The Chocolate Soldier

“Suffer hardship with me, as a good soldier of Christ Jesus. No soldier on service entangleth himself in the affairs of this life; that he may please him who enrolled him as a soldier.”

— 2 Timothy 2:3-4, ASV

England at War

Studd came home in the early months of 1915 to a country at war. The great armies had dug themselves into trenches across Belgium and France, and the casualty lists in the newspapers grew longer every week. Hundreds of thousands of young men had volunteered for the army in the first months of the war. They were cheered through the streets, and those who did not go were often treated with contempt.

Priscilla was ill, and for a time her life seemed in danger, but she recovered. Studd, for his part, threw himself into meetings. From the spring of 1915 he was speaking wherever he could, calling on Christians to give themselves to the evangelisation of the world as completely as the soldiers were giving themselves to the war. It was the one thing he wanted to talk about, and the war gave him a comparison that everyone understood.

Heroism, the Lost Chord

The fullest statement of what he was saying in these years is the tract that has become his best-known work, The Chocolate Soldier, or Heroism—The Lost Chord of Christianity. It is usually dated to 1912, and it may have been begun then, but the text as it was published speaks of the Great War, so in its familiar form it cannot be earlier than the war years. It is short, angry and memorable.

The title needs explaining. A chocolate soldier was a toy, a soldier made of chocolate, who would melt as soon as he was exposed to heat. The phrase had been made popular by George Bernard Shaw’s play Arms and the Man (1894), whose hero carries chocolate instead of cartridges. Studd used it for the Christian who looked like a soldier of Christ but melted at the first touch of hardship or danger. The tract opens by declaring that heroism is the lost chord of present-day Christianity. It compares the Church, unfavourably, with the courage of the aviators and polar explorers of the day, the suffragettes, and the men who had volunteered for the war. If Christians had the pluck of the airmen, the polar explorers or the volunteers of the Great War, he argued, every soul on earth could know the name and salvation of Jesus Christ within ten years. It ends by putting to each reader Christ’s own question, as Studd framed it: would he be a malingerer or a militant?

There is real power in it. Studd had a gift for the short, sharp phrase, and he was saying something that needed to be said: that Christians who would admire a soldier’s courage often expected to follow Christ without any courage at all. Paul had used the same comparison. “Suffer hardship with me, as a good soldier of Christ Jesus.” There is no Christian life without some cost, and Studd was right to say so.

There is also something troubling in it, and a reader a century later is likely to feel it more than his first readers did. In the years of the war millions of young men went to their deaths, and some of them had volunteered because they had been shamed into it. Studd’s tract praises their courage without any hint of the horror of the war, and it uses the language of military recruitment, with its contempt for shirkers and its glorification of sacrifice, to recruit for Christ. The comparison is understandable, and Paul made a version of it. But a gospel that recruits by shame is in danger of forgetting that the Captain of salvation does not force anyone into his army, and that his soldiers are first of all his children. Studd’s rhetoric would grow more extreme over the years, and some of the conflicts of his later life can already be heard in this tract.

It should be added that Studd never seems to have doubted his own courage, and that he was right not to. He had faced the hostility of a Chinese city, the climate of the Congo and the opposition of his own family, and he had not flinched. But courage of that kind can make a man impatient with the fears of others. The Christians he rebuked in The Chocolate Soldier were often people with families to feed, debts to pay and no fortune behind them, even a fortune given away. The tract has no word of understanding for them. That silence is part of what it teaches, too.

Rhymes and Etceteras

In 1914 a London publisher brought out a small book of his verse, Quaint Rhymes for the Battlefield, credited only to a Quondam Cricketer. A quondam cricketer is a former one. The verses carry the same call to Christian heroism, and the title and the pen-name show another side of Studd: a man who liked a rhyme and a joke, and who could make fun of his own past.

The following year he published a pamphlet called Christ’s Etceteras. It is only a few pages long, but it is important, because it is the first statement of the principles on which his mission would be built, and in later years WEC International described it as the manifesto from which its own constitution developed. In it Studd cast the existing missions and their workers as the people of real standing in God’s work, and described his own little band as Christ’s etceteras: the humble helpers who would go to the places no one else was reaching, not to compete with anyone, but to fill the gaps. It is one of the gentlest things he wrote, and it shows how he wanted his mission to be seen. In time, the gaps he wanted to fill would grow to include not only the heart of Africa but every part of the world where the gospel had not been preached.

It is striking to set Christ’s Etceteras beside The Chocolate Soldier. The one is all trumpets and reproach; the other is almost shy, describing Studd’s band as the humblest of helpers, filling in behind the real missionaries. Both were written by the same man in the same years. The contrast shows that Studd was not only a man of one register. When he thought about his own mission, he could be modest, even self-deprecating. When he thought about the Church at large, he could only shout. The trouble, in later years, was that the shout increasingly drowned out the modesty, and that the people on the receiving end of it were his own colleagues.

Recruits

The meetings of 1915 and 1916 were meant to find people, and they did. Studd was looking for men and women who would go to the Congo on his terms: without salary, without promise of furlough, ready to live as simply as he did and to work as hard. He did not much care whether they had been to university or theological college. He cared whether they were wholehearted.

Those who answered him were a varied company. Some were young people from evangelical homes who had grown up on missionary stories. Some were working men and women who would never have been accepted by the older societies. Some had been deeply stirred by the war and wanted to give their lives to something as costly and as great. They were brave, and many of them were very able. Some of them would serve for decades and become pillars of the mission. Others would find, once they reached the Congo, that the life Studd demanded was more than they could bear.

The pattern of recruitment, then, carried the seeds of later trouble. Studd called people to heroism and offered them hardship. Those who came were by nature the kind of people who would not easily accept being told what to do, and Studd was the kind of leader who expected to be obeyed. It was an explosive combination, and in the 1920s it would explode.

Back to Africa

In 1916 Studd sailed again for the Congo, taking with him a party of new missionaries recruited through the meetings of the previous year. His daughter Edith went with him; she would marry Alfred Buxton in the Congo in 1917. Priscilla remained at Highland Road to run the mission at home.

Studd was fifty-five. So far as the record shows, he never saw England again. For the remaining fifteen years of his life he lived in the Congo, and he and Priscilla met only once more, for a few days, near the end. The daughters who stayed in England saw him, if at all, only rarely. That was the price of the decision he made in 1916, and the family paid it with him.

A Good Soldier

Paul’s picture of the soldier at the head of this chapter has two parts. The good soldier suffers hardship, and the good soldier does not entangle himself in civilian affairs, “that he may please him who enrolled him as a soldier.” Studd took both parts literally. He would suffer any hardship, and he would let nothing, not health, home, family or comfort, entangle him.

The soldier’s aim, though, is to please the one who enlisted him, and the one who enlisted Christians is not a general but a Saviour who “came not to be ministered unto, but to minister” (Matthew 20:28, ASV). Studd knew that perfectly well. In his best moments, he lived it. But there was in him, from these years onward, a tendency to forget that a soldier of Christ is also a member of a family, and that the family of God includes those who are slow, weak and afraid. The chocolate soldiers of his tract were real enough. So were the ordinary Christians who were not heroes, and whom Christ also loved.