Chapter 18. Padres

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_ 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 Class, 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 nobody 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 classed 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 advertisement 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 classes 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 "Brass 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 "Brass 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 passed into general use.

"Padre" is another nickname; but a friendly one. I should much rather be called a padre than a Brass 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-class bowling, he is nobody.

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 passed 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: "Pass, Charlie Chaplin, and all's well."

It is not a very instructive story, though the pun is only fully appreciated when we realise that it depends for its value on the contrast between a man whose business is the comedy of grimace and one who is concerned with very serious things. That in itself is a popular judgment. Religion is a solemn business, and the church stands against the picture house in sharp contrast; the resemblance between chaplain and Chaplin being no more than an accident of sound.

There are other stories--not "best sellers," but with a respectable circulation--which throw more light on the way the padre is regarded. For instance, a certain fledgling curate was sent to visit a detention camp. He returned to his senior officer and gave a glowing account of his reception. The prisoners, no hardened scoundrels as he supposed, had gathered round him, had listened eagerly while he read and expounded a chapter of St. John's Gospel, had shown every sign of pious penitence. Thrusting his hand in his pocket while relating his experience, this poor man found that his cigarette case, his pipe, his tobacco pouch, his knife, his pencil, and some loose change had been taken from him while he discoursed on the Gospel of St. John.

I like to think that men will tell a story like that about their clergy. The padre, an ideal figure, who is the hero of it, will fail to win respect perhaps. He will, if he preserve his innocence, win love. There will come a day when even those prisoners will----. See Book I of Les Miserables and the Gospel generally.

A chaplain, this time no mere boy, but a senior man of great experience, was called on to hold a service for a battalion which was to go next day into the firing-line. This particular battalion was fresh from England and had never been under fire. It wanted a religious service. The chaplain preached to it on tithes considered as a divine institution.

I am sure that story is not true. It cannot be. No human being is capable of so grotesque an action. But consider the fact that such a story has been invented and is told. It seems that men--in this case hungry sheep who look up--actually find that the sermons preached to them have no conceivable connection with reality. About to die, they ask for words of life--they are given disquisitions on tithes.

"Well, sir"--I have had this said to me a hundred times--"I am not a religious man." If religion is really presented to the ordinary man as "tithes," or for that matter as a "scheme of salvation," or "sound church teaching," it is no wonder that he stands a bit away from it. I in no way mean to suggest that all religion in the army is of this kind. But the broadly indisputable result of the preaching to which our men have been subjected is this: They have come to regard religion as an obscure and difficult subject in which a few people with eccentric tastes are interested, but which simple men had better leave alone. And the tragedy lies in the fact that the very men who think and speak thus about religion have in them something very like the spirit of Christ.

The padres themselves, the best and most earnest of them, are painfully aware that the ordinary pulpit sermon is remote, utterly and hopelessly, from the lives of the men, is in fact a so many times repeated essay on tithes. And the padres, again the best of them, are not content to be just padres. They feel that they ought to have a message to deliver, that they have one if only they can disentangle it from the unrealities which have somehow got coiled up with it. All the odd little eccentricities in the form of service and the recent fashion of spicing sermons with unexpected swear-words are just pathetic efforts to wriggle out of the clothes of ecclesiastical propriety.

But something more is wanted. It is of little avail to hand round cigarettes before reading the first lesson, or to say that God isn't a bloody fool, unless some connection can be established between the religion which the men have and the religion which Christ taught.

There is another story which should be told for the sake of the light it gives on the way men regard the padres, or used to regard them. They are less inclined to this view now.

A chaplain, wandering about behind the lines, found a group of men and sat down among them. He chatted for a while. Then one of the men said "Beg pardon, sir, but do you know who we are?" The chaplain did not. "I thought not, sir," said the man. "If you did you wouldn't stay. We're prisoners, sir, waiting to be sent off for Field Punishment No. 1."

The story often finishes at that point, leaving it to be supposed that the padre was unpleasantly surprised at finding himself on friendly terms with sinners, but there is a version sometimes told which gives the padre's answer. "It's where I ought to be."

I am not, I hope, over-sanguine, but I think that men are beginning to realise that the padre is not a supernumerary member of the officers' mess, nor concerned only with the small number of men who make a profession of religion; that he is neither a member of the upper, officer, class, nor a mild admirer of the goody-goody, but--shall we say?--a friend of publicans and sinners.

It is a confusing question, this one of the religion of the soldier, who is nowadays the ordinary man, and his relation to the Church or the churches. But we do get a glimpse of his mind when we understand how he thinks of the clergy. He knows them better out in France than he ever did at home, and they know him better. He has recognised the "---- parson" as a padre and a good sport. That is something. Will the padre, before this abominable war is over and his opportunity past, be able to establish his position as something more, as perhaps the minister and steward of God's mysteries? _

Read next: Chapter 19. Citizen Soldiers

Read previous: Chapter 17. A Holiday

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