by Jean Findlay
Again he was protected from real horror by his own poetic bubble, his ability to see the beauty around him and focus on that, excluding the ghastly aspects no matter what. At Rosendael, he read that Rupert Brooke’s younger brother, Alfred, had been killed, Rupert himself had died in April. When, two weeks later, at the same place, Charles’s friend Lieutenant Gordon Swinley was shot, he spent most of the day writing to the dead man’s mother and as the sun went down he transplanted a clump of Madonna lilies to his grave, where he hoped they would flourish. Briefly, on the death of Swinley, the protective bubble burst. Full of unexpressed grief and anger, Charles put his name forward along with the coal miners in his company to form part of a Brigade tunnelling company, a deliberately dangerous choice.
A routine strategy in trench warfare was to undermine the enemy’s trenches by digging a tunnel at considerable depth, ending directly below the enemy trench; then explosives would be set off at the end. Both sides dug such tunnels but neither side was able to counteract the other; the challenge was to locate the enemy’s tunnel and dig one even deeper, or, dig your own trenches so deep that undermining them was impossible. His old commanding officer from Lanark days, Holden Mackenzie, brought up a megaphone to be used by listening posts to identify the whereabouts of German tunnelling. Charles reported that this was excessive as all you could hear, very loudly, were the rats scratching their whiskers from several yards distance, which drowned and confused any sound the enemy might make.
When torrential summer rains halted any more digging work, Charles and his company were ordered to leave. On 6 July, he finally made the long awaited trip to the falling spires of Ypres, and picked up a piece of stained glass and a scrap of bell metal.7 He wrote home, ‘We are on tiptoe for a flight. This should be an interesting week of trekking away among the towered cities of France.’8
* * *
It was not a flash of light on the road to Damascus that turned Charles towards Catholicism but a steady tramp through France and the dramatic appearance of a devastated world. France had something to do with it; his aesthetic and historical interests were in art and buildings inspired by the Catholic spirit – pre-Reformation churches and cathedrals in Britain, the towered cities of France and the steady stream of chapels and wayside monuments to the Madonna in the Low Countries. However it was more by observing other people that Charles was inspired to conversion.
The writer and publisher Guy Chapman expressed the difference of attitude between the churches in his autobiography:
… These bluff Anglicans had nothing to offer but the consolation the next man would give you, and a less fortifying one. The Church of Rome sent a man into action mentally and spiritually cleaned. The Church of England could only offer you a cigarette. The Church of Rome, experienced in propaganda, sent its priests into line. The Church of England forbade theirs forward of Brigade Headquarters, and though many, realising the fatal blunder of such an order, came just the same, the publication of that injunction had its effect.9
In recounting the progress of his own conversion to his parents, Charles was also impressed by the behaviour of individuals: he was careful to emphasise that the attraction lay not in ritual and the allure of beauty, but from sharing trenches with other Catholics and from small, everyday experiences, not even the heroic or exceptional examples. There were about two hundred Catholics in his battalion and company and in the trenches about forty. On Easter Sunday at Winchester he had been to the cathedral before breakfast and to Holy Trinity Church afterwards. Then he visited what he called a ‘hideous, drab’ little RC chapel in Portland, on a dull road flanking convict quarries, with an old priest recovering from a stroke, so that he could not speak the words he wanted to, but brought them out in a little rush, with omissions and repetitions. There was a large congregation in the chapel, made up of men from his previous 3rd Battalion including his old quartermaster, Major Parkinson, for whom he had a great regard, the Major’s nephew, Sergeant Parker, who was with him at St Nazaire and a fine man, Dr Munro, a naval doctor and Highlander, whom Charles had got to know in September when he lived on Chesil Beach.
