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 medi?val 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.