An Acceptable Warrior

by Earle Looker

  Abruptly, and again with a touch of wonder at the sharpness of his memory, a passage from Renan occurred to him: “The construction of a religion is for humanity what the construction of a nest is for a bird. A mysterious instinct awakens in the heart of a being, who heretofore has lived totally unaware of the existence in himself of any such possibilities. The bird, which itself has neither laid an egg nor seen an egg laid, possesses a secret knowledge of the natural function that it is going to perform. It lends itself with a species of pious and devoted joy to an end it does not understand. The birth of religious idea in man is something quite analogous. Mankind is moving forward unsuspectingly in its allotted course, and suddenly a little period of silence comes upon it, a lapse of sensation, and it cries to itself, ‘Oh God, how strange is the destiny of man! Is it indeed true that I exist? What is the world? Am I the sun, and does its heat and light feed upon my heart? O Father, I see thee beyond the clouds, and the noise of the outer world begins again, and the window, open out upon the infinite, closes once more; but, for the moment, a being to all appearance egoistic will perform inexplicable deeds and will experience a need to bow the knee and to adore.’”

  3

  “Doctor Beaumont,” David said, “May I speak with you.”

  The clergyman flipped a page of his romance novel, laid his book aside, took a firmer grip upon his pipe and looked up with a more genuinely friendly interest, David thought, than he had so far shown.

  “About religion,” David said.

  “Really,” Beaumont said. “That’s direct, my lad. It’s rather a relief, too, to me. I make it a rule never to talk of the Church unless the other fellow brings up the subject.”

  “About marriage …”

  “Not to be entered into lightly,” Beaumont said immediately. “A holy state, for does not …”

  “I mean,” David interrupted, “how about a marriage between a Protestant – a friend of mine – and a Catholic?”

  “You mean a Roman Catholic? A tremendous mistake! Fraught with every sort of complication. The children, for example, have to be …”

  “Just a minute,” David said. “What I’m really wondering is whether or not you have any proof that such a marriage can’t work, particularly if one, one of the parties to it hasn’t very much formal religion?”

  “By that, I suppose you mean that the Protestant is the weaker?”

  “Well, yes.”

  Beaumont sighed heavily for emphasis, “Unfortunately, that’s often so. In that case the Roman Catholic, she – right?”

  “Yes.”

  “In that case, she will surely endeavor to convert him. She can be extremely skillful. She can withhold her affection and her love; some of them seem utterly without conscience.”

  David felt his anger flare. He had been foolish to hope for anything constructive from Beaumont, though again and again he had been grateful for the human compassion of chaplains fighting for justice for the men, for their health and comfort and what few amusements could be devised. But Beaumont, obviously, was just a civilian clergyman. David looked at him and hoped he was of a type fast disappearing, a fine façade but doubtless full of ancient lumber. However, he thought the conversation could hardly be coldly dropped without giving offense.

  “I just asked,” David said, lamely, “out of interest. I wondered what might happen.”

  Beaumont faced squarely about: “You’re really asking for yourself.”

  Advice was what he wanted, David thought, but not personal prying. “No,” he lied and felt himself flush. “But – it really doesn’t make any difference.”

  “I’m sure, my lad, you wouldn’t have asked unless it did,” Beaumont persisted.

  “Let it go,” David said, wondering what could best divert the topic, then added, “It was only a supposition.”

  “You can talk to me, really quite frankly,” Beaumont said. “It’s my daily work to help in such cases.”

  “Never mind,” David said, feeling a surge of annoyance while thinking of the most useful finality: “She’s … dead, you see, so that’s that!” The statement seemed to hang in the air, over-emphasized now that it was out, an unpardonable blunder like cursing the enemy aloud in a contact post, like stupidly attracting the attention of fate as lighting three cigarettes from one match in a front-line position.

  “Oh!” Beaumont said. “Really; my most sincere sympathy, and – but isn’t it rather – ah – unwise and dangerous for one, in these troubled days, to think of what might have been?”

  David groped again for a topic to change the subject. “What do you think,” he asked, “about all the men who’ve just been killed?”

  “‘I am the resurrection,’” Beaumont quoted, “‘and the life; he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live, and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.’” He looked at David closely. “Surely,” he said, “that is not new to you?”

  “No, it’s old and very familiar.” He thought of his country church back in Greenwood with all its beautiful albeit meaningless rituals and music and when as a boy he served as an acolyte. The whole service just seemed a congregational prelude to a Sunday of gin and tonics at Farmington Country Club.

  David’s reaction hardly seemed to meet the clergyman’s approval. “There is comfort also,” he said, “in that verse, ‘That happy Easter morning when all the graves their dead restore, and father, sister, child and mother meet once more’.”

  “I guess it’ll be a big reunion.”

  “Eh, what? Oh! Yes, magnificent. ‘May the radiant angels appear and give to aching hearts that holy calmness, which comes from owning God’s hand in whatever befalls’.”

  “So, God’s hand,” David said not without bitterness, “was in the death of those men, hundreds of thousands of them who were more fit to live than many who weren’t even scratched?”

