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Milne's piece, "Onward Christian Soldiers," has been a bit of a classic for Christian pacifists, though not as well known as his Winnie-the-Pooh and Christopher Robin children's classics. Originally a chapter in his book Peace with Honour (New York: Dutton, 1934), it was reprinted as a separate essay in The New Pacifism, ed. Gerald Hibbert (London: Allenson, 1936). It is this latter source from which Peter Sippel drew the text for his website, and from which Culbert Rutenber quoted it in another 20th century Christian pacifist classic, The Dagger and the Cross (Nyack, NY: Fellowship, 1958).
Now it so happens that the author of a classic may not share his readers' estimate of the work's importance. Milne wrote in his autobiography that he wished the public would pay more attention to his plays, novels, essays, and poetry instead of fixating on his children's books:
It is easier in England to make a reputation than to lose one. I wrote four 'Children's books,' containing altogether, I suppose, 70,000 words -- the number of words in the average-length novel. Having said good-bye to all that in 70,000 words, knowing that as far as I was concerned the mode was outmoded, I gave up writing children's books. I wanted to escape from them as I had once wanted to escape from Punch; as I have always wanted to escape. In vain. England expects the writer, like the cobbler, to stick to his last. (A. A. Milne, Autobiography [New York: Dutton, 1939], p. 286)Milne's son (who understandably had his own problems with being known as the boy in the Pooh books) observed of his father:
If I was jealous of him, he was no less jealous of himself. If I wanted to escape from Christopher Robin, so, too, did he.... The House at Pooh Corner was to mark his meridian. After that came the decline.... He had always written what he wanted to write. His luck was that this was also what the public wanted to read. Now his luck was deserting him. (Christopher Milne, The Enchanted Places [New York: Dutton, 1974], pp. 166-67)I will not here try to decide the issue between Milne and the Pooh-loving public; but it illustrates a problem that recurs with his "Onward Christian Soldiers." Having written this as part of his 1934 Peace with Honour, Milne found himself trying to take it back, or explain it away, in his 1940 War with Honour (London: Macmillan War Pamphlets No. 2):
If anybody reads Peace with Honour now, he must read it with that one word "HITLER" scrawled across every page. Before every irresistible conclusion to which I seek to draw him he must insert another premise. HITLER. (War with Honour, p. 12)Once again, in fact, Milne felt he had been pigeon-holed, as he had been with the Pooh books:
Writers are known, less by what they write, than by the labels which other people write for them: a misleading form of knowledge. I was now labelled "Pacifist". (War with Honour, p. 6)Actually, Milne himself had unabashedly used the word "Pacifist" throughout Peace with Honour, so it was hardly fair to imply that others had made up this label for him. Indeed he continued to claim the label even in War with Honour:
I must make this attempt to keep the ear of the Pacifists who listened to me once, in order that I may explain to them, not why one ardent Pacifist has suddenly become, as they would say, a "violent militarist", but why it is the very ardour of his Pacifism, unchanged since 1934, which inspires his passion now for military victory. (War with Honour, p. 13)Essentially, Milne in 1940 felt that in 1934 he had been misunderstood: that his own antiwar convictions were not really the same as those of most of the pacifists he had since met. Those who quoted back to him in 1940 what he had written in "Onward Christian Soldiers" seemed to him to have missed his meaning entirely:
Every one of us has had the experience of writing a letter which is totally misunderstood by the reader. Why? We have used simple words, words of only one meaning, and have expressed ourselves clearly and in reasonably good English. We thought we were writing a friendly letter, and are shocked to find that it has been bitterly resented. Why has this happened? Simply because the spirit behind the letter as we wrote, the background of the letter, was left out of the envelope.... Words can say much and leave much unsaid. (War with Honour, p. 13)Milne explained that in 1934 he had written of "war as we knew it": modern total warfare, which by World War One had become vastly more destructive than even the Napoleonic Wars. Yet though the nature of war had changed drastically between 1815 and 1914, an equally drastic change in the nature of peace had occurred in the brief period 1935-39. Just as old-fashioned war had been replaced by "total war," so old-fashioned peace (such as the humiliation and economic ruin imposed on Germany by the peace of Versailles) had by 1939 been replaced by the new invention of "German peace," characterized by the Gestapo, the Hitler Youth, and the horrendous ideology expressed in Rauschning's book Hitler Speaks. (Milne does not, however, mention the Final Solution among the abominable characteristics of "German peace." In 1940, it would seem, the nations fighting Hitler did not yet recognize the seriousness of Hitler's treatment of the Jews. The Holocaust became public knowledge only in 1945. However much it may be cited in retrospect as a reason why Hitler had to be defeated, in 1940 it was not listed among the reasons for fighting him.)
