Authors: Richard Holmes
Tommy (69 page)
This was not a view confined to bellicose bishops: Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy, later the celebrated chaplain âWoodbine Willie' but then a vicar, wrote in his parish magazine in September 1914: âI cannot say too strongly that I believe every able-bodied man ought to volunteer for service anywhere. There ought to be no shirking of duty.'
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Even Conrad Noel, the socialist vicar of Thaxted in Essex, supported the war because it promised to help small nations against Prussianism.
The view of the war as a great crusade did not often survive contact with its harsher realities. Julian Bickersteth worked in an advance dressing station on the Somme.
One poor fellow, a gunner, died in my arms in the aid-post, whither he had been brought by his comrades, hoping that it might be possible to save his life. The doctor looked at him, shook his head, and passed to another patient. It wasn't even worthwhile dressing his wounds. The morphia tablets helped him to bear the pain, but he was conscious up to the end. The doctor left me alone with him, so we were able to have prayers together and a little talk, and I administered to him the last Sacrament. The roof of the little dugout was low and the place was dark and he tried to raise himself to look out of the narrow doorway as if to have a last look outside. Grey and pitiful enough was that scene.
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The Reverend Michael Stanhope Walker went straight from a Lincolnshire parish to the Western Front, and was at a casualty clearing station on the Somme: he buried 900 men in three months. On the first day of the battle he wrote:
We have 1,500 in and still they come, 3â400 officers, it is a sight â chaps with fearful wounds lying in agony, many so patient, some make a noise, one goes to a stretcher, lays one's hand on the forehead, it is cold, strike a match, he is dead â here a Communion, there an absolution, there a drink, there a madman.
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The Reverend Charles Doudney described the smell of the once-pretty garden of Potyze Chateau, near Ypres, home to an advance dressing station.
The flowers are gone, and their perfume is replaced by the all-pervading stench that one is even beginning to become accustomed to â of putrefaction fraught with chloride of lime; in some parts of the ground one has the predominance, in some the other. But it's the smell of a charnel house, and in places is added the strange effluvium, indescribable, of newly-shed blood.
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Some chaplains collapsed under the impact of such things. On 17 August 1916 the level-headed Reverend Harold Davies reported:
Found a new Chaplain⦠in No I Field Ambulance. Apparently he was suffering from dysentery and shock. As usual he had no previous military experience and had just been sent out here. Someone had sent him to the 108th Brigade at Bully Grenay, where he was not really wanted and he had seen bad sights, which had unnerved him.
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Alan Hanbury-Sparrow thought that âthe priests, with the exception of the Roman Catholics, did not seem sufficiently equipped to withstand, without harm to themselves, the arguments of an earnest doubter'.
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At its worst the experience of the front could break a chaplain's faith, as Bishop Gwynne had seen all too clearly.
Many chaplains who survived the physical and psychological assaults of the front rejected the Winnington-Ingram view of the great crusade. Harold Davies admitted âI shall never be a soldier' after being chided for holding an impromptu service in what turned out to be the trench-mortar bomb store, putting his congregation somewhat closer to their Maker than he had intended. But he was firmly committed to the war, and was perfectly prepared to help doctors usher numerous unwounded stragglers out of the Royal Naval Division's casualty clearing station during its attack on Beaumont Hamel in November 1917: âIt's worse than the tramp ward of a workhouse', a surgeon told him. However, he agreed with a gunner officer in wishing that âthe chattering magpies of our English Parliament who draw £400 a year and talk so much hot air could have been compelled to spend an afternoon in this valley of horrors'.
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Father Francis Drinkwater, a Roman Catholic, spent much of the war at the front, was wounded and gassed, and emerged with his strong faith undimmed. But on 2 July 1916 he wrote that: âI shall soon be a pacifist and a conscientious objector â to modern warfare anyhow. It becomes more impossible every month, and the ghastly mangling of human beings en masse seems disproportionate to any conceivable object.
