Truth, First Casualty of War

What’s propaganda and what’s news? One of the great texts to map the question is Arthur Ponsonby’s Fasehood in War-Time (1928) (h/t Jolyon Mitchell). The subtitle says it all — “an amazing collection of carefully documented lies circulated in Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy and America during the Great War.” Wartime requires lies, but when peace breaks out people should wise up to what has been done to them.

It’s a treasure trove of fantasies and deceptions, great and small — Russian troops marching through Crewe with snow on their boots, babies with their hands cut off, mutilated nurses and branded nuns, corpse factories, enamelled adverts with secret spy info hidden on the back.
One enterprising Austrian firm supplied atrocity photographs to both sides, ready for captioning as required.

In among the small fry swim mighty Koi — great Lies of State. As late as 1913, Hansard records fervent, lofty denials of any understanding with France that could lead to a British Expeditionary Force being sent to war on the continent. As well as lies of commission came lies of ommission. The violation of the “scrap of paper” that resulted in the invasion of Belgian was true, but less heinous when one remembers the French had laid eerily similar plans to do the same thing if necessary. All nations were on the game, fuelled by fear and hysteria:

When Antwerp Fell [Köln] Church Bells were rung — Kölnische Zeitung



According to the Kölnische Zeitung, the clergy of Antwerp were compelled to ring the Church bells when the fortress fell — Le Matin



According to what Le Matin has heard from Cologne, the Belgian priests who refused to ring the Church Bells when Antwerp was taken have been driven away from their places — The Times



According to what The Times has learnt from Cologne via Paris, the unfortunate Belgian priests who refused to ring the church bells when Antwerp was taken have been sentenced to hard labour — Corriére della Sera



According to information to the Corriére della Sera from Cologne via London it is confirmed that the barbaric conquerors of Antwerp punished the unfortunate Belgian priests for their heroic refusal to ring the church bells by hanging them as living clappers to the bells with their heads down — Le Matin

As Wartime rationing induced permanent change in the food industry, wartime distortion and manipulation transformed the media game. One product of the Great War was Lord Northcliffe’s propaganda department at Crewe House, which made “you provide the pictures, I’ll provide the war” methods of what had been called the yellow press acceptable in the mainstream media of the day. In the more direct media landscape we now inhabit (some call it “disintermediated”) Chinese Whispers are higher power, but also far easier to check and challenge from the source. We need to get our heads around the diference between being media consumers and participants...

Harry Patch: Last of the Old Brigade

The death yesterday of Harry Patch, last Britisih veteran serviceman of the First World War, is a milestone which can’t fail to move anyone with any historical imagination. I rather sympathise, in principle, with Damian Thompson’s suggestion of a state funeral in the Abbey, family willing.

Some five and three quarter million British War Medals 1914-20 were issued. The death of Mr Patch the plumber marks the end of all that, as living memory. My father, 28 years a soldier, took us to beatings of retreat in the sixties where anyone over 70 had seen service in the First World War. Thank goodness the voices of that generation have been increasingly recorded since the groundbreaking 1964 BBC Documentary The Great War.

Some 30 years ago I had a close personal encounter with Harold Macmillan at a St Catherine’s Day dinner in Balliol. With utter simplicity and a painfully clear memory Mr Macmillan, who had been shot up as a guardsman during the retreat from Mons, described the lives, hopes and characters of fellow students from the lost class of 1914, under half of whom survived, pinpointing who had lived on which staircase, and what talents had been lost by their deaths.

One of the great experiences of my ten years in Reading was meeting, eventually officiating at the funeral of, Charlie Evans, like Harry Patch a survivor of Passchendaele. He returned passionate to do something for his mates who hadn’t made it (three quarters of his platoon); joined the Post Office Union and the Labour Party, and ended up as a much loved mayor of Reading — there’s a road on the Amersham Road estate named after him.

The world I grew up in may well have been a more respectful, safer, more decent place because pretty much everyone a certain age, soldier or civilian, male or female, from plumbers to politicians, had undergone the experience of real danger and gut-wrenching fear; of doing without and having to make the best of things. Nobody would wish that on a dog, but this experience generaly gave most of them a particular perspective on life and people. Unlike our politicians, they did not acquire knowledge of war primarily from movies. Large numbers of young men were abruptly brought to an awareness of their own limitations, the need to look out for others, tolerance of different people they would never have met in a month of Sundays had they not been drafted into the Services. Some lost God, and some found God, but many found something of themselves we struggle to understand.

This whole stream of our culture is now almost extinguished, although there may be a few civilians who lived through it left. I am not sure where this leaves us in our own Great War for Civilisation. I am optimistic enough to believe young people have a great underlying spirit and capacity for altruism, that comes out when really necessary. I love the way our children’s generation network and care for each other. Plainly the ravages of ego, selfishness and materialism come much more easily to us, and them, than to Mr Patch’s generation — another reason to respect our young people, who have so much more confused and confusing a world of which to make sense.

