'WHEN whole nations are the armies,' thought William James, 'and the science of destruction vies in intellectual refinement with the sciences of production ... war becomes absurd and impossible from its own monstrosity.'(1) War was absurd and monstrous, but the movement born in answer to James's appeal for an international constructive service had fallen short, far short, of making it impossible. The courage that lies dormant during peacetime, and which international voluntary service had only tapped in a limited way in its first two decades, was once again galvanized in the struggle for mutual annihilation. In peacetime the mass of young people, even if they could have been reached by civilist propaganda, might not have volunteered for international constructive service. Now, stirred by the instinct of individual and national survival, they readily accepted mobilization for destruction.
The astonishing thing about the history of voluntary service during the Second World War is not that there were so many projects. It is that, in an apparently suicide-bent civilization where international and social values were crumbling, there were any projects at all. Yet there were. Although, for obvious reasons, few were international projects, the number of young people rendering wartime social service --- for the most part not against their will --- was surprisingly little less than the pre-war peak of labour service for the jobless. Courage was the ideal, if not always the behaviour, of nations at war. It also characterized the various and contradictory achievements of wartime voluntary service.
There was, first of all, the courage of those who did not turn cynical, who were willing to harvest and build knowing full well that their crops and houses might be destroyed the following month or the next day. In Britain, for instance, military conscription soon left agriculture seriously undermanned. Beginning in 1942 with the personal blessing of Field-Marshal Montgomery, Youth Service Volunteers (YSV) teams took hundreds, then thousands of sixteen to twenty-year-olds into the countryside to bring in harvests and do forestry work. YSV's objective was double: to help the nation in its struggle and to give young people the opportunity to devote holidays to positive work. Youth Service Volunteers contributed to feeding Britain and there is much truth in YSV's recent retrospective claim that 'every hand in the field meant a mouth fed'.(2) In 1949. in order to bring itself in line with the task of post-war reconciliation, the organization changed its name to Concordia, and a year later a similar association, called Concordia France, was created across the channel.
In occupied France, both Vichy and German zones, voluntary service did more than survive: it flourished as it never had before in that country. Even under the unitary pressures of a corporate political system imposed from abroad, the French genius for schism of ideas, personal feuding, and multiplication of structures remained sufficiently vigorous to lead to the creation of no less than five separate types of youth service. In all but one of these (CIMADE, described below), centrifugal tendencies quickly led to the constitution of internal oppositions. Nevertheless two principal political tendencies co-existed in wartime French youth services. The first three types described below were, in varying degrees, favourable to the New Nazi Order in Europe. The last two, in spite of necessary compromises, were hopeful that Nazism and its French supporters would soon collapse.
One of the main problems facing defeated France in 1940 was posed by the thousands of disillusioned army recruits who had been trained to defend French liberty. Finding their country occupied by an enemy which most of them hadn't had a chance to fight, they formed a potentially explosive threat to Fascist rule. Only weeks after the fall of France General de la Porte du Theuil opened the first chantiers de jeunesse in which this and succeeding waves of conscripts were set to work harvesting, road building, doing forestry and other sorts of work. The chantiers were used as indoctrination schools and many of the tens of thousands of Frenchmen conscripted into them still remember with vivid distaste being lectured by eminent collaborators. Their memories are often mixed, however, for working in the chantiers de jeunesse was a simple way of avoiding being dispatched to a worse fate --- draft labour in Germany. Furthermore, chopping trees in France at least gave one the feeling of aiding France and the chantiers helped sustain the nationalism that, as the conflict wore on, sent many recruits --- even whole camps --- into the resistance.
The second type of youth service, called the Compagnons de France, was created in the summer of 1940 by a national meeting of youth leaders. Evacuees to the Vichy (unoccupied) zone and other workless young men were only too glad to volunteer for construction and forestry work in return for food and a place to sleep. As Fascism's grip tightened on an increasingly effervescent France, many of the Compagnons' original sponsors found more useful and less compromising work, often in the maquis,(3) but the attitude of the organization towards Fascism remained passably ambiguous. Some volunteers were for, others against, many apathetic. But the fifty thousand or so that worked during the war felt they were serving France.
