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Angels in the Trenches: British Soldiers and Miracles in the First World War

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

Katherine Finlay
Katherine Finlay*
Affiliation:
Wolfson College, Oxford
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In their interactions with the soldiers during the First World War the British military chaplains were afforded the opportunity to see the Christian body in microcosm. The chaplains’ frontline experiences shaped their positions on popular religion and the sincerity of Christian belief and practice amongst Britain’s youth. A comparative assessment of clerical responses to soldiers’ claims of the miraculous not only demonstrates a critical divide in clerical understanding of the supernatural – a divide which is more appropriately separated along theological rather than denominational lines. It also indicates that many of the differences between Catholic and Protestant evaluations of popular religion were, fundamentally, differences of clerical perception rather than popular practice and belief.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 41: Signs, Wonders, Miracles Representations of Divine Power in the Life of the Church , 2005 , pp. 443 - 452
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2005

References

1 See especially D. S. Cairns, The Army and Religion (London, 1919); Charles Plater, ed., Catholic Soldiers (London, 1919); Anon., Catholics of the British Empire and the War (London, 1916); Arthur Herbert Gray, As Tommy Sees Us: a Book for Church Folk (London, 1917) and Stephen H. Louden, Chaplains in Conflict: the Role of Army Chaplains since 1914 (London, 1996).

2 See Alan Wilkinson, The Church of England and the First World War (1st edn, London, 1978; 2nd edn, 1998), 169–96; Albert Marrin, The Last Crusade: the Church of England in the First World (Durham, NC, 1974), 135–42; Alan Wilkinson, Dissent or Conform?: War, Peace and the English Churches 1900–1945 (London, 1986), 33–6; Stuart Mews, ‘Religion and English Society in the First World War’, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Cambridge, 1973, 173–87; Thomas Johnstone and James Hagerty, Cross on the Sword: Catholic Chaplains in the Forces (London, 1996), 100–90; Adrian Hastings, History of English Christianity 1920–1990 (London, 1991), 30–140.

3 Snape, Michael, ‘British Catholicism and the British Army in the First World War’, Recusant History 26 (2002), 354–52, and Wilkinson, Church of England, 153–68 Google Scholar.

4 See Hermann, Mary, Catholic Devotion in Victorian England (Oxford, 1995), 33 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Ibid., 115.

6 See Gilley, Shiels and Sheridan, W. J., A History of Religion in Britain: Practice and Belief from Pre-Roman Times to the Present (Oxford, 1994), 278 Google Scholar.

7 Derek Holmes, J., More Roman than Rome: English Catholicism in the Nineteenth Century (London, 1978), 13–47 Google Scholar.

8 Thomas, Terence, The British: their Religious Beliefs and Practices (London, 1988), 64 Google Scholar.

9 Ibid., 63–4. William Sanday and Hensley Henson were two of the more controversial proponents of these ideas. See The Church Times, 21 December 1917, 538 for the debate surrounding Henson’s beliefs.

10 A. E. J. Rawlinson, Authority and Freedom: the Bishop Paddock Lectures for 1923 (London, 1924), 97, and H. Home, ed., Chaplains in Council (London, 1917).

11 Imperial War Museum, First World War Collection, ‘Religion’, E. E. Hayward file, Hayward to his aunt, 14 October, 1916.

12 Ibid., Montague Bere file, Bere to his sister, 29 March 1917.

13 Ibid., 30 March 1917.

14 Ibid., Bulstrode file, Bulstrode diary, p. 47.

15 The Church Times, 9 July 1915, 47.

16 See Wilkinson, Church of England, 194–5.

17 The Church Times, 13 August 1915, 148.

18 The Tablet, 28 August 1915, 286.

19 Downside Abbey, Rawlinson Collection, Letters 1915–1917, Rawlinson to General French, 15 August 1915.

20 Ibid.

21 See H. Atteridge, Army Chaplains in the Great War (London, 1916).

22 Imperial War Museum, First World War Collection, ‘Religion’, E. C. Crosse file, E. C. Crosse, unpublished war diary, n.p.

23 Ibid.

24 Bedborough, George, Arms and the Clergy, 1914–1918 (London, 1934), 77 Google Scholar.

25 Mercier, Cardinal D. J., The Voice of Belgium (London, 1917), 55 Google Scholar.

26 TheTablet, 26 August 1916,268.

27 E. M. G., A Brave Soldier (Melbourne, 1942), 20.

28 Plater, Catholic Soldiers, 25.

29 The Tablet, 6 October 1917, 427.

30 Atteridge, Army Chaplains, 18.

31 StonyhurstMagazine (February 1917), 1834.

32 O’Rahilly, Alfred, Martyr Priest: the Life and Death of Father William Doyle S.J., Who Died in the ‘Great War’, ed. Harney, John (Limerick, 1998), 27 Google Scholar.

33 R B. Talbot Kelly, A Subaltern’s Odyssey: Memoirs of the Great War, 1915–1917, ed. R. G. Loosmore (London, 1980), 93.

34 Imperial War Museum, First World War Collection, ‘Religion’, D. V. Dennis, File, ‘A Kitchener Man’s Bit’, unpublished war memoir, 1928.

35 Cairns, Army and Religion, 42.

36 The Tablet, 19 August 1916, 229.