Britain's recent centenary commemorations of the First World War witnessed a long overdue refocusing on the significance of the Christian faith to the men and women engaged in the conflict and those who supported them on the Home Front. Those engaged in land warfare were supported by approximately 5,000 Army chaplains, 179 of whom were to lose their lives in military service.

One of those who volunteered for service in the Royal Army Chaplains’ Department was the Revd H. B. Cowl, a Wesleyan Methodist minister. Serving from 1914 through to 1919, Cowl was seriously wounded by shrapnel on the Western Front in 1915, and, during his evacuation to England on the hospital ship Anglia, saved many lives after the vessel struck a mine. After nearly drowning, Cowl survived and was awarded the Military Cross for his courage. Cowl left a voluminous archive, covering not just his wartime service but his subsequent ministry at Wycliffe College and in London and Dorset. His granddaughter, Sarah Reay, has painstakingly edited this enthralling collection of documents, many of them signed ‘From your loving son, The Half-Shilling Curate, Herbert’. Reay skilfully blends her personal archive with numerous contemporary sources to produce a book which is not only highly readable and engaging, but also full of useful source material for historians of twentieth-century war and religion.

The half-shilling curate serves as further confirmation that the experience of twentieth-century warfare, rather than providing an impetus for secularisation, commonly served to strengthen the Christian faith of those in whom it was firmly rooted.