Duty and Honour

Friday August 1 2014

R D Kernohan reflects on Church of Scotland attitudes to the ‘Great War’ which started 100 years ago this month

THERE are none left to tell us how it was then and why they went to war or expected others to go.

When we read what was said then, not least in Church magazines and sermons, mindsets are often so different from ours that it’s almost like translating from some dead language.

The conflict now seems both a European civil war and “world” war. In this centenary year it’s being recounted and wrangled over again in print and on TV –because its impact remains as much a part of our national identity as the ordeals of 1939-45.

Yet 1914-18 was a different kind of war. It wasn’t caused by planned aggression but by reckless risk-taking in power politics and diplomatic failures. For Britain its monstrous cost in loss and pain was to be borne overwhelmingly by a generation of young men, not all “lost” but all scarred in body, mind, or spirit, and by their families.

 More than a million of those who responded to “the Empire’s call” didn’t return. We shouldn’t be surprised that, as noted by Life and Work when peace came, 16 chaplains from Scotland’s Presbyterian Churches were killed. But we might be taken aback to discover that by early 1915 90 per cent of eligible sons of the manse had volunteered to fight and that before the war ended 38 Scottish ministers or probationers and 52 divinity students were killed as combatants. Though there were some doubts, there was not much “conscientious objection” in the Churches of 1914.

But most Christians and others who had doubts in 1914, like some of Asquith’s Liberal Cabinet, set them aside once the decision was taken.

The dark times were not to be long in coming but the immediate aftermath of the stumble into war was an eruption of hyper-patriotism all over Europe. The editor of Life and Work, R H Fisher, had the wisdom to balance his conviction that “though war is always evil it may be a necessary evil and there are worse things than war” with a warning against the wilder frenzies of 1914. Despite the violation of justice and international law, he wrote, we must not “minimise our respect for German philosophy and music and philosophy and our real kinship with their people”. These were brave words for the time.

But soon excitement had given way to endurance, as politicians and generals floundered amid the new complexities of industrialised war. In Life and Work and the UF Record the trickle of bad news became a flood.

The endurance was to be prolonged and the suffering extended. Gallipoli, the Somme, and Passchendaele are etched in our British folk-memory as well as history but the worst losses were to come in the final victorious campaign of 1918.

But in commemorating the 1914-18 war it’s important to avoid generalisations. This became a war of citizen armies; and, like the civilian citizenry from which they were recruited and soon drew most of their officers, they reflected different social attitudes, not least to religion and chaplains, who got a better press in church publications than in some later memoirs of the trenches.       

Britain’s most eminent and pious soldier, the Presbyterian Earl Haig, was tumultuously received at the General Assembly before his reputation became subject to fierce and still-rumbling disputes.

But after relief and enthusiasm came uncertainty and disillusionment, in the Church and elsewhere. For a minority of the survivors, like the decorated ex-officers George MacLeod and Archie Craig, that led to Christian pacifism. For most it did not.

Some slipped quietly back into ways of peace like Bruce McEwen of St Machar’s in Aberdeen who had been away for four years as infantryman and Machine-gun Corps major.

Another St Machar’s minister with an outstanding war record, Melville Dinwiddie, was ordained after staying on as a regular, then moved to run the BBC in Scotland and devised what became “Thought for the Day”.

The war had left its indelible mark on millions of others, not least women for whom it opened new horizons and, so often, left a lifetime of sadness. That is why in Church and State we can scarcely fail to commemorate the centenary and honour those did their duty, but with more meditation than celebration.

This is an abridged version of an article published in the August 2014 issue of Life and Work. Subscribe here