There was widespread agreement that church parade did little for a man’s spirituality. Private Frank Richards of the Royal Welch Fusiliers thought that 95 per cent of his comrades ‘thoroughly detested’ them. He remembered that they had unofficial words for hymns, and ‘O God our help in ages past’ was transmuted into
John Wesley had a little dog,
It was so very thin,
He took it to the Gates of Hell,
And threw the bastard in.43
However, Horace Wyndham thought that most soldiers enjoyed singing, and Acland-Trote believed that they generally behaved ‘quietly and properly’, and could often be found discussing the sermon after the service. Wyndham went to the heart of the matter when he argued that ‘it is not the service that is considered so obnoxious, but the compulsory attendance threat.’ Soldiers, he argued wisely, could be led but not driven.44
Men resorted to a variety of subterfuges to escape church parade altogether or to attend the shortest service. In one garrison the absence of a Catholic chaplain encouraged numerous conversions to Catholicism until the commanding officer decreed that, as the converts could not attend Mass, they should have extra drill instead. The future field marshal Evelyn Wood served in the Aldershot cavalry brigade in 1867, and recalled that ‘Sunday was a show day in stables’. One young soldier went to his commanding officer and asked to change his religion to Roman Catholic. He eventually admitted, ‘Well, you see, sir, a Roman Catholic always goes to Church at eight o’clock, and I think if I was a Roman it would give me a better chance with my ’arness.’45
Chaplains’ rooms in barracks, where they were available, helped soldiers meet chaplains on more equal terms, and Church of England Soldiers’ Institutes, part of the broader trend towards setting up facilities where soldiers could read newspapers and buy non-alcoholic drinks, also gave Anglican soldiers the opportunity to talk to their chaplain. By the end of the nineteenth century army chaplains were informally known by the term ‘padre’. This had originally been applied to Roman Catholic missionaries in India, but soon had wider currency. Today’s army chaplains are described as ‘Padre’ on the name badge above the left breast pocket of their combat kit.
In a series of colonial campaigns and the Boer War of 1899–1902 chaplains demonstrated both courage under fire and attention to the wants of the sick and wounded. The brave and headstrong General Sir Hugh Gough, commander-in-chief during the first Sikh War of 1845–6, hoped to get a chaplain promoted to brevet bishop but was gently informed that no such appointment existed. In 1879 the Revd J. W. Adams of the Bengal Ecclesiastical Establishment became the first chaplain to earn the Victoria Cross, for rescuing two cavalrymen who had fallen into a deep, water-filled gully with Afghan pursuers very close behind. The burly Adams seems to have had no reservation about bearing arms, but Sergeant Forbes-Mitchell of the 93rd had seen another clergyman in real trouble when caught in ‘a furious charge’ by rebels in north India in 1858:
I remember the Rev Mr Ross, chaplain of the Forty-Second, running for his life, dodging round camels and bullocks with a rebel sowar [trooper] after him till, seeing our detachment, he rushed to us for protection, calling out ‘Ninety-Third, shoot that impertinent fellow!’ Bob Johnston of my company shot the sowar down. Mr Ross had no sword nor revolver, not even a stick with which to defend himself. Moral – when in the field, padres, carry a good revolver.46
It was never a simple matter for the chaplain general to assert doctrinal control even over Anglican chaplains, and there were repeated but unavailing demands for him to be made a bishop to enhance his powers.47 Neither Presbyterian chaplains, first commissioned in 1858, nor Roman Catholics, commissioned in 1859, could accept the chaplain general’s spiritual authority, and both enjoyed distinct ecclesiastical chains of command. The Roman Catholic Church promoted several former chaplains to be bishops of dioceses with strong military connections, and recognition that military rank was transcended by priestly status undoubtedly helped Catholic chaplains relate more easily to officers and men alike. Father Robert Brindle was a hero of the 1884–5 Gordon Relief Expedition, marching with the men instead of riding with the officers (he used his own pony to carry foot-sore soldiers), and helping at the oars when 1/Royal Irish rowed up the Nile. He was awarded the DSO, and attempts to procure him a knighthood eventually foundered when it was decided that such an honour was ‘inappropriate for a chaplain’.48
