Of the men of God who served in the trenches a century ago, only one really stands out
By B.C.
AMONG historians of Europe and faith, it's often remarked that the first world war dealt a near-fatal blow to organised Christianity. In each of Europe's historically Christian nations, soldiers marched off to the sound of prayers from pompous hierarchs who assured them that God was on their side. But the pietistic platitudes of the 19th century weren't much help in the ghastly realities of trench warfare, or in communities back home where a whole generation of young men was lost.
Religion did, of course, surface in rather a dramatic way exactly 100 years ago, when soldiers on opposite sides called a Christmas truce, sang Nativity carols together and exchanged souvenirs. As my colleague Lexington has pointed out in this week's print edition, people are still poring over the implications of that Nativity ceasefire, whether for the meaning of life, death and war or the politics of the Washington beltway. The brutal fact is that as soon as that inspiring celebration of the Prince of Peace was over, the two sides went back to killing each other. And in subsequent Christmases, there was less appetite for a truce, especially when poison gas was floating over the battle-lines.
In the collective memory of the British soldiers who slogged through the Flanders mud, there was only one cleric who really stood out. He was a uniquely empathetic figure among the 5,000 chaplains who were sent to the war front (and were initially instructed to keep a safe distance). His real name was the Reverend Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy, but he was universally known as Woodbine Willie, for his habit of dishing out cigarettes, as well as crosses and Bibles, to soldiers on the line. In an age long before the medical consequences of smoking were understood, a quick drag was one of the few kinds of solace available at moments when life seemed hellish. In between dishing out smokes, Woodbine Willie wrote a lot of poetry, much of it in his best approximation of the soldiers' homely English. Literary critics called it doggerel, but ordinary folk bought hundreds of thousands of copies.
According to his grandson Andrew Studdert Kennedy, who has followed the family tradition of priestly service, Woodbine Willie was himself profoundly affected by four years in the trenches. He initially believed the rhetoric of self-sacrifice in a noble cause, but as the war dragged on he became disillusioned with patriotic clichés. Comradeship and the desire to die honourably made sense to him, but not much else. The only God he could believe was one who suffered unconditionally with his people. In Christian theology, there had been debate for centuries about whether God could feel pain; of course Jesus, as the son of God, had suffered agony, but it was deemed heretical to think of God the Father experiencing discomfort. Woodbine Willie became exasperated with such speculation; divine suffering was the thing that rang most true for him. But even in the worst of suffering, there could be unexpected moments of comfort, whether spiritual...or material. After all, as he scribbled,
If old Fritz 'as been and got you And you have to stick the pain If you haven't got a fag on Why it hurts as bad again.