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Julian Bickersteth also saw the war out to the end, but it strained even his determination. He wrote at the end of 1916:
Oh! To get this wretched business over. There is only one question that no Tommy is ever tired of asking, âWhen do you think it will end, Sir?' Yet I do think it is true that no one wants to see the business half done. Peace must not be returned to Europe for a year, but if possible for all time⦠Who can stick it longest? That is the question.
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And in 1918 he acknowledged that:
The war becomes more terrible and soul-corroding as month succeeds month⦠It has lost all the romance of some years ago. It is now a perpetual round of dull, prosaic murder, with one desire in the hearts of all â to keep alive a little longer and to see an end to the business. No one has any heart in it⦠We are in it and we can't get out of it now, even if it costs the lives of all who are now in France.
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The crusade of 1914 had become, four years later, a matter of sheer endurance.
Many soldiers, and indeed some Anglican priests, felt that Roman Catholic chaplains' requirement to be on hand to administer the extreme unction encouraged them to spend more time in the front line. Robert Graves argued that if Anglican regimental chaplains
had shown one-tenth of the courage, endurance and the other human qualities that regimental doctors showed⦠the British Expeditionary Force might well have started a religious revival. But they had not, being under orders to avoid the fighting and to stay behind with the transport. Soldiers could hardly respect a chaplain who obeyed these orders, and yet not one in fifty seemed sorry to obey them. Occasionally, on a quiet day in a quiet sector, the chaplain would make a daring afternoon visit to the support line and distribute a few cigarettes before hurrying back⦠[But] the Roman Catholic chaplains were not only permitted to visit posts of danger, but definitely enjoined to be where the fighting was, so that they could give extreme unction to the dying.
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Guy Chapman echoed similar sentiments.
These Catholic priests impressed one. [Father] Leeson never dropped a word of religion in my hearing; but one felt a serenity and certitude streaming from him such as was not possessed by our bluff Anglicans. Already there was a growing dislike of the latter. They had nothing to offer but the consolation the next man could give you, and a less fortifying one. The Church of Rome sent a man into action mentally and spiritually cleaned. The Church of England could only offer you a cigarette. The Church of Rome, experienced in propaganda, sent its priests into the line. The Church of England forbade theirs forward of Brigade Headquarters, and though many, realizing the fatal blunder of such an order, came just the same, the publication of that injunction had its effect.
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And Julian Bickersteth confessed that: âIt makes me despair of the Church of England. Rome makes no mistakesâ¦'.
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Yet many Anglican chaplains recognised, as did Bickersteth himself, that they would only gain men's respect if they entered the crucible with them. âI must admit that I find it increasingly difficult to face enemy fire,' he wrote, âbut our task is absolutely nothing compared to what the brave lads in the trenches have to endure when they take part in an attack.' He made a practice of carrying a pyx containing Sacrament in one kind, bread marked with wine, and going forward to give it to the wounded and dying. The universally-admired Reverend Theodore Bayley Hardy, a fifty-five-year-old Church of England clergyman, earned the MC, DSO and VC during a year's service at the front and was eventually killed in action. On one occasion he spent two days in the mud with a half-buried soldier, working with the men who were trying to extract him. Other chaplains shared similar risks. Anthony French was lying wounded in a crater in September 1916.
I heard movement coming my way and I thought of rats, bloated rats, and felt weak and defenceless. I lay stork still. Dimly I saw a figure passing to and fro, here and there, bending low. My heart beat uncontrollably.
His head was bent over mine. I stared unbreathing. I saw a white collar and the familiar tin hat. He spoke in cultured English, and his voice had a deep, rich timbre.
âAre you asleep?,'
âNo, Padre.'
âBadly hurt?'
âNot really.'
âCould you walk?'
âAfraid not, but I can crawl.'
âBetter lie still. You're some way off, but I'll try to send the stretcher bearers. They're all busy just now, but be patient and lie still.'
I thanked him. But he had gone, and I feared for him out there when the rattle of fire was resumed.
