XVII A Soldier’s Calvary
There is one afternoon on the Somme that stands out in my memory like a dark hill when the sun has sunk below the verge and left a lingering bar of red across the sky. It was a Calvary thick with the bodies of our men. I was looking for the Westminsters and they were difficult to find. I passed over one trench and reached another. There I asked the men if they knew where the Westminsters were, and they expressed the opinion that the regiment was in the trench ahead. There was no communication trench so I followed a fatigue-party for some distance which was marching in single file, and carrying hand-grenades to the firing line. They turned to the right and I kept straight on. Every few yards I passed rifles reversed and fastened in the ground by their bayonets. They marked the graves of the dead. A few soldiers, but newly killed, were still lying out.
At last I reached a trench and found in it a number of Westminsters. They were signalers on special duty, and they told me that I had already passed the regiment on my left. The poor fellows were in a sad plight. The weather was cold and they were without shelter. There were German dug-outs but they were partly blown in and full of German dead. The stench that rose from these, and from the shallow graves around, was almost unbearable. Yet there amid falling shells, the lads had to remain day and night. Their rations were brought to them, but as every ounce of food and drop of water, in addition to the letters from home, had to be brought on pack mules through seven or eight miles of field tracks in which the mules struggled on up to the knees in sticky mud and sometimes up to the belly, it was impossible for the regiment to receive anything beyond water and “iron rations,” i.e., hard biscuits. Water was so precious that not a drop could be spared to wash faces or clean teeth with, and I always took my own water-bottle and food, to avoid sharing the scanty supplies of the officers. After a little time spent with the signalers I moved up the trench and looked in at the little dug-out of the Colonel commanding. All the officers present, bearded almost beyond recognition, were sitting on the floor. The enemy had left a small red electric light, which added an almost absurd touch of luxury to the miserable place. Farther up the trench I found the Brigade Staff Captain in a similar dug-out and after making inquiries as to the position of the Queen’s Westminster Regiment which was my objective, I left to find it; for the sun was already setting. The path was across the open fields, and the saddest I have ever trod. I was alone and had but little idea of location, but it was impossible to miss the path. On the right and left, it was marked at every few steps with dead men. Most of them were still grasping their rifles. They had fallen forward as they rushed over the ground, and their faces—their poor, blackened, lipless faces—were towards the foe. There had, as yet, been no opportunity to bury them for the ground was still being shelled and the burial parties had been all too busily engaged in other parts of the field. I longed to search for their identity discs that I might know who they were and make a note of the names; but I had to leave it to the burial party. I was already feeling sick with the foul smells in the trench and the sights on the way, and lacked the strength to look for the discs around the wrists and necks of the poor, decomposed bodies. It had to be left to men of the burial party whose nerves were somewhat more hardened to the task by other experiences of the kind. It was a new Calvary on which I was standing. These poor bodies miles from home and with no woman’s hands to perform the last offices of affection were lying there as the price of the world’s freedom.
Would that all who talk glibly of freedom and justice might have seen what I saw on that dreary journey, that they might the better realize the spiritual depths of liberty and righteousness, and the high cost at which they are won for the race. It is fatally easy to persuade ourselves that there is no need for us to tread the bitter path of suffering and death—that we can achieve freedom and justice by being charitable, and by talking amiably to our enemies. We try to believe that they are as anxious to achieve liberty for the world as we are, that they are striving to bind mankind in fetters of iron, only through lack of knowledge as to our intentions. Their hearts and intentions are good but they are misled, and after a little talk with them around a table they would put off their “shining armor” and become angels of light carrying palm branches in place of swords and fetters.
This is a mighty pleasant theory, only it is not true; and we cannot get rid of evil by ignoring it, nor of the devil by buying him a new suit. There are men willing to die to destroy liberty, just as there are others willing to die in its defense. It is not that they do not understand liberty. They do, and that is why they wish to destroy it. It is the enemy of their ideal. Whether liberty will survive or not, depends upon whether there are more men inspired to die in defending liberty, than there are willing to die in opposing it. A thing lives while men love it sufficiently well to die for it. We get what we deserve; and readiness to die for it is the price God has put on liberty.
Words are things too cheap to buy it. When someone suggested establishing a new religion to supersede Christianity, Voltaire is reported to have asked if the founder were willing to be crucified for it? Otherwise, it would stand no chance of success. It was a deep criticism, and showed that Voltaire was no fool. Blood is the test, not words. A nation can only achieve liberty when it is determined to be free or die. “Whosoever shall seek to save his life shall lose it.” “Never man spake” as Christ spake, but He did not save the world by talking to it, but by dying for it. Outpoured blood, not outpoured words, is the proof of moral convictions and the means of their propaganda; our soldiers may not be learned in some things, but they have learned that. They know the cause will win which has most moral power, and that the cause with most moral strength will prove itself to be the one with most martyrs. And the side with most men ready to be martyrs will outstay the other. The spirit of martyrdom, not negotiation, is the path to liberty and peace. You cannot negotiate with a tiger. The dispute is too simple for negotiation. You have to kill the tiger, or yourself be killed.
While I was on leave, a man told me that he had asked some soldiers from the Front why they were fighting, and they could not tell him. Probably. All the deepest things are of life beyond telling. No true man can tell why he loves his wife or children. This trust in words, in being able to “tell why,” is truly pathetic. I would not trust a wife’s love if she could tell her husband exactly why she loved him; nor would I trust our soldiers not to turn tail in battle if they could tell just why they are fighting. They cannot tell, but with their poor lipless faces turned defiantly against the foe they can show why they are fighting. Let those who want to know the soldiers’ reason why they fight go and see them there on the blasted field of battle, not ask them when they come home on leave. The lips of a soldier perish first, as his dead body lies exposed on the battlefield; his rifle he clutches to the last; and it is a lesson terrible enough for even the densest talker to understand.
