The most foul-mouthed lot that I have struck since I came to France. Yet after nauseating me for an hour this afternoon with their ‘poisoned gas’ they suddenly began to sing hymns with real feeling and piety. There is some real religion deep down in the hearts of these lads – one cannot call them godless because no sooner has one come to this conclusion than some spark of the Divine flashes out of them. The difficulty is to seize it and kindle a real fire within them.29
The Church of England was not simply England’s established church, but was the religion given on attestation (sometimes with supreme cynicism) by the great majority of soldiers. It is important not to view the Church through the prism of the early twenty-first century, but to remember that a century ago it exercised a much more prominent role in national life, and that clergymen were comparatively well paid. Church attendance was substantially higher than it is now: in 1911, 98 per 1,000 of the population of England took Holy Communion in Church of England churches on Easter Sunday, a figure that had shrunk to 73 in 1939, 42 in 1973, and is now much lower. Perhaps most significantly for the men who went to war, three-quarters of children in England and Wales attended Sunday school in 1888, so that: ‘the religion of the average private soldier had been formed in the Sunday and day schools, not by adult worship in church’.30 Other Protestant sects had a very strong following in Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland and parts of England. And Roman Catholicism, for all the disadvantages under which it had laboured for so long, had a powerful hold on the southern counties of Ireland and footholds in England too.
In short, there was a wider sense of spirituality than is the case today. But increasingly it was expressed, not with any theologically-precise certainty, but with that generalised sense that encouraged one sergeant major to tell a padre: ‘to most men religion means nothing, except the notion that there was one above, a sense of duty to live cleanly, and a belief that there would be a reckoning sometime’.31 Indeed, this tendency to move towards ‘a non-dogmatic affirmation of general kindliness and good fellowship’ was precisely what the Liberal MP C. F. G. Masterman had identified in his 1909 book The Condition of England. Padre Julian Bickersteth was detailed to pass the night with a man due to be shot for desertion the following morning. The victim, from the poorest of the poor in London’s East End, had lost his father young, been sent off by his mother ‘to do what he could for himself and was in prison by the time he was twenty: there was no sign of a conventional religious background. He gave ‘great heaving sobs’ when Bickersteth explained what must happen at dawn. But he rallied after tea, bread and jam and a pipe of tobacco, and they sang together for three hours.
He chooses the hymns. He will not sing one over twice. He starts the hymn on the right note, he knows the tunes & sings them all perfectly … Oh how we sang! – hymn after hymn … After half an hour away for some dinner, I returned to the little room … we agreed to close the singing, but he wanted to sing one of the hymns he had already sung, a second time as a last effort. So we sang ‘God be with you till we meet again’ … he said ‘We haven’t finished yet: we must have God Save the King,’ and then and there we rose to our feet, and the two Military Police who had replaced the ordinary guards … had to get up and stand rigidly to attention … a few seconds later the prisoner was asleep.
At dawn Bickersteth walked the 300 yards to the post, stood beside the bound and blindfolded soldier, whispered ‘Safe in the arms of Jesus’ and heard him repeat the words clearly. The assistant provost marshal silently motioned him away, and the volley came a few seconds later. Bickersteth, believing that his duty lay with the living, followed the members of the firing party out of the yard, spoke to them and gave them cigarettes.32
If the Church of England gained much from being the established church, it lost much too. In the 1906 Church Congress a bishop supported Christian Socialism by arguing that: ‘The bishops’ incomes linked them with the wealthy. The clergy sought their friends among the gentry and professional people. So clerical opinions and preferences reflected those of the upper and middle classes, not those of the wage-earners.’33 It was said that after Cosmo Gordon Lang became archbishop of York in 1908 he never again entered a shop. The alignment between the established church and the ruling elite more widely is underlined by the family links between regular officers and clergymen before the war. In 1900 some 10 percent of regular officers had clergymen as fathers: the future Field Marshal Montgomery, subaltern in 1914 and temporary lieutenant colonel in 1918, was a bishop’s son, and Major General Feilding, commander of the Guards Division for much of the war, had a brother in the Church.
