News from No Man's Land by James Green - HTML preview

VI
 THE GOD OF BATTLES

Lord God of Hosts, whose mighty hand

Dominion holds on sea and land,

In Peace and War Thy will we see

Shaping the larger liberty.

Nations may rise and nations fall,

Thy Changeless Purpose rules them all.

JOHN OXENHAM.

VI
 THE GOD OF BATTLES

Everything is in the melting-pot. Even our ideas of religion are changing. The development of theology is being hastened by the 'big push,' and orthodoxy is being tested in the red crucible of war. There is a lot of confusion, and that all the contending nations claim God is embarrassing to us, but not to God. We may be sure that there is no jostling or confusion in the Eternal mind. The Good Shepherd knows His own and is not deceived by our claims and counter-claims. 'Gott mit uns' is engraved upon the belt of each German soldier, and the Kaiser claims God as the German God. He has been appealed to by the Austrian Emperor, by the Czar; even the Sultan's soldiers advance to the charge crying, 'Allah, Allah.' We appeal to God too. It is all natural and, from the human standpoint, right. We may be sure that the God of Battles knows the worth of all our claims, knows how much of truth is contained in our cause. In His name the conscientious objector declines to fight, and God only knows where conscience ends and cowardice begins. 'The Lord is a Man of War,' and if history shows anything it shows that God does not despise the sword as an instrument whereby men contend for the faith, and even the blood of men is not too precious to spill for the defence of the ideals of freedom and right. Like the pulsator on the diamond fields of Kimberley, war, the mill of God, throbs back and forth. We may throw on it the heaps of earth, but as it throbs it will shake away the clods and wash away the mire; the true diamonds will remain.

To the superficial, war seems to be a grim contradiction of the fact that God is the Ruler of the world. To them it seems as though this world were governed by a demon. But really war is a terrible confirmation of God's presence in the world and a lurid re-emphasis of His inevitable and inexorable Law.

The mental disease of selfishness, lust of power, and military glory was present; it was slumbering in the heart of the nations in times of peace. The disease (which shows itself in commercial competition too) broke out in the violent inflammation and irruption of war. War is a delirium, a delusion, and a degeneracy. It is made possible by the brute strength of a soulless people on the one part and the weak unpreparedness of an easy-going, prosperous, and pleasure-loving people on the other part.

Suddenly a bolt from the blue fuses all antagonisms into the mad storm which we call 'War.' A good deal of dross will be burnt up, but the pure gold will remain. Out of the collision of national ideals which are right or wrong, heroism and self-sacrifice are born. Out of the commotion of contending ideals, truth, single-eyed, in clear perspective and circular, containing every point of view in its comprehensiveness, will emerge. It is not to the balance of power or the inter-relation of dynastic connexions that we must look for peace, but to the balance of the naked truth and the essential solidarity and brotherhood of man.

The Concert of Europe has broken down in discord, the Conductor is rapping out with His baton the true music of humanity, and He insists that we should all recognize the Keynote.

The pre-millenarian sees in it all a superhuman interference with the human will which is the prelude to a forcible application of the Divine Will and a millennium of peace and perfection. But when we investigate, we see that there is no mental violence in the coming of the Great War. We are reaping what we sowed. It arises out of logical and adequate causes. It will not end until these causes have been removed.

Political excrescences must be sloughed off. Nations will be born or reborn in a day. So war is working the world-fever out of our blood, cleansing our hearts, and making us seriously face life's issues.

To get to particulars. We hear much about man-power to-day. It is the last word of the strategist, the first thought of the statesman, and the secret of victory. But who bothered about man-power a few years ago?

A Russian peasant in Petrograd, after the Revolution, said to an English press correspondent: 'We shall have fine times in the church now. There will not be so many long prayers for the Czar, the Imperial family, and all the nobility, with a little prayer for the poor peasants at the tail end.'