If one reads Peace with Honour as a whole, Milne's retraction in War with Honour makes a certain amount of sense, at least in terms of the development of his own thinking. Both works are concerned with the problem of abolishing some vast global evil; they differ only in which evil seems most urgent to abolish, war or Naziism. Both, indeed, suffer from some of the same faults: the grandiose predictions of universal disaster, and the oversimplified nature of the solutions proposed.
In Peace with Honour Milne had predicted that the next World War would certainly destroy civilization (p. 169); we now know it did not (there being no nuclear weapons until its closing days). But in War with Honour he made equally dire predictions about the consequences of a triumphant totalitarianism; and although Hitler's totalitarianism did not survive the war, Stalin's did, and we now know (with the collapse of the USSR) that even the ordeal of Stalinism could not permanently and irrevocably destroy the human spirit in Russia. A Nazi ordeal lasting several generations, though horrible to contemplate, might also not have been the irrevocable end of humanity that Milne in 1940 expected. (In Milne's estimate, I might add, the autocracies of Hitler and Stalin were equally abominable: Milne, Behind the Lines [New York: Dutton, 1940], p. 16.)
As the predictions were overdrawn, so were the solutions oversimplified. In Peace with Honour Milne had, with a touch of irony, imagined himself hosting the leaders of England, France, Germany, and Italy at his home for a peace conference, where he would set forth a perfectly reasonable proposal for the abolition of war in Europe. That proposal, alas, took insufficient account of the perversity of politicians, and seriously underestimated the difficulties of reforming the ingrained orthodoxies of Nationalism as a religion. Come 1940 and War with Honour, and we find Milne arguing that "Hitler is a crusader against God ... the self-elected, self-confessed anti-Christ," and that therefore a war to stop him is "not a war between nations, but a war between Good and Evil" (War with Honour, pp. 16-17). At that time the Hitler-Stalin nonaggression pact still held; but when the two self-confessed anti-God totalitarians fought each other, which would play Good to the other's Evil? The one that was allied with England, no doubt; which is just to say that it was a war between nations after all.
Yet, to the Christian pacifist reader, all of this seems strangely irrelevant to the arguments Milne had advanced in "Onward Christian Soldiers." For in that chapter alone -- the chapter which in other people's judgment was worthy of separate publication -- did Milne examine the problem of war from the viewpoint of Christian ethics:
Right and Wrong are not just distinctions made for our children, so that the house can be kept quiet for Father to enjoy his sleep on a Sunday afternoon; nor are they high-sounding synonyms for Convenience and Inconvenience. Whether he base his faith on the Ten Commandments or the Sermon on the Mount, the Christian is pledged to some ultimate standard of reference by which he conducts his life....
In this chapter, then, I propose to bring the war-convention to the measure of Christianity. (Peace with Honour, pp. 69-70)But it was only for one chapter. As soon as it is over he returns to his main line of argument, which is not particularly religious (or at least not Christian):
The previous chapter must be regarded as an interlude. Doubtless it was omitted by the many who feel that religion is meant only for women, children and one's own last moments. But since the call to arms comes through the voices of "King and Country," and since the King is not only Emperor of India but also Defender of the Faith, one had some justification for asking what the Faith was which we were all (presumably) defending. In this chapter, which is concerned with politicians, Christianity will find no sort of a loophole through which to intrude. (Peace with Honour, p. 91)For Milne's own religious outlook was not Christianity. What it was he usually did not say; indeed he did not even tell his beliefs to his own son until the boy was grown up, for fear of unduly influencing him. Christopher Milne tells us how he finally learned what his father believed:
My father waited until I was twenty-four. The war was on. I was in Italy. From time to time he used to send me parcels of books to read. In one of them were two in the Thinker's Library series: Renan's The Life of Jesus and Winwood Reade's The Martyrdom of Man. I started with The Life of Jesus and found it quite interesting; I turned to The Martyrdom and found it enthralling.... One Man! Mankind! There was no God. God had not created Man in His own image. It was the other way round: Man had created God. And Man was all there was. But it was enough. It was the answer, and it was both totally convincing and totally satisfying. It convinced and satisfied me as I lay in my tent somewhere on the narrow strip of sand that divides Lake Comacchio from the Adriatic; and it has convinced and satisfied me ever since.
