hinking only of my little
home at Streatham Hill. The horrible Hun? I've no quarrel with the poor
blighters over there by Hooge. They are in the same bloody mess as we
are. They hate it just as much. We're all under a spell together, which
some devils have put on us. I wonder if there's a God anywhere."

This sense of being under a black spell I found expressed by other men,
and by German prisoners who used the same phrase. I remember one of them
in the battles of the Somme, who said, in good English: "This war was
not made in any sense by mankind. We are under a spell." This belief was
due, I think, to the impersonal character of modern warfare, in which
gun-fire is at so long a range that shell-fire has the quality of
natural and elemental powers of death--like thunderbolts--and men killed
twenty miles behind the lines while walking over sunny fields or in
busy villages had no thought of a human enemy desiring their individual
death.

God and Christianity raised perplexities in the minds of simple lads
desiring life and not death. They could not reconcile the Christian
precepts of the chaplain with the bayoneting of Germans and the shambles
of the battlefields. All this blood and mangled flesh in the fields of
France and Flanders seemed to them--to many of them, I know--a certain
proof that God did not exist, or if He did exist was not, as they were
told, a God of Love, but a monster glad of the agonies of men. That at
least was the thought expressed to me by some London lads who argued
the matter with me one day, and that was the thought which our army
chaplains had to meet from men who would not be put off by conventional
words. It was not good enough to tell them that the Germans were guilty
of all this crime and that unless the Germans were beaten the world
would lose its liberty and life. "Yes, we know all that," they said,
"but why did God allow the Germans, or the statesmen who arranged the
world by force, or the clergy who christened British warships? And how
is it that both sides pray to the same God for victory? There must be
something wrong somewhere."

It was not often men talked like that, except to some chaplain who was
a human, comradely soul, some Catholic "padre" who devoted himself
fearlessly to their bodily and spiritual needs, risking his life with
them, or to some Presbyterian minister who brought them hot cocoa under
shell-fire, with a cheery word or two, as I once heard, of "Keep your
hearts