THE ALPHA AND OMEGA

Gisborne Times, Volume XXX, Issue 3487, 29 March 1912, Page 5

THE ALPHA AND OMEGA

OF AN ARMY CHAPLAIN’S LIFE. SOME CRITICISMS BY COLONEL BELL. AND A FEW SUGGESTIONS. By Telegraph—Special Correspondent. AUCKLAND, March 2S. Colonel Allen Bell, Officer Commanding the Waikato Regiment,* has--evidently no great admiration for the regimental chaplains who are attached to the Dominion forces. He is retiring from his post and in ■doing so has issued a memorandum to the chaplains in which he thus refers to their efforts: .“I feel that in the past the chaplains, with a few notable exceptions, have been a useless excrescence on the various regiments. As a class they have not displayed any initiative or ability to strike out on modern lines. They do not seem to recognise that if they are going to do good work they will have to cast aside the useless-me-thods of the .past and work on the lines of a democratic country. The utter uselessness of the present methods was never more clearly demonstrated than at the church parade held at the termination of the training camp at Tauhereu and at Tauherenikau, the only striking feature of which was that the hymn ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’ was not sung.

“This service was attended by a large body of instructors and senior officers who were on the eve of going out to all parts of the Dominion to assist in til© work of building up a citizen army, and the occasion presented a unique opportunity of pointing <ut to all assembled the great work that lay before them —to point out to them tliat their work did not end with teaching the men to drill and shoot, hut that the great underlying principle of the universal training movement was the elevation of the national character ! Instead of having pointed out to us those grand ideals we were treated to the singing of a few hymns and the old stock sermon. The formal service held in a military camp on Sundays is .merely a parade productive of unuttered profanity on the part of most of those who have to attend it and doing no really good work for the betterment of the forces, whilst all along the line there is splendid work waiting to be done amongst- the thousands of youths who now constitute our citizen army in this Dominion.

“I am quite certain that the majority of the chaplains to our forces are men who wish to do good work, but the trouble seems to be that they do not know how their upbringing and training seems to really unfit- them for the work of appealing to their fellow men.

The occasion of the reorganisation of our army in this Dominion presents ;an opportunity of doing away with tin deplorable state of affairs. In the first- place I would suggest that the Chaplain should not be an officer, and should not hold any military rank whatever. He should be brought to recognise that the lowest rank in his church should be something that was of more value than the highest military rank that could be conferred 'upon him ” The memorandum then sets forth a number of suggestions including a proposition that chaplains should he organised and trained in the work of running regimental institutes, camp entertainments, and amusements of various kinds, and that their special duty should be to see that life m a military camp should he made at least more attractive than the bar of an hotel or the streets of our towns The good work done -by a. “Citizen s Committee” attached to the regiment under his command 1 is also dealt wit.i by Colonel Bell, and lie states that the chaplain must he the friend of the regiment, and that before any real o-ood can be done by the chaplains themust- cast aside the obsolete methods which have produced “dry rot among them and which have lowered their status in the military forces of this Dominion. - “I make these suggestions, ’ concludes the Colonel, “after an experience of over 15 years of military life on active service and in times of peace as a trooper and in command of a regiment. I can safely say during that long period I have only been associated with one chaplain who die anv really good and lasting work, and that was a Jesuit .priest named blather Barthelemy, chaplain to our forces in the Matabele "V\ ar. “.He was one of these who recognised that the alpha and omega cl an armv chaplain’s life was not to hold church parades. His actions, example and modern methods of work called up tli e manly qualities of all with whom he was associated, and lie cl id more to raise the moral tone of our column than anybody else associated with it.”