Abstract
In April 1930, Frank Percival Crozier, a former Brigadier General who had seen extensive service on the Western Front during the war but later embraced pacifism, was quoted in the Daily Mirror as saying that during a war a Christian country ceases to be Christian. ‘For this reason’, he insisted ‘chaplains are quite out of place during a war. There were some very fine chaplains at the Front. They served a useful purpose when they gave out cigarettes and that sort of thing. But their usefulness was limited to that’.1 Crozier’s memoir of his wartime experiences, A Brass Hat in No Man’s Land, was first published shortly before these remarks were made. The iconoclastic and disenchanted tone of the book, as well as the author’s preference for colourful vignettes at the expense of chronological coherence, bear some comparison with the text of Goodbye to All That. Yet unlike Graves, and indeed Siegfried Sassoon, Edmund Blunden, and Guy Chapman, Crozier had significant pre-war experience as an officer with regular and irregular armed forces. He had fought in the South African War and had gone on to serve with a variety of military and paramilitary formations in West Africa, Canada, and Ireland. He also had a wartime record of aggressively efficient command of combat troops and a post-war history that included a brief command of the notorious Auxiliary forces during the Anglo-Irish War.2
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Frank Ballard (1916) Christianity after the War (London: C. H. Kelly), p. 6.
Donald Hankey (1916) A Student in Arms (London: Andrew Melrose), p. 50.
Neville Talbot (1916), The Challenge, 25 August.
J. M. Stanhope-Walker, in Michael Moynihan (ed.) (1973) People at War (Newton Abbot: D & C), p. 58.
George Birmingham (1918) A Padre in France (London: Hodder & Stoughton), p. 52.
David Raw (1988) “It’s Only Me”, A life of the Rev. Theodore Bayley Hardy (London: Peters), p. 22.
H. C. Jackson (1960) Pastor on the Nile (London: SPCK), p. 161.
Everard Digby (1917) Tips for Padres: A Handbook for Chaplains (London: Gale and Polden), pp. 5, 11, and 21.
R. Langley Barnes (1939) A War-Time Chaplaincy (London: Mowbray), p. 7.
Ibid., p. 142. For an interesting account of the general change in attitudes that finally brought about the abolition of compulsory church parades see Jeremy Crang (2005) ‘The Abolition of Compulsory Church Parades in the British Army’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 56(1), pp. 92–106.
An Army Chaplain (1917) Can England’s Church Win England’s Manhood (London: Macmillan), p. 45.
Oswin Creighton (1916) With the Twenty-Ninth Division in Gallipoli (London: Longmans, Green & Co.), p. 33.
Examples of such texts include Charles Ardent Du Picq’s Etudes sur le Combat and Jean Colin’s Les Transformations de la Guerre (1911), which was translated into English in 1912. For a revealing examination of the dissemination of military texts between European and North American states before the war, see Christopher Bassford (1991) Clausewitz in English: The Reception of Clausewitz in Britain and America, 1815–1945 (Oxford: OUP), Chapter 10.
David Englander (1997) ‘Morale and Discipline in the British Army’, in J. Horne (ed.) State Society and Mobilisation in Europe during the First World War (Cambridge: CUP), p. 126.
Duncan Blair (1954) ‘Leaves from the Journal of a Scottish Padre in the First World War’, Chaplains’ Department Journal, 57(8), p. 46.
John Keegan (1976), The Face of Battle (London: Cape), p. 274.
G. R. Fitzroy (1917) Notes for Young Officers (London: Foster & Gordon), p. 8.
A. L. J. Shields (1940) A Chaplain on Service (London: SPCK), p. 15.
Oswin Creighton (1920) Letters of Oswin Creighton: C. F., 1883–1918 (London: Longmans), p. 202.
H. W. Blackburne (1932) This Also Happened on the Western Front (London: Hodder & Staughton), p. 60.
H. W. Blackburne (1917) ‘A Chaplain’s Duties’, in Chaplains in Council (London: Edward Arnold), p. 38.
Chaplain Neville Talbot was particularly active in this capacity. See F. H. Brabant, Neville Stuart Talbot, pp. 59–60 and Edward Madigan (2008) ‘“The Life Lived” versus “Balaam’s Ass’s Ears”: Neville Stuart Talbot’s Chaplaincy on the Western Front’, The Journal of the Royal Army Chaplains’ Department, 47, pp. 14–16.
For a personal account of the close relationship between Haig and Duncan, see G. S. Duncan (1966) Douglas Haig as I Knew Him (London: George Allen & Unwin).
Cited in R. J. Northcott (1941) Pat McCormick (London: Longmans), pp. 45–6.
Haidee Blackburne (1955) Trooper to Dean (Bristol: Arrowsmith), p. 51.
Gary Sheffield and John Bourne (2005) Douglas Haig, War Diaries and Letters, 1914–1918 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson), p. 13.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2011 Edward Madigan
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Madigan, E. (2011). The Anglican Clergy-in-Uniform. In: Faith under Fire. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230297654_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230297654_4
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-31483-6
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-29765-4
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)