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 mediæval 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.