THE SHEEP THAT WERE NOT FED
I
"Of late years," the novel of _Shirley_ begins, "an abundant shower of
curates has fallen upon the North of England; they lie very thick on the
hills; every parish has one or more of them; they are young enough to be
very active, and ought to be doing a great deal of good." This blessing,
conferred on the West Riding a little before Waterloo, descended on our
Western Front a little after the first battle of the Marne.
It was received by our troops with the greater thanksgiving because it
brought with it no perceptible revival of church parades, a ministration
of which the average private, _l'homme moyen sensuel_ of Matthew Arnold,
had taken a long and glad farewell on leaving Salisbury Plain. Like the
infinite cleaning of brass-work, the hearing of many well-meaning
divines in the Tidworth garrison church had been one of the tribulations
through which the defender of Britain must work out his passage to
France. With the final order to tarnish his buttons with fire and oil
there came also a longed-for release from regular Sunday adjurations to
keep sober and think of his end. "The Lorrd," said a grim Scots
corporal, a hanging judge of a sermon, after hearing the last essay of
our English Bossuets before he went to the wars, "hath turrned the
capteevity of Zion." No more attendance for him at such "shauchlin'"
athletic displays as the wrestlings of the southron divinity passman
with the lithe and sinuous mind of St. Paul. "Sunday," the blithe
Highlander in _Waverley_ said, "seldom cam aboon the pass of Bally
Brough." For better or worse, as a reliever from work or a restrainer of
play, Sunday seldom came across the Channel during the war. A man in the
ranks might be six months in France and not find a religious service of
any kind coming his way, whether he dreaded or sought it.
Yet chaplains abounded. Not measures, but men, to invert the old phrase.
And men of all kinds, as might safely be guessed. There was the hero and
saint, T. B. Hardy, to whom a consuming passion of human brotherhood
brought, as well as rarer things, the M.C., the D.S.O., the V.C., the
unaccepted invitation of the King, when he saw Hardy in France, to come
home as one of his own chaplains and live, and then the death which
everyone had seen to be certain. There was a chaplain drunk at dinner in
Gobert's restaurant at Amiens on the evening of one of the bloodiest
days of the first battle of the Somme. There was the circumspect,
ecclesiastical statesman, out to see that in this grand shaking-up and
re-arranging of pre-war positions and values the right cause--whichever
of the right causes was his--was not jilted or any way wronged. There
was the man who, urged by national comradeship, would have been a
soldier but that his bishop barred it; to be an army chaplain was the
next best thing. There was the man who, urged by a different instinct,
felt irresistibly, as many laymen did, that at the moment the war was
the central thing in the whole world, and that it was unbearable not to
be at the centre of things. And there was, in great force, the large,
healthy, pleasant young curate not severely importuned by a vocation,
the ex-athlete, the prop and stay of village cricket-clubs, the good
fellow whom the desires of parents, the gaiety of his youth at the
university, and the whole drift of things about him had shepherded
unresistingly into the open door of the Church. Sudden, unhoped-for, the
war had brought him the chance of escape back to an almost solely
physical life, like his own happy youth of rude health, only better: a
life all salt and tingling with vicissitudes of simple bodily discomfort
and pleasure, fatigue and rest, risk and the ceasing of risk; a heaven
after the flatness, the tedium, the cloying security and the confounded
moral problems attending the uninspired practice of professional
brightness and breeziness in an uncritical parish. He abounded so much
that whenever now one hears the words "army chaplain" his large, genial
image springs up of itself in the mind.
II
In the eyes of the men he had notable merits. He was a running fountain,
more often than not, of good cigarettes. Of the exceeding smallness of
Low Country beer he could talk, man to man, with knowledge and right
feeling. He gladly frequented the least healthy parts of the line, and
would frankly mourn the pedantry which denied him a service revolver and
did not even allow him the grievous ball-headed club with which a
mediæval bishop felt himself free to take his own part in a war, because
with this lethal tool he did not exactly shed blood, though he dealt
liberally enough in contused wounds that would serve equally well.
