Tommy by Richard Holmes Page A

cannot remember – my despair of a religion that could teach that such a patronizing stand-offish attitude was the right one, when my words were drowned by a terrific burst of fire from our guns, who had spotted a counterattack forming up. When the firing was over Groser told me that he would do what I wanted provided he didn’t carry arms. To that I readily agreed. 66
    Father Groser was awarded the Military Cross, and wounded and sent home in 1918. On 8 October 1918, 2/Royal Welch Fusiliers lost its Nonconformist padre, killed in action.
    The padre should not have gone with A Company in the early morning. He was told that he would be an embarrassment to them, but he was impulsive, he insisted on going, and was killed while seeking an MC to please some fool of a girl in Liverpool who had taunted him with having no decoration. 67
    Many chaplains were unsure whether their main role was spiritual or temporal, whether they were, as one put it, ‘Mr God or Mr Cinema’. It was easy to slip into the latter role, and to concentrate on providing the troops with much-needed welfare support, like tea and cake at the base or cigarettes in the front line, or to offer advice with problems that arose at home. The majority of private mail, except that in strictly-rationed green envelopes, had to be censored by an officer, and padres – often less busy than combatant officers – were frequently busy reading soldiers’ letters, which gave them a few useful insights. The Reverend John Sellors, a working-class Anglican sent to France in 1917, was delighted to find that one of his letters had been written by
    quite a wag. He said his doctor had ordered him a holiday abroad, and here he was, but he could give no answers as he had not decided what hotel to stay at. He could not say much owing to the censor, but he would tell one secret… ‘I am determined to finish this war’… I could not resist the temptation to put ‘Good old sport (censor)’ on the letter although I am told that this is strictly against orders.
    The Reverend Pat Mc Cormick, an Anglican who had served in the Boer War, was amused to censor a letter betokening a fleeting relationship just before the writer left for France:
    Dear Molly,
    A Happy Christmas. I am sending this to my aunt to forward to you as I do not know the address. Please tell me your name when you write as I have forgotten it. Yours, Dick 68
    Slipping between the roles of welfare officer and priest did not come easily to many. Sellors had been advised by a friendly sergeant that he would be best advised to ‘mix with the boys, join in their lives and interests and see the boys made more contented and happy’. And Sellors hoped that by mixing with them in this way he could indeed help ‘bring them to higher things, the things of God’. But his was not an easy road. His diary makes it clear that he was gently teased by the NCOs, who asked him to speak to the other officers and get them to acknowledge salutes more politely. And then over dinner in the mess many officers suddenly affected ‘a bleating kind of laugh; all eyes turned in my direction and I assumed it was meant to imitate me…’’. 69 The real question of whether he ever managed to be more than a decent sort who gave cigarettes to the boys must remain unanswered.
    When the Reverend Theodore Bayley Hardy arrived in France he spoke to the more experienced Studdert Kennedy.
    He asked me about purely spiritual works. I said there is very little: it is all muddled and mixed. Take a box of fags in your haversack and a great deal of love in your heart and go up to them. Laugh with them, joke with them. You can pray with them sometimes but pray for them always. 70
    But even Studdert Kennedy, eccentric and outgoing as he was, questioned his own role.
    What the bloody hell is the Church doing here? An amateur stretcher bearer or an amateur undertaker? Was that all a Christian priest