War, 1928 woodcut print, John Moody |
G.A. Studdert Kennedy |
The
cutting of the world in two by the sword has helped me to see it whole. Men’s minds are of necessity less parochial,
less insular, and more cosmopolitan, in the best sense, than they were. As a
consequence of this there is a quickened interest in ultimate questions, a desire
to know the meaning of it all.*
Although an enthusiastic
supporter of the war at its onset, its experiences changed him, and after the
war ended, he became a vocal pacifist. His first collection of poems, Rough Rhymes of a Padre (1918), was
dedicated “To the Officers and Men of the 46th and 24th
Infantry Divisions living here and beyond the veil… by one who is proud to have
been their comrade.” One of the shortest poems in the collection is titled “War.”
War
There’s a soul
in the Eternal,
Standing stiff before the King.
There's a little English maiden
Sorrowing.
There's a proud and tearless woman,
Seeing pictures in the fire.
There's a broken battered body
On the wire.
Standing stiff before the King.
There's a little English maiden
Sorrowing.
There's a proud and tearless woman,
Seeing pictures in the fire.
There's a broken battered body
On the wire.
—G.A. Studdert Kennedy
The poem simply describes
four victims of war. The first is a soldier who has risen from the dead, but
whose stiff posture, even in heaven, recalls his body’s rigor mortis and the
military discipline that was demanded of him in life. The final snapshot is
that of a dead man suspended on barbed wire in No Man’s Land; the adjectives “broken
and battered” link his sufferings with those of Christ.
The two middle
images are those of women on the home front who grieve the dead, each in her
own way. One is an idealized English sweetheart, the other a woman who seems
almost heartless in her pose of detachment. By including both women, the poem
suggests there is no single way to mourn and that outward appearances may be
misleading.
In its structure
and imagery, the poem also connects the brokenness of the soldiers with the
emotional devastation of the home front. The sorrowing maiden is linked with the
battered body of the dead soldier in the poem’s only two indented lines (“Sorrowing”
and “On the wire”), while the resurrected soldier and the “proud and tearless
woman” are alike in their stoic restraint.
Studdert Kennedy
rejected platitudes and easy answers as he searched for the meaning of war and
God’s place in the conflict. In his essay “God in History,” he wrote,
War
is only glorious when you buy it in the Daily
Mail and enjoy it at the breakfast-table. It goes splendidly with bacon and
eggs. Real war is the final limit of
damnable brutality, and that’s all there is in it. It’s about the silliest,
filthiest, and most inhumanely fatuous thing that ever happened. It makes the whole universe seem like a mad
muddle. One feels that all talk of order and meaning in life is insane
sentimentality…. Men are driven to the conclusion that war is the will of the
Almighty God. If it is true, I go morally mad. Good and evil cease to have any
meaning…. War
is the crucifixion of God, not the working of His will.**
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* Geoffrey
Studdert Kennedy, The Hardest Part, Hodder
and Stoughton, 1919, pp. xii-xiii.
** Geoffrey
Studdert Kennedy, “God in History,” in The
Hardest Part, Hodder and Stoughton, 1919, pp. 32, 35, 44.
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