Yet it is the great mass of men which Russia possesses which forms the famous 'steam-roller' upon which so many have placed their hope for the liberation of Europe. It may be that the God of Battles has ordained that in saving Russia, and in part Europe, the Russian people are to save themselves.

How was it with us? How many cubic feet of air have our men had to breathe in the wretched and monotonous tenements in which they were compelled to live? Houses must be built that way, I am told, because the land is dear. Who made the land dear and men cheap?

Men in many callings could not obtain a living wage. Some weird economic law--'supply and demand' or other phrase—made it impossible to give the worker more! But, suddenly, a struggle for national life is thrust upon us, and there is money enough!

I know it is a very complicated question, but it is there. We must face it; we are 'our brothers' keepers.' They are like 'sheep without a shepherd,' unless they are cared for. It is a national obligation to provide right conditions of life, proper education for mind and body for the boy who is going to be the unit in the man-power of the nation.

We must organize our national life to allow of this, for we have no right to permit our industrial development to outpace our humanitarian provision of the fair conditions of a full-orbed, manly life. Each nation contending is 'up against it.' Men are precious in France, but scarce. The birth-rate has fallen off. Why? We leave it to French patriots to solve, and turn to our own affairs once more.

We have suffered in this war, and victory has been delayed because we lacked organization, and yet we prided ourselves upon being organizers.

The victories in war are manufactured in days of peace. We were not organized in pre-war days. Things happened. Under the pressure of war we have had to organize ourselves in many ways. The railways have been brought under central control to serve England and not companies merely. The vested interest of the Drink Traffic has had to be squeezed into more reasonable proportions, and may have to go altogether to secure victory. Men and women are being mobilized for national service, and agitation for women's suffrage is silenced for the present. In the silence it may be that we shall learn that the claim for suffrage depends not upon being but upon doing. National service is surely a good claim for suffrage. Representation should not merely depend upon taxation, but upon a wider qualification—service for the common good in war and peace.

We are not the only people under the pressure of war and compelled to listen to the will of the God of Battles.

We have seen an Anglo-Saxon nation, claimed to be the freest in the world, struggling to grasp at the same time peace and conserve its liberty, reluctant to grasp the sword even to protect its nationals. Led by a far-seeing, cautious, and astute President, it made a wonderful attempt to keep out of war; but the grim circles of battle have with ever-widening sweep reached this huge nation of peace-lovers, and it is learning that in citizenship quantity is not everything; quality, racial purity, counts for something.

Moreover, nations are not permitted, any more than individuals, by the God of Battles to evade or shirk the great moral issues of life:

Once to every man and nation

Comes the moment to decide,

In the strife of truth with falsehood,

For the good or evil side.

The Church is being tested by war. It had not been prepared by its human leaders for this test, though history shows clearly War, Revolution, Crisis, and Persecution are the foster-mothers of Religion.

But we built up the Church for peace and prosperity. Its ordinances, ceremonials, customs, and solemn pomps; its appeal, apparel, and ambition, all needed peace for their opportunity and prosperity for their support. When a nation strips for war, however, it needs a religion from which everything which is extraneous and superfluous is eliminated.

When the soldier, living in the world of elemental passions and away from all the Church aids and props, free from the suggestiveness of the church as a sacred place and all the sensuous accessories and aids to worship, asks for religion, he wants it neat. He needs the fundamental, the essential, the irreducible minimum.

Now the Church has to work in an altogether different atmosphere. It must not be thought that it is an atmosphere less favourable to religion. The drama of the soul never has so fitting a setting as in the red landscape of war, with its alternations of lively death and deadly life.

The very processes of soul growth and the problems of time and eternity are, so to speak, 'filmed.' A lifetime is compressed into a campaign.

As the individual soul has its tragic opportunities, so the Church itself has its great chance. Never was such a setting for the divine drama since it was first enacted. Never were the truths of religion so clearly illustrated or the comforts of religion so pathetically needed. The suitability of the gospel message as a response to man's needs, and the perfection of Christ as man's Comrade and Saviour, never shine forth so fully as in the lurid glare of war's terrible perspective.

