Free Tommy by Richard Holmes Page B

moved up to Loos:
    There was some confusion in orders and billeting arrangements. The battalion passed through Haillicourt, wandered about in the country beyond, and eventually returned to the village, which, being recognized by the men, although it was dark, was greeted with the song, ‘Here we are! Here we are! Here we are again!’ 26
    And it could be flung in the teeth of the worst the war had to offer. A crippled battalion coming out of the line, its men muddied and filthy and its strength left on the battlefield, somehow braced up as it reached the village where it was billeted, and found courage to bark out the old words ‘Here we are! Here we are! Here we are again …’.
    But despite the bawdiness and cynicism of much of what they sang, soldiers, perverse as ever, could sometimes sing so sentimentally that they moved others to tears. The Reverend Julian Bickersteth, looking out through the inverted V of his tent flap in a bivouac behind the Somme battlefront in September 1916, could see twenty men round a bright camp fire.
    The fire lights up their faces, and the sound of their voices singing well-known songs comes clearly across to us. ‘Keep the home fires burning’ is one of them, and I wonder how many of them will ever gather round a home fire again. A full moon fills the top of the triangle and completes the picture. 27
    Welsh-recruited battalions often sang beautifully, and there is a heart-stopping account of a battalion moving up in the dark singing that most beautiful of hymn tunes,
Aberystwyth,
until the voices were lost in the sound of shellfire. The Welsh Guards choir came second in the male voice competition at the Welsh National Eisteddfod in 1918; but its finest hour had probably come earlier, as the regiment’s historian, an eyewitness, remembered:
    The really effective singing did not come from the choir standing in a body on a rough platform, but from the heart of the battalion when going into battle or after the fight. ‘In the sweet bye and bye, we shall meet on the beautiful shore,’ after the engagement at Gouzeaucourt, when the shattered battalion was withdrawn to a wood behind the village, brought a hush over the camp. The singers were hidden amongst the trees in the moonlight and the air was frosty and still. This was not a concert, but a message, a song of hope and faith. 28
    So what hope and faith moved this vast assemblage of the proud and the profane, the cynical and the contemptuous, that constituted the British army in France? The question is a complex one, all the more so because it is bound up in the role of the military chaplain, an individual who has generally had a poor press. Religion and those who championed it divided men’s opinion, but there was a far more powerful spiritual undertow on the Western Front than we sometimes think. The Reverend Harold Davies was struck by the paradox inherent in a battery of artillery he visited. They were:
    The most foul-mouthed lot that I have struck since I came to France. Yet after nauseating me for an hour this afternoon with their ‘poisoned gas’ they suddenly began to sing hymns with real feeling and piety. There is some real religion deep down in the hearts of these lads – one cannot call them godless because no sooner has one come to this conclusion than some spark of the Divine flashes out of them. The difficulty is to seize it and kindle a real fire within them. 29
    The Church of England was not simply England’s established church, but was the religion given on attestation (sometimes with supreme cynicism) by the great majority of soldiers. It is important not to view the Church through the prism of the early twenty-first century, but to remember that a century ago it exercised a much more prominent role in national life, and that clergymen were comparatively well paid. Church attendance was substantially higher than it is now: in 1911, 98 per 1,000 of the population of