i6 
Land & Water 
February 7, 191 8 
in the British Army, as in no other, one seems to find the 
resolution of the problem which has so often perplexed 
philo£ophers — how to reconcile libertj' with authority. The ■ 
spirit was always there, for it was native to the English 
character. There never was any Army in which respect for 
the individual was so strong. It was always bad form for an 
officer to punish a man " with his tongue " — it was enough 
for him to say " Will you take my award ? " — and it was 
absolutely fatal to his career for him to lay his hands upon him. 
The very first thing a subaltern learnt when he did his day's 
duty as orderly otlicer was that his first thought must be the 
comfort of his men : and art Army Manual reminds him, if he 
is in dinger of forgetting it, that he must put it before his own. 
The recruit is quick to discover this and |x»rhaps not more 
quick than surprised. Also he discovers that he himself is 
" his brother's keeper." He learns that everything he-does 
or does not do in\'olves others besides himself. This is a war 
of platoons, and the " specialists," bombers, rifle-bombers, 
Lewis gunners, learn to work together and with the riflemen. 
like the forwards in a football team, who " feed " each other 
with the ball. It is the same with discipline as with tactics — , 
the man who goes " ca canny " or defaults soon discovers that 
others have to suffer for his dereliction as well as himself, 
and if a corporal neglects to see that the rifles of his section 
are clean at a company inspection, he may be the first to hear 
of it, but assuredly he will not be the last, for the platoon 
sergeant and the platoon commander will hear of it too, and all 
of them " get it in the neck." 
In an Army thus constituted, a soldier finds a rule of life 
and a theory of conduct. It is not in itself a religion, though it 
may easily become one if he is inspired by an ideal in sub- 
mitting himself to it. It bears the same relation to that ideal 
as dogma does to faith. One may have the dogma without the 
faith ; one may be disciplined merely because one is docile. 
But the acceptance of a dogma sometimes generates a faith, and 
the soldier who joined the (31d Army menly b?cause he liked 
it, and strove to keep his conduct-sheet clean because he 
knew that a " dirty " one obscured his chances of promotion, 
was, in the process of becoming a good soldier, well on the way 
to becoming a good man. To tell a falsehood is a military 
offence ; in learning to avoid it he was in a fair way of dis- 
covering it was a moral offence. There are, it is true, military 
offences which are not moral offences and there are moral 
offences which are not mihtary offences. But generally speaking 
in the Old Army a bad man made a bad soldier, and a good man 
a good soldier. In the New Army most recruits had the faith 
before they learnt the dogma. Many of them joined for the 
sake of a "cause, '< all for the sake of an emotion, but it was an 
emotion, whether patriotism, pride, emulation or love of 
adventure, which had little or none of the impurity of ambition. 
Most of them accepted the discipline without any great 
enthusiasm for it, and probably with some aversion from it 
as a thing foreign to their civilian habit of mind, and were 
surprised to find that it had a meaning and even embodied a 
theory of conduct. In their impulse to join there was an 
emotion ; in the discipline to which they subjected them- 
selves there was a morahty. And it it be true, as someone 
has said, that religion is morality touched with emotion, then 
these men were assuredly religious. 
How far the introduction of conscription altered this 
character, and whether, indeed, conscription as a permanent 
system were compatible with it I am not concerned to discuss. 
But as regards the British Army during the years of 1914-1916, 
and more particularly the Old Army, which leavened it, it is 
sufficient to say that by their works ye shall know them. 
Kitchener never wrote anything finer than the allocution 
which he addressed to the old B.E.F. when they landed in 
France. It breathed the very spirit of those articles of 
war which Henry V: issued to the host on the landing at 
Harfleur. The men were worthy of it and they hved up to it. 
During the first eight months of the war, there were only 
two cases of offences against the inhabitants of the country. 
The British soldier showed himself to be what he was— a 
gentleman. The French were prepared to find him that ; 
what they were not prepared to find was that he was gay, 
witty, tender and debonnair. His playfulness to children 
delighted them ; his tenderness to animals astonished them. 
British gunners and drivers often show extraordinary devotion 
to their horses, but, after all, "horsemastership" is part of their 
training and " ill-treating a horse " leaves a black mark on a 
soldier's conduct-sheet and has to be expiated by F.P. That, 
however, does not account for the passion of a battahon for 
making a pet of a dumb animal, nor does it explain the 
spectacle, very stupefying to the Italians, of a fox-terrier 
marchmg at the head of a rifle battalion and giving himself 
the airs of a second-in-command. 