It is the business of the soldier's preacher to interpret this. He has abundant mental material to hand, and he works in an atmosphere solemn, insistent, and impressive.

If he turns aside to talk of lesser things, he wastes his time. He must not get between the men and God, or put the Church, or its ordinances, or its rules, so far as they are human, between the men and God.

If this is so when we speak of the Church in the larger sense, how much more is it so when we speak of the Church as a denomination!--and all Churches are denominations when we are at war.

The minister, too, has to cut his baggage down. His spiritual equipment is in his mind and heart. The soldier does not inquire what college his padre comes from, or what qualifications the titles before or after his name stand for. Whether he is a bishop, a great evangelist, or a popular preacher means little to the man. What the man asks is, 'What sort of chap is he? How is he sticking it? What has he got to say? Does he help a fellow?'

The chaplain's one object is to lead men in thought and faith to God as God is revealed in Christ, and to get him there quickly.

In regard to the Church as an institution, there is a feeling among the men, more or less articulate, that it has humbugged them. It has denounced the sins it does not often commit, but has been too silent about the sins which are common to its own membership. The Church, in time of peace, has built up a vast superstructure of respectability. The sins of the flesh and drunkenness and swearing were not respectable; but it has not turned the white burning light of truth against the sins of the spirit—covetousness, selfishness, lying, fraud, greed, and injustice. The soldier has many things to put up with, but for the time he is freed from the soul-destroying influence of an industrial system built upon the basis of competition. He is not afraid of losing his job, and he need not toady to any one to secure the chance of his bread-and-butter. Under the pressure of campaigning he begins to exalt comradeship and self-sacrifice to the first place in the list of virtues. Battle forges a new and strong bond of brotherhood.

He does not possess this at first. He comes out of a world of self-seeking, but he gradually discovers that men depend on each other. In a word, the shells that fly, knocking the parapets about, and the rough and tumble of campaigning knock a man's creed about fearfully. He has to re-sort his ideas of religion and the Church, and when he puts them together again, he finds that they fit his complex needs better when they are built up the other way. Perhaps an arrangement of topics which I have found to be dead topics as far as work amongst soldiers is concerned, and others which seem to be live topics, will help to show what I mean.

The soldier is particularly interested in spiritual biography, and very glad to hear about what God did for Paul, Peter, Moses, Joshua, and David. There are vestiges of superstition lingering in many men, and it is hard to see where superstition ends and faith begins. I have known men sample all sorts of religion during the campaign, trying to find out perhaps what different chaplains have to say about things.

There is a species of fatalism; they value luck, and would sympathize with the Prayer-Book phrase, 'Good luck in the name of the Lord.'

It is strange that men should turn to the elements of religion in which the Church is getting slack. They value prayer, and I think most of them pray in their own way. They believe in providence, but do not expect that prayer for them means necessarily immunity from wounds or death; but they know quite well that whatever may be their lot they will be the better for the prayers which ascend for them and for their own prayers.

An Australian of the real primitive sort was moving across No Man's Land to the attack on Fromelles, and he stopped amid the hail of bullets and bursting shells and leaned on his rifle. A comrade rushed up and inquired, 'What is the matter, mate; are you hit?' 'Hit, no,' he shouted; 'if you want to know what I am doing, I'll tell you. I am saying a prayer.' With that he seized his rifle and went forward to the charge.

An Australian non-com., who went right through Gallipoli and was in many a fight, wrote to me and said that since a certain service at Mena Camp, in Egypt, he had made prayer the habit of his life, and it helped him to play the game. 'I have never gone over the bags without prayer first, and specially commending myself to God, and I find it bucks me up a lot.'

Another, referring to an address on the text, 'Thy rod and Thy staff comfort me,' wrote: 'The note of guidance and strengthening helped me a great deal in the hard business of the attack on the Lone Pine, and it was constantly with me in the Gallipoli days.'

