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.