A Padre in France Part 15

Yet it was not altogether the strange conditions of the performance which worried me. I should, I think, have come to grief just as badly with those audiences if they had been collected into rooms or halls.

I was out of touch with the men I was talking to. I did not understand them or how to address them. I had some experience, experience of six months or so, of soldiers; but that was no help to me. These were soldiers of a kind quite new to me. They belonged to the old army. Officers and men alike were professionals, not amateurs soldiering by chance like the rest of us.

The cavalry is, with the possible exception of the Guards, the only part of our force in which the spirit of the old army survives. Every infantry battalion has been destroyed and renewed so often since the war began that the original personality of the thing, the sense of memory, the link with the past and all its traditions, no longer survives. An infantry regiment bears an old name; but it is a new thing. Its resemblance to the regiment which bore the name before the war is superficial, a thin veneer. In spirit, outlook, tone, interest, tradition, in all but courage and patriotism, it is different. In the cavalry this great change has not taken place.

The cavalry suffered heavily in the early days of the war and has lost many men since. Large numbers of recruits have come in to make good the losses. But the number of new men has never been so great as to destroy the old regiment's power of absorption. Recruits have been digested by the original body. They have grown up in the tradition of the regiment and have been formed by its spirit. The difference between the cavalry troopers and the infantry privates of the army of to-day is difficult to define; but it is very easily felt and plain to recognise.

Perhaps it is most clearly seen in the att.i.tude of men towards their officers. In the old army officers were a cla.s.s apart. Everything that could be done was done to emphasise the distinction between officers and men. And the distinction was a real, not an artificial thing. The officer was different from the men he commanded. He belonged to a different cla.s.s. He had been educated in a different way. He was accustomed before he joined the army and after he left it to live a life utterly unlike the life of the men he commanded. It can scarcely have been necessary to deepen by disciplinary means the strong, clear line between officers and men.

In the new army all that can be done by regulations is done to keep up the idea of the officer super cla.s.s. But the distinction now is an artificial one, not a real one. Neither in education, social cla.s.s, manner of life, wealth, nor any other accident are our new officers distinct from the men they command.

For the men of the old army the officer was a leader because he was recognisably in some sense a superior. He might be a good officer or a poor one, brave and efficient or the reverse. Whatever his personal qualities he was an officer, a natural leader.

For the men of the new army an officer is an officer more or less by accident. No one recognises any kind of divine right to leadership.

Discipline may insist, does quite rightly insist, on due respect to officers as such; but everybody feels and knows that this is a mere question of expediency. Men cannot act together unless some one commands; but it does not follow that the man who gives the orders is in any permanent way the superior of the men who receive them.

What has really happened during the war is that the army has changed in the essential spirit of its organisation. It is no longer built on the aristocratic principle like the army of Louis XIV. It has been democratised and is approximating to the type of Napoleon's armies or Cromwell's Ironsides. The sh.e.l.l of the old organisation is there still. The life within the sh.e.l.l is different.

I do not know how the men of the old army regarded their generals and officers in high command. If we may trust Kipling they had, sometimes at least, a feeling of strong personal affection and admiration for certain commanders.

"He's little, but he's wise, And he does not advertise, Do you, Bobs?"

Very likely the cavalry men still have this kind of feeling for their generals. The men of the brigade I visited certainly ought to have loved their general. He did a great deal for them. But the new army does not seem to have any feeling either of respect or contempt for its generals.

Nothing surprised me more when I became intimate with the men than their att.i.tude towards their commanding officers. I had read of the devotion of armies to their leaders. We are told how Napoleon's soldiers idolised him; how Wellington's men believed in him so that they were prepared to follow him anywhere, confident in his genius.

Misled by newspaper correspondents, I supposed that I should find this sort of thing common in France. I had often read of this general and that as beloved or trusted by his men.

In fact no such spirit exists. Very often the men do not know the name of the commander of the particular army, or even the brigade, to which they belong; so little has the personality of the general impressed itself on the men. Very often I used to meet evidences of personal loyalty to a junior officer, a company commander, or a subaltern. Occasionally men have the same feeling about a colonel.

They never seem to go beyond that. There was not a trace of admiration for or confidence in any one in high command. It was not that the men distrusted their generals or disliked them. Their att.i.tude was generally neutral. They knew nothing and cared very little about generals.

Perhaps men never did idolise generals, and historians, like newspaper correspondents, are simply inventing pretty myths when they tell us about the hero worship paid to Napoleon, Wellington, and the rest.

Perhaps the fact is that the conditions of modern warfare tend to obscure the glory of a general. He can no longer prance about on a horse in front of lines of gaping men, proudly contemptuous of the cannon b.a.l.l.s which come bounding across the field of battle from the enemy's artillery. His men are inclined to forget his existence, usually do remain ignorant of his name because they do not see him.