The connection continued during the war. Samuel Bickersteth, vicar of Leeds in 1914, and his wife Ella had six sons, two of them in holy orders. All served in the army or the War Office. One was killed as a subaltern with the Leeds Pals on 1 July 1916, and two were awarded Military Crosses, one, Julian, for his courage as a padre and the other, Burgon, for bravery as a cavalry officer at the very end of the war. A. F. Winnington-Ingram, bishop of London and perhaps the war’s most vocal supporter on the bench of bishops, was a chaplain to a territorial battalion, and gave some of his most rousing appeals in uniform, sometimes speaking from a wagon decked in Union Jacks.
Archbishop Randall Davidson had refused to see a party of unemployed men who had marched to London in 1907 under the auspices of the Christian Social Union, and the incident heightened the tension between the conservative and more radical elements within the established church which pre-dated the war. Many wartime observers felt that the fact that many Church of England chaplains came from middle-class backgrounds made it hard for them to empathise with the soldiers to whom they ministered. In contrast, Roman Catholic chaplains often came from working-class backgrounds. Father Willie Doyle was the youngest of seven children of a devout Irish Roman Catholic family, and three of his brothers became priests. Cardinal John Heenan, Roman Catholic archbishop of Westminster in 1963–75, was fond of relating that he had been at seminary with ex-Lance Corporal Masterson, later archbishop of Birmingham, and ex-Sergeant Griffin, later Archbishop of Westminster.
But the sheer diversity amongst chaplains of all denominations warns us yet again that there is no easy categorisation. Nor should we forget that, while clergymen were never formally conscripted during the war (though they came close to it in 1918), many clergymen volunteered to serve as officers or in the ranks. In September 1916 Julian Bickersteth celebrated Holy Communion with two other clergymen, one a private and one a lance corporal, in his tiny dugout. ‘We could just three of us kneel in comfort,’ he told his parents. ‘Every few seconds the blast of one of our guns would shake the whole air, but nothing disturbed us. I never felt so close to you in my life.’34 Earlier he had reported that there were four clergymen serving in the ranks of 56th London Division, two RAMC privates and two others. Father Hubert Northcott enlisted as a gunner with his bishop’s permission. ‘I now no longer wonder why men are not particularly moved by matters of religion,’ he wrote. ‘You know what it feels like to be a convalescent after an illness. Every faculty seems dormant save the physical … ’.35 Some clergymen serving in the combat arms proved formidable soldiers. The Reverend Dr Bruce M’Ewen, minister of the second charge of St Machar’s Cathedral in Old Aberdeen, joined the infantry at the age of thirty-eight and ended the war as a major in the Machine Gun Corps, returning to his pastoral duties (now as minister of the first charge) when hostilities ended.
In Stephen Graham’s Scots Guards battalion there was a sergeant, later company quartermaster sergeant, who had served in the regiment in the Boer War and returned to civilian life when his enlistment expired. He had attended theological college, been ordained and had a Church of England parish in Surrey when war broke out. He was recalled as a reservist and joined without protest. ‘I soon learned that he was very much pained at the brutality of the conversation,’ wrote Graham, ‘which was so much worse at the front than at home. Or than it had been in the Boer War, and he found difficul
ty in accustoming his mind to the flow of brutal talk which covered his ears day and night.’ His habit of looking at the world from beneath a lowered brow gave him the nickname ‘the Creeping Barrage’, but although ‘he was laughed at for many things, he was in secret and sometimes also openly, greatly admired because he lived what he preached. “I will say this about the Creeping Barrage,” said one; “He lives the life”.’ In contrast, Graham believed that ‘the padres, being officers, lived at ease; and whereas the men had poor food, they ate and drank in the company of officers. I could not help feeling how badly handicapped the padres were’.36
Frank Richards raised another criticism of chaplains, widely echoed elsewhere. It was not simply that they were officers, but that they encouraged combat without participating in it themselves. He thought them ‘a funny crowd: they prayed for victory and thundered for the enemy to be smitten hip and thigh, but did not believe in doing any of the smiting themselves’. He believed that 95 percent of his comrades ‘thoroughly detested’ church parades on Sunday, though they amused themselves by putting some unauthorised words to O God, our help in ages past
John Wesley had a little dog,
It was so very thin,
He took it to the Gates of Hell,
And threw the bastard in.37
The army’s bureaucratisation of religion through compulsory church parades certainly did not help. Bernard Martin, who came from a Nonconformist family, ‘soon learnt in the army that anything but Church of England was called “Fancy religion”.’38 Private Eastwood, in Stuart Dolden’s company of the London Scottish, claimed to be Roman Catholic, thinking that this would get him off church parade. But on Sunday he was marched off with other Roman Catholics to a service five miles away, and changed his religion the next day. ‘I have never seen such a dramatic conversion,’ remembered Dolden, ‘and all without the aid of prayer.’39
C. E. Montague thought that the soldiers he knew hovered on the threshold of religion, ‘prepared and expectant’, but were driven away by a chaplain who could not grasp their fleeting spirituality.
