Reflections on the Battlefield: From Infantryman to Chaplain 1914-1919

Blurb

"In August 1914, Robert J. Rider, aged twenty-five, was about to begin his third year of training for the ministry of the Wesleyan Methodist church, at Handsworth Theological College in Birmingham. Two months later he had enlisted with the First Birmingham Battalion, later termed the 14th Battalion, of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment. His superiors became aware of his clerical background, and in 1916 he was commissioned to serve as an army chaplain, and ministered to an artillery unit on the Western Front until his eventual demobilisation in 1919." "Reflections on the Battlefield is Rider's account of his experiences, and is derived from a typescript left to his descendants after he died in 1961. Broadly autobiographical, the text is unusual in that the author had experience of life both as a fighting soldier and subsequently as a non-combatant Christian minister, and was thus particularly exposed to the ambiguities of chaplaincy service on the battlefield. Written as a series of episodes presented in the third person, Rider's account is not so much a history as an attempt to convey the decency and humanity of the men he served with and ministered to, despite the brutalities, degradation and suffering of war. Reflections on the Battlefield thus provides us with a personal and valuable contribution to the debate about how the ethics of war were viewed from the World War I battlefield."--Jacket.