In the multifarious ramifications of their military organisation the
Germans by no means neglect religion. Each army corps is partitioned
into two divisions and each division has its field chaplain. In those
corps in which there is a large admixture of the Catholic element,
there is a cleric of that denomination to each division as well as a
Protestant chaplain. The former is known as a _Feldgeistliger_, a word
which in itself means nothing more distinctive than a "field
ecclesiastic," while the Protestant chaplain has usually the title of
_Feldpastor_. Of the priest I can say but little. The pastors, for the
most part, are young and energetic men. They may be divided into two
classes: those who have at home no stated charges, and those who have
temporarily left their charge for the duration of the war. The former
generally are regularly posted to a division; the latter, equally
recognised but not perhaps quite so official, are chiefly to be found
in the lazarettoes, in the battlefield villages whither the wounded are
borne to have their fresh wounds roughly seen to, and on the
battlefield itself. Not that the regular divisional chaplains do not
face the dangers of the battlefield with devoted courage; but their
duties, in the nature of their special avocation, lie more among the
hale and sound who yet stand up before an enemy, than with the poor
fellows who have been stricken down. Earnestness and devotion are the
chief characteristics of those pastors. It struck me that their
education was not of a very high order--certainly not on a par with
that of the average regimental officer.
The _Feldpastor_ wears an armlet of white and light purple to denote
his calling; but indeed it is not easy to mistake him for anything else
than he is. He has his quarters with the Divisional General, and
preaches whenever and wherever it is convenient to get a congregation.
A church is passed on the wayside, a regiment halts and defiles into
it, and the pastor mounts the steps of the altar and holds forth
therefrom for half an hour. There is a quiet meadow near a village, in
which a brigade is lying. Looking over the hedge, you may see in the
meadow a hollow square of helmeted men with the general and the pastor
in the centre, the latter speaking simple, fervent words to the
fighting men. When, as during the siege of Paris, a division occupies a
certain district for a long time, you may chance--let me say on a New
Year's night--on the village church all ablaze with light. The garrison
have decorated the gaunt old Norman arches with laurels and evergreens;
they have cleared out the market-vendor's stock of tallow-dips to
illuminate the church wherewithal. The band has been practising the
glorious _Nun Danket alle Gott_ for a week; the vocalists of the
regiments have been combining to perfect themselves in part-singing.
The gorgeous trumpery of Roman Catholic church paraphernalia, unheeded
as it is, looks strangely out of place and contrasts curiously with the
simple Protestant forms.
The church is crowded with a denser congregation than ever its walls
contained before. The _Oberst_ sits down with the under-officer; the
general gropes for half a chair between two stalwart _Kerle_ of the
line. Hymn-cards are distributed as at the Brighton volunteer service
in the Pavilion on Easter Sunday. As the pastor enters and takes his
way up the altar steps--he goes not to the pulpit--there bursts out a
volume of vocal devotional harmony, which is so pent in the aisles and
under the arches that the sound seems almost to become a substance.
Then the pastor delivers a prayer and there is another hymn. He
enunciates no text when he next begins to speak; he chops not a subject
up into heads, as the grizzled major who listens to him would partition
out his battalion into companies. There is no "thirteenthly and lastly"
in his simple address. But he gets nearer the hearts of his hearers
than if he assailed them with a battery of logic with multitudinous
texts for ammunition. For he speaks of the people at home, in the quiet
corners of the Fatherland; he tells the soldier in language that is of
his profession, how the fear of the Lord is a better arm than the
truest-shooting _Zündnadelgewehr_; how preparedness for death and for
what follows after death, is a part of his accoutrement that the good
soldier must ever bear about with him.
Herr Pastor has other functions than to preach to the living. The day
after a battle, his horse must be very tired before the stable-door is
reached. The burial parties are excavating great pits all over the
field, while others pick up the dead in the vicinity and bear them unto
the brink of the common grave. Herr Pastor cannot be ubiquitous. If he
is not near when the hole is full, the _Feldwebel_ who commands the
party bares his head, and mutters, "In the name of God, Amen," as he
strews the first handful of mould on the dead--it may be on friends as
well as on foes. If the pastor can reach the brink of the pit, it is
his to say the few words that mark the recognition of the fact that
those lying stark and grim below him are not as the beasts that perish.
The Germans have no set funeral service, and if they had, there would
be no time for it here. "Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust,
in sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life, _durch
unsern Herr Jesu Christe_. Amen;" words so familiar, yet never heard
without a new thrill.
They are slightly uncouth in several matters, these _Feldpastoren_, and
would not quite suit sundry metropolitan charges one wots of. They do
not wear gloves, nor are they addicted to scent on their
pocket-handkerchiefs. Their boots are too often like boats, and when
they are mounted there is frequently visible an interval of more or
less dusky stocking between the boot-top and the trouser-leg. They
slobber stertorously in the consumption of soup, and cut their meat
with a square-elbowed energy of determination that might make one think
that they had vanquished the Evil One and had him down there under
their knife and fork. But they are simple-hearted and valiant servants
of their Master. Who was it, in the bullet-storm that swept the slope
of Wörth, from facing which the stout hearts of the fighting men
blenched and quailed, that there walked quietly into it, to speak words
of peace and consolation to the dying men whom that terrible storm had
beaten down? A smooth-faced stripling with the _Feldpastor's_ badge on
his arm, the gallant Christian son of an eminent Prussian divine, Dr.
Krummacher of Berlin. At one of the battles (I forget which) a pastor
came to fill a grave, not to consecrate it. Shall I ever forget the
unswerving hurry to the front of Kummer's divisional chaplain when the
_Landwehrleute_, his flock, were going down in their ranks as they held
with stubbornness unto death the villages in front of Maizières les
Metz? Let the _Feldpastoren_ slobber and welcome, say I, while they
gild their slobbering with such devotion as this! But there must be
times and seasons when Herr Pastor is not at hand; nor can the
ministration of any pastor stand in the stead of private prayer. The
German soldier's simple needs in this matter are not disregarded. Each
man is served out when he gets his kit with a tiny gray volume less
than quarter the size of this page, the title of which is _Gebetbuch
für Soldaten_--the Soldier's Prayer-Book. It is supplied from the
Berlin depôt of the Head Society for the Promotion of Christian
Knowledge in Germany, and it is a compendium of simple war prayers for
almost every conceivable situation, with one significant
exception--there is no prayer in defeat. The word is blotted out of the
German war vocabulary. It has been said that the belief in the divinity
of our Saviour is rapidly on the wane in Germany. If this war
prayer-book avails aught, the taint of the heresy may not enter into
the army.
Germany is at war. While Paris is frantically shouting _A Berlin!_,
while all Germany is singing and meaning _Die Wacht am Rhein_, Moltke's
order goes forth into the towns and villages of the Fatherland for the
mobilisation of the Reserves. Hans was singing _Die Wacht am Rhein_
last night over his beer; but there is little heart for song left in
him as he looks from that paper on the deal table into Gretchen's face.
She is weeping bitterly as her children cling around her, too young to
realise the cause of their parents' sorrow. Hans rises moodily, and
pulling down what military belongings he has not given into the arsenal
after the last drill, falls a turning over of them abstractedly. By
chance his hand rests upon the little gray volume, the _Gebetbuch für
Soldaten_. It opens in his hand, and he comes and sits down by Gretchen
and reads in a voice that chokes sometimes, the