Living in a society which generally idolises the latest and trivialises the past, we all have an amnesia problem. It’s hard to think Mr Patch’s death will help with that, but I hope some strand of corporate memory and respect will transmit forward, and increase our chances of recovering some greater measure of our core values — corporate understanding, fellow feeling, dignity, and self-respect — before it’s too late. Just pray it doesn't take a disaster like the wars of the 20th Century to get us there...

War to end War?

The 90th anniversary of the Armistice has triggered interesting historical reflection about the First World War. Perhaps the time is coming when our perceptions of it can become more historical. Military Historians are probing the inadequacies of what you might call the Blackadder view. Nowadays they talk about a “learning curve” on the Western Front, which the British army negotiated painfully and sometimes haltingly, but neverthless successfully.

Confronted with the horror of the war, of course people said “never again” and talked of it as a war to end war. Given the way in which Germany collapsed, and the way things were left after Versailles, we can easily see now that the peace terms contained the seeds of the next war; so the real learning curve is about exit strategies and how you leave things. The Clemenceau desire for punishment and revenge, however understandable, has to be curbed, in a way it wasn’t in 1919.

I wonder wehther a generation raised on computer games will have a greater or a lesser capacity to feel for the human dimension of war? We are more squeamish than our great grandparents, but there’s a danger everything becomes a computer game for us. With the Big Snit in mind, I was interested to come across a Bigger Snit, pictured by Vincent Chai at the University of Hertfordshire — a dead cert war to end wars, cobbled together from 21st century fears, fantasies and images:

Time to Think Different?

Confronted by the big problems of the real world, let alone the arcana of church politics, it is easy to reach sticking points where people simply dig in. In 1914 the fusion of spades, agricultural barbed wire and machine guns gave the world Trench warfare. The men who dug in thought it would all be over by Christmas, but they were wrong. Accidentally they had invented an all but unwinnable form of warfare.

The sober fact for all sides to contemplate is that, to quote Saint Albert himself, You cannot solve a problem on the level it was created. For everyone except the few lunatics who actualy enjoy warfare (boy, this is what I call Vahalla!) the formulation of impossible opposites is an invitation, not to dig in, but to start up the little grey cells. It’s time for fresh thinking, not trench warfare! So the question of the day becomes, reversing a slogan of 1914, Do you know a man digging trenches, when he should be digging your garden?

Whether you’re running the Lambeth conference, pathfinding for the Anglican Communion, getting life expectancy in Zimbabwe higher than it was in England in the 11th century, or finding how to be radically inclusive in a fully traditional church, the only method is not Power Play, Militant Entryism and Dumb-Boy Thuggery, but FAITH! And here is the perfect illustration of this principle, courtesy of Scott Gunn:

Vicarage Allsorts: Clergy Quality

The most important person in a business is always, in a way, the person on the front desk. The wellbeing of clergy is, in that obvious sense among others, vital to the wellbeing of the Church. Since Chaucer’s time there’s been public anxiety about this subject. 200 years ago Sidney Smith lamented the decline in the quality of clergy since the enforcement of residence was preventing gentlemen from desiring ordination. In the roaring 20’s, Hensley Henson bemoaned the decline in the quality of ordinands since the first world war. The document quoted in last week’s Sunday Telegraph, however, is barking up a very different tree. A more accurate headline than “poor quality of vicars alarms church leaders” would probably be “desperation to dramatize drab HR questionnaire twits journalist.”

Faced with a round robin inquiry from the training department no bishop, if you think about it, is going to say that everything’s 100% tickety boo and there’s no need to bother; mainly because neither of those statements could possibly be true. But quantifying exactly what is less than tickety-boo, and by how much, is a finger-in-the-air mug’s game. So, in a way, the figures in this document are inconsequential. Take them too literally and they imply most bishops are unhappy about ordaining large proportions of the people they do in fact ordain. If that really were the case, the remedy would lie in their lordships’ own hands — keep your mitts to yourselves! But that’s obviously rubbish, and a complete travesty of what this straw poll was about. It probably only took straw poll form so as to enable MinDiv more easily to prioritse the results, which are pretty much obvious, into strategic proposals.

How stands the quality of clergy? Well, the role is more complex and demanding than hitherto, and the social infrastructure to affirm and support clergy weaker than ever. Anyone who thinks this job is easy ought to have a go at doing it. The roles we perform in a thousand different contexts are damn difficult and impossible to win at half the time. English clergy have to straddle the fears, fantasies and expectations of people who go to church and people who don’t, multitasking with spindly resources from a home where the phone never stops ringing. It’s a tall order and, frankly, I'm amazed at how well the vast majority of colleagues habitually cope.

