WITH MERCY AND WITH JUDGEMENT:
Strict Baptists and the First World War
By Matthew J. Hyde
Gospel Standard Trust. 552 pages.
£13 plus £2.85 p&p
ISBN 978 1 897 837 566
Oh, the madness of war – yet even this can bring glory to God! This book is an outstanding piece of work relating to the First World War, 1914-18, and it mirrors the horrors of hatred and the power of weapons, including the use of gas!
Reading it, I was constantly reminded of Isaiah 40.6-8: ‘All flesh is grass … all the goodliness thereof as … the flower of the field … grass withereth, the flower fadeth, but the word of our God shall stand for ever’.
How little did they know...
The reading of this large book, with its 56 photographs of Christian men on the inside of the front cover and 57 similar photographs on the inside back cover, has taken me a long time. I felt I owed it to all the efforts involved, as well as to honour the shocking deaths and casualties of that four-year period. How little did the marching men pictured know of what lay ahead: living in trenches they had dug, often soaked with rain; rats running over them; flying shells and bullets causing countless deaths, wounding and destruction.
From what little I know, I gather that my own father was involved in those terrible years and, though wounded twice, he lived to beget twins in 1931. However, he did suffer a lot from the effects of war. I never knew him or my mother to attend church or to read the Bible to us, but, in God’s gracious purposes, we twins did attend Mount Zion Baptist Church, Courland Grove, Clapham, and, later, I was converted in 1944.
This book has so much to teach us concerning human experience. In the main there are four sections, entitled as follows:
1. Overview
The Strict Baptist response to war. Reasons given for joining up. Life in the Forces – Army, Royal Navy, Air Forces, Prisoners of War. Worldly influences in service. The war on the ‘home front’ – seven sections. The war and the churches – five sections. The war and ministers – eight sections.
2. Diaries and memories
In this section, covering 135 pages, 33 names are mentioned. I recognised a number of well-known names; I knew none of them personally, though I did hear Stanley Delves preach once.
3. Letters
Of these, 37 were written from the Front, including one by Joseph Piggott of Horsham. There are six letters from parents and friends; four letters from home to service men, including Abraham Jarvis of Greenwich; and pastoral letters from Eastbourne, Hastings, Bath, Brighton and Nottingham.
4. War poetry
The poems are very good and most touching, as well as up-to-date, e.g. ‘Right About Turn’ by M.A. Chaplin, Galleywood, January 1917. Sadly, there is still much swearing to be heard today. Our nation has not changed. It has got worse morally. Altogether there are 55 war poems, including one about Nurse Edith Cavell who was shot by the Germans, and another on Lord Kitchener’s death at sea.
I thank Dr Matthew J. Hyde for this monumental piece of research and for its publication (he is a minister as well as a research scientist). I am so glad to have been given a copy to read and review. May this excellent work do much good for God’s glory. Although I would have liked to have read of more assurance amongst these poignant pages, I rest assured that, out of the shocking numbers of deaths recorded at the awful battles of the Somme, more trusted to the Lord Jesus Christ than can ever be told. I rejoice that in heaven and later in the ‘new heavens and new earth’ there will be a ‘multitude that no man can number’ and God on his throne will be glorified.
God bless this book to many, especially to the young. As Scripture says: ‘Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth, while the evil days come not, nor the years draw nigh, when thou shalt say, I have no pleasure in them’ (Ecclesiastes 12.1).