In Portland, he discovered that all these men were Catholics and one or two others who seemed to have been driven across his path about the same time, notably a young officer in the Wiltshire Regiment at Weymouth called Brooke – a friend of Neil Macleod’s. ‘I found sooner or later that I was a Roman Catholic,’ Charles wrote,
It wasn’t anything to do with the sensuous appeal of music, flowers, lights, vestments, etc., as at Portland we had not a note of music, nor anything else except that ragged old man in his frayed chasuble. But finally at Rouen Cathedral at Pentecost (the last service I have attended in church) I felt quite sure that I was at home, while in Winchester Cathedral on Easter morning I realised – in spite of my love and knowledge of it – that my place was not there …10
Rouen Cathedral could certainly rival Winchester; it was just as old, its site dating back to the fourth century, with thirteenth-century stained glass including a piercing cobalt blue known as bleu de Chartres. Until the 1880s, its tower, at nearly five hundred feet, made it the tallest building in the world. Monet painted the magnificent front over thirty times in 1893 in different lights. Charles would already have known the history of the Cathedral from his reading of Ruskin who had used it as one of his examples in the Seven Lamps of Architecture, saying that as a building it embodied Sacrifice, Truth, Power, Beauty, Life, Memory and Obedience. The book was illustrated with some of the earliest of photographs of details, some from Rouen Cathedral. Charles would have been familiar with these thanks to his mother who had read and discussed Ruskin with him from an early age. Later Ruskin and Rouen would strike a familiar note when Charles started translating Proust; the boy in Du Côté de chez Swann has a transforming experience while reading Ruskin’s The Lamp of Memory in the garden at Combray. Proust himself translated some of Ruskin’s work and later said that he knew The Seven Lamps of Architecture by heart.11 When criticised for his imperfect translation, Proust said, ‘I don’t claim to know English, I claim to know Ruskin.’12
What Charles did not tell his parents at the time of his conversion was that he had also met and corresponded with the Anglican priest Ronald Knox, who later wrote to Meg regretting that he could not find Charles’s letters as ‘he was, among other things, such a splendid letter-writer’.13 Knox, who had been ordained in 1912 and was the Chaplain at Trinity College, Oxford, was the third of four brilliant sons of an Anglican bishop, a scholar at Eton and King’s College Oxford, a prolific novelist and the shining star of the English clergy, later tagged by the Daily Mail as the ‘wittiest young man in England’. He was very close to Guy Lawrence, a friend of Charles’s from Winchester, which attachment was, ‘the strongest human affection of Ronald’s early manhood’.14 The other attachment was to Harold Macmillan to whom Knox was a tutor until Macmillan’s mother advised him that he was influencing Harold towards Catholicism and must stop. As a Catholic Macmillan would not have been made Prime Minister, but he remained close friends with Knox till the end of his life.
Many converts from Anglicanism to Catholicism during the first part of the twentieth century were influenced by Hugh Benson, one of the brilliant sons of the Archbishop of Canterbury, an Anglican convert in 1903 and ordained as a Catholic priest in 1904. A talented writer, he gave an inspired series of sermons, attracting crowds wherever he preached. Benson’s influence could be traced to the mid-nineteenth century Oxford Movement. These were High Church Anglicans, often associated with the University of Oxford, who argued for the reinstatement of lost Christian traditions of faith and their inclusion into Anglican liturgy and theology. They saw the Anglican Church as one of three branches of the Catholic Church. John Henry Newman, the eloquent Anglican clergyman who converted and became a Catholic Cardinal, argued that the doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church as defined by the Council of Trent were compatible with the Thirty-Nine Articles of the sixteenth-century Church of England. Ne
wman’s conversion in 1845, and his writings, followed by that of Henry Manning who also became a cardinal, in 1851, had a profound effect on a largely anti-Catholic England.
Ronald Knox simply called conversion ‘poping’. Knox met Father Martindale, another Anglican convert, who was writing the biography of Benson, for advice on his own conversion. Martindale advised caution, not to ‘shut his eyes and take a plunge’15 into the Catholic Church as Knox was inclined to do, but rather to go in with his eyes open. It was well known by his family and friends that Knox was flirting with Rome. His father, the Bishop of Manchester, thoroughly disapproved. Guy Lawrence converted first, longing for Knox to do so.