Most reminiscent of the Hitler Arbeitsdienst's strength-through-hate-through-joy were the elite Equipes du Maréchal (Marshal Pétain's Teams) created towards the end of the war. Avowedly, even rabidly, Fascist, the Equipes carried out such emergency tasks as clearing away rubble left by Allied bombing raids. Their servility to an old man nearing his dotage left post-war youth leaders perplexed because of their authentic exaltation. Like Hitler, le Maréchal had inspired a significant group of young people to serve their country constructively with a single-minded devotion lacking in pluralistic political systems.(4)
The fourth type of wartime French youth service was created by traditional youth movements (Catholic student, rural and working youth and Catholic, Protestant and secular Scouts) when the Compagnons de France drifted or were drawn closer to Fascism than their founder intended. Permanent centres and temporary camps were organized in the German-occupied North zone of France and, later, in the Vichy South. Contrary to the impression of many French workcampers and leaders today, and although they were under the wing of the Fascist-controlled Youth and Sports Ministry, the centres and camps had nothing in common with the chantiers de jeunesse or labour draft system that deported so many workers to Germany. The following description by a volunteer whose resistance credentials are unimpeachable indicates they were hardly carbon copies of the Arbeitsdienst, but drew inspiration from the romantic anti-industrial retour à la terre philosophy that gained popularity in France during the 1930s.
While the centres gave employment to many thousands of jobless youths (some, but far from all, delinquent) summer camps afforded students of different backgrounds an opportunity to do agricultural work. According to this volunteer., who took part in student camps in the summers of 1941 and 1942,
The projects were strictly voluntary in the sense that we only received board and lodging and that many students were eager to work in them. We were getting a free education from society and here was an opportunity to repay our debt. Also, the camps enabled us to escape from the depressing grey of wartime Paris, to rough it.
There were about a hundred and fifty men in each camp and discipline --- meted out by army officers --- was fairly harsh. Still, the Germans didn't interfere directly and no effort was made to indoctrinate us. In fact the spirit of the camps remained very French, perhaps even more French than the Germans realized. Although the students were generally neither chauvinistic nor militaristic, we made quite a show out of raising the tricolore and singing the Marseillaise every morning. So much so that we finally had to go about it more or less clandestinely.
Personally, I profited from the camps in two ways: they gave me a vocation for agriculture (I later studied agronomy), and they taught me all the student songs I know.(5)
A word must be said, finally, about CIMADE (Inter-Movement Committee for Evacuees), although it did not organize workcamps until after the war. Infused with a radical Protestantism not unlike Pierre Ceresole's, CIMADE initiated its activities in 1939 by assisting Republican refugees from Franco's Spain. During the war a group of volunteers that grew from twenty to a hundred provided relief (and often escape routes to Algeria and Switzerland) for Jewish, Communist and other internees. Since 1945 CIMADE volunteers have successively helped many groups ranging from interned collaborators and 'white' (e.g. Sudeten, Yugoslav and Polish) refugees from Eastern Europe to Algerians who opposed French Rule and were grouped in concentration camps during the war in their homeland. CIMADE's constant tolerance helped the spirit, if not the workcamps, of Service Civil International to survive Nazi occupation of France.
Elsewhere in war-torn Europe, volunteers were attending to equally pressing tasks. In 1944 the ZWM (Union of Fighting Youth) did agricultural work in the liberated territory of Poland related in particular to the application of land reform.
The 'work actions' which, as we shall see, contributed forcefully to rebuilding post-war Yugoslavia and uniting its disparate peoples, began spontaneously in the first weeks of the 1941 Montenegro uprising. In the summer of 1942 the first concerted Yugoslav work drive was organized in the Sanica valley of Bosnia. Two thousand young people, mostly girls, felled trees across the path of an advancing Panzer corps and, working 90 successive nights under the occupying army's noses and guns, harvested and transported 270 goods-van loads of food. An estimation made in 1958 by the People's Youth of Yugoslavia (now called the Union of Yugoslav Youth) placed the number of voluntary workdays contributed by partisan youth between the Sanica tour de force and the end of the war at thirty-five million. Grain was sown and reaped; wounded and foodstuffs were transported; railways, roads and bridges repaired; housing and schools built.(6)
The exploits of volunteers in Europe complemented and supported the feats of men on the fighting lines --- even in France, the pro-resistance workers felt they were indirectly helping the maquisards(7) and the pro-Fascists deemed they were contributing to Nazism's advance. In some cases, e.g. Yugoslavia, the distinction between volunteer and soldier was blurred. Many young partisans swapped shovels for guns as soon as a skirmish was in the offing. Apart from some of the French camps, all these programmes were part of the effort to defeat Fascism, and even the Equipes du Maréchal, Compagnons de France and chantiers de jeunesse played an unintentional role in forming the resistance movement.
