In combat: no atheists in the foxholes?

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A quiet tent at a forward operating base, late evening. Distant artillery mutters like thunder far off. Nigel, a civilian embedded briefly with a military chaplaincy unit, is seated opposite Father Thomas, a Roman Catholic military chaplain in his late fifties. A metal mug of tea steams gently between them.

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Nigel:
You’ve heard the phrase, “There are no atheists in the foxholes”. I’ve always thought it was glib, but recently I’ve been wondering if there’s a deeper, psychological truth buried in it. Not about metaphysics, necessarily, but about fear. Existential fear. What happens when a man is reduced to bare consciousness under fire.

Fr. Thomas:
Yes. That line gets tossed around far too lightly. As if terror makes a man reason his way to God. But terror unravels reason. In the foxhole, no one’s doing apologetics. They're just trying not to disappear.

Nigel:
Precisely. In that moment, belief isn’t about propositions. It’s about relief. It’s the only conceptual structure available that says: You are not annihilated. You continue. Somehow. Even if your body is torn apart.

Fr. Thomas:
That’s the soul crying out for permanence, for identity beyond ruin. I’ve sat with soldiers before dawn attacks. You can feel the nausea in them, the animal panic. Some grip rosaries. Some mutter nonsense. Some are numb. But they’re all trying, somehow, to keep from dissolving.

Nigel:
And the fear isn’t just personal, is it? It’s contagious. It spreads. Like the mind of the platoon begins to fray if someone cracks.

Fr. Thomas:
Exactly. One man bolts, and others follow. Which is why armies, historically, have always stationed figures behind the line - officers, NCOs, commissars - with instructions to shoot deserters. It’s crude. But effective. The greater fear behind to block the fear ahead.

Nigel:
A horrible equilibrium of terrors. What interests me, though, is what keeps a man on the line without needing a gun at his back. What’s the internal mechanism?

Fr. Thomas:
A few things. Training, for one. Not just physical, but behavioural conditioning. If you drill long enough, some actions become automatic, even under fire. That buys you a few seconds of function before fear floods in.
And then: loyalty. To comrades, to your unit. Men often don't die for flags or causes. They die for each other. That’s real.

Nigel:
So it’s love, in a way. Not romantic, not abstract, but visceral loyalty. My friend is here; I will not abandon him. Even if I’m petrified.

Fr. Thomas:
Yes. But that only gets you so far. Because there comes a moment - a shell burst too close, a cry too terrible - when all that’s left is the self. And then the self asks: Will I vanish? And that’s where belief steps in. Or tries to.

Nigel:
It’s the psychological trapdoor. Not the impossible escape from the battle, but from the finality of it.

Fr. Thomas:
And even a flicker of belief can help. The thought: If I die, I will still be. It doesn’t have to be orthodox. It doesn’t even have to be clear. Just the sense that death isn’t the cliff-edge of selfhood. That there's continuity.

Nigel:
And so religious belief functions here not as epistemology but as survival scaffolding. A structure the soldier can hang from when everything else is falling away.

Fr. Thomas:
Yes. And I don’t scorn that. I see it as grace. The grace of endurance. In the catechism, we speak of the theological virtues: faith, hope, and charity. But on the battlefield, hope is sometimes the most visible. Hope in its rawest form: that this pain, this loss, this death is not the final word.

Nigel:
It must make your role strange. You’re not there to argue doctrine, but to offer presence. Stability. A reminder that not everything has collapsed.

Fr. Thomas:
Exactly. I walk among the tents. I listen. I pray if they ask. Often I just sit. I’ve found that silence can be sacred when words are too small.

Nigel:
Do they ever ask you whether God is watching?

Fr. Thomas:
Yes. Or worse: why He allows the shells to fall at all. Why men suffer. I don’t answer with apologetics. I can’t. I just tell them what I believe: that Christ is in the trench with them. Not observing, but bleeding. That God, in Christ, knows fear, pain, dereliction. That the cross was a foxhole too.

Nigel:
So you don’t promise safety.

Fr. Thomas:
No. Never that. Only solidarity. That they are not abandoned. And - if they can accept it - that death is not the end.

Nigel:
And that is enough?

Fr. Thomas:
Sometimes. Not always. But even a little belief, in extremis, can ease the tightening in the chest. It gives the terrified mind a thread to hold. And sometimes, that thread holds the man.

Nigel:
Which is, perhaps, what the aphorism meant all along. Not that fear makes men into believers. But that belief is what lets men stay human in the face of the utmost terror.

Fr. Thomas:
Yes. Not a conversion of intellect. A conversion of anguish into courage. Through the hope that the soul - their essential being - endures.

Nigel:
A strange alchemy, isn’t it? Death closes in, and out of that darkness emerges not theology, but a murmur of persistence.

Fr. Thomas:
And in that murmur - maybe, just maybe - is God: in that place, in that time...

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