I see from my diary it was on a Sunday night I found that memorable
quartette so diversely employed in our Quiet Room. So, after all, there
had been something to lead up to the most singular feature of the scene.
Sunday is Sunday in a Y.M.C.A. hut, and in ours it was no more a day of
rest than it is in any regular place of worship; for that is exactly
what we were privileged to provide for a very famous Division whose
headquarters were then in our immediate neighbourhood.
Overnight the orderlies would work late arranging the chairs
church-fashion, moving the billiard-table, and preparing the platform
for a succession of morning services. These might begin with a
celebration of the Holy Communion at nine, to be followed by a C. of E.
parade service at ten and one for mixed Nonconformists, or possibly for
Presbyterians only, at eleven; the order might be reversed, and the
opening celebration was not inevitable; but the preparations were the
same for all denominations and all degrees of ceremonial.
In a secular sense the hut was closed all morning. But in our private
precincts those Sabbaths were not so easy to observe. The free forenoon
was too good a chance to count the week's takings, amounting in a busy
canteen like ours to several thousand francs; this took even a quick
hand all his time, what with the small foul notes that first defied the
naked eye, and then fell to shreds between the fingers; and often have I
watched my gay young leader, his confidence ruffled by an alien frown,
slaving like a miser between a cross-fire of stentorian hymns. For the
cinema, ever our rival, was in similar request between the same hours;
and we were lucky if the selfsame hymn, in different keys and stages,
did not smite simultaneously upon either ear.
On a Sunday afternoon we opened at four instead of half-past, and drove
a profane trade as merrily as in the week until the hut service at
six-thirty. During service the counter was closed; and after service, in
our hut, we drew a firm line at tea and biscuits for what was left of
the working night.
Neither of ourselves being ordained of any denomination, we as a rule
requisitioned one of the many ministers among the Y.M.C.A. workers in
our district to preach the sermon and offer up the prayers: almost
invariably he was the shepherd of some Nonconformist fold at home, and a
speaker born or made. But the men themselves set matters going,
congregating at the platform end and singing hymns--their favourite
hymns--not many of them mine--for a good half-hour before the pastor was
due to appear. Of course, only a proportion of those present joined in;
but it was a surprising proportion; and the uncritical forbearance of
those who did not take part used to impress me quite as much as the
unflinching fervour of those who did. But then it is not too soon to say
that in all my months in an Army area I never once saw or heard
Religion, in any shape or form, flouted by look or word.
The hymns were always started by the same man, a spectacled N.C.O. in a
Red Cross unit, with a personality worthy of his stripes. I think he
must have been a street preacher before the war; at any rate he used to
get leave to hold a service of his own on Tuesday evenings, and I have
listened to his sermon more than once. Indeed, it was impossible not to
listen, every rasping word of the uncompromising harangue being more
than audible at our end of the hut, no matter what we were doing. The
man had an astounding flow of spiritual invective, at due distance the
very drum-fire of withering anathema, but sorry stuff of a familiar
order at close range. It was impossible not to respect this red-hot
gospeller, who knew neither fear nor doubt, nor the base art of mincing
words; and he had a strong following among the men, who seemed to enjoy
his onslaughts, whether they took them to heart or not. But I liked him
better on a Sunday evening, when his fiery spirit was content to 'warm
the stage' for some meek minister by a preliminary service of right
hearty song.
But those ministers were wonders in their way; not a man of them so meek
upon the platform, nor one but had the knack of fluent, pointed, and
courageous speech. They spoke without notes, from the break of the
platform, like tight-sleeved conjurors; and they spoke from their hearts
to many that beat the faster for their words. In that congregation there
were no loath members; only those who liked need sit and listen; the
rest were free to follow their own devices, within certain necessary
limitations. The counter, to be sure, had those green curtains drawn
across it for the nonce. But all at that end of the hut were welcome as
ever to their game of draughts, their cigarettes and newspapers, even
their murmur of conversation. It generally happened, however, that the
murmur died away as the preacher warmed to his work, and the bulk of the
address was followed in attentive silence by all present. I used to
think this a greater than any pulpit triumph ever won; and when it was
all over, and the closing hymn had been sung with redoubled fervour, a
knot of friendly faces would waylay the minister on his passage up the
hut.
And yet how much of his success was due to the sensitive response of
these simple-hearted, uncomplaining travellers in the valley of Death!
No work of man is easier to criticise than a sermon, no sort of
criticism cheaper or maybe in poorer taste; and yet I have felt, with
all envy of their gift and their sincerity, that even these powerful
preachers were, many of them, missing their great opportunity, missing
the obvious point. Morality was too much their watchword, Sin the too
frequent burden of their eloquence. It is not as sinners that we should
view the men who are fighting for us in the great war against
international sin. They are soldiers of Christ if ever such drew sword;
then let them contemplate the love of Christ, and its human reflex in
their own heroic hearts, not the cleft in the hoof of all who walk this
earth! That, and the grateful love we also bear them, who cannot fight
ourselves, seem to me the gist of war-time Christianity: that, and the
immortality of the soul they may be rendering up at any moment for our
sake and for His.
It is hateful to think of these great men in the light of their little
sins. What thistledown to weigh against their noble sacrifice! Yet
there are those who expatiate on soldiers' sins as though the same men
had never committed any in their unregenerate civil state, before
putting hand to the redemption of the world; who would charge every
frailty to the war's account, as if vice had not flourished, to common
knowledge and the despair of generations, in idyllic villages untouched
by any previous war, and run like a poisoned vein through all the
culture of our towns. The point is not that the worst has still to be
eradicated out of poor human nature, but that the best as we know it now
is better than the best we dared to dream in happier days.
Such little sins as they denounce, and ask to be forgiven in the
sinner's name! Bad language, for one; as if the low thoughtless word
should seriously belittle the high deliberate deed! The decencies of
language let us by all manner of means observe, but as decencies, not as
virtues without which a man shall not enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Taste
is the bed-rock of this matter, and what is harmless at one's own
fireside might well empty a public hall and put the police in
possession. To stigmatise mere coarseness of speech as a first-class sin
is to defeat an admirable end by the unwitting importation of a false
yet not unnatural glamour.
The thing does matter, because the modern soldier is less 'full of
strange oaths' than of certain _facons de parler_ which must not be
suffered to pass into the currency of the village ale-house after the
war. They are base coin, very; but still the primary offence is against
manners, not morals; and public opinion, not pulpit admonition, is the
thing to put it down.
In a Y.M.C.A. hut the wise worker will not hear very much more than he
is meant to hear; but there are times when only a coward or a fool would
hold his own tongue, and that is when an ounce of tact is worth a ton of
virtue. It is well to consider every minute what the men are going
through, how entirely the refining influence of their womankind has
passed out of their lives, and how noticeably far from impropriety are
the thoughts that clothe themselves in this grotesque and hateful habit
of speech.
Let me close a tender topic with the last word thereon, as spoken by a
Canadian from Vimy Ridge, who came into my hut (months later, when I had
one of my own) but slightly sober, yet more so than his friends, with
whom remonstrance became imperative.
'I say! I say!' one had to call down from the counter. 'The language is
getting pretty thick down there!'
'Beg pardon, sir. Very sorry,' said my least inebriated friend, at once;
then, after a moment's thought--'But the shells is pretty thick where we
come from!'
It was a better answer than he knew.