Simultaneously, another group of men became volunteers for reasons opposite to those motivating the wartime volunteers mentioned. They refused to participate, directly or indirectly, in the preparation or prosecution of the war. 'War will exist,' President Kennedy once said, 'until the distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same prestige the warrior does today.'(8) The 'conshies' as they were derisively known in Britain, sought to hasten that 'distant day' by demonstrating that their rejection of war was not tantamount to a withdrawal from society. Conscientious objectors were conscripted and cannot, strictly speaking, be considered to have chosen national service of their own free will. But they were volunteers in the sense that they opted for civilian rather than military duty.(9)
The United States Supreme Court recognized that 'in the domain of conscience there is a moral power higher than the state'.(10) Some six thousand objectors failed to obtain conscientious objector status and served prison sentences. However, twice that number performed non-military duties in the Civilian Public Service, most in special forestry camps, others in social services under civilian direction. Adopted in 1947, the American Universal Military Training and Services Act offers conscientious objectors the opportunity 'to perform for a period equal [to military service] civilian work contributing to the maintenance of the national health, safety or interest. . . .'(11) Since then, some thirteen thousand have done civilian service under the sponsorship of the Quakers, Brethren, Mennonites and other 'peace churches', and increasingly in Europe and the developing countries.
In the weeks following the outbreak of the Second World War, delicate negotiations took place in London concerning the fate of British conscientious objectors.(12) It was agreed that, as in the First World War, many could undertake alternative service in the famed Friends Ambulance Unit. But there were more conscientious objectors than places in the Unit, and the Ministry of Labour asked SCI's British branch to organize forestry camps. Having ascertained that the conscientious objectors would plant rather than chop down trees --- the latter task would have contributed indirectly to the war --International Voluntary Service accepted and the men set to work with a will. In one month ten of them planted 350,000 saplings. At a time when chauvinism abounded, borders were closed and the composition of service projects was restricted to nationals of the country where they took place, it was notable that the main SCI/IVS team of British conscientious objectors was led by Willy Begert, a Swiss.
While their friends in Switzerland managed to organize a few, mostly agricultural camps, British civilists met non-military needs of their embattled country. They did relief work and demolished bombed and dangerously sagging houses in London's blitzed East End. In co-operation with the Cumberland Agriculture Committee, they also organized junior workcamps. Later, British civilists were invited to join other private agencies in the Council of British Societies for Relief Abroad to prepare for post-war reconstruction. Looking and feeling a little silly in the khaki uniforms the authorities insisted they wear, the first unit embarked on February 1944 on a relief odyssey that took civilists to Egypt, Palestine, Greece, Italy, Holland and, finally, Germany.
So close were the non-combatant civilists to the fighting that they sometimes moved faster than the allied armies. In retrospect it seems historic justice that they should have been among the first into Bilthoven, Holland, site of the Fellowship of Reconciliation Conference that conceived the SCI idea twenty-six years earlier. At the time, it caused some confusion. 'Thus it was that the first "soldier" [of the liberating Allied Armies] that Kees Boeke [a Dutch Quaker friend of Pierre Ceresole] caught sight of in Bilthoven ... turned out, at a close look, to have " International Voluntary Service for Peace" plastered all over his tunic...'(13)
Courage also characterized the group of pioneers who had sufficient faith to maintain and even expand the use of classical international voluntary workcamps in countries that were spared military operations. These camps neither contributed to the war effort nor expressed opposition to it.
In the United States, for example, Associated Junior Work Camps, Inc. expanded its activities in deprived southern areas. Back North, in Vermont, Camp William James was founded in 1940 by a group of student disciples of Dr Rosenstock-Huessy, by then in exile and teaching at Dartmouth College. The Camp was created in an attempt to demonstrate the feasibility of broadening the base of Civilian Conservation Corps recruitment which, until then, had been limited to youngsters of lower income brackets. 'It was found that an Ohio hill-billy could wield an axe with such dazzling aplomb,' recently recalled one volunteer, 'as to make a Harvard Magna cum laude alumnus feel humble and awed.'(14) Anticipating the spread of their idea to other countries, the students sent detachments to Mexico and Alaska, but military conscription brought the enterprise to an end in 1942.
At the same time, a number of religious bodies began camps on the Quaker pattern and formed the United Christian Youth Movement to co-ordinate their activities. The American Friends Service Committee, which had held its first camp in Mexico in the summer of 1939, undertook an ambitious wartime programme that brought more than two hundred young North American men and women to work in Vera Cruz, Morelos and other states of that country. These were probably the first American young people to work on an unpaid long-term basis in a developing country and were thus the earliest ancestors of the thousands of Peace Corpsmen who, two decades later and most of them unknowingly, would follow their example.(15)
In Scandinavia, the seeds of post-war action were sown before the conflict was over. Wolfgang Sonntag, a German refugee in Sweden, thought long and hard through the early war about what he called the 'breakdown of civilization' in his home country and felt keenly 'the urgency of humane education'.(16) He mulled over the problem with the tenacity that characterizes him (and that once led Nigerian workcampers to nickname him 'The Hawk') and finally hit upon 'transferring the basic idea of the Scandinavian folk high-school into modern conditions'.(17)
Wolfgang was a prime mover in creating, in 1942-3 and with Quaker support, Internationella Arbetslag (IAL-International Workcamp Association) in Sweden. IAL saw its immediate task as relief and set about establishing homes for concentration camp survivors and administering refugee camps. Still going strong today, the association nearly foundered on its first project, and was saved in the nick of time by ... Nazi Germany. At the critical point, a German publisher sent Wolfgang $500, payment for a translation he had done.
