The Great War as I Saw It

Frederick George Scott was not supposed to survive the Great War. As the first Canadian chaplain to walk the front lines, he entered the killing fields of Ypres, the Somme, and Passchendaele with a Bible in one hand and the dead in his arms. This memoir traces his journey from the fields of Quebec, where he volunteered with the urgent conviction of a man who believed God had called him there, through the training camps at Valcartier, across the Atlantic, and into the mud and blood of the Western Front. Scott writes not with the detachment of a historian but with the raw anguish of a priest who buried boys he had baptized, who questioned his faith in the same trenches where faith seemed absurd, and who found something like grace in the unbearable. This is not a triumphalist war memoir. It is a man's desperate attempt to make sense of industrialized slaughter, to hold onto his sanity and his God while watching the world tear itself apart. It endures because it captures something many war histories miss: the interior life of a man who chose to be present at humanity's worst and somehow emerged with his soul intact, if permanently scarred.