There is a sort of lyrical temperament in the British soldier ■ 
you discover it in the way he sings. The French rarely sing 
on the march ; the British always. It is true the German 
sings— but he sings to order. Nothing is more characteristic of 
the difference between the British and the German Armies 
than the fact that a " gesangbuch " of songs — doubtless 
passed by the censor — figures in the German soldier's list 
of necessaries and is absent from the Englishman's. German 
officers have been known to strike a man across the shoulders 
with the endearing exhortation " Singen Sie ! " The English 
soldier makes his own songs and sings them or not as 
it pleases him. I have even seen in the early days of the war 
a fatigue-party of soldiers, under sentence of F.P., marching 
to their unsanitary tasks singing " Keep the Home Fires 
Burning " — a spectacle which would produce a fit of apoplexy 
in the German mind. I often think that whatever else the 
British Army has done or not done in France it has destroyed 
for ever on the Continent the legend of a dour phlegmatic 
England, hostile to cakes and ale. It has restored the old 
tradition of a " Merrie England." 
This same soldier, cheerful, humane, sardonic, engrossed in 
learning how to live the military life and to do his bit, has 
not troubled his head about how to die. That is, I suppose, 
why, when it comes to the point, he is so little exercised about 
it ; not having sought to " save " his life, he is hardly 
conscious that he " loses " it. He is as one 
Who through the h^at of conflict keeps the law 
In calmness made, and sees what he foresaw." 
I have seen many soldiers die. I do not know what, if 
anything, they would have said to a fadre. I only know 
that all I ever heard them say was " I've done my bit," 
" What must be must be," " It wur worth it," " It bain't 
no use grousing " or " I'm all right — I'm topping." I've 
often thought that the secret of their fortitude was thit 
they had done what they could. 
One chaplain I knew who was, indeed, remarkably successful. 
But then he was far more convinced of the salvation of 
the men than he was of his own. I suppose he was very 
unorthodox ; he was certainly dying to fight. Also he had 
no brotherly love for the Boche at all ; he hated him. I forget 
his creed — if indeed I ever knew it, for he was the last man to 
obtrude it. He never tried to improve the occasion ; if a 
dying soldier wanted religious consolation he gave it, if he did 
not want it he was content -to sit and hold the dying man's 
hand — and it was no bad viaticum. The men respected him 
as a man and loved him as a brother. He was quite ready to • 
take another chaplain's duty and, what was more remarkable, 
to let him take his, for he never seemed to be exercised as to 
whether the chaplains of other faiths than his own had 
" grace," and I don't suppose that he ever vexed himself 
about apostolic succession. Like the Galilean fishermen 
he was of lowly birth and he had the humility of 
Him who washed the disciples' feet. I knew just 
enough of his religious beliefs to know that they were 
the religion of the Sermon on the Mount.. He got his way 
at last and went up with a draft to the Front. I never saw 
him again, but I heard afterwards that he w^s killed when 
dressing a wounded soldier under fire. 
I often think that in his own way that chaplain was a born 
soldier. It was not so much that the men had his religion 
as that he had theirs. Theirs is a religion which has never 
hardened into a creed ; it is the religion of humanity : 
Give unto me, made lowly wise, 
The spirit of self-sacrifice. 
It is the spirit of the gunners and drivers in the retreat from 
Mons who got off their horses and limbers and walked in the 
heat and dust in order that the weary infantry might ride ; 
the spirit of the thousands of nameless and unremembered 
men who have crawled out into the open under fire to rescue 
the wounded and been sniped for their pains ; the spirit of 
the gunner captured at an observation post who, though 
scourged, buffeted and despitefully used by a German officer, 
broke his instruments before his face and refused to betray 
the position of his battery ; the Spirit of those lonely exiles 
who held their heads up and never flinched when spat upon 
and kicked through the streets of German towns in the long 
via dolorosa that leads to the hell of a ^efangenenlager and often 
to the grave. 
It is on those exiles and their proud, indomitable 
spirit that my mind most often dwells when I think of 
the faith of the soldier. They were not happy in an oppor- 
tune death on the field of battle ; they were wounded not only 
in body but in spirit : they were scourged and mocked and 
starved in an alien land in which the very spirit of humanity 
seemed dead and hope deferred enfeebled the heart. But 
they refused to be cast down. The Germans robbed them of 
everything but their self-respect. That remained and it 
endured to the end. Of such as these a great EngUshman 
must surely have been thinking when he wrote : 
This man is free from servile bands 
Of hope to rise or fear to fall :' 
Lord of himself, though not of lands ; 
And having nothing, yet hath all. 