This is all the more amazing because the freedom of not being directly supervised in the workplace can easily turn into a vacuum, an unnerving feeling of being lost in space. All this and lousy pay, too. But, before you get the violins out, there are great satisfactions and joys to be had, too.
Could all of us clergy raise our games? No doubt, in a thousand ways, especially bishops and archdeacons, perhaps. Does that mean we’re all useless? Well, of course, yes, I suppose every one of us is a bit useless some of the time. Bishops, priests and deacons are all wounded healers, and do well to remember the wisdom of Chesterton’s Hymn for the Church Militant:

Great God, that bowest sky and star,
Bow down our towering thoughts to thee
And grant us in a faltering war
The firm feet of humility.

Lord, we that snatch the swords of flame,
Lord, we that cry about Thy ear,
We too are weak with pride and shame,
We too are as our foemen are.

Yea, we are mad as they are mad,
Yea, we are blind as they are blind,
Yea, we are very sick and sad
Who bring good news to all mankind.

The dreadful joy Thy Son has sent
Is heavier than any care;
We find, as Cain his punishment,
Our pardon more than we can bear.

Lord, when we cry Thee far and near
And thunder through all lands unknown
The gospel into every ear,
Lord, let us not forget our own.

Cleanse us from ire of creed or class,
The anger of the idle kings;
Sow in our souls, like living grass,
The laughter of all lowly things.

The fact is, however, that all over the country God still blesses people richly, left right and centre, through the prayers and hard work of most ministers, most of the time, and often in ways they will never know. Things break down incredibly rarely, given the sensitivity of the work clergy do, and their vulnerability. But go wrong they sometimes do.

Most failures are about human interaction, not theology or even ethics. Many are driven by misunderstanding, desperation or exhaustion. If there’s any way people can go over the top with better weapons and body armour, I’m all for trying it. Who wouldn’t be?

It’s interesting to note the suggestions bishops made: Clergy need to focus on the realities of the Church they represent. They need support in missional thinking, doing and living. The Church needs to get its act together about consistency of training and deployment. Anyone disagree? presumably not. But How to do it? There’s the rub...

Contemplating this question, we could take a moment out to celebrate earlier, kinder times, when absolutely everybody really could cope faultlessly with their jobs and associated expectations, and nobody needed to push the boat out on training for this kind of public role:

Linslade — fast forward into St Albans...

Celebration, led by the Bishop of Bedford, to inaugurate the new Ouzel Valley Team Ministry at St Barnabas Linslade. This has involved the parish leaving our diocese and going into St Albans. The County boundary changed in 1966, and it’s plainly been the right way to go. Church Property shootouts are fun, but we don’t really do turf wars over here.
The pre-1966 county boundary had its uses, though. Someone was telling me that the licensing hours were different in Buckinghamshire to Bedfordshire, and people used to nip across the river our way to get another pint in at closing time!

St Barnabas serves what the Victorians used to call an artisan parish. There’s a sad First World War memorial. A lot of “pals” joined up together from the Church, leaving a dirty great long list of names, and two crosses on the wall from the original field graves of a choirman and one of the servers, killed in 1918. On a brighter note I was once preaching there of a Sunday morning and someone said to afterwards, “You know what, bishop? You’d make quite a good vicar!” — which I took as a real compliment.

It was a great joy to thank people for 162 years of faithful life and service in our diocese (it was Lincoln until 1846) with all its ups and downs, and to share the parish’s joy, offering love and prayers as it embraces a new future. During the service +Richard licensed Fr Bernard Minton to the new team ministry. Sadly Bishop Christopher of St Albans was ill and unable to be with us, so it was just +Richard and me. Having paid good money to see the three wise monkeys, all people got was the two stooges!

Wodbine Willie says...

Before leaving this season of Remembrance, a passage from the writings of G. A. Studdert-Kennedy, World War I Uberchaplain and evangelist, caught my eye. Democracy and the Dog-Collar (1921) is about the organisation of working life, reacting to the claim that the First World War was a failure of Christianity, but this says something powerful about ecclesiology, too...

TRUE PERPETUITY IS ONLY OBTAINED BY PERPETUAL READINESS TO CHANGE
ORGANISED Christianity is a failure, but then organised anything is a failure. Christianity is a life, and you cannot really organise life in its fulness. It always tends to break its body and reform it into a more perfect expression of its real soul. It is not only organised religious life that fails and is always crying out for reformation; organised political life fails, and is always crying out for reformation. That is the necessity that lies behind political change. An organisation that was not a failure could never hope ultimately to succeed — it would be dead. Christ has always been greater than His Church, and always must be, until His Church becomes the new Jerusalem and the Kingdom of God.