When Charles first met him, Ronald Knox was an Anglican priest with whom Charles felt he could discuss his love of men. In 1913, Knox wrote a prayer:
O God, I submit my affection to thee, beseeching thee to take from me all particular objects of my desire, all friendships and acquaintance, however harmless in themselves, which thou seest to be a distraction to my soul …16
Knox corresponded with Charles during the war and in a short story Knox wrote at this time he showed he understood the feelings of one young man for another, and the struggle for celibacy:
In an agony of loneliness, he stretched out his arms as if to fling them round some warm protective body and when they closed upon air, he shook with sobbing. His whole body shook with the unquenchable thirst for human contact. Yet when his brain cleared, it cleared completely.17
The self-disciplined Knox had taken a vow of celibacy as a schoolboy, and had reached a point where he could help someone like Charles. Knox himself was received into the Catholic church two years after Charles on 22 September 1917. An account of his conversion is given in the autobiographical Spiritual Aeneid. Charles kept his copy of this book all his life, and into the page that describes the day of conversion he stuck with glue a postcard from Knox, sent the year before publication on the actual eve of Knox’s conversion, 21 September 1917. It says, ‘Thank you awfully, yours affect. Ronnie.’18 It seems likely that Charles had a hand in Knox’s conversion and vice versa.
After his visit to Rouen Cathedral in May 1915 and his encounter with a priest in June, Charles moved towards formal conversion. In July he was officially received into the Catholic Church at Steenvoorde, a French town with a Flemish name on the Western Front, which had a medieval church with an astonishingly high bell tower, 92 metres, untouched by the war. At Mass, the priest named from the pulpit one of his parishioners who had been recently killed in action, and then called out, ‘à genoux’, whereupon all the elderly people, those left behind not fighting in the war, got down from their chairs and knelt on the floor. ‘The humility, piety and devotion here, as it was in Rouen, and I believe all over France, is very moving,’19 wrote Charles.
On Friday morning, I caught our Brigade Chaplain, Father Evans. I walked down the road with him and told him what I had in mind. We turned back and went to the parish church, where he received me, and gave me conditional baptism (in case my former baptism might be in any way invalid) and heard my confession. So now I am a proper Papist. As we left, the Sacristan, who had been tidying up things, said very kindly, ‘C'est un nouveau frère en Jesus Christ.’20
That summer Charles bought a leather-bound Order of the Mass in English and Latin. Mass was still said in Latin, and the beautiful language, both poetic and economical with words, appealed to the linguist and classical scholar. Three of the readings are bookmarked with stained army parcel string. One runs, ‘O lord I have loved the beauty of thy house and the place where thy glory dwelleth. Take not away my soul with the wicked nor my life with men of blood … But I have walked in mine innocence; redeem me and have mercy on me.’21 These three sentences could sum up his experience at Rouen Cathedral, the war and his homosexuality – in that order. The contradiction remained. Charles wholeheartedly joined a religion that expected either celibacy or marriage, but had the gift of absolution; repentance for sin in the confessional and a release from its burden. At the back of his book Charles noted each place he attended Mass from July 1915, and each place he received Holy Communion. Catholics in 1915 did not receive Holy Communion each time they went to Mass, since Communion had always to be preceded by Confession. However Charles recorded that he received Communion about once a month from then on. Another piece of army parcel string bookmarked the page with the text of the Mass, ‘Grant, O lord, that what we have taken with our mouth, we may receive with a clean mind, and that from a temporal gift, it may become for us an everlasting memory.’ Writing down each location where he took communion created a map of his movements throughout the war: ‘Ribemont-sur-Ancre, Bray-sur-Somme, Cathédrale Rouen, Cathédrale St-Raphaël, Nice, St Mary’s Lanark…’
During a war, when people are faced with death on a daily basis, there are more conversions than in peacetime. At the front conversion was common and the Catholics gained more than the Anglicans; nearly everyone was already registered as C of E on their official papers and a genuine conversion, turning towards God, often prompted a move.
