At the end of May 1914 the young and suitably-named Ernest Willmore, an undergraduate at St John's College, Oxford, recorded some impressions of his fellow students in a diary. ‘It is a great shame’, he wrote, ‘that people like Laycock, Lakin, and Vincent should be so fond of drink. It is particularly annoying since they are all becoming parsons.’ Willmore's whinge was not, of course original; throughout the history of the Church, the laity have always been dissatisfied with their clergy. Some priests are seen as too pious – killjoys without the human touch. Others have been all too human: drunk or lecherous or both. But if the laity look on the ordained with disapproval, this is nothing compared to the complaints from clergy that echo down the ages. Each generation of priests seems dissatisfied with their flocks, who refuse to believe or to behave in ways of which their pastors approve. This was never truer than in the First World War, which failed to produce the religious revival expected of it by the Churches, and which left many soldiers alienated from organised religion. In popular mythology – and not a few academic studies – the Church of England emerged especially badly from the conflict: belligerent at home and ineffectual in the trenches, it has been portrayed as the great loser in the Great War. In this book Edward Madigan suggests that such a conclusion is mistaken. Although he acknowledges the difficulties faced by Anglican chaplains – who were distanced by their class from ordinary soldiers, and who had to improvise a role for themselves at the front – he goes on to show that many performed vital services for the troops and some were truly heroic. Drawing on 723 chaplains' files held by The National Archives, he is able to give a good sense of who these men were and what they sought to achieve. The book as a whole will consequently make a major contribution to studies of the First World War and will be of use to anyone interested in the relationship between the Church and the armed forces. It would, however, have been still better had the author spent longer considering his terms of analysis. What does it mean to say that someone is ‘simply very religious’ (p. 162)? Who are the ‘very orthodox Christians’ (p. 194) that are called into play? Although chapter vi does consider the difference between religious participation and religious belief, more thought really needed to be devoted to the nature of popular religiosity and the definitions of faith that this book deploys. After all, just because they were fond of a drink, the three putative parsons of St John's were not necessarily lacking in piety. Although a soldier, who won an MC and bar in the war, Vincent ended up as bishop of Damaraland. Faith is more complex than the simple binary of ‘orthodox’ and ‘non-orthodox’ that Madigan sometimes deploys. Still, any further work on the subject is bound to draw on this elegant and erudite study.