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 rearranging of prewar 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.