At the end of the First World War the British Army Chaplains' Department employed some 3,500 chaplains, including around 2,000 Anglicans, over 600 Catholics, over 800 from other Christian denominations and 16 Jews. There is a long-standing orthodoxy, strongly influenced by Robert Graves's Goodbye to all that (1929), according to which religion was irrelevant to most soldiers, their indifference being confirmed by the incompetence of the Anglican chaplains, but that the Catholic chaplains none the less did a great job, while those of other denominations were too unimportant to be worth mentioning. Michael Snape and Edward Madigan have for some years been in the forefront of those questioning these stereotypes and working towards a more balanced and complex religious history of the war. This conference volume is part of the same enterprise. Snape, most notably in God and the British soldier, conclusively established that religion was more important to many of those fighting in the First (or indeed the Second) World War than most historians have recognised. The task of providing a fairer and more precise evaluation of the work of the chaplains is more difficult, both because of their diverse backgrounds, the infinite variety of their individual personalities, and the fact that chaplains were officers and thus part of a largely class-based hierarchy. The interplay of the two latter factors is analysed by Gary Sheffield in a very interesting essay on the army's ‘bureaucracy of paternalism’, in which he uses a detailed examination of individual examples to discuss the reasons why some chaplains were well regarded by fellow officers and/or men, others much less so. The importance of religion for some of the combatants is highlighted in chapters by David Coulter on the well-known example of Douglas Haig, and by Neil Allison on the much less known phenomenon of religious revivals among the soldiers in France, especially those from Wales. But most chapters focus on the chaplains themselves, the main themes being their diversity, the complications that this caused, especially in terms of what Snape calls ‘ecclesiastical turf wars’ between denominations or between religious and military authorities (or, as James Hagerty shows, between different members of the Catholic hierarchy), and the impact of wartime experiences upon the chaplains. In the latter category are Stuart Bell's chapter, the only one with a theological emphasis, on the celebrity chaplain ‘Woodbine Willie’ and his rediscovery of the early Christian ‘heresy’ of the ‘suffering God’, and Linda Parker's portrait of a generation of Anglican clergy radicalised by the war. In the latter category are the two most deeply researched contributions, those by J. H. Thompson on Nonconformist chaplains and by Snape on the chaplains who had been working with the British Army in India. This is a solidly useful collection, which is for the most part convincing, but without breaking dramatically new ground.