Having a caste of his own, not precisely the combatant officer's, he had
a tongue less rigidly tied in the men's hearing, so he could soothe the
couch of a wounded sergeant by telling him, with a diverting gusto, how
downily the old colonel, the one last ungummed, had timed his enteric
inoculation at home so as to rescue himself from the fiery ordeal of a
divisional field-day. These were solid merits. And yet there was
something about this type of chaplain--he had his counterpart in all the
churches--with which the common men-at-arms would privily and
temperately find a little fault. He seemed to be only too much afraid of
having it thought that he was anything more than one of themselves. He
had, with a vengeance, "no clerical nonsense about him." The vigour with
which he threw off the parson and put on the man and the brother did not
always strike the original men and brothers as it was intended. Your
virilist chaplain was apt to overdo, to their mind, his jolly implied
disclaimers of any compromising connection with kingdoms not of this
world. For one thing, he was, for the taste of people versed in carnage,
a shade too fussily bloodthirsty. Nobody made such a point of aping your
little trench affectations of callousness; nobody else was so anxious to
keep you assured that the blood of the enemy smelt as good to his nose
as it could to any of yours. In the whole blood-and-iron province of
talk he would not only outshine any actual combatant--that is quite easy
to do--but he would outshine any colonel who lived at a base. I never
met a regimental officer or "other rank" who wanted a day more of the
war for himself, his friends or his country after the Armistice. But I
have heard more than one chaplain repining because the killing was not
to go on until a few German towns had been smashed and our last thing in
gas had had a fair innings.
No doubt the notion was good, in a way. If the parson in war was to make
the men mind what he said he must not stand too coldly aloof from "the
men's point of view": he must lay his mind close up alongside theirs, so
as to get a hold of their souls. It sounds all right; the wisdom of the
serpent has been bidden to back up the labours of the dove. And yet the
men, however nice they might be to the chaplain himself, would presently
say to each other in private that "Charlie came it too thick," while
still allowing that he was a "proper good sort." They felt there was
something or other--they could not tell what--which he might have been
and which he was not. They could talk lyddite and ammonal well enough
for themselves, but, surprising to say, they secretly wanted a change
from themselves; had the parsons really nothing to say of their own
about this noisome mess in which the good old world seemed to be
foundering? The relatively heathen English were only groping about to
find out what it was that they missed; the Scots, who have always had
theology for a national hobby, made nearer approaches to being
articulate. Part of a famous division of Highland infantry were given
one day, as a special treat, a harangue by one of the most highly
reputed of chaplains. This spell-binder preached like a tempest--the old
war-sermon, all God of Hosts and chariots of wrath and laying His rod on
the back of His foes, and other thunderous sounds such as were then
reverberating, no doubt, throughout the best churches in Berlin. In the
south-western postal district of London, too, his cyclone might have had
a distinguished success at the time. As soon as the rumbling died away
one of the hard-bitten kilted sergeants leant across to another and
quoted dourly: "A great and strong wind, but the Lorrd was not in the
wind."
III
"I've been a Christian all my life, but this war is a bit too serious."
So saying, a certain New Army recruit had folded up his religion in
1914, and put it away, as it were, in a drawer with his other civil
attire to wait until public affairs should again permit of their use. He
had said it quite simply. A typical working-class Englishman, literal,
serious, and straight, he had not got one loop of subtlety or one
vibration of irony in his whole mind. Like most of his kind he had, as a
rule, left church-going to others. Like most of them, too, he had read
the Gospels and found that whatever Christ had said mattered enormously:
it built itself into the mind; when any big choice had to be made it was
at least a part of that which decided. Not having ever been taught how
to dodge an awkward home-thrust at his conscience, he felt, all
unblunted, the point of what Christ had said about such things as wealth
and war and loving one's enemies. Getting rich made you bad; fighting
was evil--better submit than resist. There was no getting over such
doctrine, nor round it: why try?
Ever since those disconcerting bombs were originally thrown courageous
divines and laymen have been rushing in to pick them up and throw them
away, combining as well as they could an air of respect for the thrower
with tender care for the mental ease of congregations occupied generally
in making money and occasionally in making war. Yet there they lie,
miraculously permanent and disturbing, as if just thrown. Now and then
one will go off, with seismic results, in the mind of some St. Francis
or Tolstoy. And yet it remains where it was, like the plucked Golden
Bough: _uno avulso, non deficit alter_, ready as ever to work on a
guileless mind like our friend's.
But this war had to be won; that was flat. It was like putting out
houses on fire, or not letting children be killed; it did not even need
to be proved; that we had got to win was now the one quite certain thing
left in a world of shaken certainties. Any religion or anything else
that seemed to chill, or deter, or suggest an alternative need not be
wholly renounced. But it had to be put away in a drawer. After the war,
when that dangerous precept about the left cheek could no longer do
serious harm, it might come out again; our friend would see what could
be done. For he was a man more strongly disposed than most of his
fellows to hold, if he honestly could, the tenets of some formal
religion. "They got hold o' something," he used to say, with curiosity
and some respect, of more regular practitioners than himself. "Look at
the Salvation Army legging along in the mud and their eyes fair shining
with happiness! Aye, they got on to _something_." He would investigate,
when the time came.
