As an account of bygone religious experience, Frank Cottrell Boyce’s documentary (9 November) had several conspicuous merits. One was its insistence that we ought to examine spiritual responses to the Great War on their own terms rather than by yardsticks devised a century later. Another was its determination to scotch some of the myths dreamed up in the post-war period. A third was its separation of the orthodox from the individual. If, to a certain extent, conventional religion and private belief parted company in the 1914-18 conflict, then this detachment was what gave the period its fascination.Conventional history usually maintains that religion was one of the major casualties of the Flanders campaign; that the Church, or rather the Churches, discredited themselves in their end
13 November 2014, The Tablet
Faith under fire
God and the Great War, BBC Radio 3
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