Tell it to the Chaplain!

Humorous confessions of an army chaplain. “Tell it to the Chaplain!” That was the chant of the G.I. with a gripe. And now, in this delightfully amusing volume, the Chaplain tells it to you.

Young Reverend Chapman laughs with us through the mud, noise, and confusion of Camp Pinedale; sweats out a humorous guardhouse riot caused by homemade brew; holds a straight face in spite of the fantastic tales of illness from the G.I.’s, and in general presents the amusing side of the very serious business of war.

Here, in a chaplain’s-eye view of Army life, there is nothing staged or stilted in the telling. Every moment of it has the breath of life. In fact, the author seems to do more than tell us about his experiences in the Army: he seems to re-create them, to make them exist again as though they were being described in the present tense.

Anyone’s attitude towards a complex fact like Army life is bound to be full of contradictions, mingled emotions, and uncertainty. Chaplain Chapman has, however, eliminated and selected, and presented his subject, with a special emphasis. He has not chosen the more serious and painful side, but rather the lighter side of the apparently minor problems of the soldier, which were often inherently humorous against a background of immensely serious problems.

Tell It to the Chaplain is no less faithful an account of the Army for treating this other side. The author was in an excellent position to see the humor, the saving humor, in our soldiers, and he has given it to us in his book so that all can see. We can thus, too, gain a larger perspective of what it actually meant to serve in wartime.

This story has all 15 chapters featured on this site, containing a total of 46,930 words.