September 2023 Print

By Patrick Murtha

The paradox of cheerfulness and suffering would be foreign, perhaps even repugnant, if Christ had not proven the truth of it on the cross. Think, for a second, with the eyes of a non-Christian. What has your mind gone to Golgotha to see? A tortured corpse who claimed to be God? A street-preacher who, according to all the stories, taught peace and love, but angered his political authorities and opponents? A teacher of better morals forced to die for his doctrine, like a second Socrates? Whatever you have seen, without the eyes of Faith, the crucifixion and the cross will appear a curious enigma; the success of the cross will be a more perplexing irony. Gods, one would think, conquer by thunder and lighting, by hurling famines and plagues. Death is fated for the fire-stealing mortals. The immortal peacock-feather-fanned gods are destined for sipping nectar and nibbling ambrosia on the cushioned couches of Olympus. To overcome by being mortified, to triumph by being humiliated, to vanquish by being slain—surely, says the pagan, this would be no virtue, but truly a vice or a delirium, to the gods of myths and legends. “But what we preach is Christ crucified,” St. Paul says, “to the Jews, a discouragement, to the Gentiles, mere folly” (I Cor. 1:23).

More perplexing than God suffering torture and death at the hands of His creatures is the joyful and willful spirit with which Christ had shouldered His cross. Amidst the pain and the torture, Christ imposed a will to suffer for his Father and a joyful acceptance of suffering that would cause even the staunchest stoic to doubt the sanity of Heaven. “My thoughts,” says the Lord, “are not your thoughts, nor your ways my ways” (Is. 55:8), and Christ adds, “Take my yoke upon yourselves, and learn from me; I am gentle and humble of heart; and you shall find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light” (Mt. 11:29-30) and “you will weep and lament while the world rejoices… but your distress shall be turned into joy” (Jn. 16:20). If the fall was a felix culpa, the cross must be a felix dolor, a happy sorrow. The apostles preached it to the death; the martyrs sang it to theirs. Catholic soldiers have sprightly trudged behind their captain to Calvary; and Catholic poets have ecstatically found their true muse upon the cross.

This life-principle was particularly central for Joyce Kilmer, a Catholic poet-soldier of the Great War. The image of the crucifix was significant in the poetry of the Trench Poets: Wilfred Owens’s poem “At a Calvary Near the Ancre”: “One ever hangs where shelled roads part. / In this war He too lost a limb”; Siegfried Sassoon’s famous “Redeemer” in which the soldier appears as Christ with “No thorny crown, only a woolen cap,” or his posthumously published, yet unfinished, poem “Christ and the Soldier: “The straggled soldier halted—stared at Him—Then clumsily dumped down upon his knees, Gasping ‘O blessed crucifix, I’m beat!’ ” These two names are most known, appearing often in general poetry anthologies, and always in those of the poetry of World War I. Other war poets too have found a certain solace and even a stumbling-block in the crucifix: Charles Hamilton Sorley, G. A. Studdert Kennedy, Lucy Whitmell, John Oxenham, Herbert Read, to name a few. They saw the suffering soldier and allied him to the suffering Christ, but few of them saw the willful and joyful suffering Christ as a standard for the willful and joyful suffering soldier. This is what makes Joyce Kilmer and his war-poems more unique, more Catholic, and more like the cross of Christ.

It should come as no surprise that the image of the crucifix appeared in so many of the poems of the Great War. The country-side of France, where the two trench-lines snaked, were dappled with road-side shrines and crucifixes. This poor region of France was rich with the Roman religion. “I’m surprised, I acknowledge,” wrote Kilmer to Fr. Edward Garesche, “by the passionate Catholicity of the people. Even ‘Holy Ireland’ can scarcely be more Catholic than rural France” (Jan. 29, 1918). And a few months later, against to Fr. Garesche, he wrote, “It is very comfortable to dwell in so genuinely Catholic a land as this; to be reminded in every room of every house, and at every cross-road of the Faith” (May 6, 1918). This reality is also evidenced in the many front-line photographs of many way-side crucifixes that had been caught in the cross-fire of the two belligerents. The innumerable scars of shrapnel or bullets added to the five sculpted wounds. These war-shattered figures often lent themselves to thoughts of pity and sorrow; and so the poets responded in kind. 

Kilmer, even before his soldiering days, discovered a certain joy in suffering because he had discovered the cross of the Catholic Faith. The Catholic’s joy in suffering is not a pleasure or a delight in the pain itself, but in what the pain signifies. It signifies love. It is offered for charity, that is, love of God and neighbor. Fr. William Doyle, an Irish chaplain of the Great War, had written, “You can test your love infallibly and find out how much you have by asking yourself this question: What am I willing to suffer for him? It is the test of St. Francis de Sales: ‘Willingness to suffer is a certain proof of love.’ ” Or, as Fr. Doyle wrote of his own time with the army: “Naturally I have little attraction for the hardship and suffering the life would mean; but it is a glorious chance of making the ‘oul body’ bear something for Christ’s dear sake” (Nov. 9, 1914). For Christ’s dear sake! That is the reason for the joy and for the suffering. This too was the impetus for Kilmer’s longing to suffer. He wrote as much to Fr. James Daly shortly after his conversion: “I know I’m glad I live two miles from the Church, because it’s excellent for a lazy person like myself to be made to exert himself for religion. And I wish I had a stern mediaeval confessor—the sort of person one reads about in anti-Catholic books—who would inflict real penances. The saying of Hail Marys and Our Fathers is no penance, it’s a delight” (Jan. 9, 1914). This was Kilmer before his soldiering days. Then his uniform was suit and tie; his weapon, a pen; his opponent, the opinions of atheist and anti-Catholic; his battlefield measured in column inches. And during his soldiering days, his soul found its satisfaction in this type of suffering. “To tell the truth,” he wrote to his friend Robert Holliday, “I am not at all interested in writing nowadays, except in so far as writing is the expression of something beautiful. And I see daily and nightly the expression of beauty in action instead of words, and I find it more satisfactory” (May 7, 1918).

