A CHAPTER ABOUT CHAPLAINS
Whilst our narrative pauses for a while beside the Vaal which served
as a boundary between the two Republics, it may be well to devote one
chapter to a further description of the work of the chaplains with
whom in those two Republics I was brought into more or less close
official relationship. Concerning the chaplains of other Churches
whose work I witnessed, it does not behove me to speak in detail; I
can but sum up my estimate of their worth by saying concerning each,
what was said concerning a certain Old Testament servant of
Jehovah:--"He was a faithful man and feared God above many."
Of Wesleyan acting-chaplains, devoting their whole time to work among
the troops, and for the most part accompanying them from place to
place, there were eight; and to the labours of three of them--the
Welsh, the Australian and the Canadian--reference has already been
made. A fourth, the Rev. Owen Spencer Watkins, represented the
Wesleyan Church in the Omdurman Campaign and was officially present at
the memorial service for General Gordon; but in this campaign he was
unfortunately shut up in Ladysmith, so that we never met. His story
however has been separately told in "Chaplains at the Front." There
remain three whom I repeatedly saw, and who reported to me from time
to time the progress of their work--viz. the Revs. M. F. Crewdson, T.
H. Wainman, and W. C. Burgess, each of whom in few words it will now
be my privilege to introduce.
[Sidenote: _A Chaplain who found the Base became the Front._]
Mr Crewdson, who had for some years been my colleague in England, at
the commencement of the war was compelled to leave Johannesburg, and
became a refugee minister at the Cape, where on my arrival he was one
of the first to welcome me. Possessed of brilliant preaching abilities
and uncontrollably active, a life of semi-indolence soon became to him
unendurable; and presently his offer was accepted of service with the
troops, but instead of being sent as he desired into the thickest of
the fray, he found himself detailed for hospital and other homely
duties, at De-Aar Nauwpoort and Norval's Pont. Here for over twelve
months he rendered admirable, though to him monotonous, service; when,
lo, suddenly the Boers doubled back upon their pursuers, and attempted
not unsuccessfully though unfruitfully, a second invasion of Cape
Colony. The base became the front, and this vast region of hospitals
and supply depots became the scene of very active operations indeed,
in which the Guards' Brigade, now recalled from Koomati Poort, took a
prominent part. Mr Crewdson found himself at last not where wounds are
healed merely, but where wounds are made, and for the moment, being
intensely pro-British, found in that fact a kind of grim content.
[Sidenote: _Pathetic scenes in Hospital._]
Few chaplains in the course of this campaign have had so extensive an
experience in hospital work as Mr Crewdson, and in the course of his
correspondence he relates many pathetic incidents that came under his
own personal observation. At De-Aar he found a lance-corporal with a
fractured jaw and some twenty other slight or serious wounds, all
caused by fragments of a single shell. "I was one of seven," he said,
"entrenched in a little sangar on a hill. Hundreds of Boers and Blacks
came up against us. One of the seven disappeared, four others were
killed; so to my one surviving comrade I said, 'Look here, corporal,
we'll stick this out till one of us is wounded then the other must
look after him.'" Presently that unlucky shell made a victim of this
plucky fellow; but a hero it could not make him. He was that already.
A company of the West Yorkshire Mounted Infantry only twenty strong
had sustained, in storming a kopje, no less than ten casualties. The
lieutenant, shot through the base of the skull, lay in that hospital
in utterly helpless, if not hopeless, collapse; and near to him was
his sergeant who, while bandaging the wounds of a comrade, was shot
through the bridge of the nose, and his eye so damaged it had to be
removed; whilst yet another of this group, shot through the shoulder,
with characteristic cheerfulness said, "Oh, it's nothing, sir. I'll be
at it again in a week." Some of them would say that, brave fellows, if
their heads were blown off--or would try to!