As soon as his genial bulk hove in sight, and his cheery robustious chaff began blowing about, the shy and uncouth muse of our savage theology unfolded his wings and flew away. Once more the talk was all footer and rations and scragging the Kaiser, and how ‘the Hun would walk a bit lame after his last knock’.40
Siegfried Sassoon chided a chaplain’s facility for finding the wrong word. ‘And now God go with you,’ he had told a group of men bound for the front. ‘I will go with you as far as the station.’41 The dockers’ leader Ben Tillett added cowardice to the charge-sheet, and asked a 1916 Trades Union Congress meeting why those ‘who were so fond of talking about heaven should be so afraid to go through its gates’.42 Most chaplains knew that there was at least a modicum of truth in all these accusations, and many wrestled regularly with what they perceived as the most serious, the Church’s support for the war and the relative importance of the spiritual and the temporal in their task.
Their status, however, was clear. Padres were officers holding the King’s Commission, although their rank was relative, with the chaplain general, at the top of the tree, ranking as a major general, down to the most junior, a chaplain to the forces 4th class, as a captain. The chaplain general was always a priest of the Church of England until the appointment of the Reverend James Harkness, a minister of the Church of Scotland, significantly also an established church, in 1987.43 They were to be addressed ‘both officially and otherwise by their ecclesiastical title or official appointment and not by their relative rank or military title’, although, as Arthur Osburn complained, some preferred to use military ranks. In August 1914 there were 117 chaplains, 89 of them Church of England, 11 Presbyterian and 17 Roman Catholic. By August 1918 this had grown to 3,416, with 1,941 Church of England, 298 Presbyterian, 643 Roman Catholic, 246 Wesleyan, 248 United Board, 11 Welsh Calvinist, 14 Jewish and five Salvation Army. By the end of the war there were seventeen chaplains in each division, and a varying allocation to hospitals. Above divisional level the hierarchy reflected ‘a dual organization, one for Chaplains of the Church of England and a parallel one for those of other denominations who are administered as one unit…’.44 This produced a deputy assistant chaplain general (Church of England) and a deputy assistant principal chaplain (other denominations) at corps headquarters, an assistant chaplain general and an assistant principal chaplain at army headquarters, and a chaplain general and a principal chaplain at general headquarters.
Bishop J. Taylor Smith, the London-based chaplain general of the army, was an evangelical with a missionary background who had served as bishop of Sierra Leone. He had been attracted to the post because ‘being a great missionary, he might be nominated to a position which would give him the chance of dealing with the largest missionary society in the world, namely, the soldiers of the British army’. Critics suggest that he had no real theological insight, and his words tripped too easily off the tongue, while Stephen Louden, himself a senior Roman Catholic chaplain, observes that the ‘notion of the British soldier as missionary was an enduring one but curiously unimpeded by most of the evidence…’.45
A much more significant figure was the deputy chaplain general, Llewellyn H. Gwynne, bishop of Khartoum, and brother of H. A. Gwynne, editor of the Morning Post. From July 1915 he was responsible for the Western Front, and had a remarkable impact on chaplains and generals too. The Reverend F. R. Barry admitted that:
Many of us, I think, would have gone under or suffered shipwreck of their faith had it not been for the patient care and guidance of the great and saintly Bishop Gwynne, Father in God to a whole generation of young men… I have used the word ‘saintly’ deliberately. For he made it easier to believe in God. He was a commanding figure of that period.46
Julian Bickersteth, too, admired him from the moment they first met on his arrival in France.
