You need, too, to know it in order to chart out the general postwar condition of mind with its symptoms of apathy, callousness, and lassitude. Something has gone to come of it if you have lain for a time in the garden of Proserpine, where the great values decline and faith and high impulse fall in like soufflés grown tepid, and fatalistic indifference comes out of long flat expanses of tiring sameness.
I am tired of tears and laughter,
And men that laugh and weep;
Of what may come hereafter
For men that sow to reap:
I am weary of days and hours,
Blown buds of barren flowers,
Desires and dreams and powers
And everything but sleep.From too much love of living,
From hope and fear set free,
We thank with brief thanksgiving,
Whatever gods may be,
That no life lives forever;
That dead men rise up never;
That even the weariest river
Winds somewhere safe to sea.
Heaven forbid that I should impute any melodious Swinburnian melancholy, or any other form of luxurious self-pity, to millions of good fellows still fighting the good fight against circumstance. They would hoot at the notion. But in nearly all of them hope has, at some time or other, lost her first innocence. Time and place came when the spirit, although unbroken, went numb: the dull mind came to feel as if its business with ardour and choric spheres and quests of Holy Grails, and everything but rest, had been done quite a long while ago. Well chained to an oar in the galley, closely kept to a job in the mine, men caught a touch of the recklessness of the slave—if the world were so foul, let it go where it chose; they would snatch what they could, when they could; drink, and let the world go round.
It is not sense to hope to reattain at will that deflowered virginity of faith. Others who have it may come in good time to be a majority of us all. Already three yearly “classes” of men who did not suffer that immense loss of experience which came with war service have come of age since the war; the new skin grows over the wounds. But we cannot write off as mere dream, with no after effects, the time when it was a kind of trench fashion to meet the demoded oaths of a friend with the dogma that “There is no ⸻ God.”
V
The Sheep That Were Not Fed
I
“Of late years,” the novel of Shirley begins, “an abundant shower of curates has fallen upon the North of England; they lie very thick on the hills; every parish has one or more of them; they are young enough to be very active, and ought to be doing a great deal of good.” This blessing, conferred on the West Riding a little before Waterloo, descended on our Western Front a little after the first battle of the Marne.
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 rearranging of prewar 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