The First World War saw the Chaplains’ Department, along with the rest of the army, expand to an unprecedented degree, growing from 117 chaplains in August 1914 to 3,416 in August 1918. Methodist clergymen, who had hitherto declined commissions, at last accepted them, and in 1918 there were even fourteen Jewish and five Salvation Army chaplains. Jews had been allowed to attest under their own religion from the late 1880s, and the first Jewish chaplain had been appointed in 1892, though only on a part-time basis because the number of Jewish soldiers was relatively small. There was a rapid increase even before the advent of conscription in early 1916, and a commensurate growth in the number of chaplains. The headstones of Jewish soldiers stand out in Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemeteries not only because they bear the Star of David, but because visitors so often honour the practice of placing a pebble on top of the stone. Many of these men came from London’s Jewish community, and were members of the Royal Fusiliers, the Middlesex Regiment or the all-Territorial London Regiment. Indeed, the Fusiliers formed three Jewish battalions which wore, as their cap-badge, the menorah with the Hebrew characters for Kadema (‘Forward’) on a scroll beneath it. Outsiders unkindly quipped that this was somehow an abbreviation for ‘No Advance Without Security.’
All Anglican candidates for temporary chaplain’s commissions were interviewed by Bishop John Taylor Smith, the Chaplain General, who was a keen Evangelical and was believed to harbour prejudices against Anglo-Catholics. In 1916 the Revd Julian Bickersteth, son of the vicar of Leeds (one of whose brothers was to die as a subaltern in the Leeds Pals on the first day of the Somme) attended a conference in France and admitted that
I had not realised before how successful the CG had been in appointing men of his own way of thinking. There were quite a few padres there with moustaches, and as they wore khaki collars they looked very much like combatant officers.49
In mid-1916 disquiet at the state of the Anglican chaplaincy led to the appointment of Llewellyn Henry Gywnne, bishop of Khartoum, as deputy chaplain general with special responsibility for the Anglicans on the Western Front. Although Gwynne was a close friend of Taylor Smith, shared his Evangelical and missionary background, and was a keen sportsman (he had played football for Derby County), he was far more skilful than the chaplain general in dealing with men. One fellow chaplain thought that:
Many of us, I think, would have gone under or suffered shipwreck of their faith had it not been for the patient care and guidance of the great and saintly Bishop Gwynne, Father in God to a whole generation of young men … I have used the word ‘saintly’ deliberately. For he made it easier to believe in God. He was a commanding figure of that period.50
There were eventually seventeen chaplains to each division, usually sufficient to ensure one for each battalion within it, with more allocated to hospitals, and a hierarchy of senior chaplains at corps, army and GHQ.
The effectiveness of chaplains became a major issue after the war, and many diarists or memoirists had their own views. Non-commissioned personnel sometimes argued that the chaplain’s commission put him at a disadvantage. Stephen Graham was an educated man who served in the ranks of the Scots Guards. He thought that ‘the padres, being officers, lived at ease; and whereas the men had poor food, they ate and drank in the company of officers. I could not help feeling how badly handicapped the padres were.’ In contrast, a senior NCO in his battalion had served in the Boer War and left the army after it. He had been ordained after attending theological college, but did not object when called up as a reservist in 1914. His habit of looking out from beneath a lowere
d brow gave him the nickname ‘Creeping Barrage’, but ‘he was in secret and sometimes also openly, greatly admired because he lived what he preached.’51
A number of clergymen of all denominations decided not to serve as chaplains, but either took combatant commissions or enlisted into the ranks: Julian Bickersteth thought that there were four ranker priests in 56th London Division alone. In Highland Cemetery at Le Cateau lies Rifleman Bernard William King of 2/King’s Royal Rifle Corps. The cemetery register tells us that he was a vicar’s son, an old boy of St Paul’s School and a graduate of New College, Oxford and Cheshunt Theological College. He had enlisted early in 1918 ‘with his bishop’s permission’, and died at the age of thirty on 23 October 1918, when the war had just three weeks to run. Brigadier General Frank Crozier, whose rumbustious memoirs are not wholly reliable, recalled a Welsh Nonconformist padre blazing away with a rifle from a shell-hole at the fleeing enemy. There was no immediate emergency which might (at least in Crozier’s view) have justified this action, and so Crozier gave him lunch and told him that he was miscast as a chaplain. The man agreed and signed on as a private soldier in a Welsh regiment: he did very well, not least because of his spectacular command of colourful language.