The Bishop could not have been pleasanter. He explained a good deal about the work to be done and how he thought it best to attempt it, and obviously wanted to be considered not just a superior officer, but a real Father-in-God; it will not be difficult to feel that he is indeed the latter. We had three or four minutes prayers together.47
Gwynne got on well with Haig, who told him that ‘a good chaplain is as important as a good general’, and he used his connections to build a better framework for support and the spread of good practice. He approached General Plumer in search of accommodation for ‘a bombing school for chaplains’.
‘A what?’ exclaimed Plumer.
Gwynne went on to elaborate his idea and said how necessary it was to bring back the chaplains from time to time for a ‘gingering up’. ‘You have refresher courses for machine gunners and others. Why should I not have one for chaplains?’ Plumer thought the idea was a good one and offered to put at his disposal a chateau with extensive grounds and beds for twenty chaplains.48
From 1916 chaplains’ conferences were organised under the auspices of the senior chaplain to 1st Army, and the following year Bishop Gwynne’s ‘bombing school’ was established at St Omer with the Reverend B.K. Cunningham as warden. It was concerned less with ‘gingering up’ chaplains than ensuring that, as ‘BK’ put it, the chaplain did not ‘lose his bearings’.
It was easy enough for a chaplain to lose his bearings in the maelstrom of the Western Front. In 1915 Bishop Winnington-Ingram made a passionate demand for the men of Britain to:
band together in a great crusade – we cannot deny it – to kill Germans. To kill them, not for the sake of killing but to save the world: to kill the good as well as the bad; to kill the young men as well as the old; to kill those who have shown kindness to our wounded as well as those fiends who crucified the Canadian sergeant, who superintended the Armenian massacres, who sank The Lusitania – and to kill them lest the civilization of the world should itself be killed…49
This was not a view confined to bellicose bishops: Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy, later the celebrat
ed chaplain ‘Woodbine Willie’ but then a vicar, wrote in his parish magazine in September 1914: ‘I cannot say too strongly that I believe every able-bodied man ought to volunteer for service anywhere. There ought to be no shirking of duty.’50 Even Conrad Noel, the socialist vicar of Thaxted in Essex, supported the war because it promised to help small nations against Prussianism.
The view of the war as a great crusade did not often survive contact with its harsher realities. Julian Bickersteth worked in an advance dressing station on the Somme.
One poor fellow, a gunner, died in my arms in the aid-post, whither he had been brought by his comrades, hoping that it might be possible to save his life. The doctor looked at him, shook his head, and passed to another patient. It wasn’t even worthwhile dressing his wounds. The morphia tablets helped him to bear the pain, but he was conscious up to the end. The doctor left me alone with him, so we were able to have prayers together and a little talk, and I administered to him the last Sacrament. The roof of the little dugout was low and the place was dark and he tried to raise himself to look out of the narrow doorway as if to have a last look outside. Grey and pitiful enough was that scene.51
The Reverend Michael Stanhope Walker went straight from a Lincolnshire parish to the Western Front, and was at a casualty clearing station on the Somme: he buried 900 men in three months. On the first day of the battle he wrote:
We have 1,500 in and still they come, 3–400 officers, it is a sight – chaps with fearful wounds lying in agony, many so patient, some make a noise, one goes to a stretcher, lays one’s hand on the forehead, it is cold, strike a match, he is dead – here a Communion, there an absolution, there a drink, there a madman.52