Writing from Colesberg at a somewhat later date Mr Crewdson informed
me that going the round of hospitals,--where he met representatives
from Ceylon, Australia, Canada, India, New Zealand, South Africa and
the United Kingdom,--had filled much of his time during the previous
fortnight. "I cannot tell the sweet brave things I have heard from
tongues that had almost lost their power to speak. One was a Canadian
lad, who had passed through his course as a student for the ministry,
and being refused as a chaplain had volunteered as a trooper, and when
the chaplain tenderly asked, 'How are you, old man?' he received in a
kind of gasp this reply: 'Trusting Jesus!' Another, now nearly
convalescent, said, 'I have been a Christian for twenty years, but the
weeks spent in hospital have taught me more of God, and of the wonders
of His grace, than years of health.' His eyes glistened and then
dimmed as with faltering voice he added, 'I want to say, that it was
good for me that I was afflicted.'"
[Sidenote: _A battlefield scene no less pathetic._]
In the course of these incessant hospital rounds Mr Crewdson found an
Australian whose leg had been shattered by an explosive bullet and who
told him this strange tale. When thus wounded he fell between two
rocks and found himself unable to move, but while lying there a young
well-dressed Boer discovered him, and with a perfect English accent
said, "Are you much hurt, old fellow?" The Australian, suspecting
treachery, turned white and trembled in spite of the stranger's kindly
tone.
"Oh, don't be afraid of me, you are hurt enough already. Shall I get
you some water?" was the instant Boer rejoinder to the Australian's
signs of suspicion. The water was soon produced; and next there came
forth from the pocket of that young Boer a couple of peaches, which
were offered to the sufferer, and thankfully accepted.
"You must be faint with this fierce sun beating on you," said this
strange foeman; and thereupon he sat upon a rock for over an hour in
such a position that his shadow sheltered the wounded man, and surely,
as in Peter's story, that shadow must have had grace and healing in
it. Ultimately an ambulance arrived, and this chivalrous Transvaaler
crowned the helpfulness of that eventful hour by tenderly lifting the
crippled Australian on to a stretcher, with an expression of hope that
he would soon be well again.
At the close of this unnatural conflict it is our best consolation to
be divinely assured that the brotherliness which thus presented
peaches to a wounded foe will ultimately triumph over the bitterness
which winged the explosive bullet that well-nigh killed him.
[Sidenote: _Look on this picture--and on that._]
While it is undeniable that cases of chivalrous courtesy such as this
occurred repeatedly in the course of the campaign, it is equally
undeniable that the Boers sometimes deliberately set aside all the
usages of civilized war. Mr Crewdson, for instance, says that after
the Slingersfontein fight he met at least a dozen men who declared
that the Boers drove up the hill in front of them hundreds of armed
Kaffirs, and then themselves crept up on hands and knees under cover
of this living moving wall. Such strategy is exceedingly slim; but
they who make use of semi-savages must themselves for the time being
be accounted near akin to them. One word from the Queen would have
sufficed to let loose on the Boers the slaughterous fury of almost all
native South Africa, but had that word been spoken there could have
been found no forgiveness for it in this life or in the life to come.
Yet Slingersfontein was not the only sad instance of this sort, for
Sir Redvers Buller in his official report concerning Vaalkrantz
solemnly declares that then also there were armed Kaffirs with the
Boer forces, and that there also the Red flag was abominably abused,
for he himself and his Staff saw portions of artillery conveyed by the
Boers to a given position in an ambulance flying the Geneva flag. The
loss of honour is ever out of all proportion to the help such
treachery affords.
[Sidenote: _A third class Chaplain who proved a first-rate Chaplain._]
It was at Waterval Boven I first met my assistant-chaplain, the Rev.
T. H. Wainman, and found him all that eulogising reports had
proclaimed him to be. Seventeen years ago he accompanied the
Bechuanaland Expedition under Sir Charles Warren, and then acquitted
himself so worthily that the Wesleyan Army and Navy Committee at once
turned to him in this new hour of need, resting assured that in him
they had a workman that maketh not ashamed. At the time he received
the cable calling him to this task he was a refugee minister from
Johannesburg, residing for a while near Durban. There he left his
family and at once hurried to report himself in Chieveley Camp, where
a singular incident befell him.
