Art. 3.-THE SOLDIER'S FAITH.

'Religio Militis.' By Austin Hopkinson, formerly a private of Dragoons. Martin Hopkinson, 1927.

A BOOK by Mr Austin Hopkinson is an event, and both the matter and the manner of it bring joy to the reviewer's heart. It is a difficult book to review, though so short, for every page is written with a purpose, while the argument may slip along the length of many pages; but all that is written is worth grasping and retaining. We delight in Mr Hopkinson's English, which is grave, austere, and dignified, suggesting the thought that he has sat at the feet of the Elizabethan and Carolean stylists who wrought our language to its fullest glory. A wise and charming reticence pervades the book, despite its frankness. We conceive the frankness to be deliberate and possibly not easy to the author; for the true soldier is a man of action and effort rather than of words, and the Religion of the soldier is self-effacement and self-sacrifice, which do not lend themselves to analysis and description. We are told that the book 'was planned in the trenches before Ypres and has been written at odd moments since. It is a serious attempt to give an outline of the beliefs of the War-generation and to refute the allegations of those who complain that the present age is one in which faith is dying. The author holds that the boys and girls of to-day are not scoffers at religion, but the churches are not in touch with their ideals.'

We know that the soldier fulfils himself in deed rather than in word. Why, then, does one whose evident pride is to be a soldier deliberately lay bare convictions which, forged in the secret places of high endeavour and tempered by adversity, might be deemed almost too sacred for expression? Moreover, are there not too many War-books? We struggle in a spate of them, wordy, contradictory, self-assertive books. The author himself says:

'It has become but too common for great captains of the War to write books by which they show how wise were their plans, and how wonderful would have been their victories,

had not some other by his folly or by his malice rendered their dispositions vain. Such books are distasteful to soldiers, since it is held unfitting that one of us should seek to praise himself or even to gain the applause of the generation. For the true reward of the soldier's calling is in the work itself. If it be well done, no shouting of the ignorant can make the honour of it more; and if it be ill done, the thought of comrades dead through a man's own fault cannot be made more bitter to him by censure from others. To explain away and publicly to make excuse are actions unbecoming leaders of men. For they can be judged by their peers alone, whose praise or condemnation should not be spoken save among brothers in arms. Yet perhaps it may be allowed to me, the least of all soldiers, to break for once through that reticence which we so highly prize, and to set down in writing for boys and maidens some of the things which war has taught us, or has appeared to teach' (pp. 1, 2).

We must therefore seek our answer in the book itself. It is certain that the seeker will be rewarded by the search, whether the solution be to his entire liking or not. For the book has greatness in it.

Mr Hopkinson has earned the right to translate into words the soldiers' thoughts, for he has served and suffered with them. We may be pardoned for inserting here a few details, purely personal, of one who stands high in his generation, for they are relevant. Mr Hopkinson served in South Africa; and through the Great War. Being wounded, he returned to the front later as a trooper of Dragoons. Since 1919 he has represented the Mossley Division of Lancashire in Parliament. He has carried into civil life the love and honour for his fellow-soldiers gained by knowing them. In 1920, when inquiry was made into the action of certain Trade Unions who refused to admit ex-Service men into their folds, a fellow-Member told the House of Commons how Mr Hopkinson had

'started a scheme at his works to employ discharged and disabled soldiers and sailors. The Trade Union disapproved of the scheme, and told him he could not employ discharged men who were not in the trade before the War. Notwithstanding that, the scheme went on, and Mr Hopkinson was arraigned before the Munitions Tribunal by the Trade Union and fined 5l. under the Restoration of Pre-war Practices

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Act for employing disabled sailors and soldiers.' (Cries of Shame!')*

Mr Hopkinson's exposition and defence of the soldier are timely. In their reaction from war, too many people now decry the soldier's calling and abuse the Art of War which, under God, have saved them. Hearing the hateful things said by those who call themselves pacificists -lovers and promoters of Peace-against those who won that peace at awful cost; and seeing the hateful, petty wrongs that can flourish in a time of peace, we are earnestly convinced that there are ills greater and more hateful than even war, and few callings more intrinsically splendid and unselfish than that of the warrior. Mr Hopkinson's standpoint throughout the book rebukes such pacificists, both noisy and noisome, who defile the name of peace; for a pacificism bred of the ingratitude of the living to the dead, and of a flabby internationalism which finds all countries right save one's own, is a travesty, a disgrace. The true pacificists are the soldiers, who

'have shown that they can kill their enemy yet not hate him; while others, though they do not kill, cannot withhold themselves from hating. There are some even who, while they profess a deep love of their enemies, show nothing but envy and malice towards their friends, and proudly boast that they did all that lay in their power to hinder us when we were fighting for them' (p. 2).

