A Padre in France

by George A. Birmingham

PADRES

The name “padre” as used in the army describes every kind of commissioned chaplain, Church of England, Roman Catholic, Presbyterian, or Nonconformist. The men lump them all together. I have heard a distinction made between “pukka” padres and those who have not enjoyed the advantages of episcopal ordination. But such denominational feeling is extremely rare. As a rule a padre is a padre, an officially recognised representative of religion, whatever church he belongs to. The same kind of character, the same general line of conduct, are expected in all padres. We shall get a side light, if no more, on the much-discussed question of the religion of the army if we can arrive at an understanding of the way in which the padre strikes the average man.

The statistical method of arriving at knowledge is chiefly useful for purposes of controversy. Any one with access to official records might set out for admiration the hierarchy of padres, ranging from the Chaplain-General to the humble C.F. Fourth Class, might enumerate the confirmations held, the candidates presented, the buildings erected, perhaps the sermons preached. It would then be possible to prove that the Church is doing her duty by the soldiers or that the Church is failing badly, whichever seemed desirable to prove at the moment.

That is the great advantage of the statistical method. It establishes beyond all possibility of contradiction the thing you want to establish. But if you do not want to establish anything, if you merely want to find out something, statistics are no use at all. You are driven to other ways of getting at the truth, ways much less definite and accurate.

I wish there were more pictures of army chaplains. There are a few. I do not recollect that Bairnsfather ever gave us one, but they turn up from time to time in the pages of Punch. There was one in which a senior curate in uniform—the story is told in France of a much more august person—is represented waving a farewell to a party of French soldiers, expressing the hope que le bon Dieu vous blesserait toujours. We need not concern ourselves with his French. Staff officers and even generals have made less excusable blunders.

What is interesting is the figure and face of the young man. He is alert and plainly very energetic. He is full of the spirit of comradeship. One glance at him convinces you that he means to be helpful in every possible way to every human being he comes across. He is not going to shirk. He is certainly not going to funk. You feel sure as you look at him that he will keep things going at a sing-song, that a canteen under his management will be efficiently run. He is a very different man indeed from that pre-war curate of Punch’s whose egg has become proverbial, or that other who confided to an admiring lady that, when preaching, he liked every fold of his surplice to tell. He is not intellectual, but he is not, in practical matters, by any means a fool.

His sermons will be commonplace, but—you congratulate yourself on this—they will certainly be short, and he will neither be surprised nor hurt if nobody listens to them. There will be nothing mawkish about his religion and he will not obtrude it over much, but when he starts the men singing “Fight the good fight,” that hymn will go with a swing. In the officers’ mess, when the shyness of the first few days has worn off, he will be recognised as “a good sort.” The men’s judgment, expressed in the canteen after a football match, will differ from the officers’ by one letter only. The padre will be classed as “a good sport.”

There are other sketches of padres, and they do not always represent men of the senior-curate age. There is one, for instance, which serves as an advertisement of a tobacco, in which the chaplain is a man of forty or forty-five. Before the war he must have been vicar of a fair-sized parish, very well organised. And it is not always the “good sort” qualities which the artist emphasises. There is a suggestion occasionally of a certain stiffness, a moral rigidity as of a man not inclined to look with tolerant eyes on the “cakes and ale” of life.

Sometimes we get a hint of a consciousness of official position. It is not that the padre of these pictures is inclined to say “I’m an officer and don’t you forget it.” He is not apparently suspected of that. But he is a man who might conceivably say “I’m a priest and it won’t do for me to let any one forget that.”

Yet, even in these pictures, we are left with the feeling that the men who sat for them were competent and in their way effective. There is no suggestion of feebleness, the characteristic of the pre-war cleric which most commonly struck the artist. And we recognise that the clergy have discarded pose and affectation along with the dog collars which most of them have left behind in England. Freed from the society of elderly women, the British cleric has without difficulty made himself very much at home in the company of men.