We have already seen Robert Graves’ tirade against Anglicans and his assertion that Roman Catholic padres were invariably better. This was not an isolated view, for Alan Hanbury-Sparrow, who rose from lieutenant to lieutenant colonel during the war and felt its hard edge, thought that most chaplains, with the exception of Catholics, ‘did not seem sufficiently equipped to withstand, without harm to themselves, the arguments of an earnest doubter’.52 He was just such a doubter: he could not understand why Christ merited particular regard for having undergone crucifixion. Soldiers of his generation died deaths that were no less agonising and often a great deal more protracted without any certainty of salvation. Guy Chapman felt ‘a serenity and certitude’ streaming from a Catholic chaplain ‘such as was not possessed by any of our bluff Anglicans’.53 Catholics certainly enjoyed two important advantages. The requirement to be on hand to administer extreme unction to those at the point of death encouraged Roman Catholic chaplains to visit the front line at times of danger, and there was a much better chaplain-to-soldier ratio for them than for other denominations.
But if some of them came from working-class backgrounds and found it easy to talk to soldiers, this was certainly not the case with all. Father Willie Doyle MC, much loved by 16th Irish Division and held in high regard even by the Protestants of 36th Ulster Division, came from a big Dublin family, but a comfortably middle-class one. Indeed, the paucity of the Irish hierarchy’s response to requests for chaplains meant that the religious orders and diocesan clergy of England supplied the majority, and many of them were the products of public schools and universities. Indeed, some of the most successful Anglican padres came from traditional middle-class backgrounds. Theodore Bayley Hardy, who was to win the VC, DSO, and MC within a year before dying of wounds; Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy MC (‘Woodbine Willie’); and Philip ‘Tubby’ Clayton, founder of the all-ranks club ‘Toc H’ in Poperinghe, had all been educated at public schools and universities.54 The close relationship between the Anglican Church and the military establishment is poignantly underlined in the cloister of Salisbury Cathedral, where a row of wooden crosses, brought back from France when they were replaced by War Graves Commission headstones, commemorates sons of the Cathedral’s chapter who died in the war.
The effectiveness of chaplains depended more upon personality than purely on social background or even denominational persuasion. The policy of giving one-year temporary commissions to most chaplains often made it hard for them to relate to officers and men who were in it ‘for the duration’. Pressure from the high command to promote morale by preaching on the justice of the British cause struck an uneasy note with some chaplains, as well as with some of their listeners, although most senior officers believed that chaplains had indeed done much to sustain morale. Inadequate preparation and poor selection, both common during the first two years of the war, meant that some chaplains never really recovered from the first shock of seeing wholesale death and agony. Some were simply too old or too unfit (although Padre Hardy had been turned down because of his age in 1914 and died in harness at 54) and broke down physically. Others, wrestling with the conundrum of how an omnipotent God could allow such suffering to occur, lost their faith.
