XI
LETTER TO AN ARMY CHAPLAIN[2]
April 17, 1916.
Thank you very much for your letter of a week ago, which I should have tried to answer before if I had had time. I am afraid that your confidence in me as an oracle will be severely shaken when I confess that I was once on the eve of being ordained, and that in the end I funked it because it seemed such an awfully difficult job, and I couldn't see my way to going through with it.
However, I must try to answer your letter as best I can, and I hope that you will not mind my speaking plainly what I think, and will remember that I do so in no spirit of superiority, but very humbly, as one who has funked the great work that you have had the pluck to take up, and who has even failed in the little bit of work that he himself did try and do. This last means that I have no business to be an officer. It was the biggest mistake in my life, for my position in the ranks did give me a hold on the fellows, the strength of which I have only realized since I left.
Now then to the point. As I understand you, your difficulty is that you feel that you must devote yourself to strengthening a very few men who are already Churchmen, and to whom you can talk in the language of the Church of things which you know they want to hear about, or you must appeal to the crowd of those who are merely good fellows and often sad scamps too, who must be caught with buns and cinemas and who are very difficult to get any farther.
I fancy that you, like me, when you see a fine dashing young fellow, with a touch of honesty and recklessness and wonderful mystery of youth in his eyes, love him as a brother, and long to do something to keep him clean, and to keep him from the sordid things to which you and I know well enough he will descend in the long run if one cannot put the love of clean, wholesome life into his heart. But how to get at him? If you talk to him about his soul you disgust him, and you feel a sort of sneaking sympathy with him too. It does not seem the thing to make a chap self-conscious and a bit of a prig when he is not one to start with. On the other hand, if you just keep to buns and cinemas you never get any farther. Well, it is a big difficulty. The only experience that I have had which counts at all is experience that I gained while trying to run a boys' club in South London, and you must not think me egotistical if I tell you what seems to me to have been the secret of any power that I seem to have had over fellows.
At first I used to have a short service at the close of the club every evening, to which most of the boys used to stay. I also had a service on Sunday afternoon. Something of the same sort might perhaps be possible in the Y.M.C.A. tent if there is one where you are. When I was talking to them at these services I always used to try and make them feel that Christ was the fulfilment of all the best things that they admired, that He was their natural hero. I would tell them some story of heroism and meanness contrasted, of courage and cowardice, of noble forgiveness and vile cruelty, and so get them on the side of the angels. Then I would try and spring it upon them that Christ was the Lord of the heroes and the brave men and the noble men, and that He was fighting against all that was mean and cruel and cowardly, and that it was up to them to take their stand by His side if they wanted to make the world a little better instead of a little worse, and I would try to show them how in little practical ways in their homes and at their work and in the club they could do a bit for Christ.
Well, they listened pretty well, and I think that they agreed in a general sort of way, only 'they knew that I was a richish man in comparison with them, and that I didn't have their difficulties to contend with, and that all tended to undo the effect of what I had said. And then accident gave me a sort of clue to the way to get them to take one seriously. For some idiotic reason—I really couldn't say just what it was—I dressed up as a tramp one day, and spent a night in a casual ward. I didn't do it for any very worthy motive, and I didn't mean any one to know about it; but it got round, and I suddenly found that it had caught the imaginations of some of the fellows, and I realized that if one was to have any power over them one must do symbolic things to show them that one meant what one said about love being really better than money, and all that sort of thing. So in rather a half-hearted way I did try to do things which would show them that I was in earnest. I took a couple of rooms in a little cottage in a funny little bug-ridden court, instead of living at the mission-house. I went out to Australia steerage to see why emigration of London boys was not a success, and when war broke out I enlisted, although I had previously held a commission. And all these little things, though on reasonable grounds often rather indefensible, undoubtedly had the effect of making my South London boys take me more seriously than they did at first. Well, I am quite sure that with Tommies, if ever you get a chance of doing something in the way of sharing their privations and dangers when you aren't obliged to, or of showing in practical ways humility and unselfishness, that will endear you to them, and give you weight with them more than anything else. In my time in the ranks I had that proved over and over again. If once I was able to do even a small kindness for a fellow which involved a bit of unnecessary trouble, he would never forget it, and would repay me a thousand times over. I was a sergeant for about nine months in England, and had one or two chances. Then I reverted to the ranks, and for that the men could not do enough to show me kindness. (It was my not valuing rank and comparative comfort for its own sake that appealed to them.) Continually I have reaped a most gigantic reward of goodwill for actions which cost very little, and which were not always done from the motives imputed.
I am not swanking—at least, I don't mean to—but that is just my experience, that with Tommy it is actions, and specially actions that imply and symbolize humility, courage, unselfishness, etc., that count ten thousand times more than the best sermons in the world. I am afraid that all this is not much good because you are an officer, and your course of action is very clearly marked out for you by authority. But I do say that if ever you have a chance of showing that you are willing to share the often hard and sometimes humiliating lot of the men it is that which above all things will give you power with them; just as it is the Cross of Christ, and the spitting and the mocking and the scourging, and the degradation of His exposure in dying, that gives Him His power far more than even the Sermon on the Mount. After all, it is always what costs most that is best worth having, and if you only see Tommy in his easiest moments, when he is at the Y.M.C.A. or the club, you see him at the time when he is least impressionable in a permanent manner.
Well, I must apologize for writing such an egotistical and intimate sort of letter on so slight a provocation. But this that I have said is all that my experience has taught me about influencing the Tommy.
No doubt there are other ways; but I have not been able to strike them.
Yours very truly,
DONALD HANKEY, 2nd Lieut.
P.S.—Of course in becoming a Second Lieutenant I have dished my own influence most effectually. It has often appeared to me that among ordinary working men humility was considered the Christian virtue par excellence. Humility combined with love is so rare, I suppose, and that is why it is marvelled at.
Footnote 2: [(return)]
This chapter is the actual text of a letter from "A Student in Arms," and like the most of the other chapters appeared originally in the Spectator.