Up to the point of my interview and examination in London, the negotiations with regard to my commission as Chaplain to the Forces were conducted with dignified deliberation. My letters were answered a fortnight or so after they were received. There was no sense of urgency or hurry. We might have been corresponding about a monument to be erected at a remote date to some one still alive and quite young. This, if slightly irritating, gave me a feeling of great confidence in the Chaplains’ Department of the War Office. It was evidently a body which worked methodically, carefully, and with due consideration of every step it took. Its affairs were likely to prove efficiently organised. I looked forward to finding myself part of a machine which ran smoothly, whose every cog fitted exactly into the slot designed for it. No part of the War Office was likely at the moment to adopt a German motto; but the Chaplains’ Department was plainly inspired by the spirit of Goethe’s Ohne haste, ohne raste.
I have heard other men complain that the Department is dilatory, not merely deliberate, and that it is often impossible to get an answer to a letter at all. There is a story told of a man who wrote offering his services as chaplain, wrote again after a decent interval, continued to write for many months, and finally received, by way of reply, a nice little tract—not even on patience, but on conversion. I do not know whether that story is true or not. No tract was ever sent to me, and my letters were answered—after a time.
After my visit to London, the interview, and the examination, the whole spirit of the proceedings changed. I was involved in a worse than American hustle, and found myself obliged to hustle other innocent people, tailors and boot-makers, in order to get together some kind of a kit in time for a start to be made at the shortest possible notice.
I am told that the whole military machine works in this way in dealing with individuals. There is a long period of leisurely and quiet thought—it sometimes appears of complete inertia. Then there is a violent rush, and all sorts of things happen in a minute. I do not know for certain whether officers in other branches of the service suffer in this way. My experience as a chaplain made me feel like a bullet in a gun. For a long time I lay passive, and, except for the anxiety of anticipation, at rest. The man who held the weapon was making up his mind to fire. Then, without any special warning to me, he pulled the trigger, and before I could take a long breath I was flying through space to an unknown destination, without even the comfort of knowing that I had been aimed at any particular object.
But my faith in the Department was unshaken. I remembered the cautious deliberation of the earlier proceedings, and came to the conclusion that whereas there had been for many months an ample supply of chaplains at the front, and a regular flow of reinforcements from home, a sudden and desperate shortage had occurred—owing to casualties in battle, or some kind of pestilence—and that it was necessary to rush new men to the scene of action at the highest speed. This explanation seemed to me reasonable. It did not turn out to be true. There was no particularly urgent demand for chaplains when I reached France.
I am now inclined to think that the Chaplains’ Department does its business in this particular way with deliberate intention. It desires first to produce an impression of stability, wisdom, and forethought. It proceeds slowly, and for long periods does not proceed at all. It also wishes its servants to feel that it is vigorous, filled with energy, and working at terrifically high pressure. Then it does things with a rush which would put to shame the managing directors of the New York Underground Railway.