IV
The testimonies that might have ensued were foreclosed by a shell that
buried him alive in Oppy Wood, under the Vimy Ridge, where he was
engaged in diverting the energies of the Central Powers from the
prostrate army of Nivelle. He had by then been two years in France, and
had told a few friends about various "queer feels" and "rum goes" which
he would not have known by name if you had called them spiritual
experiences. One of his points--though he did not put it in that
way--was that in war a lot of raw material for making some sort of
religion was lying about, but that war also made some of the finished
doctrinal products now extant look pretty poor, especially, as he said,
"all the damning department." Rightly or wrongly, no men who have been
close friends for a year, and who know that in the next few hours they
are nearly as likely as not to be killed together in doing what they all
hold to be right, will entertain on any terms the idea of any closing of
gates of divine mercy, open to themselves, in the face of any comrade in
the business.
The sunshine of one of the first clement days of 1916 drew him about as
far as I heard him go on the positive side. "You know what it is," he
said in the course of one of the endless trench talks, "when you got to
make up your mind to do as you oughter. Worry and fuss and oh, ain't it
too hard, and why the 'ell can't I let myself off!--that's how it is.
Folla me?"
The audience grunted assent. "Some other time," he pursued, "perhaps
once in ten years, it's all t'other way. You're set free like. Kind of a
miracle. Don't even have to think what you're going to get by it. All
you know is that there's just the one thing, in all the whole world,
good enough. Doing it ain't even hard. All the sport there ever was has
been took out of everything else and put into that. Kind of a miracle.
Folla me?"
"That's right," another man confirmed. "You'll see it at fires when
people are like to be burnt. Men'll go fair mad to help them. Don't
think. Don't feel it if they're hurt. Fair off it to get at them--same
as a dog when you throw a stick in a pond."
"Ah, then," contributed somebody else, "you've only to hear a man with a
grand tenor voice in a song till you'll feel a coolness blowing softly
and swif'ly over your face and then gone, the way you'd have died on a
cross with all the pleasure in life while it lasted."
"Aye, and you'll get it from whisky," another put in. "Isn't it just
what more men'll get drunk for than anything else? And why the rum's
double before you go over?"
No doubt you know all about it from books, and you may prefer the
wording of that tentative approach made by the most spiritually-minded
of modern philosophers to a definition of God--"Something that is in and
about me, in the consciousness of which I am free from fear and
desire--something which would make it easy to do the most (otherwise)
difficult thing without any other motive except that it was the one
thing worth doing." And William James has, of course, shown more skill
in explaining what mystic ecstasy is and what is its place in religion,
and what its relations to such mirages of itself as the mock
inspirations of Antony's lust and Burns' drunkenness.
And yet the clumsy fumblings of uninstructed people among things of the
spirit might, one imagines, be just such stuff as a skilled teacher and
leader in this field might have delighted to come upon and to inspirit
and marshal. With tongues unwontedly loosened men would set to and dig
out of themselves, not knowing what it was, the clay of which the bricks
are made with which religions are built. One man, with infinite
exertions of disentanglement, would struggle up to some expression of
the fugitive trance of realization into which he had found he could
throw himself by letting his mind go, for all it was worth, on the
thought of his own self, his "I-ness" until for some few seconds of
poised exaltation he had thought self clean away and was free. "It first
came by a fluke when I was a kiddy. If I'd lie in my cot, very still,
and look hard a long time at the candle, and think very hard--'I,' 'I,'
'I,' what's 'I?' I could work myself up to that state I'd be right
outside o' myself, and seeing the queer little body I'd been, with my
thought about 'I' doing this and 'I' getting that, and the way that I'd
thought it was natural I should, and no such a thing as any 'I' there
all the time, or only one to the whole set of us. Hard I'd try, every
time, to hold the thing on. Seemed as if there was no end to what I
might get to know if I could make it last out, that sort of rum start.
But the thing went to bits every time, next moment after I'd got it
worked up, and there I'd be left on the mat like, and thinking 'Gosh!
what a pitch I got up to that time!' and how I'd screw it up higher,
next go."
Then somebody else would bring up the way he had been taken by that
queer little rent in the veil of common experience--the sudden rush of
certainty that something which is happening now has all happened before,
or that some place, when first we see it, has really been known to us of
old and is only being revisited now, not discovered. You know how you
seem, when that sudden light comes, to escape for a while from your
common thoughts about time, as if out of a prison in which you have been
shut up so long that you had almost forgotten what it is to be free: it
flashes into your mind that immortality, for all you know, may exist
within one moment; that life, for all you know, may draw out into state
after state, and that all that you are conscious of at common times
might be merely a drop or two lipping over the edge of the full vessel
of some vast consciousness animating the whole world.
