CHAPLAIN’S STORY

New Zealand Listener, Volume 32, Issue 816, 18 March 1955, Page 13

CHAPLAIN’S STORY

CAPTIVITY CAPTIVE, by James B. Chutter; Jonathan Cape, English price 13/6: LIKED Padre Chutter’s willingness to discuss all aspects of prisoner-of-war life with frankness and common sense; informers, sex, the infidelity of prisoners’ wives, the deaths caused by our own bombers are points that come to mind. And although from their presentation I imagine that his parishioners have heard many of his stories beforesome of his sentences have a polished, pulpit roundness-they are good stories for all that, some with a moral, some of them amusing. His visits outside the camp to wounded in hospitals in Italy and Germany gave him contact with the people denied his fellow prisoners and allowed him to. study the character of enemy guards and civilians and their reactions to defeat and the futility of war. Senior chaplain in the Second South African Division, Padre Chutter was taken prisoner at Tobruk in June, 1942, and spent the rest of the war in enemy hands. His account of the fall of Tobruk arid a brief sketch of the character of the commander often blamed for its surrender, General Klopper, are historically perhaps the most valuable part of his book. Some of it, but not too much, is concerned with religion in prisoner-of-war camps, in which an important New Zealand contribution was the use of New Zealand raisins in mak-

ing the Communion wine,

W.A.

G.