There was no genuine religious revival during the [First World] war nor after the war, nor was there a pastoral or theological revival – though these things were sought for, and even claimed to be coming, at the time. The war unleashed bewilderment and hate, and the churches had done very little to help with either. By the end of the war many were sorry enough for the simplistic clerical bellicosity of the early months. What in retrospect did it really matter? Christianity already appeared to have lost the intellectual battle well before the First World War began. What the war did was to shatter its social and political role as well: to unveil the truth to high and low alike of ecclesiastical near-irrelevance.

The war that spawned in the national psyche the sense of a lost generation, an abiding anger at the supposed incompetence of the chateau generals and an ultimate vision of the suffering and futility of war, has also inspired a distinctly negative perception of Anglican army chaplaincy. This perception holds that, while the Church of England acted as a cheerleader for the war, and was thus complicit in wholesale slaughter, the influence of its chaplains on those in uniform was woefully slight … These perceptions, like so much of the popular memory of the First World War, owe far more to literary contrivance than they do to fact.