Tommy by Richard Holmes

England could only offer you a cigarette. The Church of Rome, experienced in propaganda, sent its priests into the line. The Church of England forbade theirs forward of Brigade Headquarters, and though many, realizing the fatal blunder of such an order, came just the same, the publication of that injunction had its effect. 61
    And Julian Bickersteth confessed that: ‘It makes me despair of the Church of England. Rome makes no mistakes…’. 62
    Yet many Anglican chaplains recognised, as did Bickersteth himself, that they would only gain men’s respect if they entered the crucible with them. ‘I must admit that I find it increasingly difficult to face enemy fire,’ he wrote, ‘but our task is absolutely nothing compared to what the brave lads in the trenches have to endure when they take part in an attack.’ He made a practice of carrying a pyx containing Sacrament in one kind, bread marked with wine, and going forward to give it to the wounded and dying. The universally-admired Reverend Theodore Bayley Hardy, a fifty-five-year-old Church of England clergyman, earned the MC, DSO and VC during a year’s service at the front and was eventually killed in action. On one occasion he spent two days in the mud with a half-buried soldier, working with the men who were trying to extract him. Other chaplains shared similar risks. Anthony French was lying wounded in a crater in September 1916.
    I heard movement coming my way and I thought of rats, bloated rats, and felt weak and defenceless. I lay stork still. Dimly I saw a figure passing to and fro, here and there, bending low. My heart beat uncontrollably.
    His head was bent over mine. I stared unbreathing. I saw a white collar and the familiar tin hat. He spoke in cultured English, and his voice had a deep, rich timbre.
    â€˜Are you asleep?,’
    â€˜No, Padre.’
    â€˜Badly hurt?’
    â€˜Not really.’
    â€˜Could you walk?’
    â€˜Afraid not, but I can crawl.’
    â€˜Better lie still. You’re some way off, but I’ll try to send the stretcher bearers. They’re all busy just now, but be patient and lie still.’
    I thanked him. But he had gone, and I feared for him out there when the rattle of fire was resumed. 63
    Father Drinkwater particularly admired Canon Scott, Church of England padre to 1st Canadian Division, who certainly did not conform to the stereotype of the stay-back padre. ‘He wanders round all the most dangerous parts with a tin of bully and a biscuit; reads his own verses to the men in the trenches,’ wrote Drinkwater. Scott lost his son, an infantry officer, and found his body in a fresh shell hole ‘where the Canon recognized his son’s hand (by the ring) sticking out of the earth’. 64
    A few chaplains went much further. In 1918 Frank Crozier encountered a Welsh Nonconformist chaplain ‘indulging in rapid fire from a shell hole at fleeting enemy targets’. He disapproved, because these were ‘circumstances which called for no emergency’. Crozier disarmed the chaplain, gave him lunch, and told him that he should never have been a clergyman at all. ‘He renounced his vocation,’ wrote Crozier, ‘and joined up as a private. He did quite well, and I was told that he had the finest flow of language in the regiment which, being Welsh, was saying a great deal.’ 65
    However, because chaplains carried the authority of a commissioned officer there were rare moments when a commanding officer might expect his padre to exercise military command. Father John Groser, trained in the tradition of Catholic socialism at Mirfield, and later a great East End priest, was ordered to take command of a party of men who, so his CO thought, would only stand if led by an officer. He refused. ‘I reminded him of the scores of men he knew who had fallen that day after doing their utmost,’ said the colonel,
    and I was conveying to him – in what words I