A friend of mine watched two chaplains passing by. One of them was a tall man with a crown and star on his shoulder-strap.
“I wonder,” said my friend, with false simplicity, “whether Jesus Christ would have been a lieutenant—colonel?”
On the other hand, many men found help in religion, and sought its comfort with a spiritual craving. They did not argue about Christian ethics and modern warfare. Close to death in the midst of tragedy, conscious in a strange way of their own spiritual being and of a spirituality present among masses of men above the muck of war, the stench of corruption, and fear of bodily extinction, they groped out toward God. They searched for some divine wisdom greater than the folly of the world, for a divine aid which would help them to greater courage. The spirit of God seemed to come to them across No Man's Land with pity and comradeship. Catholic soldiers had a simpler, stronger faith than men of Protestant denominations, whose faith depended more on ethical arguments and intellectual reasonings. Catholic chaplains had an easier task. Leaving aside all argument, they heard the confessions of the soldiers, gave them absolution for their sins, said mass for them in wayside barns, administered the sacraments, held the cross to their lips when they fell mortally wounded, anointed them when the surgeon's knife was at work, called the names of Jesus and Mary into dying ears. There was no need of argument here. The old faith which has survived many wars, many plagues, and the old wickedness of men was still full of consolation to those who accepted it as little children, and by their own agony hoped for favor from the Man of Sorrows who was hanged upon a cross, and found a mother-love in the vision of Mary, which came to them when they were in fear and pain and the struggle of death. The padre had a definite job to do in the trenches and for that reason was allowed more liberty in the line than other chaplains. Battalion officers, surgeons, and nurses were patient with mysterious rites which they did not understand, but which gave comfort, as they saw, to wounded men; and the heroism with which many of those priests worked under fire, careless of their own lives, exalted by spiritual fervor, yet for the most part human and humble and large-hearted and tolerant, aroused a general admiration throughout the army. Many of the Protestant clergy were equally devoted, but they were handicapped by having to rely more upon providing physical comforts for the men than upon spiritual acts, such as anointing and absolution, which were accepted without question by Catholic soldiers.
Yet the Catholic Church, certain of its faith, and all other churches claiming that they teach the gospel of Christ, have been challenged to explain their attitude during the war and the relation of their teaching to the world-tragedy, the Great Crime, which has happened. It will not be easy for them to do so. They will have to explain how it is that German bishops, priests, pastors, and flocks, undoubtedly sincere in their professions of faith, deeply pious, as our soldiers saw in Cologne, and fervent in their devotion to the sacraments on their side of the fighting-line, as the Irish Catholics on our side, were able to reconcile this piety with their war of aggression. The faith of the Austrian Catholics must be explained in relation to their crimes, if they were criminal, as we say they were, in leading the way to this war by their ultimatum to Serbia. If Christianity has no restraining influence upon the brutal instincts of those who profess and follow its faith, then surely it is time the world abandoned so ineffective a creed and turned to other laws likely to have more influence on human relationships. That, brutally, is the argument of the thinking world against the clergy of all nations who all claimed to be acting according to the justice of God and the spirit of Christ. It is a powerful argument, for the simple mind, rejecting casuistry, cuts straight to the appalling contrast between Christian profession and Christian practice, and says: “Here, in this war, there was no conflict between one faith and another, but a murderous death-struggle between many nations holding the same faith, preaching the same gospel, and claiming the same God as their protector. Let us seek some better truth than that hypocrisy! Let us, if need be, in honesty, get back to the savage worship of national gods, the Ju-ju of the tribe.”
My own belief is that the war was no proof against the Christian faith, but rather is a revelation that we are as desperately in need of the spirit of Christ as at any time in the history of mankind. But I think the clergy of all nations, apart from a heroic and saintly few, subordinated their faith, which is a gospel of charity, to national limitations. They were patriots before they were priests, and their patriotism was sometimes as limited, as narrow, as fierce, and as bloodthirsty as that of the people who looked to them for truth and light. They were often fiercer, narrower, and more desirous of vengeance than the soldiers who fought, because it is now a known truth that the soldiers, German and Austrian, French and Italian and British, were sick of the unending slaughter long before the ending of the war, and would have made a peace more fair than that which now prevails if it had been put to the common vote in the trenches; whereas the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Archbishop of Cologne, and the clergy who spoke from many pulpits in many nations, under the Cross of Christ, still stoked up the fires of hate and urged the armies to go on fighting “in the cause of justice,” “for the defense of the Fatherland,” “for Christian righteousness,” to the bitter end. Those words are painful to write, but as I am writing this book for truth's sake, at all cost, I let them stand....
VI
The entire aspect of the war was changed by the Russian Revolution, followed by the collapse of the Russian armies and the Peace of Brest-Litovsk, when for the first time the world heard the strange word “Bolshevism,” and knew not what it meant.
The Russian armies had fought bravely in the first years of the war, with an Oriental disregard of death. Under generals in German pay, betrayed by a widespread net of anarchy and corruption so villainous that arms and armaments sent out from England had to be bribed on their way from one official to another, and never reached the front, so foul in callousness of human life that soldiers were put into the fighting-line without rifle or ammunition, these Russian peasants flung themselves not once, but many times, against the finest troops of Germany, with no more than naked bayonets against powerful artillery and the scythe of machine-gun fire, and died like sheep in the slaughter-houses of Chicago. Is it a wonder that at the last they revolted against this immolation, turned round upon their tyrants, and said: “You are the enemy. It is you that we will destroy”?
By this new revelation they forgot their hatred of Germans. They said: “You are our brothers; we have no hatred against you. We do not want to kill you. Why should you kill us? We are all of us the slaves of bloodthirsty castes, who use our flesh for their ambitions. Do not shoot us, brothers, but join hands against the common tyranny which enslaves our peoples.” They went forward with outstretched hands, and were shot, down like rabbits by some Germans, and by others were not shot, because German soldiers gaped, wide-eyed, at this new gospel, as it seemed, and said: “They speak words of truth. Why should we kill one another?”