A Promise at Keble

“When thou vowest a vow unto God, defer not to pay it; for he hath no pleasure in fools: pay that which thou hast vowed.” — Ecclesiastes 5:4 (KJV)

In December 1916 Jack won a scholarship to University College, Oxford. There was one problem. To get in, everyone had to pass an exam that included basic maths, and Jack, who could translate Homer at sight, could not do sums. He failed it. In the end the war solved it for him: afterwards, men who had served were excused.

He arrived at Oxford in April 1917, but the war had emptied the place. As an Irishman he was exempt from conscription. He chose to serve anyway. In June he joined a cadet battalion housed in Keble College, two to a room. His roommate was Paddy Moore, almost exactly his age and also Irish. Paddy's mother, Janie Moore, had come to Oxford to be near her son, bringing his eleven-year-old sister Maureen. She was forty-five, warm, talkative and generous, separated from a husband she called the Beast, and in the habit of mothering every young man her son brought home. To an eighteen-year-old who had lost his mother at nine and lived among schoolmasters ever since, her kitchen table meant a great deal.

At some point in those months Jack and Paddy made a promise. If one of them was killed and the other survived, the survivor would look after the dead man's parent. We know about it from Maureen, who remembered it years later, and from the way Jack lived afterwards, which only makes sense if the promise was real. Many young officers made pacts like that. Few kept one the way Jack did.

He reached the front line in France on 29 November 1917, his nineteenth birthday. He said very little about the war afterwards: a few lines about the cold, the mud, the wounded and the unburied dead. He never pretended to have been a brave soldier. He did his duty, endured, and later tried, with only partial success, to forget.

In March 1918 Paddy was posted missing in the great German offensive. Months later his family learned he had been killed. He was nineteen.

In April Jack's battalion was thrown into the fighting near the village of Mont-Bernenchon. On 14 April some sixty German soldiers came out of the smoke with their hands up and surrendered to him. He was always modest about it: as he told it, he simply discovered, with great relief, that they wanted to surrender. The next day, 15 April 1918, a shell burst beside him, almost certainly a British shell falling short. He was hit in the hand, the leg and the chest. The sergeant next to him, Harry Ayres, a kind, steady man who had looked after his young officer, was killed outright. A fragment of metal stayed in Jack's chest for more than twenty-five years.

From a hospital in London he wrote to his father, asking him to come. Albert didn't come. Jack wrote again. All that summer and autumn Albert never once crossed the Irish Sea to see his wounded son. He was a frightened widower, set in his ways and sick with worry for both his boys, but none of that made it hurt less. Someone else did come. Janie Moore, already told that her own son was missing, visited Jack, wrote to him and fussed over him. Jack had begun keeping his promise before he knew he would have to.

Ecclesiastes says that when you make a vow, you should pay it without delay. Neither young man believed in God when they made that promise. But Jack kept his word for more than thirty years. Promises are easy to make in a crisis and easy to drop when life moves on. Being someone whose word holds is a deeply Christlike thing to be.

One thing to do this week: think of one promise you have made, to a friend, a parent or God, that you have let slip. Do one concrete thing to keep it, or tell the person honestly that you can't.