One is tempted to wonder whether the formal--and very wearisome--inspections which are held from time to time behind the lines, generally on cold and rainy days, are not really pathetic efforts of kings and generals to a.s.sert themselves, to get somehow into the line of vision of the fighting men.

Perhaps it may be that generals, through no fault of their own, have lost that "plaguy trick of winning victories" which bound the heart of Dugald Dalgetty to Gustavus Adolphus. Victories, so far as we can see, are things which do not occur in modern warfare, or, at all events, do not occur on the western front. If any one did win a victory of the old-fashioned kind it is quite possible that he might become the hero of the soldier.

It would be very interesting to know what the feelings of soldiers of other armies are towards their generals. The German people seem to idolise von Hindenburg. Have the German soldiers any kind of confidence in his star? Von Mackensen has some brilliant exploits to his credit. Does Fritz, drafted into a regiment commanded by him, march forward serenely confident of victory?

Our men do no such thing. They have unshaken confidence in themselves. They are sure that their company commanders will not fail them or their colonels let them down. But they have no kind of feeling, good or bad, about their generals.

CHAPTER XVIII

PADRES

The name "padre" as used in the army describes every kind of commissioned chaplain, Church of England, Roman Catholic, Presbyterian, or Nonconformist. The men lump them all together. I have heard a distinction made between "pukka" padres and those who have not enjoyed the advantages of episcopal ordination. But such denominational feeling is extremely rare. As a rule a padre is a padre, an officially recognised representative of religion, whatever church he belongs to. The same kind of character, the same general line of conduct, are expected in all padres. We shall get a side light, if no more, on the much-discussed question of the religion of the army if we can arrive at an understanding of the way in which the padre strikes the average man.

The statistical method of arriving at knowledge is chiefly useful for purposes of controversy. Any one with access to official records might set out for admiration the hierarchy of padres, ranging from the Chaplain-General to the humble C.F. Fourth Cla.s.s, might enumerate the confirmations held, the candidates presented, the buildings erected, perhaps the sermons preached. It would then be possible to prove that the Church is doing her duty by the soldiers or that the Church is failing badly, whichever seemed desirable to prove at the moment.

That is the great advantage of the statistical method. It establishes beyond all possibility of contradiction the thing you want to establish. But if you do not want to establish anything, if you merely want to find out something, statistics are no use at all. You are driven to other ways of getting at the truth, ways much less definite and accurate.

I wish there were more pictures of army chaplains. There are a few. I do not recollect that Bairnsfather ever gave us one, but they turn up from time to time in the pages of _Punch_. There was one in which a senior curate in uniform--the story is told in France of a much more august person--is represented waving a farewell to a party of French soldiers, expressing the hope _que_ _le bon Dieu vous blesserait toujours_. We need not concern ourselves with his French. Staff officers and even generals have made less excusable blunders.

What is interesting is the figure and face of the young man. He is alert and plainly very energetic. He is full of the spirit of comradeship. One glance at him convinces you that he means to be helpful in every possible way to every human being he comes across.

He is not going to shirk. He is certainly not going to funk. You feel sure as you look at him that he will keep things going at a sing-song, that a canteen under his management will be efficiently run. He is a very different man indeed from that pre-war curate of _Punch's_ whose egg has become proverbial, or that other who confided to an admiring lady that, when preaching, he liked every fold of his surplice to tell. He is not intellectual, but he is not, in practical matters, by any means a fool.

His sermons will be commonplace, but--you congratulate yourself on this--they will certainly be short, and he will neither be surprised nor hurt if n.o.body listens to them. There will be nothing mawkish about his religion and he will not obtrude it over much, but when he starts the men singing "Fight the good fight," that hymn will go with a swing. In the officers' mess, when the shyness of the first few days has worn off, he will be recognised as "a good sort." The men's judgment, expressed in the canteen after a football match, will differ from the officers' by one letter only. The padre will be cla.s.sed as "a good sport."

There are other sketches of padres, and they do not always represent men of the senior-curate age. There is one, for instance, which serves as an advertis.e.m.e.nt of a tobacco, in which the chaplain is a man of forty or forty-five. Before the war he must have been vicar of a fair-sized parish, very well organised. And it is not always the "good sort" qualities which the artist emphasises. There is a suggestion occasionally of a certain stiffness, a moral rigidity as of a man not inclined to look with tolerant eyes on the "cakes and ale" of life.

Sometimes we get a hint of a consciousness of official position. It is not that the padre of these pictures is inclined to say "I'm an officer and don't you forget it." He is not apparently suspected of that. But he is a man who might conceivably say "I'm a priest and it won't do for me to let any one forget that."

