Ever since those disconcerting bombs were originally thrown courageous divines and laymen have been rushing in to pick them up and throw them away, combining as well as they could an air of respect for the thrower with tender care for the mental ease of congregations occupied generally in making money and occasionally in making war. Yet there they lie, miraculously permanent and disturbing, as if just thrown. Now and then one will go off, with seismic results, in the mind of some St. Francis or Tolstoy. And yet it remains where it was, like the plucked Golden Bough: uno avulso, non deficit alter, ready as ever to work on a guileless mind like our friend’s.
But this war had to be won; that was flat. It was like putting out houses on fire, or not letting children be killed; it did not even need to be proved; that we had got to win was now the one quite certain thing left in a world of shaken certainties. Any religion or anything else that seemed to chill, or deter, or suggest an alternative need not be wholly renounced. But it had to be put away in a drawer. After the war, when that dangerous precept about the left cheek could no longer do serious harm, it might come out again; our friend would see what could be done. For he was a man more strongly disposed than most of his fellows to hold, if he honestly could, the tenets of some formal religion. “They got hold o’ something,” he used to say, with curiosity and some respect, of more regular practitioners than himself. “Look at the Salvation Army legging along in the mud and their eyes fair shining with happiness! Aye, they got on to something.” He would investigate, when the time came.
IV
The testimonies that might have ensued were foreclosed by a shell that buried him alive in Oppy Wood, under the Vimy Ridge, where he was engaged in diverting the energies of the Central Powers from the prostrate army of Nivelle. He had by then been two years in France, and had told a few friends about various “queer feels” and “rum goes” which he would not have known by name if you had called them spiritual experiences. One of his points—though he did not put it in that way—was that in war a lot of raw material for making some sort of religion was lying about, but that war also made some of the finished doctrinal products now extant look pretty poor, especially, as he said, “all the damning department.” Rightly or wrongly, no men who have been close friends for a year, and who know that in the next few hours they are nearly as likely as not to be killed together in doing what they all hold to be right, will entertain on any terms the idea of any closing of gates of divine mercy, open to themselves, in the face of any comrade in the business.
The sunshine of one of the first clement days of 1916 drew him about as far as I heard him go on the positive side. “You know what it is,” he said in the course of one of the endless trench talks, “when you got to make up your mind to do as you oughter. Worry and fuss and oh, ain’t it too hard, and why the ’ell can’t I let myself off!—that’s how it is. Folla me?”
The audience grunted assent. “Some other time,” he pursued, “perhaps once in ten years, it’s all t’other way. You’re set free like. Kind of a miracle. Don’t even have to think what you’re going to get by it. All you know is that there’s just the one thing, in all the whole world, good enough. Doing it ain’t even hard. All the sport there ever was has been took out of everything else and put into that. Kind of a miracle. Folla me?”
“That’s right,” another man confirmed. “You’ll see it at fires when people are like to be burnt. Men’ll go fair mad to help them. Don’t think. Don’t feel it if they’re hurt. Fair off it to get at them—same as a dog when you throw a stick in a pond.”
“Ah, then,” contributed somebody else, “you’ve only to hear a man with a grand tenor voice in a song till you’ll feel a coolness blowing softly and swif’ly over your face and then gone, the way you’d have died on a cross with all the pleasure in life while it lasted.”
“Aye, and you’ll get it from whisky,” another put in. “Isn’t it just what more men’ll get drunk for than anything else? And why the rum’s double before you go over?”
No doubt you know all about it from books, and you may prefer the wording of that tentative approach made by the most spiritually-minded of modern philosophers to a
