‘Hello, Padre, what on earth are you doing here?’ was the wearisome comment addressed to a chaplain in the early weeks of fighting on the Western Front in 1914. It was a question which chaplains asked themselves. Michael Snape tries to answer it sympathetically in his third and final full-length study of religion in the British army. His wide range of knowledge has made him the ideal historian of this particular department and enabled him to place it firmly in context. He has had access to its archive and to many other pertinent published and unpublished sources. He traces the history from the early eighteenth century to the Cold War. ‘Padre’ became the universal appellation of the British army chaplain during the nineteenth century. Naturally, such a study embraces many changes in structure and organisation. It is something of a ‘stop’ and ‘go’ picture. Peace and war bring different requirements. Snape has a proper amount to say about the prominent men at the top in different periods, among them Owen, Gleig and Gwynne, in their relationships with both politicians and the military. Yet this is far more than a set of personal portraits. As the author comments, his approach incorporates elements of military, ecclesiastical, political, theological, social, imperial, cultural and gender history. It is hard to do justice to all these elements in a single volume but he makes the reasonable claim that he has created a new framework for understanding the history of British army chaplaincy. Ecclesiastical historians will particularly note the light that is incidentally shed upon interdenominational relationships as the Church of England, not very gracefully, yields its monopoly in the face of Catholic, Presbyterian, Methodist and other Free Church aspirations. ‘Brigading’ chaplains is shown not to be a straightforward business. The book, however, is not exclusively concerned with structural changes and administrative arrangements. It pays attention to all the personal issues which surround the identity of ‘the chaplain’. What should he wear? What rank should he hold? Might he bear arms? Should he ‘move up’ with the men, or ‘stay back’? Was he a special breed of clergyman or just a specimen of the ordinary kind? Was he a recreation manager or perhaps a saviour of dying, if perhaps still recalcitrant, souls? Snape writes pertinently on all these matters. He is well aware that the treatment he gives differs in tone and outlook from much previous historiography. Clergy have been often ‘under fire’ on the battlefield not only from such mendacious writers as Robert Graves but also from pacifist churchmen (and historians) who have thought that chaplains, by their very presence and payment, legitimised the ‘war machine’. Snape turns his verbal guns pointedly, and effectively, against the distortions and misconceptions which have arisen from such one-sided representation. Padres, one supposes, will continue to occupy a kind of ecclesiastical ‘no man's land’, sniped at from all sides, but their role has now received a well-informed, if inescapably contentious, interpretation.