Across the Kattegat, in Denmark, the idea of a voluntary service was being bruited about before the Germans evacuated the country, and the Fredsvenners Hjaelparbejde (Peace Friends, Assistance Work) was created in 1944. This agency participated in relief work in Norway, Finland and Germany, among other countries, and soon changed its name to Mellemfolkeligt Samvirke (International Co-operation). Today, government-supported but autonomous, it sponsors the country's long-term international volunteers in the developing countries.
One of the Second World War's most novel contributions to modern warfare was its systematic assault on civilian lives and property. Inaugurated by the German attack on Coventry in 1941, indiscriminate concentration bombing of non-military agglomerations was soon perfected. The allies killed 50,000 Berliners in May 1944. Nine months later, the Dresden inferno left 200,000 dead. Ten million Soviet civilians, half that country's losses, and one fifth of the inhabitants of Poland as well as half a million German civilians died between 1939 and 1945. The population of Warsaw was reduced from 1,285,000 to 160,000; its bridges were entirely gone, its factories, hospitals. theatres and historic buildings 90 to 95 per cent obliterated, its residences, schools and tramlines 70 to 85 per cent destroyed. The volume of rubble covering the city's centre and adjoining districts amounted to nearly twenty million cubic metres.
In 1945, the past was black; the future did not look bright; it was a time of despair for many thinking young people. And among those who did not despair, the language of hope --- so abundant after the First World War --- was not fashionable. Presenting a 1948 pamphlet on voluntary service. a Unesco journalist found workcamping hard to put into words. 'It is,' he said, 'something that can't be told, but must rather be seen and heard and lived.'(18)
In Eastern and Central Europe, youth was mobilized en masse in huge work-teams. Brigades worked in Albania (where one team, battering its way through the bowels of a mountain, adopted the motto 'This tunnel is our soul') and Poland (where volunteers played a significant part in the reconstruction of Warsaw), and built roads, factories, schools, hospitals and houses in Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania.
Under the sponsorship of the World Federation of Democratic Youth (WFDY) created in London in 1945, ten thousand young peasants, workers. employees and intellectuals from thirty-five countries participated in international projects organized between the end of the war and 1948. 'We have worked with inexperienced volunteers.' said one WFDY leader, 'at times even illiterates. For them, the past has offered no hope of education, no possibility of interesting work --- only a future doomed to poverty.' Through the international brigades the horizons of local and foreign volunteers alike broadened and many could boast of 'having come to know the spirit of other countries we have helped to build up, and to have formed friendships with people of all nations.'(19)
Among the most outstanding feats of volunteers in the Eastern countries were those of Yugoslav young people and the international teams that joined them in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
The heaviest burden of national reconstruction fell on the shoulders of youth.... Excluding numerous small-scale endeavours. . . in the period from 1946 to the beginning of 1953 more than seventy large projects were built, with the participation of 6,370 work brigades, including an approximate 1,200,000 young people.(20)
The most striking single achievement of the volunteers was the Belgrade-Zagreb motorway. In three summers, shifts totalling 320,000 young people --- including a few hundred foreigners --- spanned the 380 kilometres separating the once rival capitals of Serbia and Croatia with a ribbon of concrete named, with justified pretention, the Brotherhood and Unity Highway.
The Yugoslav volunteers' spirit of self-sacrifice reached on occasion proportions usually unknown in peacetime. Witness the case of a brigade building a railway when severe early winter weather threatened the freshly poured reinforced concrete of a viaduct. The volunteers stripped the blankets from their beds and covered their handiwork to prevent it from being destroyed by frost.
Elsewhere in Eastern Europe, youth's participation in reconstruction was equally massive, and took a variety of forms. In Poland, young people were encouraged to serve voluntary overtime at the normal jobs in the Youth Work Competitions launched by the Union of Fighting Youth (ZWM) at Lodz in 1945.(21) In the line of national volunteer brigades with short-term economic objectives, ZWM organized campaigns in cities, towns and villages.
In 1948, to rationalize voluntary service and enable young people to serve as summer reinforcements in factories and on construction sites, Sluzba Polsce (SP-Service to Poland) was created. Although no more than ten to twenty per cent of young people in a given school or enterprise belonged to SP, its influence was widespread among seventeen- to twenty-year-olds. Service in it was voluntary in theory and practice, but few young men did not spend a month in SP's brigades at one time or another between 1948 and the organization's dissolution in 1955-6.
'There was admittedly much pressure to volunteer,' recently reminisced one ex-brigadier.
