It is true that at British airports signs, in English and Ukrainian, offer information. But Britain barely figures on the refugee trail. We send weapons to Ukraine, and donors give money, but as yet, for shameful political reasons, the British people have been mostly unable to help the people of Ukraine. Germany, a state shaped by Angela Merkel, one of the few leaders of her generation who was both capable and decent, has helped hundreds of thousands. And there they were, women and children and old men and pets, in an old dim waiting room in Munich, where a Catholic charity was giving out food and coffee and tea.

Cristina comes from paradise: Odessa was paradise, she said. Truly, paradise. She worked in cosmetics and says her life was “perfect” before the war. “When the bombs started I called my friend and I said, ‘Am I crazy? I know I don’t follow the news but have we got Nazis? Where are the Nazis?’ And he said, ‘No, it’s the Russians, it’s Russian propaganda.’”

Cristina speaks six languages. A few weeks ago, when she first arrived in Munich — via Romania, Hungary and Austria — she translated between other refugees and the German authorities for 48 hours non-stop. She helped about 800 people, awed German officials told her afterwards. With her pencilled-on eyebrows, piercings and air of mighty charisma, Cristina struck me as a kind of punk angel. She is most proud of engineering a family’s escape from Mariupol as it was encircled and devastated by the Russian army.

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She is a fair distance from paradise now, sitting in the spring sun on the steps outside the old waiting room, but at least she is safe. “The Germans are strict but they are really good,” Cristian says, chain smoking. “If you can complete six stages, all the forms, you can get a house or a room or somewhere to live.”

Having settled her own family, found herself a room and completed a self-assigned mission to get a Ukrainian child with cancer in his chest, whom she met in Romania, to a specialist German hospital, Cristina returned to the station to help more refugees. The only time she came close to crying was when she described the welcome refugees receive in Romania:

“They just gave us everything. For the children they had made this room, this massive room, full of every sweet and cake and chocolate you can imagine. It was like a dream or something! And they got all the children together and they gathered them outside the doors and they just opened them and said there you are — it’s all for you. Romanians are incredible.”

The Austrian ticket inspector who combed refugee trains stuffed with fleeing women and children — all of whom had been issued special tickets by the authorities — extorting €160 per person in cash, on pain of ejection at the next station, is incredible in another way.

The worldwide refugee population was around 82 million, according to the UNHCR, before this war drove another 10 million from their homes. The average time it takes a refugee displaced by war to return to their country of origin varies by conflict and era — in cases of protracted catastrophe, it can be 21 years. Many will never return. A young woman I interviewed in Munich, a sales manager with a cat and a dog, who had left with six members of her family, said she would never go back to Ukraine. Her husband was fighting the Russians. She hopes he will live to join her in Germany.

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And then there are the children. It is not the babies, toddlers or the little ones you worry about. Their needs are basic and immediate and they travel well, on the whole. It is the plight of the slightly older children, eight or nine and upwards, which gets you.

There was a girl at passport control in Ukraine who was about ten years old. She was wearing a smart jacket and ear warmers. She was in charge of an adult’s suitcase, the wheeled kind you pack for a week away, and also a carrier bag. With her, waiting in the line for people emigrating on foot, were her mother and grandmother.

In a booth, two young female soldiers were handling two lines at once — people coming out of Ukraine, and people going back in. Most of the soldiers at that border near Siret were women, and they looked shattered. There was an uncertain atmosphere all around the border. The sky looked grey and bitter and all I could see of Ukraine was a low ridge, tall trees and rooks.

That girl was being so good. She must have been good for weeks, I thought, ever since the war began. It’s not right, is it, for a ten-year-old to feel she has to behave so well for weeks and months?

In a sports hall a few miles from the border, back in Romania, I interviewed a group of children who are all national and international standard swimmers. They and every refugee I spoke to began their stories in the same way.

“At five in the morning the bombs started.”

Until that point, no one I interviewed had believed the Russians were really going to attack.

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Most of the swimmers came from Kyiv and the surrounding region. Their coach had called all their families, a few weeks into the war, and offered to take the children to Romania, where they would be safe, and where they could swim.

They had been assembled in the sports hall to receive backpacks put together by volunteers from the Packed with Hope Campaign. The backpacks contained books in Ukrainian and English, head torches, water bottles and other useful things. There was an extraordinary stillness about the children. In the huge hall they chose to sit grouped tightly together. They regarded Gracie, and her Romanian co-organiser Gabriela Popescu, in a searching, almost unblinking way. They did not fidget or whisper, as any group of British 12 to 16-year-olds would.

When we spoke, they looked at me with a sort of steadiness: it was as though you were another thing in a long line of other things that had paraded through their vision during the course of the weird and terrifying and lonely dream it seemed their lives had become. They all held that measured, assessing, held-together look you see in paramedics and nurses and A & E doctors, the look of someone who has to be strong and calm and philosophical on some level. I had never seen that look in a child’s gaze before. I can see all their faces so clearly now.

The best English speakers were asked to talk to me — I was recording a Radio 4 programme about the road between Britain and Ukraine, the road to the war. I asked them normal things: what are you most interested in studying? What do you plan to do beyond school? They were all pale. One was interested in history, and one in mathematics, and they all said they wanted to continue their studies.

One, one of the oldest, Igor, said that in two years, when he turns 18, he will go back to Ukraine “to fight the fucking Russian pigs and help throw them out of the country”.

I was so glad he said it, and that he got to say it into a BBC microphone, though I doubt we shall be able to broadcast it. The children’s eyes seemed to change as he said it and they nodded and seemed to rouse and draw even closer together. That is something else they have learned, I realise now. They have learned hatred, and because they are still so young and still innocent, they may not even know it yet.

