I am very glad to learn that when asked to speak at the
Brotherhood Meeting which is to take place in your own town on
Sunday the 20th instant, you refused to do so unless you were
allowed to deal with the question of National Service.
I know that there are many very well-meaning people who think
that all military training is an abomination, and who are
convinced that the life of youth in barracks is a continued round
of vice and immorality of all kinds. I am prepared to admit that
this certainly was true 200 years ago, and possibly it was true
even at the beginning of the last century. During Marlborough’s
wars we know from history that the ranks of the Regular Army were
filled up by taking broken men of all kinds, and forcing them
into the service.
Any man who was really on his last legs--broken debtors, tramps
and vagabonds, condemned felons--these and such as these were
forced into the ranks. Can it be wondered if the Army got a bad
name? and, as we know, there is nothing so hard to live down
as a really evil reputation. But all this is changed and has
been changed for some years. Have we not heard that the Chief
Constable of the county of Cambridge announced, after the Army
manœuvres, that although 45,000 men had been turned loose in the
area for which he was responsible, yet not a single accusation
for wrongdoing had been brought against any of these soldiers?
Have not the papers just recently told us that 10,000 men taken
at random from the garrison at Aldershot have been billeted
upon the inhabitants in the Hartley district, that these men
were willingly received by the people of the district in their
houses, and that again, in this instance, there has not been one
complaint of misconduct? I must confess that I am pained, as well
as surprised, when I find that those who profess, and profess
very loudly, that they are followers of Christ, should still
look upon the defenders of their country with such unchristian
suspicion and dislike.
I should like you to read out to the meeting the following
extract which occurs in an article on “Germany and the Germans,”
by Mr. Price Collier. It can be found in the current issue of
_Scribner’s Magazine_: “Military training makes youths better and
stronger citizens and produces that self-respect, self-control
and cosmopolitan sympathy which more than aught else lessen the
chances of conflict. I can vouch for it that there are fewer
personal jealousies, bickerings, quarrels, in the mess room or
below decks of a warship, or in a soldiers’ camp, than in many
Church and Sunday School assemblies, in many club smoking-rooms,
in many ladies’ sewing and reading circles. Nothing does away
more surely with quarrelsomeness than the training of men to get
on together comfortably. Each giving way a little in the narrow
lanes of life, so that each may pass without moral shoving.
There are no such successful schools for the teaching of this
fundamental diplomacy as the sister-services: the Army and the
Navy.”
Here is another extract [Lord Roberts then goes on himself] from
a New Zealand paper which was forwarded to me by a friend in that
Dominion: “The Rev. W. Ready, the well-known Methodist Minister,
took up a strong stand on the subject of military training at a
meeting of the Society of Friends held in Auckland last week.
Mr. Ready, who was present by invitation, was taken to task for
some remarks he had made on the subject at the recent Methodist
Conference. He thereupon explained to the meeting his attitude
at the Conference. There was a time, he had told the Conference,
when he held the opinion that camps were very immoral, and not
places to which youths should be sent; but since he had had his
sons attending camp as Territorials, he had been converted into
believing that these camps were moral and were well-regulated.
Every instinct of his moral nature went against compulsory
training, but he had his sons in the Territorials. At this point
there were cries of ‘Shame’ from the assembled members of the
Society of Friends, but Mr. Ready stuck to his guns and declared
that he was not going to advise his boys to break the law,
merely because he objected on principle to military training.
The Defence Act was now the law of the land, and he would no
more advocate his sons breaking the law than he would support
the English Suffragettes in their militant tactics. This is
both sound ethics and common sense, and Mr. Ready has done the
community a service in emphasising the duty of every man to obey
the law. The change in his opinions on the subject of camps is
interesting and gratifying, and should be noted by those who
profess to be so concerned about their evil influences.”
I sincerely hope that your discourse at the Brotherhood Meeting
will help to dissipate the suspicions against military life and
all connected with it.
Yours very truly,
ROBERTS.
Lord Roberts made some appreciative remarks about my own work in
the cause of National Defence. These I took the liberty of omitting
when reading his letter at the Brotherhood Meeting, and I venture to
follow a similar course in transcribing it here. Otherwise this very
interesting letter is given exactly as he wrote it.
That the great soldier should, in his eighty-first year, have been
at the pains to write so lengthy a letter for one of the rank
and file, merely, of his supporters to read at a meeting held in
a Nonconformist Church, bears witness not only to Lord Roberts’
unwearying energies, but also to his earnest desire, one might even
say his anxiety, that the case for National Defence should be fully
and fairly put before his fellow Britons of the Free Churches. Had
he lived to see the magnificent response made by every denomination
of the Free Churches--not even excepting some members of the Society
of Friends--in sending the flower of its young manhood to the heroic
task of subduing the monster of Prussian militarism, it would have
added gladness and thankfulness to his “Nunc Dimittis,” when within
sound of the guns the hero-soul of the great soldier, patriot and
Christian, passed into the presence of his God.
Here I may perhaps be allowed to say a word about a prayer which has
often been attributed to Lord Roberts, and was in fact, soon after
his death, printed by a leading religious journal as “composed by
the late Lord Roberts and presented by him to the soldiers serving
under his command in the South African war.” The same prayer has
repeatedly been attributed to Lord Roberts in magazines, books and
newspapers; and, as the correspondence which I have permission to
quote will show, I shall be following Lord Roberts’ own wishes in
doing what I can, once and for all, to set the matter right.
Here is the prayer as given in the religious journal of which I have
spoken:
Almighty Father, I have often sinned against Thee. Oh, wash
me in the precious blood of the Lamb of God. Fill me with Thy
Holy Spirit, that I may lead a new life. Spare me to see again
those whom I love at home, or fit me for Thy presence in peace.
Strengthen us to quit ourselves like men in our right and just
cause. Keep us faithful unto death, calm in danger, patient in
suffering, merciful as well as brave; true to our Queen, our
country, and colours. If it be Thy will, enable us to win victory
for England; but, above all, grant us a better victory over
temptation and sin, over life and death, that we may be more than
conquerors, through Him who loved us and laid down His life for
us, Jesus our Saviour, the Captain of the Army of God. Amen.
The first appearance of the prayer as by Lord Roberts was, I believe,
in a volume published some years ago at Kansas City, U.S.A., and
edited by Dr. Stephen Abbott Northrop. It was entitled _A Cloud of
Witnesses_, and I had from the first my suspicions about the prayer’s
authenticity, for, though I never think or thought of Lord Roberts as
other than a deeply religious man, I found it difficult to think of
him as one who elected to write prayers for publication. Mentioning
the matter to Lord Roberts himself one day, I found him very much
mystified by what he heard. “I have not the slightest recollection of
ever writing a prayer,” he protested, and, later on, when writing on
another matter, he recurred to the subject, asking me if I could send
him a copy of the prayer. I did so, and received the following letter:
ALMOND’S HOTEL, CLIFFORD STREET,
LONDON, W.
(The only undated letter I ever remember receiving from Lord
Roberts.)