Whilst so many in pulpit and pew have ceased to ponder and wonder at the mystery of the Atonement, soldiers have seen a new meaning in it. A man in our force at Anzac said to me: 'I never could understand before; but now, when I know I may be blown out, I reckon there isn't much chance for me unless somebody has made up for my failure and done for me what I have not been able to do for myself. I guess that is what it means.'

He did not express it very well, but agreed with me when I said that 'Calvary has made up for our failure to come up to the standard of Sinai.'

That most difficult idea of substitution for us and representation of us in the death on the cross is forced into men's minds by many an illustration now. To a soldier dying at Étaples, a chaplain said, 'Do you understand, and does it help you to know that Christ died for you?' 'Oh, yes,' he said, 'I know He died for me, just as I am dying for those shirkers at home.' He used the word 'shirkers' without condemnation, just as the first word which came to him, and passed away at peace and content.

For so long the Cross, with its extended arms, has spoken to the world of a redemption of love. But we passed by carelessly, not choosing to understand; so that we might well ask of the multitude:

All ye that pass by,

To Jesus draw nigh:

To you is it nothing that Jesus should die?

Now we know a little of what it means, for so many of our best have died for us. So many real if not material crosses have been lifted on the low hills of Flanders; so many have laid down their lives for the race, that we are beginning to understand.

There is nothing morbid in these thoughts of Christ dying. The Cross to the soldier is full of sweet helpfulness, it appeals to him with comfort.

Everard Owen, in a poem which we are allowed to reprint from The Times, called 'A Kind Hill to Souls in Jeopardy,' gives us the idea of tender succour which men see in Calvary:

There is a hill in England,

Green fields and a school I know,

Where the balls fly fast in summer,

And the whispering elm-trees grow.

A little hill, a dear hill,

And the playing-fields below.

There is a hill in Flanders

Heaped with a thousand slain,

Where the shells fly night and noontide

And the ghosts that died in vain.

A little hill, a hard hill

To the souls that died in pain.

There is a hill in Jewry,

Three crosses pierce the sky,

On the midmost He is dying

To save all those who die,

A little hill, a kind hill

To souls in jeopardy.

What will the Church do with the men when the God of Battles gives the remnant back to us? We shall have to make room for them. They will want a simple and strong religion. Something to call forth and use the heroic in them. They will not stay in the Church if there is 'nothing doing,' for they are intensely practical.

To recapitulate. The war has shown the political unimportance of the Churches in Europe. The Will of God was not expressed clearly enough or sufficiently by them to prevent the war. The World was stronger than the Church and imposed its will upon the Church.

Now that we are at war, the Churches are still divided in their witness for righteousness. Even the Church, which, beyond all others, calls itself Catholic, is not catholic in the sense of unity, for it speaks with different voices in Austria, Belgium, Germany, and France. The Church which calls itself Orthodox has failed to give the people a lead in Russia. With us the lack of unity in the Christian Church has weakened its testimony in the nation and marred its work in the Army. Once more, therefore, in the history of the world, the King of Righteousness, who is also the Prince of Peace, is recalled in human life as the God of Battles.

Still, He will make the wrath of men to serve Him, and He will gird the soldier to execute His purposes, unconsciously, it may be, as He girded and used Cyrus the Persian: 'I girded thee, though thou hast not known Me' (Isa. xlv. 5). In spite of the failure of the Churches, He is setting up His kingdom of Brotherhood and righteousness in the earth.

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord;

He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;

He hath loosed the fatal lightning of His terrible swift sword:

His truth is marching on.

He hath sounded out the trumpet that shall never call retreat;

He is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgement-seat;

Oh, be swift, my soul, to answer Him, be jubilant, my feet;

Our God is marching on.

I have seen Him in the watchfires of a hundred circling camps;

They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps;

I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps;

His day is marching on.

In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,

With a glory in His bosom which transfigures you and me.

As He died to make men holy, let us live to make men free,

While God is marching on.