ship of the Bishop of Winchester and
Professor D. S. Cairns, with Mr. E. C. Carter of the Y M C A, and the
Rev. Tissington Tatlow of the Student Christian Movement, as secretaries.
Although the results and findings of this committee are not yet
published, the writer has before him the reports of numbers of workers in
France. In the base camp where he was last working, the questions were
taken up by more than a hundred of the workers and discussed in
conferences with groups of the soldiers and officers of the various
regiments. These were summarized in findings and the reports were
compared with the returns made from other centers. The writer has had
the privilege of talking with hundreds of the soldiers regarding their
own religious lives and difficulties. In this chapter he will try to
form a composite photograph of all these impressions and to state
impartially the results of his own experience and those of others.
We shall confine ourselves to three outstanding questions: I. What are
the moral standards and actions of the men in war time? II. What is
their attitude to religion and what is their religious life at the front?
III. What is their attitude to the churches, and what lessons may the
Church learn from the men at the front?
The questionnaire has been answered mainly by men of the British army,
but the writer could observe no radical difference between the British
and American forces as regards their religious life. As in other things
connected with the war, we in America may learn much from the experience
of Britain and other nations.
I
_What are the moral standards and actions of the men in war time_? At
the very beginning, we must recognize the difficulty and danger of
generalizations. No two men in the army are precisely alike. All
sweeping generalizations are likely to be misleading. Regiments differ
from one another and workers receive differing impressions of the front.
Most of all we must distinguish between the different classes in the army.
It has been repeatedly affirmed that not more than 20 per cent of the men
now under arms among the British troops were connected with the churches
in any vital way before the war, or were regular in attendance at their
services. Of this minority perhaps a half--those who were weak or
nominal Christians before the war or have lost the higher standards of
peace time or have hidden whatever religion they may have had--would not
now be classed as
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