Serious Christianity and Remembering Waterloo

Today is the 210th anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo, the Anglo-Allied and Prussian victory which delivered Europe from the decades of wars and invasions provoked by Napoleon's ambitions. On the eve of Waterloo, the Reverend George Griffin Stonestreet, chaplain to the Guards regiments, administered the Holy Communion in Brussels. Later that day, many of the officers and men in Brussels would be required to assemble and march with haste, as Napoleon's forces moved towards the Anglo-Allied positions at Waterloo. The chalice used at the service (pictured below) is kept in the Guards Museum.

On the same day, there was a report that the Chaplain General, John Owen, "gave an address to British troops". Previously, as a Brigade Chaplain, Owen had been warned by officers and men about placing himself too close to the front line. His response had been that his primary duty was "to be of service to those now departing this life".

It seems that seven chaplains were among the British forces at Waterloo. One was Samuel Briscall, a favourite of Wellington, who referred to him as the 'Pearl of Parsons'. In 1844, the Secretary of War, commending Briscall's correspondence to the care of the Archbishop of Canterbury, described how he had "served most meritoriously" during the Peninsular Campaign. Another chaplain at Waterloo was Charles Frith, whose bravery in ministering to the wounded in the Peninsular Campaign was recorded by officers and men. His preaching abilities were also noted, while one officer noted with approval his words when arriving at a forward camp: "Gentlemen, we shall have divine service to-morrow, God and the French willing".

Such were the chaplains to the British forces, serious about their ministry amidst the carnage, sacrifice, and victory at Waterloo. (The information on the various chaplains is taken from Roy Burley's study of British Army chaplaincy 1796-1844.)

Some weeks after the victory, on the Sundays of July, A Form of Prayer and Thanksgiving to Almighty God was heard in the parishes of the United Church of England and Ireland:

For the Glorious Victory obtained over the French on Sunday the Eighteenth Day of June, at Waterloo, by the Allied Armies under the Command of Field Marshal the Most Noble Arthur Duke of Wellington and Field Marshal His Highness Prince Blucher.

In the prayers, appointed for use after the General Thanksgiving at Morning and Evening Prayer, the victory at Waterloo was ascribed not to British force of arms, but to the providence of Almighty God:

O God, the Disposer of all human events, without whose aid the strength of man is weakness; and the counsels of the wisest are as nothing, accept our praise and thanksgiving for the signal victory which Thou hast recently vouchsafed to the Allied Armies in Flanders.

At a time of national deliverance, thanks and praise were returned unto the merciful and sovereign God. Here were no bland, innocuous, inoffensive liturgical texts, careful to keep God aloof from the mess and the fear and, yes, the victory.

The prayer went on to petition for an end to the bloody conflicts which had roiled over Europe since 1793, at immense cost:

Grant O merciful God, that the result of this mighty battle, terrible in conflict, but glorious beyond example in success, may put an end to the miseries of Europe, and stanch the blood of Nations.

For those sitting in the pews hearing this prayer and responding with their 'Amen', we might imagine their thoughts: of sons serving the Crown on land or at sea, some of whom had fallen in far off lands or oceans; the immense economic cost of the struggle, felt in taxes, prices, and social strife; over two decades of war across Europe and beyond, an existential struggle that could seem to those involved to be apocalyptic. All this was gathered up in prayer and thanksgiving in parish churches across the United Kingdom in the weeks following the victory at Waterloo.

Amongst those parish churches would have been the little country church of St. Catherine's, Killead, in County Antrim. In the years following, a memorial (pictured) was erected in St. Catherine's to Major Arthur Rowley Heyland, who commanded the 1st Battalion, the 40th Regiment of Foot at Waterloo. He was killed in action at, in the words of the memorial, "the close of that memorable day". He was 34 years old, had served from 1808 to 1814 in the Peninsular Campaign, and was wounded in the Battle of Vitoria and again in the the Pyrenees, both in the Summer of 1813. 

The memorial was erected by Major Heyland's brother, Langford, who, we might guess, lived into the mid-19th century. As the century progressed, and as Langford set in the pews in St. Catherine's, the memory of Arthur, fallen on the field of Waterloo, no doubt often to came to mind during divine service. There is a touching quality to the final words on the memorial: "a feeble tribute to the memory of a beloved brother". I find standing in front of this memorial a quite moving experience. Here is a memorial to a soldier, a brother, who fell on a battlefield over two centuries ago, before the invention of the machine gun, of mechanised warfare, of air power. But here is testimony to the same service, sacrifice, courage, cost, loss, grief.

What, you might wonder, how is this post on the 210th anniversary of the victory of Waterloo related to the themes usually explored on laudable Practice? The ministry of chaplains over centuries in the armed forces; the national thanksgivings for victories, and national prayers in times of peril; the memorials in many parish churches to those who fell in battles - it all quite powerfully points to the weight, seriousness, and significance of Christianity. In the midst of mortal fear and in the face of death on the battlefield; in times when the country has been confronted with struggles that would fundamentally determine whether it would continue to know its freedoms and liberties; in the memory of those fallen, their life ended on the field of battle: the presence of Christianity in all this is testimony to the reality of the faith we confess in the Apostles' Creed: "The Forgiveness of sins; The Resurrection of the body, And the Life everlasting. Amen".

The memory of Waterloo, of the chaplains ministering to those at the battle, the form of thanksgiving offered in churches in the Sundays following, the memorial in a little, rural Ulster church to an officer who fell on that field of battle, this is not only the stuff of heritage. It also embodies the Church's proclamation amidst the fears and costs of battle, of life and death struggles, and of death. It tells of the weight, seriousness, and ultimate significance of Christianity - of the reality of faith, prayer, forgiveness, resurrection. 

This is why Anglicans in particular, with our long and noble history of providing military chaplains, of offering prayer and thanksgiving for the nation in peril and in victory, of our parish churches holding memorials to the fallen, should cherish this aspect of our identity, rather than - as too often is the case in contemporary Anglicanism - mumble our embarrassment and act as if all this requires a political act of repentance, assuring polite opinion that we now have nothing to do with such relics of the past. 

We should cherish the service of chaplains on battlefields past and present, the forms of prayer and thanksgiving in times of war, and the memorials to the fallen because they remind us that Christianity is for such times and places, when death is real, when fear surrounds us, when earthly future is dramatically uncertain, when loss and grief wounds deeply. And such is the Christianity that should be proclaimed by Anglicanism today, in a deeply insecure, uncertain, and violent world: the Christianity that boldly, confidently proclaims "The Forgiveness of sins; The Resurrection of the body, And the Life everlasting. Amen".

Remembering the chaplains, prayers, and memorials of Waterloo, therefore, is certainly not only a matter of heritage; it is about the eternally weighty and consequential matter of Christian faith and hope. In the words of C.S. Lewis, from a sermon delivered at the beginning of another war:

If active service does not persuade a man to prepare for death, what conceivable concatenation of circumstance would? Yet war does do something to death. It forces us to remember it. The only reason why the cancer at sixty or the paralysis at seventy-five do not bother us is that we forget them. War makes death real to us: and that would have been regarded as one of its blessings by most of the great Christians of the past. They thought it good for us to be always aware of our mortality. I am inclined to think they were right.