Anzac religion and spirituality

St Mark’s Review, No. 248, June/July 2019 (2) Anzac religion and spirituality Daniel Reynaud, Anzac Spirituality: The First AIF Soldiers Speak. Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2018. Paperback, 370pp. ISBN 9781925588570. Daniel Reynaud’s important book, Anzac Spirituality: The First AIF Soldiers Speak, explores the myriad ways in which Australian soldiers and chaplains interacted with spirituality during the Great War. As Reynaud notes in the introduction, the aim of the study is “to give both an overview and a more detailed insider’s understanding of how the AIF (Australian Imperial Force) engaged with spiritual issues” (p. 29). The book more than accomplishes this aim through a close reading of the extant ego documents (personal letters and diaries) of around 1,000 AIF soldiers. Here Reynaud adopts an approach pioneered by historian Bill Gammage, whose classic social history of AIF soldiers, The Broken Years (1974), was based on an equivalent sample of 1,000 soldiers. Gammage’s study was striking, however, for its lack of interest in questions relating to religion and spirituality, as well as for its casual assertion that such topics were almost non-existent in AIF diaries and letters. Gammage concluded, somewhat dismissively, that Australians were not a religious bunch. Such findings reflect to some extent a general lack of interest in religious and spiritual issues among many Australian historians, but they have also fed into secular narratives of Australian war history and an Anzac civil religion that celebrates Anzac soldiers’ “irreverent secularity” (p. 10). Reynaud’s findings challenge these assumptions, noting instead a significant degree of interest in religious and spiritual issues. In fact, of the 1,000 soldiers investigated, well over 300 recorded spiritual activities and commentary. As Reynaud remarks with some justification, this is “a remarkably high number, given the virtually unquestioned belief in the secularity of the AIF” (p. 5). Reynaud begins the study with a helpful definition that distinguishes between religion and spirituality, while observing that most early-twentieth-century Australians framed their discussion of spirituality in terms of religion, which in Australia has always been dominated by Christianity. The book is organised thematically with chapters focusing on the attitudes and responses of AIF members to a wide range of spiritual or religious issues: compulsory and voluntary church attendance (where only about a third of 118 Book reviews those commenting wrote negatively about forced church attendance); personal spirituality and devotional practice (including Bible study, fellowship, and prayer); theology, religion, and justifications of war; denominationalism and other religions; personal morality and ethics; chaplains and chaplaincy; and alternative forms of spirituality. Australian soldiers offered comment on all of these issues. Their writings reveal that the experience of war could lead a soldier to ignore, question, or jettison Christian faith and practice, but it could also lead to deeper religious commitment, consolation, and a refuge amid the chaos and monotony of active service. While there was little interest in sectarianism, denominational differences, and religious formality, Australian soldiers “respected and engaged with the real thing” (p. 300). One Methodist minister noted that “very few categorically deny the existence of a Supreme Being” and that anyone who did so was attacked by their mates “in sulphuric language” (p. 303). Some soldiers debated the problem of suffering and evil or the merits of just war theory. War could make “the serious more serious, and the thoughtless more thoughtless”; likewise, some soldiers confronted death with profound “sensitivity of soul”, while others grew more “reckless and hardened” (p. 301). A strength of these chapters is the ample space given to soldiers’ writings, allowing us to hear a diverse range of voices and perspectives on their own terms. Some are marked by poignant hope, others by despair, and yet others by humour and razor-sharp wit. Hubert Meager, for example, wrote this prayer request to his mother near the eve of his death at Lone Pine in August 1915: “Pray hard for me, and if God wills it I shall see it through. I have seen the priest, and will go into action with a clean heart.” Another soldier wrote in a different vein from France to his churchgoing sweetheart in Cessnock, NSW: “Really, Nell, I have lost a great deal of faith in . . . the whole pale of religion . . . I guess if you see what we soldiers see you would think likewise” (p. 125). Some diary entries capture the immediacy and intensity of war experience—both physically and spiritually. One of the most remarkable is that of the devout Sergeant Jack Ridley, who was shot in the head during the horrific Battle of Fromelles. We rushed behind a mound of earth and then on furiously. Bullets spat to the right of me, others struck to the left, and I know [sic] a machine gun was after me. “God help me, keep me,” I prayed as I rushed; when suddenly I was 119 St Mark’s Review, No. 248, June/July 2019 (2) up to my chest in muddy water in a hollow. Dead men and wounded lay about the ditch in all directions; an awful scene of war . . . [After being hit in the head] . . . The blood was streaming up from my throat and out of my nose and this, of course, prevented me from breathing. I was in terrible agony from suffocation and I murmured “Oh, God, help. Oh Jesus.” Elliott got the bandage round my head but the blood was coming so fast he exclaimed to MacDonald, “It’s no good, Mac, it’s useless”, but still he wound his bandage round and by the Grace of God stopped the bleeding. But I was done. I felt I was dying and wondered what my first view of Heaven would be like; then I thought of my mother and all at home and I wondered what they would say when they saw my name under “Killed in Action”(pp. 144–45). Yet Ridley survived obviously and following the war went on to become one of Australia’s most beloved evangelists. His sermons, punching home in graphic terms the importance of “eternity”, would become the inspiration for “eternity man” Arthur Stace’s copperplate renderings of that word on the streets of Sydney. Another strength of Reynaud’s analysis is his careful and critical approach to sources. He is alert to the pitfalls, limitations, and potential biases of ego documents. Additionally, the conclusions drawn from this evidence are measured and fair. On the one hand, as he points out, these findings do not “lead to a conclusion that on the whole Australians were religious”; yet, on the other hand, they demonstrate, contrary to those who assert a secularist Anzac tradition, that “more Australians were spiritually attuned and even religiously active” than has been recognised. Any full-orbed understanding of the AIF therefore needs to reckon with the genuine religious and spiritual interests of a significant minority. In this sense, Reynaud’s well-researched and nuanced study makes an important contribution to a growing body of scholarship that is revising an older view that Australian soldiers of the Great War—and, by implication, Australian men generally—were instinctively irreligious and unconcerned with spiritual and religious realities or questions. This echoes the findings of several historians, including Robert Linder, John Moses, Colin Bale, and this reviewer. This is a body of work to which Reynaud has also made previous contributions, notably through his 120 Book reviews study of cinematic representations of Anzacs and a biography of one of the Great War’s most beloved chaplains, “Fighting Mac” McKenzie. One further useful feature of the book is its inclusion of a series of brief biographical sketches of each of the soldiers whose diaries and letters were referenced in the book. One minor quibble is with the decision to include footnotes for the first chapter only (I would have preferred footnotes for all chapters). A more substantial quibble is that Reynaud appears to accept without argument that Australian soldiers should be placed “at the centre of the national spiritual soul” (p. 305). This is a notion of Australian identity that is contested and one with which many historians are uneasy. It has also been the subject of robust debate in recent years, and a more nuanced discussion of that debate could have offered more substance to Reynaud’s conclusions. That said, Reynaud is certainly correct to conclude that any cogent account of the First AIF demands “an understanding of their spirituality” (p. 305). This is a valuable and finely observed book that I commend to anyone with an interest in Australian religious and military history in particular, and Australian history more generally. Michael Gladwin St Mark’s National Theological Centre Charles Sturt University, Canberra 121