Our headmaster made a point of urging us older boys to do our patriotic duty. Yet not all went, and the great majority who did, went quite willingly. It was definitely 'the thing to do' --- and a jolly good lark to boot!(22)
By 1955, several hundred thousand SP volunteers had contributed more than sixty million work-days to rebuild Poland.(23)
Confronted by these figures and tales of Eastern brigades' post-war feats, many Westerners questioned to what extent such mass youth mobilization was truly voluntary. The idealistic stream of workcamping's admiration for the short-term material impact of the economic stream was mixed with suspicion of its long-term motives. 'Were not the youth brigades just another link in the transmission belt by which Party and State sought to enlist unwilling or, at best, indifferent energies in achieving their narrow goals?' This question was often asked by unbelieving Westerners, used to the symbolic role of workcamping in most liberal-democratic countries. Put crudely, and irrespective of ideological content, what difference was there between the post-war Eastern brigades and Hitler's obligatory Arbeitsdienst?
Given the present-day need to mobilize large numbers of young people in the developing countries, these questions are of more than academic interest. Participation in the Eastern work drives was doubtless often the result of social pressure. In Yugoslav university dormitories of the period, for instance, lists of students were posted and the names crossed off, one by one, as the residents signed up for the following summer's brigades. Even if one is opposed to conformity of any kind, however, one must admit that conformity exists everywhere. It is particularly rampant among adolescents teetering along the tightrope separating childhood and adulthood.
Why not, then, orient conformism in a constructive sense? One may say that, on the whole, no more effort was spent to encourage young Easterners to participate in post-war work drives than, in a different setting and time, to encourage young Englishmen to waste their money on constantly changing fashions. In Yugoslavia for one, there were consistently more candidates than places in the brigades. And drive organizers needed willing, not coerced workers. Few if any recalcitrant young people filtered through into the teams.
Another demonstration of the voluntary nature of the mass brigades is the almost universal pride in personal and collective achievement with which ex-volunteers remember their service. Driving along the Brotherhood-Unity one day in 1960, the author was surprised when, in the countryside with not a house or person in sight, his Yugoslav companion stopped the car. Without a word, the young man --- who is decidedly apolitical in outlook and has since emigrated to France --- stepped out, thrust his hands into his pockets and strode up and down a twenty-yard stretch of asphalt for a few moments like a sea-captain on his bridge. 'This is our part of the road,' said the Yugoslav, climbing sheepishly back into the car, 'the part my brigade built in 1950. I can't help stopping here every time I'm in this part of the country.'
Finally, it can be pointed out that one of the most vivid memories sticking in the minds of Westerners who observed or participated in the Eastern work drives is the enthusiasm of the local young people. And enthusiasm is as difficult to simulate as apathy is to hide. The main difference between the way a young person volunteered for Western workcamps and Eastern brigades in the post-war era, was that he had to opt into the former and out of the latter. In neither region were work projects obligatory.
The Eastern brigades --- Yugoslav programme excepted --- all but petered out by 1950. Still, in comparison Western workcamping of this period ran a distant quantitative second. One of the main reasons for this was reluctance of governments to intervene substantially in favour of mass mobilization of youth.
The depression and unemployment crises over, the liberal tradition of Britain, the USA and Scandinavia demanded that moral and financial responsibility for youth activities outside the school be returned to private agencies. In Germany, Italy and France, where recent experience with native Fascism had left memories as fresh as they were unpleasant, youth leaders were far from eager for State interference in their affairs. Everywhere, the spectre of young Germans learning to hate joyfully in the Nazi Arbeitsdienst hovered in the minds of those seeking to enlist youth in the immense task of reconstruction.
Youth organizations contributing to relief and reconstruction sought and often got government aid. But they, and many civil servants as well, feared that direct or even indirect State intervention of any magnitude could have disastrous results. Faced with the government absenteeism many of them had urged, they found responsibility for youth service placed squarely on their insufficient shoulders. The result in the decade following the war was the return of workcamping's idealistic stream to a largely symbolic role. It may often have been symbolic at the right times and in the right place. It was, nonetheless, symbolic.
In this period, there were three overlapping but discernible phases in the evolution of Western workcamping: a spontaneous flurry of action in the months following the war's end; a rapidly increasing contribution of international teams, mostly from the USA and Britain; and, in the favourable climate thus created, a revival of pre-war workcamp groups growing into a veritable proliferation of new bodies.
France was a major theatre of the flurry of post-war Western workcamping. In the first two years of post-Liberation confusion, French voluntary service organizers felt they could contribute most to helping solve one social and two material problems: sponging up at least some of the widespread unemployment by putting the jobless to work clearing rubble and rebuilding. Side by side with volunteers whose service represented a sacrifice, several tens of thousands of men were put to work, perhaps most only for a few days, all only too glad to be fed and housed in return for their labour.
