God As We See Him

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God as we see Him! I couldn't have told you how I saw Him before I went to France. It's funny--you go away to the most damnable undertaking ever invented, and you come back cleaner in spirit. The one thing that redeems the horror is that it does make a man momentarily big enough to be in sympathy with his Creator--he gets such glimpses of Him in his fellows.

There was a time when I thought it was rather up to God to explain Himself to the creatures He had fashioned--since then I've acquired the point of view of a soldier. I've learnt discipline and my own total unimportance. In the Army discipline gets possession of your soul; you learn to suppress yourself, to obey implicitly, to think of others before yourself. You learn to jump at an order, to forsake your own convenience at any hour of the day or night, to go forward on the most lonely and dangerous errands without complaining. You learn to feel that there is only one thing that counts in life and only one thing you can make out of it--the spirit you have developed in encountering its difficulties. Your body is nothing; it can be smashed in a minute. How frail it is you never realise until you have seen men smashed. So you learn to tolerate the body, to despise Death and to place all your reliance on courage--which when it is found at its best is the power to endure for the sake of others.

When we think of God, we think of Him in just about the same way that a Tommy in the front-line thinks of Sir Douglas Haig. Heaven is a kind of General Headquarters. All that the Tommy in the front-line knows of an offensive is that orders have reached him, through the appointed authorities, that at zero hour he will climb out of his trench and go over the top to meet a reasonable chance of wounds and death. He doesn't say, "I don't know whether I will climb out. I never saw Sir Douglas Haig--there mayn't be any such person. I want to have a chat with him first. If I agree with him, after that I may go over the top--and, then again, I may not. We'll see about it."

Instead, he attributes to his Commander-in-Chief the same patriotism, love of duty, and courage which he himself tries to practice. He believes that if he and Sir Douglas Haig were to change places, Sir Douglas Haig would be quite as willing to sacrifice himself. He obeys; he doesn't question.

That's the way every Tommy and officer comes to think of God--as a Commander-in-Chief whom he has never seen, but whose orders he blindly carries out.

The religion of the trenches is not a religion which analyses God with impertinent speculation. It isn't a religion which takes up much of His time. It's a religion which teaches men to carry on stoutly and to say, "I've tried to do my bit as best I know how. I guess God knows it. If I 'go west' to-day, He'll remember that I played the game. So I guess He'll forget about my sins and take me to Himself."

That is the simple religion of the trenches as I have learnt it--a religion not without glory; to carry on as bravely as you know how, and to trust God without worrying Him.

THE END