  Beaumont looked at him, David thought, like a small boy caught in a lie. “Your attitude should be one of faith,” he said.

  David thought: ‘I brought this on myself.’

  “You must try to get in touch with God,” Beaumont said. “He offers you a goal of realized fellowship. It is folly to think anything of greater importance than your relationship with him. It may be possible that you have exercised an over-plus emphasis on some favorite view of Christ. For instance, the old debated question of ‘two natures in one person,’ though clearly set forth by Anselm and decreed in Council, is still, in practice, a question. Men feel Him to be so much ‘Very God of Very God’ that they miss His humanity. You must consider that. Honest effort can only bring a great discovery.”

  Perhaps because he had thought it should. Now it seemed little more than some mumble-jumble, yet doubtlessly sincere, notwithstanding meaningless nevertheless.

  Beaumont continued, “On the other hand, like those of other religions, there are those who have not seen the Son of God. The emphasis has been so much upon His humanity that His Deity has not been discovered. To such a one, Gospel record often seems unreliable and untrustworthy. He has difficulty in understanding Christ, for he does not sense the supernatural.”

  ‘Good God!’ David thought, ‘It’s the over-arching supernatural all around us, so prevalent here in Bruges, that’s got me thinking.’

  “Let the doubter and skeptic come with an open mind,” Beaumont continued, “Let him set aside all preoccupations and theories, and allow the facts as they are to make an impress upon the heart. As I said, honest effort will make a great discovery.”

  These strange sentences, a specialized language, David felt, were made up of phrases the man had tried to understand, believed he did, in holy writ or in things he had read, or he had formulated them himself to express great truths. Perhaps some of them might stand for verities, but blended together they certainly did not appeal to the intelligence.

  David only half listened
now. He wondered about the truth of what Hindus and Buddhists believe – that only as a human being, through its suffering, is the gateway presented to achieving enlightenment and liberation from all suffering. He remembered once, long ago, this sort of thing held meaning to him, albeit briefly in a fleeting moment one sunny Easter Sunday back in Greenwood, in a sermon given by old Rev. Bowie.

  “Only by worship and chiefly by prayer,” Beaumont began again.

  “Can you state it a little more simply?” David interrupted. “I’ve been living in reality lately.”

  “And what is reality?” Beaumont asked blandly.

  “I haven’t the slightest idea,” David said, angry with himself, “but it takes just a moderate intelligence, I think, to be bewildered.”

  “Why,” the clergyman asked in an altered tone, “do soldiers so often try to be disconcerting?”

  David laughed shortly. “We want to force the issue, I suppose. It wants forcing.”

  “Right. Let’s be frank, so we may understand each other.”

  David, suddenly weary, changed his mind and said, “This has got to become an argument. I hardly see the use …”

  “But it’s of vital importance!”

  “I doubt it. But if it is, then keep your head down!”

  “Eh? You mean you don’t follow me?”

  “No, not at all. I mean – Look here, you’re asking for this! You’ve been just quoting a lot of damned drivel. It might help some woman who’d lost a son, but not until she was ready to grab at anything. But, for God’s sake, don’t use it on me.”

  Beaumont struggled stoically and successfully with his anger, as the English do best.

  David said, “I’m sorry. I guess I got out of hand. We’d better break this off.”

  “By no means,” Beaumont replied firmly.

  It was a strange sensation, David thought, coming from absolute virile authority over a thousand men to impotence with one. Beaumont had settled back in his chair and laid down his paperback book as if it were an anchor upon the graveled path. He looked so solid and assured. David looked at Beaumont and felt sorry for him. The heavy responsibility the Church placed upon its ministers was tremendous. By every word, every action they created impressions with regard to religion itself, since most people moved from one state of mind to another without any conscious reflection. David thought his own religion had never seemed of such importance like when his attention was directed to the possibility that all religion might well be dead. Beaumont’s comments suggested to David, ‘you think there’s been no change in the Church for a long time? Who, in the name of God, is Anselm? To be really useful, the Church will have to change with the times, be alive and alert, use intelligent initiative not unlike an evolving personality.’

  “Eh?” Beaumont asked, startled and shocked.

  David realized he must have spoken some of his thoughts.

  “If there is one thing,” Beaumont said slowly, “that a soldier who has really been in the fighting, or a man who has had any real experience with life, or a person who has the instincts of a gentleman does not do, it is to speak in such a way to our clergy.”

  “I may be a little mad,” David said and heard his tone crackle, “talking this way to you breaks out of discipline myself. I’ll make no excuse for it beyond the fact I’m trying to adjust myself to men like you, civilians I can’t command and who won’t obey. I certainly don’t mean to attack you just for the fun of it.”

  “You may be sure.” Beaumont said evenly, “I’ll brook no attack upon religion.”

  “At twelve o’clock,” David said, “flat sights, an ostrich hiding.”

  “Really, my dear fellow!”

  “Let it pass. Look here now, I’m not attacking religion so much as I’m sorry and resentful for it. It must have been a fine thing before it got all confused and snarled up.”