I wrote at once to my father to tell him so and he at once wrote back. And it was then that I learned for the first time that these were his beliefs, too, and that he had always hoped that one day I would come to share them. (Christopher Milne, The Enchanted Places, p. 144)No God: only Man, who had created God in his own image. Thus the God whom Milne saw Hitler opposing in 1940 was not the God of Christianity, the God who in human form deliberately faces death by torture, unretaliating, in order to drain evil of its force, who afterwards returns to life by divine power, and who instills that power to overcome evil in all who will join themselves to him. Such a God lay outside the scope of Milne's reckoning, both in 1934 and in 1940.
Why then did he write "Onward Christian Soldiers"? Simply because the Church of England was the public custodian of morals. If one wished to talk about Right and Wrong, one might as well look at the official theology that was supposed to underlie them -- "what the Faith was which we were all (presumably) defending." Indeed even within "Onward Christian Soldiers" itself there are hints that Milne himself is not a Christian. For instance, he represents a Christian militarist as quoting Luke 11:21 ("When a strong man armed keepeth his palace, his goods are in peace"), and then remarks
The Christian apologist for war stops there, conveniently, hoping that the irreligious Pacifist doesn't read his Bible. For the next verse says.... (Peace with Honour, p. 84)Milne, indeed, is the irreligious Pacifist who has taken the trouble to read his Bible. And he finds in it confirmation of his pacifism. But the confirmation is largely incidental, an "interlude." It is not, for Milne, the main thing he wants to say.
Yet for the Christian reader, this chapter is by far the most interesting in the book, for in it Milne directs our attention not merely to what he thinks but to what God thinks. It is here that we find the scandalously updated, but all too real, picture of Christ saying to an irritated Winston Churchill in a conquered England, "Render unto Hitler the things which are Hitler's; and unto God the things that are God's" (Peace with Honour, pp. 85-86). In 1940 Milne would explain this away by saying that Hitler as imagined in 1934 would impose only financial indemnities and national humiliation (War with Honour, p. 15); yet even in 1934 he envisioned, if not the Gestapo and the Hitler Youth, at least a "secret poison-gas factory at Gleneagles." In writing this Milne was not, for the moment, thinking of his plan for the demilitarization of Europe; he was imagining what Christ would have said to Churchill. Having a good imagination, he managed to give us a shockingly accurate picture of what Jesus was really like. It was a shock Christians needed: "Render unto Caesar" has far too long been applied to one's own country's government, when it ought to be understood of an imperialist foreign power.
I need not recite the whole chapter here; readers may find it at Peter Sippel's website. I simply observe that for one chapter, Milne has set out to expound, not his own meaning, but God's meaning as shown to us in Christ. He has called on a power greater than he knew. If he later found that some readers had seen more than he intended in "Onward Christian Soldiers," it is because they have been looking at what God intended.
No wonder Christian pacifists have made a classic of "Onward Christian Soldiers" while the rest of Peace with Honour (interesting though it is) has been largely ignored. Sometimes, I suspect, an author senses that something "wants to come in" to what he is writing, even though he doesn't know all the reasons why.
Pooh was thoughtful when he heard this, and then he murmured to himself:
"But whatever his weight in pounds, shillings, and ounces,
He always seems bigger because of his bounces."
"And that's the whole poem," he said. "Do you like it, Piglet?"
"All except the shillings," said Piglet. "I don't think they ought to be there."
"They wanted to come in after the pounds," explained Pooh, "so I let them. It is the best way to write poetry, letting things come."
"Oh, I didn't know," said Piglet.
(The House at Pooh Corner, chapter 2)