WAR BOOKS NOT THE WAR

Evening Star, Issue 21036, 25 February 1932, Page 7

WAR BOOKS NOT THE WAR

—. *. AN OUTSPOKEN PADRE [By the Rev, P. B. Clayton, Founder Padre of Toe H.] Scarcely half the present nation is old enough to have heard the newsboys shouting: “Fall of Liege 1 Fall of Namur!” An intelligent schoolboy, known to me through a friend, connected nothing with the name of Kitchener, A generation of grown men and women has arisen to whom the war is ancient and ugly history, untouched by any note of personal sorrow. Their knowledge of it is largely gained from war books, which, alas! too often malign the men who fought. “ Has the war real importance?” Is it now worth remembering?” They ask this honestly among themselves. Perhaps it can be answered by throwing the stress where they will not expect it. It is their period, not ours, which has to prove its worth.

The hundred days preceding Waterloo have their own bibliography. But from 1815 to 1832 is, to all but a few, a dull and empty desert. The desert stretches on, apart from two political eruptions, for another twenty years, illumined only by a shelf of novels and a few romantic poets. The aftermath of war is a dull, sterile age, noteworthy chiefly for the foolishness of its conceit, the decline of its manners, and the decadence of its outlook.

When the twentieth century is named, so long as men learn anything, the Four Years’ War will be in it remembered ; long after those who now seek to forget it are utterly forgotten. Students will then survey with solemnity that most epochal tragedy which altered every map and every public circumstance, which forced the growth of flight, which opened new horizons to the doctor as well as to the statesman, which mortgaged Europe to America, tore down five monarchies, made Holy Russia atheist, China a desolation, and India one dark cauldron.

There is a second criterion whereby the younger men judge this armistice. Their passion is sincerity; and to their view it is irreconcilable that we ask them to commemorate with honour an army steeped in vice! How can we help them best in this confusion between war realists and the real war ? Not merely by an annual display of our own memories and revealing to them the sutbborn characters we ourselves knew so well. In Athens an unknown God was ignorantly worshipped; but in the Abbey an unknown soldier cannot receive abiding reverence from those who have grown up in ignorance of his virtues. “ Keep your saints,” said Mr Gladstone vigorously to a church dignitary who had inquired the wisest policy for the Church of England. Can we say “ Keep your saints ” to the generation joining us at the war memorials? Have we ourselves upheld them recently? Can the new generation be honestly assured that those whom we commemorate were men of character? Here is an argued answer from one who knew them well.

The flood gates of such memories as mine can never open unreservedly; for there are pools of other men’s possession which may not be disturbed. These share the priest’s own grave; and thus it conies about that any chaplain turned author has to exercise a stewardship most meticulous. He must divide his mind, rejecting quite deliberately some of the loveliest instances of goodness he has known. He must hold back sometimes the very proof fee needs; the Gospel he would pen must be detached, defective, embarrassed by lacunae.

Last year was not a year of grace at all. Thinking to do Peace service we all sat down and read new horrors day by day about the war. So it came to be thst a whole host of the less scrupulous got busy writing memoirs, some bad, some worse, until the public appetite for, this new form of Flanders mud was sated.

But were the charges true? Were our great armies filled with vice and cruelty? To prove a universal negative us past the wit of man. This is particularly true of a long line of battle, where (as Thucydides said long ago) a man can only know what went on round about him.

Let pie then limit my survey to the facts of Flanders j and in Flanders, to the only town winch remained throughout the advanced base of operations. At least 2,000,000 officers and men frequented Poperinghe during the whole period; all the time also the town was festering with Belgian refugees. What was its moral state? I turn to the irrefutable evidence of the town major’s office, where Sergeantmajor Miller was permanent chief of staff for town administration. Even before the birth of Talbot House in December, 1915, he held this office, and left it only after the armistice. Now, on the basis of these books Poperinghe must have been . a plague spot. Every condition requisite was there fulfilled. Most, divisions of the British armies were billeted, sooner or later, within reach of it. Its war-time population were mainly refugees. Only the love of gain could hold them there. They had small pride of birth, and no great patriotic instincts to detain them. It would not be surprising if any town thus circumstanced gave way in public morals. Men from the hell of Ypres, some seven miles distant, might be judged tenderly if they required provision of ill character in the one town which they could reach at intervals. The “ a priori ” case for Poperinghe as a place of sexual license was very strong indeed. What are the actual facte? They are astonishing. I quote her from the evidence, unpublished hitherto, of Ser-geant-major Miller, Town Major’s Chief-of-Staff in Poperinghe.