[Sidenote: _Running in the wrong man._]
A few hours before his arrival an official notice was issued that a
Boer spy in khaki was known to be lurking in the camp, and all
concerned were requested to keep a sharp look-out with a view to
speedy arrest. Mr Wainman's appearance singularly tallied with the
published portraiture of the aforesaid spy, and all the more because
after his long journey he by no means appeared parson-like. He was
just then as rough looking as any prowling Boer might be supposed to
be. When, therefore, he was challenged by the sentinel as he
approached the camp, and to the sentinel's surprise gave the right
password, he was nevertheless told that he must consider himself a
prisoner, and was accordingly marched off to the guard-room for safe
keeping and further enquiry. It was a strange commencement for his new
chaplaincy. More than one of our chaplains has been taken prisoner by
the Boers, but he alone could claim the distinction of being made a
prisoner of war, even for an hour, by his own people, till a yet more
painful experience of the same type befell Mr Burgess; nor did
ill-fortune fail to follow him for some time to come. He was attached
to a battalion where chaplains were by no means beloved for their own
sake; and though one of the most winsome of men, he was made to feel
in many ways that his presence was unwelcome.
[Sidenote: _A Wainman who was a real waggoner._]
Presently, however, there came an opportunity which he so skilfully
used as to become the hero of the hour, and in the end one of the most
popular men in the whole Brigade. When on the trek one of the
transport waggons stuck fast hopelessly in an ugly drift, and no
amount of whip-leather or lung-power sufficed to move it. One waggon
thus made a fixture blocks the whole cavalcade, and is, therefore, a
most serious obstruction. But Mr Wainman had not become an old
colonist without learning a few things characteristic of colonial
life, including the handling of an ox team. He therefore volunteered
to end the deadlock, and in sheer desperation the Padre's offer was,
however dubiously, accepted. So off came his tunic; this small thing
was straightened, that small thing cleared out of the way, then next
he cleared his throat, and instead of hurling at those staggering oxen
English oaths or Kaffir curses, spoke to them in tones soothing and
familiar as their own mother tongue. Some one at last had appeared
upon the scene that understood them, or that they could understand.
Then followed a long pull, a strong pull, a pull altogether, and lo as
by magic the impossible came to pass. The waggon was out of the drift!
"Brave padre," everybody cried. His name means "waggoner," and a right
good waggoner he that day proved to be. This skilful compliance with
one of the requirements of the Mosaic laws helped him immensely in the
preaching of the Gospel. He became all the more powerful as a minister
because so popular as a man. In many ways his mature local knowledge
enabled him to become so exceptionally useful that he received
promotion from a fourth to a third class acting chaplaincy, and the
very officers who at first deemed his presence an infliction combined
to present him with a handsome cigarette case in token of uttermost
goodwill. You can't tell what even a chaplain is capable of till you
give him a chance.
[Sidenote: _Three bedfellows in a barn._]
When Mr Wainman first reached his appointed quarters, the wounded were
being brought in by hundreds from the Colenso fight; later on he
climbed to the summit of Spion Kop, "The Spying Mountain," to search
for the wounded, and to bury the dead that fell victims to the fatal
mischance that having captured, then surrendered that ever famous
hill; and at night he slept in a barn with a Catholic priest lying on
one side of him and an Anglican chaplain on the other--a delightful
forecasting that of the time when the leopard shall lie down with the
kid, the calf and the young lion and the fatling together, and a
little child shall lead them. The Christian Catholicity to which this
campaign has given rise is one of its redeeming features.
While the Rev. Owen Spencer Watkins, the Wesleyan chaplain from Crete
remained shut up in Ladysmith, Mr Wainman remained with the relieving
force, ultimately accompanied General Buller into the Transvaal, where
I frequently met him, and finally, on the approaching conclusion of
the war, resumed charge, like Mr Crewdson, of his civilian church in
Johannesburg. No man learns to be a soldier by merely watching the
troops march past at a royal review; neither did Mr Wainman acquire
his rare gifts for such rough yet heroic service while sitting in an
easy chair. He endured hardness, as every man must who would serve his
generation well according to the will of God.
