One day, when I went into a mess-room in which letters were being censored, an officer said to me, "Read this, Padre, there's a reference to you, and a candid expression of a man's attitude towards religion."
I took the letter and it read: "Our chaplain isn't far out when he says, in his book, that though we may speak lightly of the church we don't think or speak lightly of Christ. However careless we may be when we are out of the trenches, when we are in we all pray. There is nothing else we can do."
I have been eighteen months with a fighting regiment on the Front, and I have never spoken to any officer who did not regard it as a mathematical certainty that, unless he happened to fall sick or be transferred--neither of which he expected--he would be either killed or wounded. And I agreed with him without saying it. He does not even hope to escape wounds. They are inevitable if he stays long enough; for one battle follows another and his time comes. He only hopes to escape death and the more ghastly wounds. He hopes the wound when it comes will be a "cushy one." The men take the same view. The period before going into the trenches, or into battle, is to them like the Garden of Gethsemane was to Christ; they are "exceeding sorrowful" and in their presence I have often felt as one who stood "as it were, a stone's throw" from them. They are going out with the expectation of meeting death.
On the 1st of July, 1916, twenty officers in our regiment went over the top. Nineteen were killed or wounded and the one who returned to the regiment was suffering from shell-shock and had to be sent home. Although our losses are much lower now, the officers and men experience the agony and bloody sweat of Gethsemane rather than the pleasure of a picnic in Epping Forest. This explains, too, their gayety. It is the happiness of men who know that they are doing their bit for the world's good, and playing the man, not the cad. The rise of happiness into gayety is the natural reaction from the sorrow and alarm which have been clouding their hearts. In peace time they will never know either the intensity of joy or sorrow they know now. A man never feels so truly humorous as when he is sad. Humor is a kind of inverted sadness. The most exquisite sadness produces the most exquisite humor as the deepest wells give the sweetest, purest and coldest water.
Tears and laughter are never far from one another,
The heart overflows on one side, and then on the other.
Our soldiers' minds are not filled with thoughts of Germans, but with thoughts of the friends they have left behind them. Nor do they often think of killing Germans. They neither think so much of the Germans nor so bitterly of them as do the people at home. The Germans have not the same prominence in the picture. Deeds relieve their emotions in regard to the Germans and leave their hearts open for the things and folk they love.
It is commonly supposed (and this idea is fostered by some war correspondents), that when our men go over the top they are possessed with a mad lust to kill Germans. The ultimate aim of a general planning a battle is to kill Germans no doubt, for that is the only way to achieve victory; and if the Germans do not want to be killed they know what to do. Let them surrender or retire. The private agrees with the general in the necessity for killing Germans, but that is not what he is thinking of when he goes over the top; nor is it what we should be thinking of in his place. He is thinking of the Germans killing him. Life is sweet at nineteen or one-and-twenty. It pleads to be spared a little longer. A lad does not want to die; and as he goes over the parapet he is thinking less of taking German lives than of losing his own. He knows that German heads will not fit English shoulders, and that, however many enemy lives he may take, none of them will restore his own if he loses it, as he is quite likely to do. He is going out to be mutilated or to die. That is his standpoint whatever may be the general's or the war-correspondent's. He goes for his country's sake and the right. It is his duty, and there is an end of it.
Most of the killing in modern war is done by the artillery and machine-guns. Comparatively few men have seen the face of an enemy they know themselves to have killed. A regiment goes out to be shot at, rather than to shoot. Unless this simple fact be grasped, the mentality of the soldier cannot be understood. The lust for killing Germans would never take a man out of his dug-out; but the love of his country and the resolve to do his duty will take him out and lead him over the top. It is what he volunteered for, but it goes hard when the time comes for all that.
The unburied men I saw had, but a short while ago, no idea of becoming soldiers. They were the light of a home and the stay of a business. With that they were content. But the challenge came; and they went out to defend the right against the wrong--the true against the false. They toiled up a new Calvary "with the cross that turns not back," and now they lie buried in a strange land. They have lost all for themselves, but they have gained all for us and for those who will come after us. Yet although they saved others, themselves they could not save.
XVIII