Abstract
As the commemoration of the Great War approaches, many a reality will get trampled in the rush to the trenches and many a myth will abound, among them the perception that British army Anglican chaplains were worthless. And we know this was so because Robert Graves wrote it in Goodbye to All That, a viewpoint endorsed in two or three other angry books of that ilk published in the 1920s.
In Faith under Fire, Edward Madigan, late of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission and now of Royal Holloway College, London, tells a very different story in his examination of the 3000 British Anglican priests who volunteered to become chaplains. Madigan’s work is sound and enjoyable to read. In fact my only real criticism is of the publishers, Palgrave Macmillan, who have failed to see the book’s appeal to the thinking public who are interested in the First World War especially at this time, but may balk at the £60 price.
Fortunately for those who will find it, Madigan has not given us an institutional history of the Chaplains’ Department (so thoroughly done for this generation by Michael Snape in Clergy under Fire, Boydell, 2008). Rather he takes a careful look at members of the clergy themselves, their social and ecclesiastical formation, the attitudes most of them put in their new kit bags, what they found in France, and how war changed them. Importantly, he tells the story of how Anglican ministers sought to make themselves and their ethos creditable to civilians turned soldiers in a world gone to hell. Madigan has written a very big book in just under 300 pages.
With the outbreak of war, large numbers of priests of all ages put themselves forward to go Over There only to find a Church and Army Chaplains’ Department wholly unprepared to take them. Undaunted, without training, with no defined role and with the predictable bureaucratic obstacles, the first chaplains found the going very heavy. Worst of all was the restriction (increasingly ignored and later rescinded) forbidding chaplains to go forward to the lines or aid stations. This was what Graves was talking about. No one knew what they should be doing or even what they were for. It was this which annoyed Graves and many others. But by dint of perseverance, finding a role, and learning, then teaching, the lessons of ministry in combat, the majority of chaplains soon enough found their place in the mud and beside the stretchers, and stayed at their posts, so that by the Armistice they were, on the whole, as valued by the brass hats as they were by the soldiers themselves.
Madigan continues to break fresh ground in examining just what the chaplains themselves thought they were doing and how they were able to observe and react to what he calls ‘the nature of combatant faith’. One padre, writing for many, was indelibly impressed ‘by the comrade-ship and selflessness’ of ordinary British soldiers, believing that in France he had discovered the ‘sanctity of human brotherhood’. ‘From the chaplains’ point of view, soldiers outwardly rejected Christianity, yet their selflessness, their courage, their strong sense of brotherhood and, not least, their sense of humour in adversity, suggested that inwardly, or unconsciously, they embraced Christian ideals.’ For the thinking chaplain, Captain Bruce Bairnsfather’s ‘Old Bill’ was not just a character, but the embodiment of this unrecognized spiritual depth.
Madigan demonstrates how the chaplains’ admiration for this trait they saw in the men they were ministering to had an unexpected (and currently little recognized) result when they returned from the front. The loss was so enormous, the anguish so profound, the stupidity so overwhelming that many chaplains came back firmly resolved to make good that loss, combat the idiocy of war, and make a better world. In short their experiences had given them an idealistic sense of solidarity between men of all classes who had shared such ordeals, and these ‘veteran padres’ were determined to promote greater cooperation and fellowship across the social strata by campaigning for increased enfranchisement and representation for the working classes.
Although Madigan is in no way an apologist for Anglican clerics or their churches, he clearly points to the contribution of veteran padres as one powerful reason why the Church flourished in many different ways in the 1920s and 1930s. The final part of his book tells the story of the determined energy of returning chaplains who were not prepared to put up with the old ways. Within the Church they wrought a new emphasis on parish-based social work within poor neighbourhoods, equality of pay for clergy, self-government, and a great swell of pressure to update the Book of Common Prayer. It was the ex-chaplains who embraced an accessible Anglo-Catholic liturgy which was designed to instil an hour of order into chaotic lives. They were the wellspring, too, at the heart of BBC religious broadcasting especially for children (which surprisingly Madigan omits to mention) and support for the advance of women’s ministry (which he does).
Outside the Church itself, a significant proportion of the ex-chaplains openly or quietly embraced the Labour movement or at least its ideals, and more than a few became socialists and even pacifists. Large numbers supported workers’ education and welfare, Toc H, the Industrial Christian Fellowship, and the Industrial Welfare Society.
In short, despite the bishops and Parliament, by the mid-1920s the newly returned chaplains were beginning to set the Church’s agenda in a changed world and making a very telling fist of it. And they were led not by gentle Jesus meek and mild, not a Father God on a throne, but the Christ they had met in the men in the trenches, a suffering, dying Christ whose earthly ministry was completely bound up in service, selflessness, and sacrifice. And they were not alone. As Madigan records, as early as 1920 more than 2000 men came forward for ordination in England alone, matched by proportionately large numbers in the Dominions. Of the 2000 from England, two-thirds were NCOs or privates. And the young chaplains made sure they were accepted for training – this generation who were called to make spiritual sense out of the senselessness which they had experienced.
Faith under Fire is first rate. It is a work which, I trust, will be valued by those who really want to understand the contribution of dedicated men who ostensibly had no role in war but found one then and in the years to follow.