There was always a balance to be struck between being, as one chaplain put it, ‘Mr God and Mr Cinema’. On the one hand there were times when men desperately needed spiritual solace, and others when a cigarette or a trip to the beach was more welcome. Chaplains, with no command responsibilities, often became, in effect, welfare assistants to their battalions, but the wisest amongst them knew that they had to go much further. The best-regarded were those who were not shy of running a soldier’s risks, and were ready to distribute home comforts in the line and to organise recreational events out of it, but remained sure in their faith and were never reluctant to share it. Colonel Walter Nicholson probably assessed chaplains fairly when he said that ‘when the padres were good they were very, very good, but when they were bad they were awful.’55
The war did not result, as some clergymen had hoped, in a large-scale religious revival. But the Toc H movement, so called from the phonetic alphabet’s initials TH, for Talbot House, flourished, and became one of the largest men’s societies in the Empire. David Railton MC, who had served as a brigade padre on the Western Front, wrote to the Dean of Westminster suggesting that an unidentified soldier should be given a national burial service in Westminster Abbey, and the idea swiftly gained momentum. In 1916 he had seen a rough wooden cross inscribed with ‘An Unknown British Soldier of the Black Watch’ in indelible pencil. ‘How that grave caused me to think,’ he wrote,
But who was he, and who were they [his folk]? … Was he just a laddie … There was no answer to those questions, nor has there ever been yet. So I thought and thought and wrestled in thought. What can I do to ease the pain of father, mother, brother, sister, sweetheart, wife and friend? Quietly and gradually there came out of the mist of thought this answer clear and strong, ‘Let this body – this symbol of him – be carried reverently over the sea to his native land.’ And I was happy for about five or ten minutes.56
In March 1919 the Chaplains’ Department, 179 of whose members had died in the war, was granted the title ‘Royal’, and was reorganised the following year so that an Anglican chaplain general would be supported by a deputy from a different denomination. Pay, which had dropped behind that of combatant officers, was substantially improved, it was made easier for chaplains to be promoted by merit, and rigid retirement ages were introduced. Military chaplains caught more than their fair share of criticism in the anti-war literature of the 1930s, and this did much to create the prevailing belief in the uselessness of most First World War padres.
The department was much better prepared for the Second World War than it had been for the first. There was a good supply of chaplains in the reserve of officers and the Territorial Army, and chaplains were now expected to serve for the duration of the war rather than for a fixed term. However, it was not easy to bring the department up to wartime strength, partly because of the influence of inter-war pacifism. Senior chaplains, so many of whom had served in the earlier war, were well aware of the problems that padres would face, and a number of publications, notably The Chaplains in the Grand Assault, by 8th Army’s assistant chaplain general, Frederick Llewelyn Hughes, gave valuable practical advice. Training had also improved immeasurably, and the padres of the inexperienced 2nd Army, which was to land in Normandy, spent a week at a chaplains’ battle school learning the skills of camouflage, obstacle-crossing and night marches with map and compass.
Courage was always highly valued. Dom Rudesind Brookes (‘Father Dolly’) had served as an officer in the Irish Guards during the First World War, resigning his commission after it to enter the Benedictine
novitiate. He was chaplain to 1/Irish Guards during bitter fighting at Anzio, which resembled some of the worst days on the Western Front a generation before. The citation for his Military Cross tells us that
There are not words strong enough to describe the wonderful and shining example Father Brookes gave to all ranks, and all the officers and men of this Battalion would give testimony to the tireless kindliness, inspiration, and help they all received from his hand. His personal bravery in addition to his priestly qualities gain him the admiration of all. The sight of Father Brookes pacing up and down reading his Breviary under heavy fire has restored the confidence of many a shaken man.57
The prompt and reverent burial of the dead had always been important, for although soldiers sometimes deploy a black humour to help them deal with death, the sight of a dead man reminds them forcefully of their own mortality. One of the most profoundly shocking aspects of death in battle is the capricious destruction of the fragile and complex human body by projectile, explosive or fire, or its abandonment to weather and carrion. A. R. C. Leaney described burying members of 5/Dorsets on the Dutch–German border on a wet and dreary day in November 1944:
It took a long time. I suppose it is not clear to those who have not witnessed or taken part in one of these field burials how much the padre has to do … The searching of pockets and general preparation of the body, which was usually roughly string-sewn in an old blanket, fell most often to the padre, whose office made others feel, I believe, that what would otherwise seem desecration or intrusion on the privacy of the unfortunate, was thus a reverent and kindly office.58
Leslie Skinner was chaplain to the Sherwood Rangers Yeomanry. Some of his problems were as old as war itself. In Normandy, on his way back from looking for a missing sergeant, he was approached by an officer in the Duke of Wellington’s Regiment who
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