Igor was tremendously articulate, his English was excellent, and as we bade friendly farewells I punched him on the arm and said, “You should be a bloody politician mate!”

He laughed. It was the only time I saw any of them laugh.

Others had a different explanation. Voltaire satirised the Christian idea that the world was being ultimately organised by some benevolent Deity. In seeking to defend God in the face of human suffering, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz had claimed that this was “the best of all possible worlds”. In other words, of all the possible worlds that God could create, this one, with all its pain and suffering, was the best one available. No one really bought this argument. Voltaire took Leibniz’s phrase and turned it into a sarcastic attack on the naively religious. The Lisbon earthquake is often pointed to as the moment the European intelligentsia lost its faith in God. Atheism entered the Enlightenment during the period of its conception. Reason and God were no longer compatible.

But suffering and pain are still with us. Mariupol is being starved and bludgeoned into submission as if it were some medieval siege. The innocent are blown up in their beds, maternity hospitals are targeted with high-tech missiles. And dark talk of nuclear war has returned, with nightmares of a Third World War. Has the age of reason really served us any better than the age of faith?

Back when I used to teach Philosophy of Religion in Oxford, I spent many hours sitting in tutorials with undergraduates discussing the “problem of evil”. If God is all powerful and perfectly good, then why is there great suffering in the world? One can, of course, discuss the difference between natural evil and that caused by human beings. But whatever the cause, great suffering is often cast as the slam dunk of atheism. Now that God is supposed to be dead, and suffering remains, I wonder if humanism could be said to have an evil problem too? It’s not quite the same problem, but it is adjacent: if human beings are good and increasingly powerful, how come there is so much suffering in the world?

Scrolling through humanist websites on Ukraine, one of the interesting things is that you can find a kind of defence of humanity in the face of human evil that is not unlike the defence that Christians sometimes use to defend the existence of God in the face of human evil. Consider this, on Ukraine, from the explicitly “humanist” Gold Foundation website:

“Still, through the scenes of rubble and destruction, we see humanity. Humanity in the healthcare heroes dodging artillery as they work tirelessly on the frontlines of the conflict. Humanity in those rising to defend their homes, their country, and democracy at large. Humanity in the charitable donations and mobilization here in the United States and around the globe.”

Compare it to Rowan Williams answering John Humphrys asking “Where was God?” the morning after the Beslan Massacre in 2004.

“The short answer is that God is where God always is, and that is with those who are trying to comfort and bring light in any situation. … I would guess that there must have been older children putting their arms around younger children, you might see God there.”

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These are remarkable similar responses, exonerating God or humanity by pointing towards what is best in the response of these respective actors. But this much is obviously true: evil and suffering have outlived the loss of faith. Once we had God to blame. But now that God has gone (… other explanations are available …) we have no one left to blame but ourselves. Not for earthquakes, but certainly for the horror of war. Humanists now own the problem of evil. So why don’t humanists more often experience some sort of loss of faith in humanity? Where is their existential crisis? I may be wrong, but it seems to me like it’s a dog that doesn’t often bark.

Yes, humanists disagree about the extent to which they think of human beings as intrinsically good. Though, in truth, they do dither on this. Nonetheless, they place human beings at the centre of their belief system. And indeed, why would you call your belief system after human beings if you didn’t think human beings are in some ways fundamentally good? For instance, I’m not sure that you could believe in some kind of secular equivalent to original sin and still call yourself a humanist, though I would be fascinated to be contradicted on this.

My own view is that the Enlightenment too often used human suffering as line in a handy argument against an all-powerful, benevolent Deity, but only feigned to be interested in suffering itself. Suffering was deployed as a part of a syllogism against God. But it felt existentially inert, absent of the kind of crisis that suffering created for faith. Humanist suffering always seems a bit too much like suffering at a philosophical distance. Indeed, the kind of crisis of faith that suffering causes for Christianity seems to be just the sort of perfectly appropriate response that suffering should create in all of us.

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With Easter round the corner, it’s worth saying that for Christianity, the proper response to human suffering and evil — and by proper, I mean the response that is internal to Christian theology — is the cross. This is not the sort of answer that was admissible in Philosophy of Religion tutorials, because it presumes faith rather than holding it up for critical scrutiny. But when Christians talk of suffering, they are not so interested in trying to reconcile the all-powerful, good God plus suffering “problem” — because people being murdered by Russian bombs isn’t first and foremost an intellectual “problem”. It is a crisis, a collapse of faith, a desolation. The cross is where all of that is carried, and — for Christians – overcome. Humanists will scoff that this doesn’t answer the question, and they are right. For Christians, the “problem of evil” is a very different kind of question. To call it a problem is too cold, too detached.

Humanists have responded to the crisis in Ukraine with generosity, as many have. Of course, I applaud them for this. But what I can’t quite figure out, is whether humanists ever experience what might be called a crisis of faith? Do they ever wonder whether human beings are ghastly creatures and that it makes no sense to follow a philosophy named in their honour? And if they don’t, then it seems to me that humanism is all the poorer for it. What we see on our TV screens should quite properly rock us to the core. It should make us question our deepest commitments, there should be a dark night of the soul.

The British Humanist Association offers a downloadable primer on humanism and suffering. They conclude: “For humanists then, the answer to the question why bad things happen is simply, because they do: that is just the way the world is.” In other words, shit happens. What I find most objectionable about all this is not the atheistic cosmology so much as the kind of detached emotional shrug that accompanies it. A world view that has become intellectually insulated from a crisis of faith is not one that has properly exposed itself to the horrors of the world.