On the wire

War, 1928
woodcut print, John Moody 

G.A. Studdert Kennedy

Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy is one of the best-known British chaplains of the First World War.  His war-time nickname “Woodbine Willie” was gained from his practice of offering cigarettes to wounded and dying soldiers as he attended to their physical and spiritual needs. He was awarded the Military Cross for conspicuous gallantry in 1917, when during an attack at Messines Ridge, he risked his life to cross a heavily shelled area to procure morphine for the wounded and to care for and retrieve injured soldiers from No Man’s Land.  In his 1919 collection of essays, The Hardest Part, he wrote,

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 46^th and 24^th 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.”  

Bamforth song card, WWI

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.

            —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.

Bamforth song card, WWI

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.

Wrestling with God

It is commonly accepted that the one of the casualties of the First World War was belief in God.  By the second year of the war, the British public was growing to resent Church of England clergy who supported the war and encouraged others to enlist while they remained safe in their pulpits.
The Bishop of London, Arthur Winnington-Ingram, was one of the most enthusiastic war promoters, and his hatred of Germany was so vociferous that even Prime Minister Asquith described the bishop’s rhetoric as “jingoism of the shallowest kind.”

However, approximately 3,000 of the 25,000 Church of England clergy did enlist and accompany troops to the front as military chaplains; they were likely as diverse as the men they served.  Some were scorned, others were loved.  Robert Graves, in his memoir Goodbye to All That, accused Anglican chaplains of being cowardly and out-of-touch, while other soldiers wrote admiringly of regimental chaplains who not only lived with their men, but risked everything to go “over the top” with their units and assist with the wounded.

Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy was one of the beloved chaplains of the war, known to the troops as Woodbine Willy for his habit of offering cigarettes to the men in his care. Serving in France from December of 1915 until 1919, Studdert Kennedy was also a war poet.  His writings frequently grapple with doubts and questions as he attempts to distinguish between clichés of faith and an authentic spirituality.

As the war dragged on, it became increasingly difficult to see the presence of a loving God in the relentless suffering and death. But unlike other war poets who criticized and dismissed the Christian faith as an empty sham, Studdert Kennedy, like Jacob, wrestled with his God for answers that could stand up under harsh scrutiny.

His poem “Solomon in All His Glory” alludes to the brevity of human life, while affirming the dignity and beauty of each individual’s sacrifice that breaks the heart of God.

Solomon in All His Glory

Still I see them coming, coming,
In their ragged broken line,
Walking wounded in the sunlight,

Wounded at the Somme, 1916

Clothed in majesty divine.

For the fairest of the lilies,
That God's summer ever sees,
Ne'er was clothed in royal beauty
Such as decks the least of these.

Tattered, torn, and bloody khaki,
Gleams of white flesh in the sun,
Raiment worthy of their beauty,
And the great things they have done.

Purple robes and snowy linen
Have for earthly kings sufficed,
But these bloody sweaty tatters
Were the robes of Jesus Christ.
--GA Studdert Kennedy


The poem gazes unflinchingly at the suffering of the men at the front: “Still I see them coming, coming.” It bleakly catalogues the bloody wounds, the torn uniforms, and the immensity of misery as evidenced by the ragged line of walking wounded that stretches out of sight.  And yet the poem also dares to speak of beauty and glory.

Sacrifice Charles Sims © IWM (Art.IWM ART 5581)

The war itself is neither beautiful nor glorious; however, the poem honours the men who have been caught up in it, its sacrificial victims. Their endurance in the face of unimaginable horrors transforms their suffering into something to be reverenced. The ugliness they have witnessed makes even the least of them “fairer than summer lilies.” As well, the poem subversively contrasts the wounded soldiers with the men of power and privilege who have ordered and organized the war.  The muddy brown khaki of the foot soldiers’ ragged uniforms is not transformed into snowy linen; their bloodstained and filthy garments put to shame the distant authorities who deck themselves in royal robes and snowy linen.

In his 1918 book The Hardest Part, Studdert Kennedy wrote, “Beside the wounded tattered soldier who totters down to this dressing station with one arm hanging loose, an earthly king in all his glory looks paltry and absurd.” In their agony, the injured men become Christ-like. They, too, are suffering servants, willing to lay down their lives for others, and in this act, they surpass in both beauty and virtue the kings and bishops who live in a sanitized world distant from the agonies of trench warfare.  The poem whispers that each soldier’s sacrifice is as precious in the sight of God as the death of his only son.

Paul Fussell, in The Great War and Modern Memory, states, “The sacrificial theme, in which each soldier becomes a type of the crucified Christ, is at the heart of countless Great War poems” (119). Many modern readers have dismissed such comparisons between soldiers and Christ as a religious cliché that was used both as an emotional crutch and as a propaganda tool. However, Dr. Michael Snape, Professor of Anglican Studies at Durham University cautions,

"We have a tendency to be condescending about our forebears. We're tempted to think we are cleverer than they were. Their religious beliefs seem to be part of their fateful and fatal naivety. But we shouldn't be so willing 100 years after the event to muscle in with our own interpretations of the war, to impose our standards and reactions on them."

Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy was forever changed by his experience at the front.  The war converted the military chaplain to pacifism, and in his 1923 book The Wicket Gate,  he wrote,

“for God, under any provocation whatsoever, hatred is impossible. He simply cannot hate. Nothing justifies it, not even this Crucifixion. This is the Goodness that would bring us back to realities. Nine-tenths of our wars and battles are fought in the land of dreams, with unreal people and unreal nations, which our hatred and our fear create. Germany hates and fears a monster called Britain, which does not exist; and Britain retaliates by hating and fearing an equally unreal Germany.”

Nearly one-hundred years later, his words are more relevant than ever; he cautions us against the temptation to demonize our enemies as we shape their identities out of our own hatred and fear. Studdert Kennedy’s poem “Solomon in All His Glory” continues to remind us of the sobering cost of war etched in the faces of wounded men as still we “see them coming, coming/ In their ragged broken line.”

Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy

Kneeling in the Mud

 Over 5,000 British priests and pastors served as army chaplains or padres during the First World War.  Their job was to provide spiritual guidance for the soldiers and to boost the morale of the men at the front.  The grim realities of the job included scenes they hardly could have imagined. 

Often stationed just behind the lines at first aid posts and casualty clearing stations, padres ministered to wounded and dying men.  In a war in which bodies were often torn apart or abandoned in No Man's Land, padres assisted in retrieving and identifying soldiers' remains and giving them burial.  They frequently had to deliver news of men's death to their comrades-in-arms, and theirs was the gut-wrenching duty of providing solace to men who had deserted and were to be shot by their fellow soldiers at dawn.  The BBC webpage "Why did chaplains end up on the front line in WW1?" tells more of their stories.   

Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy was not only a padre, but a poet.  His poem "Lighten our Darkness," shares the struggles of a man wrestling with his faith and his God in the midst of war. 

Lighten our Darkness 

Lighten our darkness, Lord, in bygone years,
Oft have I prayed and thought on childish fears,
Glad in my heart that, when the day was dead,
God's four white angels watched about my bed.

Lighten our darkness! Kneeling in the mud,
My hands still wet and warm with human blood,
Oft have I prayed it! Perils of this night!
Sorrow of soldiers! Mercy, give us light.

Lighten our darkness! Black upon the mind
Questions and doubts, so many paths that wind,
Worlds of blind sorrow crying out for sight.
Peace, where is Peace? Lord Jesus, give us light.

Lighten our darkness! Stumbling to the end,
Millions of mortals feeling for a friend,
Shall not the judge of all the earth do right?
Flame through the darkness, Lord, and give us Light.
    --Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy

The poem begins with a memory:  in "bygone years," when he was safe at home and in his bed, a man remembers praying for God's light in response to his "childish fears."  The second stanza repeats the prayer, but this time an exclamation point marks the desperate urgency and need in his very different current circumstances:  "Lighten our darkness!"  Three more exclamation points in the stanza communicate the mental anguish that prompts his call to God. 

He kneels in prayer, not at his own comfortable bedside, but rather in mud on a battlefield, his hands "still wet and warm with human blood."  In the muck and gore of the Western Front, in the darkness and dangers of the night, he calls out to God, simply naming him "Mercy." 

The third stanza again repeats the prayer for light.  Darker than the terrors of the battlefield, however, are the bleak, internal struggles of the mind.  The man's "Questions and doubts" are likened to the maze-like paths of the trench system that are estimated to have stretched for over 25,000 miles if laid end-to-end.  Like the zig-zagging trenches that are shored up with dead bodies and are full of misery and fear, the man's doubts are life-threatening.  From the blackness of his thoughts, "Worlds of blind sorrow" cry out for sight.  Each dead man encapsulates a world of his own -- a home, a family, friends, dreams -- and the padre carries with him worlds and worlds of grief that have blinded him with tears and with the inability to see past the losses. 

 

He begs the question "Peace, where is Peace?" No answer is given, and so he again prays for light, this time addressing Jesus directly.  It is as if the speaker knows that an end to the fighting is nowhere in sight, but if light can be given, he can endure the war.  Light signifies both hope and vision:  he prays for insights that will reveal that the war has purpose or meaning. 

The last stanza extends that prayer: it is not just one man who struggles, but "millions of mortals feeling for a friend" in the darkness.  The double sense of the word "feeling" suggests both emotional attachment and a blind man's reaching out to find the way.     

In the poem's last line, however, the seeker turns from a plea for meaning to a prayer for Presence.  The man asks God to "Flame through the darkness," an image that recalls the pillar of fire that embodied the holy presence of God that led the Moses and the Israelites in their wanderings through the desert.  Like Moses, it is as if the supplicant relinquishes his need for answers and control, saying "If Your Presence does not go with us, do not bring us up from here" (Exodus 33:14).  Even though he may "stumble to the end," it is possible to move forward if God's flame, whether pillar of fire or candle light, is there with him.   

Studdert Kennedy is one of the best-known and loved chaplains of the First World War. Nicknamed "Woodbine Willie" because he shared cigarettes of that name with soldiers, he was known for his humble willingness to simply stand alongside the fighting men and do what he could to lessen their suffering.  Further details of his life and service can be found here and here. 

When he died on March 8, 1929, as his body lay in state in Liverpool, over 1,700 mourners paid their respects in a single day.  Studdert Kennedy once wrote, "Nobody worries about Christ as long as he can be shut up in churches.  He is quite safe there.  But there is always trouble if you try to let him out."  Studdert Kennedy loved a dangerous God that he wrestled with on the battlefields of the First World War.