[Sidenote: _A fourth-class Chaplain that was also a first-rate
Chaplain._]
The Rev. W. C. Burgess was a refugee minister from Lindley, in the
Orange River Colony, and like Mr Wainman, was early chosen for service
among the troops, joining General Gatacre's force just after the
lamentable disaster at Stormberg. He was attached to the "Derbys," and
found among them a goodly number of godly men, as in all the
battalions and batteries that constituted that unfortunate column.
Some of these were Christian witnesses of long standing, including no
less than five Wesleyan lay preachers, and some were newly-won
converts. Hence, at the close of Mr Burgess's very first voluntary
service, one khaki man said to him, "I gave my heart to the Lord last
Sunday on the line of march before we met the enemy"; while many more,
though not perhaps walking in the clear shining of the light of God's
countenance, yet spoke freely of their religious upbringing and
relationships. It was possibly one such who, at the close of a little
week-night service, where nearly all the men were drenched with recent
rain, suggested the singing of "Love divine, all loves excelling." The
character of that man's upbringing it is not difficult to divine.
Another said, "I have a wife and four children who are praying for
me"; while yet another added, "For me an aged mother prays." It would
be strange indeed if such confessors were not themselves praying men.
They were to be found by hundreds, probably by thousands, among the
troops sent to South Africa. Never was an army so prayed for since the
world began; and seldom, if ever, has an army contained so many who
themselves were praying men.
[Sidenote: _A Parson Prisoner in the hands of the Boers._]
Nearly four months after the Stormberg tragedy, but only four days
after that at Sanna's Post, Mr Burgess found himself, with three
companies of the Irish Rifles and two of the Northumberland Fusiliers,
cooped up on a kopje about three miles long not far from Reddersburg.
With no water within reach, with no guns, and an almost exhausted
store of rifle ammunition, this small detachment found itself indeed
in evil plight when De Wet's commando of 3200 men put a girdle of
rifle barrels around it, and then began a merciless cannonade with
five guns. That cannonade indeed was merciless far beyond what the
rules of modern war permit, for it seemed to be directed, if not
mainly, certainly most effectually, on the ambulances and hospital
tents, over which the Red Cross flag floated in vain. In the vivid
description of the fight which Mr Burgess sent to me, he says that
several of the ambulance mules were killed or badly wounded, and it
was a marvel only one of the ambulance men was hit, for in one of
their tents were four bullet holes, and a similar number in the Red
Cross flag itself. Some of the occupants of the hospital were Boer
prisoners, some were defenceless natives, so all set to work to throw
up trenches for the protection of these non-combatants, and among the
diggers and delvers was the Wesleyan chaplain with coat thrown off,
and plying pick like one to the manner born. To that task he stuck
till midnight, and oh, that I had been there to see! A chaplain thus
turning himself into a navvy is probably no breach of the Geneva
Convention, but all the same it is by no means an everyday occurrence;
and those Boer prisoners would think none the worse of that Wesleyan
predikant's prayers after watching the work, on their behalf, of that
predikant's pick.
The defence of Reddersburg was one of the least heroic in the whole
record of the campaign, and the troops early next morning surrendered,
not to resistless skill or rifle fire on the part of the Boers, but to
the cravings of overmastering thirst. A relieving force was close at
hand when they ran up the horrid white flag, and had they been aware
of that fact we may be sure no surrender would have taken place. It
requires scant genius to be wise after the event, and still scantier
courage to denounce as lacking in courage this surrender of 500 to a
force six times as large. That was on April 4th, and among those taken
captive by De Wet was the Wesleyan chaplain. His horse, his kit, and
all his belongings at the same time changed hands, and though he was
solemnly assured all would be restored to him, that promise still
awaits redemption.
