It was received by our troops with the greater thanksgiving because it
brought with it no perceptible revival of church parades, a ministration
of which the average private, _l'homme moyen sensuel_ of Matthew Arnold,
had taken a long and glad farewell on leaving Salisbury Plain. Like the
infinite cleaning of brass-work, the hearing of many well-meaning
divines in the Tidworth garrison church had been one of the tribulations
through which the defender of Britain must work out his passage to
France. With the final order to tarnish his buttons with fire and oil
there came also a longed-for release from regular Sunday adjurations to
keep sober and think of his end. "The Lorrd," said a grim Scots
corporal, a hanging judge of a sermon, after hearing the last essay of
our English Bossuets before he went to the wars, "hath turrned the
capteevity of Zion." No more attendance for him at such "shauchlin'"
athletic displays as the wrestlings of the southron divinity passman
with the lithe and sinuous mind of St. Paul. "Sunday," the blithe
Highlander in _Waverley_ said, "seldom cam aboon the pass of Bally
Brough." For better or worse, as a reliever from work or a restrainer of
play, Sunday seldom came across the Channel during the war. A man in the
ranks might be six months in France and not find a religious service of
any kind coming his way, whether he dreaded or sought it.
Yet chaplains abounded. Not measures, but men, to invert the old phrase.
And men of all kinds, as might safely be guessed. There was the hero and
saint, T. B. Hardy, to whom a consuming passion of human brotherhood
brought, as well as rarer things, the M.C., the D.S.O., the V.C., the
unaccepted invitation of the King, when he saw Hardy in France, to come
home as one of his own chaplains and live, and then the death which
everyone had seen to be certain. There was a chaplain drunk at dinner in
Gobert's restaurant at Amiens on the evening of one of the bloodiest
days of the first battle of the Somme. There was the circumspect,
ecclesiastical statesman, out to see that in this grand shaking-up and
re-arranging of pre-war positions and values the right cause--whichever
of the right causes was his--was not jilted or any way wronged. There
was the man who, urged by national comradeship, would have been a
soldier but that his bishop barred it; to be an army chaplain was the
next best thing. There was the man who, urged by a different instinct,
felt irresistibly, as many laymen did, that at the moment the war was
the central thing in the whole world, and that it was unbearable not to
be at the centre of things. And there was, in great force, the large,
healthy, pleasant young curate not severely importuned by a vocation,
the ex-athlete, the prop and stay of village cricket-clubs, the good
fellow whom the desires of parents, the gaiety of his youth at the
university, and the whole drift of things about him had shepherded
unresistingly into the open door of the Church. Sudden, unhoped-for, the
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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