Another man would bring into the common stock a recollection of the kind
of poignant portrait dream that sometimes comes: not a dream of any
incident, but only the face of a friend, more living than life, with all
the secret kindness and loneliness of his mind suddenly visible in the
face, so that you think of him as you think of your mother when she is
dead and the stabbing insight of remorse begins.
Thus would these inexpert people hang unconsciously about the uncrossed
threshold of religion. With minds which had recovered in some degree the
penetrative simplicity of a child's, they disinterred this or that
unidentified bone of the buried God from under the monumental piles of
débris which the learned, the cunning, and the proud, priests and kings,
churches and chapels, had heaped up over the ideas of perfect love, of
faith that would leave all to follow that love, and of the faithful
spirit's release from mean fears of extinction. In talk they could bring
each other up to the point of feeling that little rifts had opened here
and there in the screens which are hung round the life of man on the
earth, and that they had peeped through into some large outer world that
was strange only because they were used to a small and dim one. They
were prepared and expectant. If any official religion could ever refine
the gold out of all that rich alluvial drift of "obstinate questionings
of sense and outward things," now was its time. No figure of speech,
among all these that I have mixed, can give the measure of the greatness
of that opportunity.
V
Nobody used it: the tide in the affairs of churches flowed its best, but
no church came to take it. Instead, as if chance had planned a kind of
satiric practical epigram, came the brigade chaplain. As soon as his
genial bulk hove in sight, and his cheery robustious chaff began blowing
about, the shy and uncouth muse of our savage theology unfolded her
wings and flew away. Once more the talk was all footer and rations and
scragging the Kaiser, and how "the Hun" would walk a bit lame after the
last knock he had got. Very nice, too, in its way. And yet there had
been a kind of a savour about the themes that had now shambled back in
confusion, before the clerical onset, into their twilight lairs in the
souls of individual laymen.
When you want to catch the Thames gudgeon you first comb the river's bed
hard with a long rake. In the turbid water thus caused the creatures
will be on the feed, and if you know how to fish you may get a great
take. For our professional fishers of men in the army the war did the
raking _gratis_. The men came under their hands at the time of most
drastic experience in most of the men's lives, immersed in a new and
strange life of sensations at once simple and intense, shaken roughly
out of the world of mechanical habit which at most times puts a kind of
bar between one's mind and truth, living always among swiftly dying
friends and knowing their own death at any time to be as probable as
anyone's. To get rid of your phlegm, it was said, is to be a
philosopher. It is also to be a saint, at least in the rough; you have
broken the frozen ground; you can grow anything now; you can see the
greatest things in the very smallest, so that sunrise on Inverness Copse
is the morning of the first day and a spoonful of rum and a biscuit a
sacrament. Imagine the religious revival that there might have been if
some man of apostolic genius had had the fishing in the troubled waters,
the ploughing and sowing of the broken soil.
The frozen fountain would have leapt,
The buds gone on to blow,
The warm south wind would have awaked
To melt the snow.
Nothing now perceptible came of it all. What, indeed, could the average
army chaplain have done, with his little budget of nice traits and
limitations? How had we ever armed and equipped him? When you are given
an infant earth to fashion out of a whirling ball of flaming metals and
gases, then good humour, some taste for adventure, distinction at
cricket, a jolly way with the men, and an imperfect digestion of
thirty-nine partly masticated articles may not carry you far. You may
come off, by no fault of your own, like the curate in Shakespeare who
was put up to play Alexander the Great: "A marvellous good neighbour, i'
faith, and a very good bowler: but, for Alisander--alas, you see how
'tis--a little o'erparted."
The men, once again, did not put it in that way. They did not miss
anything that most of them could have described. They only felt a
vacancy, an unspecified void, like the want of some unknown great thing
in their generals' minds and in the characters of their rulers at home.
The chaplain's tobacco was all to the good; so was the civil tongue that
he kept in his head; so were all the good turns that he did. But, when
it came to religion, were these things "all there was to it"? Had the
churches really not "got hold of something," with all their enormous
deposits of stone and mortar and clerical consequence? So, in his own
way, the army chaplain, too, became a tributary brook feeding the
general reservoir of disappointment and mistrust that was steadily
filled by the surface drainage of all the higher ground of our British
social landscape under the dirty weather of the war.