Yet, even in these pictures, we are left with the feeling that the men who sat for them were competent and in their way effective. There is no suggestion of feebleness, the characteristic of the pre-war cleric which most commonly struck the artist. And we recognise that the clergy have discarded pose and affectation along with the dog collars which most of them have left behind in England. Freed from the society of elderly women, the British cleric has without difficulty made himself very much at home in the company of men.

That is the impression we get of the padre from the artists who have drawn pictures of him. But there are not nearly enough of these pictures to make us sure that it is in just this way that the men in France regard the clergy who have gone on active service. The fact is that the artists who have sketched generals and staff officers in hundreds, subalterns in thousands, and men of the ranks in uncountable numbers, have not taken very much notice of the padres.

They felt perhaps that the clergy did not really count for much in army life.

Fortunately it is not only in the drawing of artists that the general opinion finds expression. The average man, a very sure and sane judge of worth, cannot use pencil, brush, or paint; but he has other ways of expressing himself. For instance he labels whole cla.s.ses with nicknames.

Consider the various names for the enemy which are current in the trenches. "Hun" was not the invention of the army. It came from the newspapers. The soldier uses it, but not with delight. He prefers "Boche"; but that was not his own word either. It originated with the French. And there is a noticeable difference between the way a Frenchman and an Englishman say "Boche." The Frenchman hisses it. In his mouth it is eloquent of a bitter hatred for something vile. An Englishman says "Boche" quite differently. You feel as you listen to him that he regards his enemy as brutal and abominable, but also as swollen, flatulent, and somewhat ridiculous.

"Fritz" and not "Boche" is our own invention in the way of a name for the enemy. It expresses just what the men feel. "Fritz" whom we "strafe" continually is in the main a ridiculous person, and any healthy-minded man wants to rag him. There is an inflated pomposity about Fritz; but given the necessary hammering he may turn out to be a human being like ourselves. He wants to get home just as we do. He likes beer, which is very hard to come by for any of us, and he enjoys tobacco.

Or take another nickname. Generals and staff officers are called "Bra.s.s Hats." The name was fastened on them early in the war and it still sticks. Perhaps if we were starting fresh now we should give them another name, a kindlier one. For a "Bra.s.s Hat," if such a thing existed, would be more ornamental than useful. It would occupy a man's time in polishing it, would shine, no doubt agreeably, on ceremonial occasions, but would be singularly uncomfortable for daily wear. Is that the sort of way the fighting men thought of the staff after Neuve Chapelle? The name suggests some such general opinion and the name pa.s.sed into general use.

"Padre" is another nickname; but a friendly one. I should much rather be called a padre than a Bra.s.s Hat. I should much rather be called a padre than a parson. It is an achievement, something they may well be proud of, that the old regular chaplains were spoken of by officers and men alike as padres. I, who had no part in winning the name, feel a real satisfaction when I open a letter from man or officer and find that it begins "Dear Padre."

And yet--there is a certain playfulness in the name. A padre is not one of the serious things in army life. No such nickname attaches or could attach to a C.O. or a sergeant-major. They matter. A padre does not matter much. Religion, his proper business, is an extra, like music lessons at a public school. Music is a great art, of course. No one denies it, chiefly because no normal boy thinks about it at all.

The real affairs of life are the Latin grammar and the cricket bat.

There is a master who gives music lessons to those who want such things. He may be an amiable and estimable man; but compared to a form master or the ex-blue who is capable of making his century against first-cla.s.s bowling, he is n.o.body.

Some feeling of that kind finds expression in the nickname "padre."

It is not contempt. There is not room for real contempt alongside of the affection which the name implies. It's just a sense that, neither for good nor evil, is the padre of much importance. It is impossible to imagine King Henry speaking of Thomas a Becket as the padre. He hated that archbishop, and he also feared him, so he called him, not a padre, but a turbulent priest.

Is the kingdom of heaven best advanced by men who strike the world as being "padres" or by "turbulent priests"? It is a very nice question.

There is yet another way in which we get at that most elusive thing, popular opinion. Stories are told and jokes pa.s.sed from mouth to mouth. It is not the least necessary that the stories should be true, literally. They are indeed much more likely to give us what we want, a glimpse into the mind of the average man, if they are cheerily unconnected with sordid facts. No one supposes that any colonial colonel ever begged his men not to address him as "Sam" in the presence of an English general. But the story gives us a true idea of the impression made on the minds of the home army by the democratic spirit of the men from overseas.

I only know one padre story which has become universally popular. It takes the form of a dialogue.

Sentry: "Who goes there?"

Padre: "Chaplain."

Sentry: "Pa.s.s, Charlie Chaplin, and all's well."