[Sidenote: _Caring for the Wounded._]
Mr Burgess, though stripped of all he possessed, except what he wore,
received De Wet's permission to search for the wounded as well as to
bury the dead; and in one of his letters to me he tells of one
mortally wounded whom he thus found, and who, in reply to the query,
"Do you know Jesus?" replied, "I'm trusting Jesus as my Saviour"; then
recognising Mr Burgess as his chaplain, he added, "Pray for me!" so,
amid onlooking stretcher-bearers and mounted Boers, the dying lad was
commended to the eternal keeping of his Saviour. It is this element
which has introduced itself into modern warfare which will presently
make war impossible, except between wild beasts or wilder savages.
Prayer on the battlefield, and the use on the same spot of explosive
bullets, is too incongruous to have in it the element of perpetuity.
The number of soldiers that thus die praying, or being prayed for, may
be comparatively small; but even the unsaintly soldier, when wounded,
often displays a stoicism that has in it an undertone of Christian
endurance. A lad of the Connaughts at Colenso, whom a bullet had
horribly crippled in both legs, shouted with defiant cheerfulness to
his comrades--"Bring me a tin whistle and I will play you any tune you
like"; and a naval athlete at Ladysmith, when a shell carried away one
of his legs and his other foot, simply sighed, "There's an end of my
cricket." Pious readers would doubtless in all such cases much prefer
some pious reference to Christ and His Cross in place of the tin
whistle and cricket; but even here is evidence of the grit that has
helped to make England great, and it by no means follows that saving
grace also is not there. The most vigorous piety is not always the
most vocal.
After nearly four and twenty hours of terrific pelting by shot and
shell, Mr Burgess tells me our total loss was only ten killed and
thirty-five wounded. Not one in ten was hit; and so again was
illustrated the comparative harmlessness of either Mauser or
machine-gun fire against men fairly well sheltered. This war thus
witnessed a strange anomaly. It used the deadliest of all weapons,
and produced with them a percentage of deaths unexampled in its
smallness.
[Sidenote: _How the Chaplain's own tent was bullet-riddled._]
Late on in the campaign Mr Burgess was moved, not to his own delight,
from near Belfast to Germiston, but was speedily reconciled to the
change by the receipt of the following letter from an officer of the
Royal Berks:--
"Truly you are a lucky man to have left Wonderfontein on Monday;
and it may be that it saved your life, for the same night we were
attacked. It was a very misty night; but we all went to bed as
usual, and at midnight I was awakened by heavy rifle fire. Almost
immediately the bugle sounded the alarm, and everybody ran for
their posts like hares. From where I was it sounded as if the
Boers had really got into camp; but after two hours of very heavy
firing they retired. Yesterday morning, when I went over the
ground, _the first thing I saw was six or eight bullet holes
through your tent_; and one end of our mess had twenty-three
bullet marks in it. Nooitgedacht, Pan and Dalmanutha were all
attacked the same night at exactly the same hour, causing us a
few casualties at each place."
It may perchance be for our good we are sometimes sent away from
places where we fain would tarry.
[Sidenote: _A sample set of Sunday Services._]
The following typical extract is taken from Mr Burgess's Diary:--
"_Sunday, January 20th._--Rode out to Fort Dublin for church
parade at 9 A.M. Held parade in town church at 11. Then rode out
to surrendered burghers' laager and held service in Dutch, fully
a hundred being present. Conducted service for children in town
church at 3.30 P.M., and at 4.30 rode out to Hands Up Dorp; two
hundred present and ten baptisms. Managed to ride back to town
just in time for the evening service in the church at 6.30, which
was well attended."
"Oh, day of _rest_ and gladness!"
As the war was nearing its close, I sent Mr Burgess to labour along
the blockhouse lines of communication, which have Bloemfontein for
their centre. Here the authorities granted to him the use of a church
railway van, in which he travelled almost ceaselessly between
Brandfort and Norval's Pont, or beyond; and thus he too for a while
became chaplain to part of the Guards' Brigade.