'Although SCI's work was not accomplished on a vast scale, it has done us much good: it has brought us all closer together.'(34) With fortuitous symbolism, the first village completed by the civilist team happened to be called Shantipur ---'Village of Peace'.
Pierre returned for a brief break to a Europe caught up in preparations for war. Two days after his arrival in Switzerland, as he spent a quiet evening at home, the Government ordered the first practice blackout. Though taken by surprise, Pierre realized instinctively what the reaction of other pacifists would be. He refused to extinguish his lights and found himself owing a hastily imposed and heavy fine.