  “There is nothing confusing if you’ll only … Mysteries, yes, but …”

  “Why don’t you talk straight? God knows I need it. We soldiers are sick and tired waiting for one of you to say something of importance. Instead we listen to word twisting. My God, I wish you’d stop deceiving yourself and others. Come right out and say you can’t answer my questions. Say you don’t know where in hell millions of men have just gone to. Say you really don’t know what’s happened to all of them since the world began. Or say yes, by God, you do know and then state your convictions – but simply. The sounder the philosophy, the simpler it can be expressed, yes? You don’t need to look at me as though I’ve gone off the deep end.

  “Ever since I was a boy I have had trouble with Christianity,” David continued. “Now, Hinduism, that’s a bit different although still confusing with all of its brightly colored smiling gods running around. You know they even have a god of street corners? But nevertheless it has always seemed to me an environmentally sensitive philosophy. A Hindu is taught to live in harmony with nature and to recognize divinity prevails in all things. But in the West, inhibitions to the exploitation of nature vanished as the Church took the spirits out of the trees, mountains, animals, seas …”

  “‘Whom the gods destroy they first make,’” Beaumont began.

  “Another quotation,” David interrupted, “and pagan at that. I can answer you with Montaigne: ‘Man is certainly stark mad; he cannot make a flea, and yet he will be making gods by the dozens.’ Skip that sort of, well scholarly, back and forth. I’ll tell you one of the things that made me want to talk to you – my conscience. Do you understand? Not just a schoolboy conscience of regretting a lie or a binge or dirt but what all your crowd calls ‘murder up to the moment the transports sail’. I’ve been thinking about a couple of men I killed. Don’t look so horrified. What do you think we’ve been doing, playing games? I’ve killed two men, personally, myself. I’ve commanded a thousand others to kill, and you may be sure I did it well. Life is sacred, you fellows say. No. Nothing of the kind. It’s cheap.”

  Beaumont looked helplessly down at his hands, his fingers twisting and untwisting. David waited, his anger mounting, for the man to speak. He looked at Beaumont hopefully as a commander tries to put the spark of life into a clod that must too quickly act the soldier. The clergyman’s response must be quick and sharp, David thought, or his opening for action would be forever past. Perhaps this was the first time he had been frankly challenged. He should see it as an opportunity, rise to it, strike back. This was for what he must have been, should have been, preparing for years. Or was he just a heavy, lifeless, unresponsive thing like a sack of soil suspended from a cross-tree to be struck at in bayonet practice?

  “You wear a uniform yourself,” David heard himself say. “You belong to an older outfit than mine. I was thinking a moment ago you almost spoke the language of the cross-bowman. Man, your regimental history goes back to the time of the – the short sword. Stand up, for Christsake! Or should you be sent to the rear to dig graves?”

  Beaumont seemed stunned and for that instant, David thought, in fear of physical harm.

  “Am I shell-shocked?” David said. “No. Or naturally violent? No. Disturbed? Yes. Why? Because I wonder if all of the past contains ideas great enough for practical use now – and whether there are personalities fit to give them leadership. These are great considerations – perhaps too great for me. But somebody’s got to think of them. The old men don’t. They just send the best young men to fight their battles and wreck the whole world along the way. Do you ever think of them? Or don’t you? Do you?”

  ‘Damn you,’ David thought. ‘Did the martyrs look like that?’

  David found himself standing at full height, trembling, striding toward him, picking up Beaumont’s cheap pulp fiction romance novel. He thought it was for the purpose of maybe living vicariously?

  “So, you’ve nothing more to say? Then will you go? – and take your Bible with you!” David said.

  Beaumont reached
for the book eagerly, caught it out of David’s hand so anxiously the incident seemed doubly shocking. David felt his mind dart off into the sharpest curiosity as to the title of the book. He wondered if the repressions contracted in the clergyman’s line of duty were not compensated in some pornographic mental holiday within its pages. He was at the point of snatching the book back, and he wondered if something had finally snapped in his head.

  “Get the hell out of here!” David cried in a fury. “Go and get down on your knee and pray – pray for yourself as well as for me, and take your goddamned sparrows with you!”

  David paced the empty garden, angry and ashamed. Presently he returned to his chair, unhooked the collar of his tunic for air, unbuttoned it for ease, turned his face once more to the sun. Certainly something had snapped, perhaps the curb of his mind, thus to absurdly quarrel with the past, and that was Beaumont, to try to fight out of it some future assurance. Why not admit, he thought, there was no discernible plan or purpose and cease struggling to build up specious reasons? Admit this great killing through which he had passed was but one larger episode among a thousand others and the aftermath, now coming, had been as many times repeated. Admit reconstruction would not be spiritual but only house another generation to be as quickly begotten as possible to try once more to outnumber the sons of another enemy. Admit war and sudden death would come again and again to millions before they hardly dreamed their future. Admit a man must reproduce himself, not once, if he wished to be sure something of himself would endure. Admit even love itself was also an instrument to keep this futile cycle turning. Just let the mind go, he thought, and admit his desire for Celeste was so strong there was a coarseness to it and if he really loved her it were almost better first to – what was the phrase? – “donner du soulagement – to those impulses, whatever they may be, what you have so long repressed.”