Padres in No Man's Land: Canadian Chaplains and the Great War

J.L. Granatstein is a professor of history at York University, the
co-author of the Dictionary of Canadian Military History and Empire to
Umpire: Canada and the World to the 1990s, and the author of The Good
Fight.

This is a very competent piece of work, though it bears all the marks of
the doctoral dissertation it began as. Crerar lays out the organization
adopted by the army during World War I as it sought to provide chaplain
services to its troops; unfortunately, convoluted bureaucratic and
political details burden the beginning of the story with too much
minutiae. Nevertheless, once Crerar begins to talk about the
chaplains—about their reactions to the war, their courage and their
occasional cowardice, their faith and their doubts, and their
difficulties in relating to the troops, the story comes alive. Too many
padres preferred to stay in the rear, preaching to the officers, and
these won only the scorn of the men; others, however, lived at the
front, and one won the Victoria Cross for rescuing five wounded men in
broad daylight. Roman Catholic padres, in short supply, tended to be
most respected, and on one occasion late in the war the francophone 22nd
Regiment had to go into action with a Gaelic-speaking priest—the
closest approximation available—rather than one of their own. Most
striking in Crerar’s tale is how the war sparked a growing concern for
a new social gospel among the padres and, they believed, the troops. In
fact, however, most of the padres proved less radical in action than in
preaching, and the impact of the war did not last long past the
armistice.

Crerar’s is a well-researched piece of work. The faith exhibited by
the chaplains who went into action with the men of the Canadian
Expeditionary Force was impressive, but their good work was outweighed
by the less courageous. The reputation of Canadian chaplains in the
Great War, perhaps inevitably, tended to be based on the slackers.