“ I was in Poperinghe three and a-half years, and during the whole of that time I was in the office which was responsible for the Military Police Service, the billeting of all troops in the town, and for the liaison work between the British military and Belgian civil authorities, and during that period I can vouch for the facts that:— 1. Never was a licensed brothel for the troops open in Poperinghe or anywhere in Belgian territory occupied by British troops. 2. Drunkenness was indeed very rare, and, in fact, more rare than any town in peace time so much frequented.

Several thousands of troops were billeted regularly in the town up to early in 1918, while many thousands were always in camp within a few miles’ radius. Spirits were unobtainable, and only very light wines, beer, and stout were sold, or allowed to be sold to troops in the local estaminets. Any civilians who were known to sell or give brandy or spirits had their premises closed by the Belgian authorities. 3. The Belgian families did not complain of outrage or offence by British troops; and crime was most infrequent. Nothing of any very serious nature ever took place during the time I was on duty there. 4. In 1915, when it became plain that Poperinghe was to be a military centre for a great number of men, the Belgian town authorities suggested to the Second Army the opening of licensed brothels. The Second Army, on the advice of doctors and padres, asked the Belgian authorities to produce the evidence that such houses were needed. The Belgians, when challenged to do so, could only produce.one case of rape during the whole period up to December, 1915. Looking back on those years spent among my countrymen in service abroad, I have nothing but praise of, and pride in, their temperance, cheerfulness, and chivalry. In other words, war was no Sunday school; but these men lived more cleanly than many of their critics. There was a goodness in them as stubborn as their physical endurance ; and by their deeds they kept the faith of nations.

It is the fashion to decry soldiers, because soldiers make war. So, indeed, they do; it is their duty; and some have seen them at it. But making war is a different thing > altogether from making wars; which is the devil’s own business, though only one of his many activities. History shows that nations make wars; and when wars are made, soldiers are called in to conduct them on behalf of those who have rendered them inevitable. They are like a file brigade in their functions, when the far-off citizen rings for them so frantically. But firemon_ in their senses do not kindle conflagrations. The British Expeditionary Force did not make the war; it was called out to suffer and to die for peace. What then, makes war? Many contributory causes, but most of all, bad treaties. When men see an unfair treaty signed, God sees the Ambassadors once more being handed their passports. Cut down the fleets and forces as you may, and an angry or frightened nation will yet find itself in the throes of war; unless you can make justice more general, international friendship more feasible, and all those myriad clinging fibres of human aspiration so consecrated by the acknowledged Fatherhood, that the thought of war between the races becomes as far away as the thought of a bloody feud breaking out between Dorset and Devon. If we could but now repair, with more prayer, more wit, more artistry, the old home which men call Europe; let light in through all its windows: cleanse it and keep it clean; give all our folk the free and friendly sense that the whole family has, a common code to live by,' and a common task to serve; relate them to each other by the well-springs from on high of love and joy and fair-shared work and play; then those who died to conquer hate would be well satisfied. To all of us in 1918 it was as though God Himself had spoken. Behind us at last stood the four years’ crucifixion of our friends. Before us opened that sunlit expanse which in the most perfect medieval pictures is traced behind the Cross. Sweet fields and swelling floods, and little hills that rise rejoicingly. What was there more to fear now that the peace was won ? It never crossed the mind of one single man on the first Armistice Day that we should ever live to find the victory, then achieved would lead to graver troubles. For that brief' space no single soul among us was embittered. No lips but framed, each in his own way, praise and thanksgiving. No heart but knew, however dimly, that the bodies broken for us were sacraments of sublime fruition for the future. The people thus redeemed would live with an ever-growing strength of purEose. The old internal feuds _ and atreds would be swallowed up in the new family life of the nation and the race, and beyond the race itself friendship would issue forth beneath the unchallengeable tegis of the universal sacrifice to hold the world in fee. We should be strengthened by their might, made perfect in their ways, and guided into the truth that they had sought to find. No shadow of doubt or hesitancy lay across that dawn. From that moment onwards all would be well with every cause they loved. Now, after thirteen years, how strange those aspirations sound. The watchman can but say in the old words. “ Neighbours, remember the dead.” We, at least, will not again forget.