Converts talk about ‘coming alive’ and God suddenly ‘being real’ – the experience is one of intense wonder and joy.22 The normally conflicting demands of sexual and spiritual appetites, of family, duty, friends, society and ambition, no longer cause strife: after conversion unity reigns. When Pascal underwent a conversion he wrote down his Mémoire and had it sewn into his clothes; part of it ran: ‘Certainty, certainty, heartfelt joy. Peace.’ Converts speak of conversion as receipt and acceptance of God, they feel that they are chosen and acted upon rather than taking the initiative themselves. But instead of becoming floppy and passive, they undertake an amount of active work that exceeds expectations and has to be seen to be believed. Dante said, ‘In His will is our Peace.’ But the belief in the will of God lent an energy that surpassed normal human energy. Basking in the wonder, energy and peace of the act of conversion, Charles next took a trip away from the war to an almost celestial town.
While most of his colleagues waited exasperated for the field cashier to arrive with their pay, knowing the man could be several hours, Charles decided to ride to Cassel, five miles away, perched on a high hill, ‘like Edinburgh set on the top of Arthur’s Seat in the middle of Norfolk’. He rode slowly up a zigzag path with the town in front and thirty miles of fields and hedges over his shoulder at every turn of his head. In the little square at the top, he was greeted like a knight of old, he said, by a group of small boys who insisted he visit the Castle while they held his mare. Charles told them that he had only two sous, but they declared that they did it for patriotism and the love of animals, and not for the love of money. ‘Their names were Jean Naels, Albert Vermoulin, and Emile Georges, who doesn’t go to school, and so cannot write, but his father rings the bells in the Church.’23 The boys trotted round with the horse and fed it with water out of a petrol tin, and after exploring the town they parted under a gateway, where Charles gave the eldest boy his sous to buy sweets. He was impressed by their ability to speak French to him and Flemish to passers-by almost in one breath. Just before leaving he met two little girls whose father was a prisoner in Germany. Then he rode back through peaceful side lanes and small sunny villages. It was typical of Charles to remember and write home about all the details of such a visit, even the names of the children, which to most would seem totally irrelevant.
So entranced was Charles with Cassel that he went there four days running, both alone and with fellow soldiers. He walked there cross-country with his friends, Captain Lionel Machin, Lieutenant A. Anderson and Captain Alexander Herries. Herries, who became a close friend, was an only son of the family of Spottes Hall in East Lothian; an Etonian who rowed for Cambridge, he already had an Arts Degree and was about to study Medicine when war broke out. He was responsible, talented, spirited and epitomised a certain quality of manhood and leadership nurtured by generations of the very best upbringing. Charles wrote that Anderson said, ‘This is one of the three fines
t views in the world, and I haven’t seen the other two.’24 Herries made out Dunkirk quite clearly and Machin, on a bright day, remarked to Charles that he saw the sea glittering through hollows in the dunes. It was as if Cassel embodied Charles’s conversion and he wished to share the epiphany with his most valued friends.
On leaving Steenvoorde on 30 July, Charles was asked to command the whole Battalion for a few hours while they marched four miles to a train. The train journey from Flanders to Picardy took twelve hours – only marginally faster than walking the distance of 111 km. The troops were hot, tired, hungry and thirsty, but on their arrival Charles was well pleased: ‘We take over trenches from the French, beautiful ones, with good dugouts, cut in chalk.’ Here at Bray-sur-Somme, he went to Mass again: ‘a rather pleasant custom here is that they bring round little pieces of bread in baskets for the congregation. I ate mine on leaving the church, as I was probably meant to do …25 He did not realise that the ‘pleasant custom’ was sometimes a way of sharing bread in a starving population.
Two days later when he saw some men of the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry decked in flowers, he remembered that the KOSB shared the same privilege as the Yorkshires on the anniversary of the Battle of Minden in 1759. He had forgotten about the tradition until he saw the men wearing roses. He went over to the stationmaster’s wife, who was tending her garden, and explained that his regiment had defeated the Germans (and, he knew but omitted, the French) on 1 August and had worn roses on that day ever since, but here he was without one. ‘So very graciously (for a Picarde) she said that I might take one, which I did, and borrowed a pin from one of the Yorkshire officers.’26