The Anglican Clergy-in-Uniform

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