Lessons Learned

After several campaigns the chaplains came to the conclusion that each campaign seemed to be entirely different and that the methods found useful in one would not necessarily apply in the next. But those chaplains who went to Greece or Crete experienced action under very difficult conditions, and although they came back to Egypt with few new formulas or methods, all of them had grown in moral stature and knowledge. They knew only too well what a soldier felt like when he came back from a battle or a campaign, and they could speak with a certain authority about behaviour on leave without any risk of their advice being mistaken for the limited and restricted opinions of a ‘base-wallah’.