The dead lads lying out in the open with their rifles pointing towards the enemy voice their reason why loud enough for the deaf to hear and the world to heed. Ideals must be died for if they are to be realized on earth, for they have bitter enemies who stick at nothing. And we have to defend our ideal with our lives or be cravens and let it perish.
History, with unimportant variations, is constantly repeating itself; and in nothing is it so consistent as in the price it puts on liberty. The lease of liberty runs out; the lease has to be renewed, and it is renewed by suffering and martyrdom. The dear dead lads whom I saw on that terrible afternoon were renewing the lease. With their bodies they had marked out a highway over which the peoples of the earth may march to freedom and to justice.
The view, all too common, that our soldiers regard the war as a kind of picnic, and an attack as a sort of rush for the goal in a game of football, is false—false as sin. It is a view blind to the whole psychology of the war, and misses the meaning of our soldiers’ gayety as much as it ignores their fear and sorrow. The trenches are a Gethsemane to them and their prayer is, “Our Father, all things are possible unto Thee: take away this cup from me: nevertheless not what I will, but what Thou wilt.”
One day, when I went into a mess-room in which letters were being censored, an officer said to me, “Read this, Padre, there’s a reference to you, and a candid expression of a man’s attitude towards religion.”
I took the letter and it read: “Our chaplain isn’t far out when he says, in his book, that though we may speak lightly of the church we don’t think or speak lightly of Christ. However careless we may be when we are out of the trenches, when we are in we all pray. There is nothing else we can do.”
I have been eighteen months with a fighting regiment on the Front, and I have never spoken to any officer who did not regard it as a mathematical certainty that, unless he happened to fall sick or be transferred—neither of which he expected—he would be either killed or wounded. And I agreed with him without saying it. He does not even hope to escape wounds. They are inevitable if he stays long enough; for one battle follows another and his time comes. He only hopes to escape death and the more ghastly wounds. He hopes the wound when it comes will be a “cushy one.” The men take the same view. The period before going into the trenches, or into battle, is to them like the Garden of Gethsemane was to Christ; they are “exceeding sorrowful” and in their presence I have often felt as one who stood “as it were, a stone’s throw” from them. They are going out with the expectation of meeting death.
On the 1st of July, 1916, twenty officers in our regiment went over the top. Nineteen were killed or wounded and the one who returned to the regiment was suffering from shell-shock and had to be sent home. Although our losses are much lower now, the officers and men experience the agony and bloody sweat of Gethsemane rather than the pleasure of a picnic in Epping Forest. This explains, too, their gayety. It is the happiness of men who know that they are doing their bit for the world’s good, and playing the man, not the cad. The rise of happiness into gayety is the natural reaction from the sorrow and alarm which have been clouding their hearts. In peace time they will never know either the intensity of joy or sorrow they know now. A man never feels so truly humorous as when he is sad. Humor is a kind of inverted sadness. The most exquisite sadness produces the most exquisite humor as the deepest wells give the sweetest, purest and coldest water.
Tears and laughter are never far from one another,
The heart overflows on one side, and then on the other.
Our soldiers’ minds are not filled with thoughts of Germans, but with thoughts of the friends they have left behind them. Nor do they often think of killing Germans. They neither think so much of the Germans nor so bitterly of them as do the people at home. The Germans have not the same prominence in the picture. Deeds relieve their emotions in regard to the Germans and leave their hearts open for the things and folk they love.
It is commonly supposed (and this idea is fostered by some war correspondents), that when our men go over the top they are possessed with a mad lust to kill Germans. The ultimate aim of a general planning a battle is to kill Germans no doubt, for that is the only way to achieve victory; and if the Germans do not want to be killed they know what to do. Let them surrender or retire. The private agrees with the general in the necessity for killing Germans, but that is not what he is thinking of when he goes over the top; nor is it what we should be thinking of in his place. He is thinking of the Germans killing him. Life is sweet at nineteen or one-and-twenty. It pleads to be spared a little longer. A lad does not want to die; and as he goes over the parapet he is thinking less of taking German lives than of losing his own. He knows that German heads will not fit English shoulders, and that, however many enemy lives he may take, none of them will restore his own if he loses it, as he is quite likely to do. He is going out to be mutilated or to die. That is his standpoint whatever may be the general’s or the war-correspondent’s. He goes for his country’s sake and the right. It is his duty, and there is an end of it.
Most of the killing in modern war is done by the artillery and machine-guns. Comparatively few men have seen the face of an enemy they know themselves to have killed. A regiment goes out to be shot at, rather than to shoot. Unless this simple fact be grasped, the mentality of the soldier cannot be understood. The lust for killing Germans would never take a man out of his dug-out; but the love of his country and the resolve to do his duty will take him out and lead him over the top. It is what he volunteered for, but it goes hard when the time comes for all that.
The unburied men I saw had, but a short while ago, no idea of becoming soldiers. They were the light of a home and the stay of a business. With that they were content. But the challenge came; and they went out to defend the right against the wrong—the true against the false. They toiled up a new Calvary “with the cross that turns not back,” and now they lie buried in a strange land. They have lost all for themselves, but they have gained all for us and for those who will come after us. Yet although they saved others, themselves they could not save.