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Father Drinkwater particularly admired Canon Scott, Church of England padre to 1st Canadian Division, who certainly did not conform to the stereotype of the stay-back padre. âHe wanders round all the most dangerous parts with a tin of bully and a biscuit; reads his own verses to the men in the trenches,' wrote Drinkwater. Scott lost his son, an infantry officer, and found his body in a fresh shell hole âwhere the Canon recognized his son's hand (by the ring) sticking out of the earth'.
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A few chaplains went much further. In 1918 Frank Crozier encountered a Welsh Nonconformist chaplain âindulging in rapid fire from a shell hole at fleeting enemy targets'. He disapproved, because these were âcircumstances which called for no emergency'. Crozier disarmed the chaplain, gave him lunch, and told him that he should never have been a clergyman at all. âHe renounced his vocation,' wrote Crozier, âand joined up as a private. He did quite well, and I was told that he had the finest flow of language in the regiment which, being Welsh, was saying a great deal.'
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However, because chaplains carried the authority of a commissioned officer there were rare moments when a commanding officer might expect his padre to exercise military command. Father John Groser, trained in the tradition of Catholic socialism at Mirfield, and later a great East End priest, was ordered to take command of a party of men who, so his CO thought, would only stand if led by an officer. He refused. âI reminded him of the scores of men he knew who had fallen that day after doing their utmost,' said the colonel,
and I was conveying to him â in what words I cannot remember â my despair of a religion that could teach that such a patronizing stand-offish attitude was the right one, when my words were drowned by a terrific burst of fire from our guns, who had spotted a counterattack forming up. When the firing was over Groser told me that he would do what I wanted provided he didn't carry arms. To that I readily agreed.
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Father Groser was awarded the Military Cross, and wounded and sent home in 1918. On 8 October 1918, 2/Royal Welch Fusiliers lost its Nonconformist padre, killed in action.
The padre should not have gone with A Company in the early morning. He was told that he would be an embarrassment to them, but he was impulsive, he insisted on going, and was killed while seeking an MC to please some fool of a girl in Liverpool who had taunted him with having no decoration.
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Many chaplains were unsure whether their main role was spiritual or temporal, whether they were, as one put it, âMr God or Mr Cinema'. It was easy to slip into the latter role, and to concentrate on providing the troops with much-needed welfare support, like tea and cake at the base or cigarettes in the front line, or to offer advice with problems that arose at home. The majority of private mail, except that in strictly-rationed green envelopes, had to be censored by an officer, and padres â often less busy than combatant officers â were frequently busy reading soldiers' letters, which gave them a few useful insights. The Reverend John Sellors, a working-class Anglican sent to France in 1917, was delighted to find that one of his letters had been written by
quite a wag. He said his doctor had ordered him a holiday abroad, and here he was, but he could give no answers as he had not decided what hotel to stay at. He could not say much owing to the censor, but he would tell one secret⦠âI am determined to finish this war'⦠I could not resist the temptation to put âGood old sport (censor)' on the letter although I am told that this is strictly against orders.
The Reverend Pat Mc Cormick, an Anglican who had served in the Boer War, was amused to censor a letter betokening a fleeting relationship just before the writer left for France:
Dear Molly,
A Happy Christmas. I am sending this to my aunt to forward to you as I do not know the address. Please tell me your name when you write as I have forgotten it. Yours, Dick
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Slipping between the roles of welfare officer and priest did not come easily to many. Sellors had been advised by a friendly sergeant that he would be best advised to âmix with the boys, join in their lives and interests and see the boys made more contented and happy'. And Sellors hoped that by mixing with them in this way he could indeed help âbring them to higher things, the things of God'. But his was not an easy road. His diary makes it clear that he was gently teased by the NCOs, who asked him to speak to the other officers and get them to acknowledge salutes more politely. And then over dinner in the mess many officers suddenly affected âa bleating kind of laugh; all eyes turned in my direction and I assumed it was meant to imitate meâ¦''.
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The real question of whether he ever managed to be more than a decent sort who gave cigarettes to the boys must remain unanswered.