When the Great War finally snagged the United States, Kilmer was among the first to join the army. He wanted to be among the first in France, the first to the Front. He wanted to fight with a Catholic company, and his first fight was to enter the famous Fighting 69th, the Fighting Irish. Like Christ, whom he called his captain, he did not cringe at the thought of the cross, but took it up, “not as I will, but thine be done.” His letters home were often pregnant with tidbits about not only his acceptance of suffering, but more so his love of suffering, his anticipation and his searching out of suffering. He delighted so much in the tribulations of combat and the hardships and self-sacrifice of the soldier that he wrote to Holliday, “Wonderful life! But I don’t know what I’ll be able to do in civilian life—unless I become a fireman.” This love of Sacrifice and this strength to Sacrifice came to him from the Mass and Communion, which he received as often as he could. “Spiritual pain (sometimes physical pain),” he wrote to his wife Aline, “is beautiful and wholesome and in our soul we love it, whatever our lips say.” It was, as if Kilmer had taken to heart, the words of St. Paul to Timothy: “Then, like a good soldier of Christ Jesus, take thy share of hardship” (II Tim: 2:3).

So spoke Kilmer’s private letters; so also speaks Kilmer’s public poetry. His war poems, though only five, are perhaps his best. And the best of these few are two in which he ponders the Cross: “The Peacemaker” and “The Prayer of a Soldier in France.”

As regards the first, Kilmer despised the pacifist, the man who refuses to fight for the good of God and the good of man. “We are peacemakers,” he wrote to Aline, “we soldiers of the 69th, we are risking our lives to bring back peace to the simple, generous, gay, pious people of France, whom anyone (knowing them as I have come to know them in the last six months) must pity and admire and love” (May 18, 1918). They were the peacemakers, willingly sacrificing themselves and their suffering for a higher peace than mere non-war:

Upon his will he binds a radiant chain,
          For Freedom’s sake he is no longer free.
          It is his task, the slave of Liberty,
With his own blood to wipe away a stain.
That pain may cease, he yields his flesh to pain.
          To banish war, he must a warrior be.
          He dwells in Night, eternal dawn to see,
And gladly dies, abundant life to gain.

Such is the image of the soldier as opposed to the mercenary. It is, more specifically, the image of Christ and the Cross. And so Kilmer continues:

“Who fights for Freedom, goes with joyful tread
          To meet the fires of Hell against him hurled,
And has for captain Him whose thorn-wreathed head
          Smiles from the Cross upon a conquered world.”

These words are not so different from an earlier poem “Memorial Day” when Kilmer observed the graves of soldiers from a more distant and likewise bloody war:

“May we, their grateful children, learn
          Their strength who lie beneath this sod,
Who went through fire and death to earn
          At last the accolade of God.
 
In shining rank on rank arrayed
          They march, the legions of the Lord;
He is their Captain unafraid,
          The Prince of Peace… who brought the sword.

So the soldier saw his captain Christ. As Winifred Mary Letts, a poetess of that same war, wrote, praising the army chaplains:

“Ambassadors of Christ you go
Up to the very gates of Hell…
 
But yours, for our great Captain Christ,
To know the sweat of agony,
The darkness of Gethsemane,
In anguish for these souls unpriced.
Vicegerent of God’s pity you,
A sword must pierce your own soul through…
 
Then God go with you, priest of God,
For all is well and shall be well.
What though you tread the roads of Hell,
Your Captain these same ways has trod.
Above the anguish and the loss
Still floats the ensign of His Cross.

Conflict and Cross! Suffering and sacrifice! I will let the last poem, Kilmer’s “Prayer of a Soldier in France,” speak for itself:

My shoulders ache beneath my pack
(Lie easier, Cross, upon His back).
 
I march with feet that burn and smart
(Tread, Holy Feet, upon my heart).
 
Men shout at me who may not speak
(They scourged Thy back and smote Thy cheek).
 
I may not lift a hand to clear
My eyes of salty drops that sear.
 
(Then shall my fickle soul forget
Thy agony of Bloody Sweat?)
 
My rifle hand is stiff and numb
(From Thy pierced palm red rivers come).
 
Lord, Thou didst suffer more for me
Than all the hosts of land and sea.
 
So let me render back again
This millionth of Thy gift. Amen.