Our author envisages a world overturned by the War, the rules and safeguards of centuries denied or cast away; the flower of the world's true aristocracy cut down; the little men left alive; Demos, the Mob, snatching his chance of power and place; the leaders content to sit and count aloud the vanishing coin of reputation; the market-place filled with the clamour of 'the fool' who says there is no God; the meek too bewildered to rise and seek their heritage. In all this we have a state of life more odious than war, because of it neither valour nor unselfishness is born. Have we not full excuse for sour pessimism? The author, however, has no use for pessimism, which is a vulgarity

* Daily Telegraph,' Feb. 19, 1920.

conducive to a greater degeneracy in man than many bigger faults. He assures us that even

'if there were nothing in the nature of things ever bringing to nought the contrivings of the crowd, the ills which come from exalting quantitative methods to the neglect of qualitative considerations are now so manifest that we may well hope to see a healthy reaction against democracy in our own generation. But for my part I cannot think that the end of democracy should be in tyranny, though this indeed would be its end if natural law were permitted to take its course all unrestrained by the conscious action of individuals. I trust rather that we may at length attain some degree of aristocracy. . . . To many this may seem but a vain hope. Yet it need not be so. For it would not be untrue to say that periods of upheaval and of devastating war favour the rise of an aristocracy of one kind or another. When empires reel and civilisations tremble the crowd is filled with fear, and . . . is more than ordinarily ready to seek guidance from the few who stand undismayed by the falling heavens and the cataclysm of war, finding no terrors therein, but rather cause for a deeper faith, a wider hope, and a yet more potent charity' (pp, 5, 6).

He shows the rule of Demos, the unbridled Mob, to be the basest form of government possible, and for the demagogue, Demos' son, that odious human parasite, he has less than contempt, calling him Pan's successor who 'cries aloud for the return to nature which is but the return to the beast, for a setting of the heels above the head and a swearing that the brain is in the feet. Thus he maintains his claim to be the god of the crowd, the spirit of reversion' (p. 101). Now, as it is at least doubtful whether a proletariat, trained by demagogues to become entirely parasitic, can ever face the terrors of such war as science is preparing for us,' we may look for

'a revival of military aristocracy, confined to those individuals who alone can contemplate undismayed the tortured earth vomiting its dead and the shrieking heavens falling in flame. It may be that such an aristocracy will be the means whereby the human race can be saved from the intellectual, moral, and physical reversion which is inevitable if a mere counting of heads remain the sole criterion of values. Though a military aristocracy can itself do no more than arrest the

degeneration of the age, yet even this negative action may save civilisation by rendering possible the subsequent rise of an aristocracy based upon more enduring principles than mere physical courage. . . . Posterity may yet see war carried on by those who are true soldiers, slaying and being slain without fear and without hate, going to battle as to a bride because they know that progress for the many comes only through the self-sacrifice of the few' (pp. 103, 104).

Whether the reader agree with this or not, he cannot deny that it is a noble conception of discipline and service, tending to progress. It is an answer also to those who think it is Christianity to preach peace to the tiger till it eats him, and who, in fact, are pacificists because they are not big enough to be soldiers. The true soldier is he who is willing to lose his life that others may live, he who having taken on himself the burden of unconditional service, cannot lay it down this side of immortality. The hardest part of his service is now, when the big guns are silent and the chatter of the little men is heard all round: I won the War.' 'Nay, I!' Is the fellow disabled? Well, he has a pension surely, and I am taxed for that'-the chatter of the little, little men to whom service and sacrifice are hardly even names. It is the soldier's service in the War which has given him the right to serve his generation in the Peace with that soul and body already scarred by service. For all this he will receive neither gratitude nor recognition. But

'the true mark of the soldier is this, that he bears with a stout heart all the hardships of his calling, hopes ever that his sacrifice may not be in vain, believes that progress can come only through suffering, endures unshaken the horrors of science degraded to the service of slaughter, and in toil and pain learns to have compassion on the weak, to pity the coward, to feel no resentment for ingratitude, and in the end to love his enemy. Surely, then, it is fitting that soldiers, before all others, should take up the heavy burden of aristocracy, . . . and hold themselves ready to fulfil duties far more toilsome and difficult than any which war could lay upon them. . . . We who have drunk delight of battle with our peers show but a graceless spirit if we do not consecrate to the service of our fellow-men our lives ennobled by that privilege, and thus preserve some memory of the time when from the sodden trenches of Flanders, under the mocking