The Clergy in Khaki: New Perspectives on British Army Chaplains in the First World War. Edited by Michael Snape and Edward Madigan. Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate Publishing, 2013. xvi + 222 pp. $99.90 hardcover.
(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)The Clergy in Khaki: New Perspectives on Army Chaplains in the First World War . Edited by Michael Snape and Edward Madigan . Burlington, Vt. : Ashgate Publishing , 2013. xvi + 222 pp. $99.90 hardcover.Book Reviews and NotesThe brief, unlabeled forward to Michael Snape and Edward Madigan's edited collection, Clergy in Khaki: New Perspectives on Chaplains in the First World War , contains a critical piece of information for readers. British army it states, not fared well in the mythology of the First World War. foreword goes on to compare the treatment of chaplains to that of generals, the men actually professionally accountable for the weeks and months of carnage on the Somme, at Ypres, and Passchendaele. There is one difference: scholarship surrounding generals has been revised. army chaplains of the Great War have long deserved an extended and sympathetic reexamination, and Snape and Madigan have compiled a deeply sympathetic volume. Their collection paints a composite picture of chaplains as hard working, earnest men whose aim was to serve the soldier faithful, and whose sense of duty led them into circumstances more challenging than most can imagine. A century removed from the conflict itself and its human cost, this revisionist stance is certainly professionally appropriate. Equally appropriate is the volume's commitment to writing into the historiography the stories of non-conforming chaplains and chaplains based at the periphery of the Empire. Clergy in Khaki offers these as new perspectives and, in the process, points the way toward future research on a topic relevant far beyond the sectors of the battle line.Three essays in particular demonstrate the strengths of this collection and the promise of its animating spirit: J.H. Thompson's on non-conformist chaplains, Neil Alison's on revivalism among the troops, and Michael Snape's on the wartime activities of chaplains serving the Empire in India. These are not only excellent and satisfying pieces of scholarship on their own; they also offer useful points of comparison for future studies of Great War chaplaincies. Michael Snape's essay, The First World War and the Chaplains of India, describes the struggles of the chaplains of the Indian Ecclesiastical Establishment (IEE) to integrate effectively with the England-based Army Chaplains Department, and the hardships of their service, largely in Mesopotamia. In pointing up the fact that chaplains came from across the Empire and served on many fronts, Snape also demonstrates that while chaplaincy was for most an embodied expression of devotion to ministry, for some it also required interaction with a daunting colonial bureaucracy. One's ability to serve as a chaplain was determined in part by willingness and fitness but also by the dynamics of empire. More generally, Snape's essay brings to the forefront the easily ignored fact that the Great War was waged by colonial powers and encourages further reflection on the effect of empire on religious life. How and to what extent did the metropole and the margins shape the religious lives of the warring armies? Did chaplains serving at the margins or among colonial subjects of other empires face similar obstacles to pastoral care and the maintenance of morale?Neil Alison's study of revival-like phenomena (9) in the Expeditionary Force provides convincing evidence that the Welsh Revival of 1904-1905 reached forward into the Great War, bringing together chaplains schooled in the arts of revivalism and revival-minded soldiers pressed up against their own mortality. …