Edward Montmorency Guilford

Robert Graves left a great legacy of poetry and literature behind him, but he’s also partly responsible for the poor reputation of Army chaplains following the First World War.

Graves was contemptuous of the padres, characterising them as faint-hearts who did next to nothing for the men’s morale, showed no courage or stamina, and were only too happy to obey orders to stay away from the front line.

Siegfried Sassoon added his voice to the chorus of disapproval, writing “the padres never came near us – except to bury someone”.

In the case for the defence, Peter Fiennes presents his grandfather, Edward Montmorency Guilford, known to all as Monty. Fiennes has fond memories of Monty, but his grandfather, like most men of his generation, talked little about the war. That he had been awarded the Military Cross and once stayed up all night with a man about to be executed for desertion – and somewhere along the way lost his faith – was almost as much as Fiennes knew, until he examined the diaries and documents in Monty’s old brown suitcase.

Monty’s diary was a staccato round-up of the day’s events not a place where he unburdened his feelings, but it was enough for Fiennes to develop a deeper sense of the man his grandfather was in 1916 when, aged 28 and married for three years, he was posted to the Western Front.

Critics such as Graves argued that the social class the padres were drawn from, and the fact that regulations automatically defined them as officers, meant that they couldn’t identify with the majority of the fighting men. But the clipped, breezy tone of Monty’s diary entries shouldn’t be confused with detachment. He may have been partial to long lies, hot baths and hands of bridge, but Fiennes emphasises “Monty’s lifelong ability to draw out confidences, especially from the young, or otherwise neglected”. While it might have been hard for the casual onlooker to determine exactly what it was that Monty did, beyond handing out cigarettes and chatting, it’s beyond doubt that his contribution to the men’s morale was tangible and appreciated.

His diary stops at the end of January 1917. Shortly afterwards, his brother-in-law, Jack Bigger, was killed when his isolated trench was overrun. Four months into his baptism of fire, this is the point at which Fiennes thinks that “the war has come home to Monty”. There is thus no diary entry recording the night he sat with Private Joseph Bateman before his execution. Fiennes doesn’t know what they talked about, or how deeply the experience affected him, but it’s around this time that the Anglican priest lost his faith.

Clues to his state of mind can be found in a letter to a Church of England newspaper, in which he and his co-author claim that, after the close bonds they had made with their flock at the front, they would find it impossible to go back to being parish priests, “divorced from the life and interests of the man in the street”. Luckily, he was scooped up by just the right person to restore his sense of purpose: Dick Sheppard of St Martin in the Fields, whose progressive humanitarianism was exactly what Monty needed.

To his credit, Fiennes admits that he was fairly ignorant of the war and picked up the history as he went along. But what he’s learned about the war and the Church of England touches on numerous areas of historic importance, making this memorial to his grandfather of more than just family interest.