The First World War has a unique place in the popular culture of Great Britain and many of the combatant countries. But common perception of that conflict is often characterized by words such as ‘meaningless’ and ‘futile’. That the Tommies were ‘lions led by donkeys’ remains widely accepted, as does the assertion that almost every family suffered through death or injury. All these ‘facts’ are, at best, half-truths. Opinion at the time almost universally endorsed the moral validity of the war; generals did not shelter from danger well behind the lines; the total cost in human life was great, but fell well short of justifying the ‘loss of a generation’ rhetoric. Finally, while trench warfare was inevitably a matter of attrition, by 1918 new methods of engagement led to what have been described as ‘the greatest series of victories in British military history’.Footnote 1

For two decades, historians have been offering a more nuanced narrative of the First World War. Part of that task has involved identifying the origins of public perceptions of futility – and they are easily found. School children in Britain have for at least a generation studied the First World War guided not primarily by historians, but by teachers of English literature. The poems of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon have become set texts, to be read alongside All Quiet on the Western Front. These literary sources almost invariably date from the late 1920s or early 1930s, the period of disenchantment in which it became clear that the hopes of the immediate postwar years had come to nothing. The consequence is powerful literature, but poor history.

This process of revision provides both the context of and a model for the thesis of Edward Madigan's Faith under Fire: Anglican Army Chaplains and the Great War. As in the broader narratives, World War I army chaplains in general and Anglican ones in particular have had until recent times a very bad ‘press’. Again, the origins of highly critical assessments of their character, role and effectiveness are easily identified and it is Robert Graves’ Goodbye to All That which, together with the work of several other people from that period, has led to this judgment.

Faith under Fire addresses the misleading picture painted by the writers of the disenchantment and offers an analysis founded on contemporary evidence. It opens with an examination of the postwar literature on army chaplains, including numerous memoirs and novels. Like Graves, most other authors had their own agenda. Madigan then analyses the responses of the Church of England and its leaders to the outbreak of war and describes how a very small army chaplains’ department had to develop rapidly when the conflict started. A chapter on the Edwardian clergy, the vast majority of whom were middle- or upper-class and public school and Oxford or Cambridge educated, paints a picture of the men who would very quickly be expected to minister to working-class men, the like of whom most had rarely encountered either professionally or socially.

Madigan then recounts how those clergy approached their new roles and faced the indifference of most soldiers to organized religion. Their engagement with new tasks, official and unofficial, is described using a multiplicity of sources. These themes are explored further in a chapter addressing styles of ministry in the trenches. Throughout, Madigan draws on the accounts both of famous chaplains, such as Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy, ‘Tubby’ Clayton and Theodore Hardy, as well as representatives of the largely unknown majority, of whom around 200 were awarded the Military Cross.

Unfortunately, Madigan is less assured when handling theological issues in his chapter on combatant faith. First, he writes,

While the equating of soldiers’ sacrificial deaths with that of Christ was a widely recognized wartime phenomenon, it was not patripassianism. Accusations of that heresy were made during the war, but they were aimed at the advocates of divine passibility such as Studdert Kennedy.Footnote 2

The origin of this incorrect terminology appears to be Adrian Gregory's Silence of Memory in which he wrote that ‘Equating the sacrifice of the war dead with Christ's passion would be heresy, the heresy known as patri-passionism …’Footnote 3 In doing so, he was devising a new word, quite distinct from patripassianism. Subsequently, Patrick Porter wrote a paper on World War I chaplains, ‘New Jerusalems’, in which he used the two terms synonymously on successive pages.Footnote 4 Now, citing Porter, Madigan uses ‘patripassianism’ to refer to the belief which Gregory had originally and perhaps confusingly labelled ‘patri-passionism’.

Second, Studdert Kennedy's advocacy of faith in the God revealed in a suffering Christ, rather than being set against belief in ‘an omnipotent, unknowable and impassable [sic] Old Testament God’Footnote 5 was frequently contrasted by him with the Greek idea of the impassible Absolute Being. Studdert Kennedy found in the Old Testament picture of the ‘Hebrew Father’ support for his faith in a God who shares in the world's suffering.Footnote 6

The final chapter offers a comprehensive survey of the postwar activities of army chaplains with a thematic approach describing their involvement in, among others, Toc H, the Industrial Christian Fellowship, the commemoration of the war and postwar pacifism.

Faith Under Fire will have a ready readership among those interested in the interface of religion and military conflict. Scholars of the ecclesiastical history of the twentieth century will find that it offers a further corrective to the picture of the war period painted by the authors of a decade or so later. It may also be of interest to the more general reader grappling with how the Church, almost a century after the war, can engage with the unchurched masses of much of Western society.