These camps were organized by several distinct bodies which, in spite of ideological disagreements, banded together in the Comité de Co-ordination des Services civiques (Co-ordinating Committee of Civilian Services). This experiment, probably a unique moment of unity in the history of French youth organizations, was short-lived. By 1947, intensifying internal political tensions and the cold war's incipient frosts led to the Comité de Co-ordination's disintegration.(24)
In other countries, even before the Third Reich surrendered, groups were planning or actually organizing voluntary service projects. At first, these were aimed primarily at providing immediate relief to the devastated continent; soon, workcamps began to meet the omnipresent need for clearing away and reconstruction. After the first flurry of workcamping subsided, teams from America, Britain and elsewhere replaced the Continent's unemployed on work-sites.
With Sweden and Denmark, America (where workcamping had expanded during the war) was an early provider of volunteers for post-war work in Europe. What are known as 'the historical peace churches'--- Brethren, Mennonites and Quakers--- formed the core of American overseas workcamp sponsors in the months following the end of the war. Brethren volunteers, mostly from farming areas, were among the Heifer Project contingents who accompanied livestock across the Atlantic to help revitalize Europe's herds. By 1947. the American Friends Service Committee was organizing twelve European workcamps a year and exchanging numerous campers with other organizations. In 1949 the first European volunteers came to work in Quaker-sponsored camps in the USA and Mexico.(25)
The American Unitarian Universalist Committee was another important source of transatlantic volunteers, as were the Congregationalist Service Committee and the Specialized Ministries Department of the United Church of Christ. A crucial step forward in Protestant workcamping was taken in 1947 by an Oslo conference of the World Council of Churches' Youth Department. The Council decided to encourage and help its national affiliates sponsor international projects, concentrating first on Germany.
While SCI and Youth Service Volunteers continued agricultural aid camps at home, joined by the National Union of Students, British volunteers poured across the channel. Indeed, SCI's British branch spearheaded the revival on the Continent. Working successively in Belgium, Italy, Czechoslovakia, Holland, Britain, France, Greece, Austria and Germany, SCI teams cleared away rubble, built bridges, dikes, hospitals, laid out sports-grounds, redecorated children's homes, and aided self-help workers' co-operative housing schemes known as Castor (Beaver) projects.
Occasionally, the job at hand was more dangerous than volunteers liked to let on. Transporting material for house repairs over what, a few months before, had been the scene of a savage battle, one team in Italy took particular precautions.
We had to have a look at the bridges --- the German army had blown up practically every one of them, and the substitutes were adequate for ox-carts but not too good for loaded lorries. The German soldiers were said to have mined the banks near them, and I must admit I felt pretty uncomfortable scrambling about in streambeds to have a look at the beams and abutments.(26)
Youth hostellers were not idle in this period either, and the Youth Hostels Association of England and Wales played a key role in revitalizing intra-movement workcamping. In the summer of 1946, two hundred boys and two hundred girls paid their way from Britain to Norway (to continue work on the Mjølfjell Hostel described in Chapter 2), France, Holland, Italy and Luxembourg. In one French project young people of ten nationalities (including some Algerians) built a refugee home in the Pyrenees that would later be converted into a hostel. It was an eloquent demonstration that post-war workcamps were exempt from the war-born hates that hindered post-war rapprochement. 'Remarkably enough for the time,' writes Oliver Coburn in his brief history of hostel workcamping, 'the building operations were directed by one of the three Germans present, all of whom had been prisoners of war until recently.'(27)
In Holland, only seven out of seventy youth hostels could re-open after the war. In 1946 an international work party rebuilt a badly damaged hostel at Arnhem. Commandeered as a German observation post, it had been shelled by British paratroops in 1944. Among the volunteers was a British veteran of the unit responsible for the hostel's destruction. He had signed up specially for the Arnhem camp to say to the Dutch Youth Hostel movement: 'In 1944 we destroyed your hostel.... Now we have come back to restore it.'(28)
From this description of post-war international projects in Western Europe, it might be thought that one had only to turn the corner of a bombed-out street in any city or town to discover a crew of young people eagerly toiling to remove cartloads of jumbled debris and lay neat rows of bricks, while babbling to one another in all languages of the Continent. This image would not be entirely true. In no year did the total number of workcampers in the West reach more than about twenty-five thousand, and not all camps had spectacular results, in terms either of houses built or friendships made.
On the other hand, for the young people who took part in them, workcamps were an irreplaceable experience. They dented the formidable task of reconstruction and breached the equally formidable barriers of national prejudice in a way accessible through no other form of youth exchange. When they went home, volunteers talked about workcamping. When they came back the next year they brought their friends with them, and the idea of workcamping snowballed. No matter how rapidly they expanded, organizations sponsoring workcamps were hard put to keep pace with the demand of prospective volunteers. The stimulus from Britain and America led to the creation of continental branches of bilateral or international organizations, and to a veritable proliferation of new organizations each of which gave workcamping its own particular twist.
SCI, for one, did more than return to its pre-war level of activity. To ensure that confusion would not overtake rapid expansion, representatives of all active European SCI groups held the organization's first international assembly. A year later, they designated an International Secretary.
The Secretary was Willy Begert, a Swiss printer who had become a civilist in 1937 when --- with an SCI team of about two dozen volunteers --- he went to aid Spanish Civil War victims. From Spain, Willy went to England where, prevented from returning to Switzerland by the outbreak of the war, he led a conscientious objector camp. Willy served as SCI's International Secretary, carrying an increasing load of administration but always glad to get his hands on a shovel, until 1951. Then he was named the first permanent secretary of Unesco's Co-ordination Committee for International Voluntary Workcamps which grouped the major sponsoring organizations. He later left the Co-ordination Committee to become a United Nations community development expert in Western Cameroons. In March 1962, it seemed as if the mountain was coming to Moses when the Co-ordination Committee's 13th World Conference was held at N'Kpwang, near Yaoundé, capital of the recently united Cameroun Republic.
While SCI was picking up the threads of 'civilism' and weaving a new pattern that would soon include strands from North Africa and Asia, American-sponsored workcamping in Europe was having repercussions on both sides of the Atlantic. In the United States, veteran volunteers who had been to camps in Europe were looked on with awe by neophytes and became the core around which, to a large extent, post-war American workcamping was structured. Soon. a Commission on Youth Service Projects (today grouping more than thirty organizations) was formed to avoid duplication among, and provide common publicity for, the many bodies active in the burgeoning American workcamp movement.
Abroad, American-organized projects raised an enthusiastic response from European participants. Mennonite and Brethren service programmes found they could count on local youngsters, mostly in the Germanic countries, to turn out in large numbers for --- and lead --- their camps. American Quaker volunteers gave impetus to national workcamping everywhere they went, leading in particular to the creation in 1947 of the Finnish Kansainvälinen Vapaaehtoinen Tyoleirijarjesto (International Workcamp Association) --- better known outside Finland, for obvious reasons, as KVT.
In 1948 a group of French organizations of different orientations created a new joint body, Jeunesse et Reconstruction (J&R---Youth and Reconstruction). Unlike the defunct Comité de Co-ordination, J&R was not designed to co-ordinate separate workcamp programmes undertaken by each member body, but to provide all of them with a single common workcamp agency.
The same year saw the creation, in Germany, of Internationale Jugendgemeinschaftsdienste (IJGD-International Youth Social Service). The aims of IJGD were a combination of those of SCI, of the 'working folk high schools' organized before the war by Professor E. Rosenstock-Huessy, and of the pre-war Weimar camps. Also in Germany, but a year earlier, a group sympathetic to pacifism but wishing to base workcamping on a specifically religious motivation (which SCI projects were not) founded the Nothelfergemeinschaft der Freunde (Friends Association for Helping the Needy). Similar (but much smaller) bodies such as Friendship Home in Bückeburg, Germany, Agni Orjansgarden in Sweden and the Protestant Agape work and study centre high in the Italian Alps, began to spring up around the Continent.
In Britain, the Friends Service Council established a special committee to deal with workcamps and in 1948 the various British organizations involved in voluntary youth service helped form a joint information centre, the Central Bureau for Educational Visits and Exchanges. In the German Federal Republic, more new bodies had commenced workcamp programmes, including one devoted to furthering --- as its name indicates --- Christian Jewish co-operation. A structure for interorganizational collaboration was created in 195o under the title of Arbeitskreis Internationaler Gemeinschaftsdienste.
By the late 1940s a climate favourable to workcamping had been created. At the time it did not seem unreasonable to hope that, although expanding, workcamping would remain attached to the principles and even the organization that had carried it forward in the quarter of a century since the Bilthoven conference. Such was not to be the case. In the late forties and early fifties the propitious climate generated in Western Europe something of the order of thirty-five new workcamp sponsoring agencies, each with its own ideological or methodological nuance that prevented it from merging with an already existing body. Whence the need for co-ordination.
At the turn of the decade, co-ordination was an overriding preoccupation of Western European and North American workcamp organizers. Many organizers expected that by ordering the growth of existing workcamp associations they could check the proliferation of new bodies. A few, doubtless, sought to draw any fresh initiatives within the realm of their own activities. The aim of most of them was not, however, to build separate empires but to prevent anarchy through united action.
In the early 1950s they were only partially successful. Cooperative publicity did contribute mightily to rationalizing --and increasing --- recruitment. Far from slowing proliferation, however, better publicity rapidly spread the workcamp idea and accelerated the rate at which new sponsoring bodies appeared in Western Europe.
In the summer of 1951 a group of young Germans went south to work with peasants in the Austrian Tyrol. Two years later, the group obtained official recognition as Aufbauwerk der Jugend (AdJ---Youth Construction Work). After a first project in 1952, workcamping also became an important activity of the Christian Movement for Peace (CMP), which had been founded by a French army officer following the First World War. CMP sought to promote ecumenical exchange between Protestants and Catholics and between them and non-Christians such as the Moslems. CMP soon had branches organizing workcamps in seven countries of Western Europe and was instrumental in launching workcamps in Morocco.(29)
A bright chapter in the story of Christian-inspired voluntary service concerns the International Association of Builder Companions, usually known by its Flemish initials IBO. In 1953, some Belgian, Dutch and German Catholics compared the distress of refugees and other homeless people with the evolution of Church thinking on the layman's role in the modern world and decided that it 'is not enough to sacrifice a certain percentage of one's wealth to charity.(30) Wishing to furnish 'a personal witness and to sacrifice such recognized values as wages and profits,'(31) the group set to work that summer in twelve camps in Germany to rehouse refugees.
Word about the first project struck a responsive chord among young European Catholics, many of whom were impatient with what they considered to be clerical reticence on social questions. By the late 1950s busy, white-clad teams of Companions were a familiar sight in refugee camps, slums and shanty-towns from Holland to Italy. Students, skilled workers, teachers and priests, obeying both terms of the ora et labora injunction, built orphanages and youth clubs, schools and churches, sometimes entire villages. In 1960 some of the bolder and more experienced Companions took the teachings of Pope John XXIII and the workcamp idea to far-flung countries and territories where the Dutch and Belgian churches were present --- South Africa, Congo (Kinshasa), New Guinea, Rwanda and even the tiny Dutch-speaking enclave in South America, Surinam. Celebrating its tenth anniversary three years later, IBO could point to concrete results: branches in seven European and two developing countries. 38,000 volunteers, 4,500 dwellings and 420 public buildings.
Among the many other programmes initiated in the early 1950s. three more examples will suffice to show the diversity of inspiration that characterized Western European workcamping. Young British supporters of the United Nations, penetrated by the gloom of uncertainty that shrouded the world body's future, cast about for a practical way to manifest
Floods that devastated Holland in 1953 gave them their chance. At the urging of Pierre Ceresole's friend, Scan Inebnit, a professor at Leeds University, and sponsored by the UN Association of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (UNA), workcampers helped inundated Dutch villagers dig out and repair flood damage.
These teams and those sent to Holland at the same time by SCI gave impetus to workcamping among Dutch students, which in turn gave birth in 1959 to Stichting Internationale Werkkampen (SIW---International Workcamps Foundation). In the years that followed, UNA teams aided almost one-and-a-half thousand refugee families in Austria to build homes, held numerous camps with immigrants in Britain and saw an assistance project for Albanian refugees in Greece through from start to finish. The success of these projects led UNA to send volunteers to the developing countries, a programme described in Chapter 9.
In 1951, the generation of Spaniards born just before and during the Civil War was reaching maturity. Seeking to bridge the gulf that separated them from workers of their own age and relatively free of the prejudice and memories of their elders, a group of university students spent the summer labouring in the mines of Almeria. The next year, they created the Servicio Universitario del Trabajo (SUT---University Work Service) in order to
offer student youth an instrument of human and social education, to encourage relationships between students and workers. and to [enable students] to become conscious of the reality of the contemporary world and of its social, economic, human and cultural problems.(32)
At the outset, the SUT's voluntary workcamps were seen primarily as a means of completing students' academic training. Gradually, they also became a method of improving the workers' education and, alongside the workcamps (which attracted 10,582 volunteers in the following fourteen years), SUT launched a series of social welfare and fundamental education campaigns.
A final few words must be said about le Tonton. Le Tonton --- familiar French for 'Uncle' --- as he is known to thousands of young people, is Charles Chareille, a bootmaker, who led a resistance réseau in his native province of Creuse in central France. After the war, le Tonton took part in several SCI camps and appreciated the value of workcamping for students and other young people who have long holidays. What of the young workers and apprentice craftsmen, he wondered? Why not found a special workcamp open to all but designed particularly as an international crossroads for young craftsmen and workers? There would be hard labour, but time, too, for leisure activities.(33)
The province of Creuse abounds in hills, streams and mills, one of which the maquisard Chareille had used as a hideout. Near this mill, in the summer of 1952, seventeen French apprentices held the first workcamp of what quickly became known as Le Moulin des Apprentis --- the Apprentices' Mill. Now, there are seventeen Moulins des Apprentis in France, Germany, Yugoslavia and as far away from their native Creuse as N'Kpwang, Cameroun.