CRAFT AND CONFLICT: Masonic Trench Art and Military Memorabilia Mark J.R. Dennis and Nicholas J. Saunders, Savannah Publications, 2003. Paperback, 64 pages, £8. ISBN 1-902366-16-6

Freemasonry touches so many aspects of everyday life, and is capable of colouring it, that we may take its beneficent effects for granted. But when it touches and infuses extraordinary and at times traumatic human experiences, it may become immediately a more priceless coinage altogether. So it is with war and human conflict generally: Freemasonry may then become a source of enormous comfort and sustenance, and succeeds not only in providing inner strength when most needed, but also gilds and enriches the adverse circumstance, to make out of it something positive for the spirit.
   So let me get my criticism out of the way at the start. Trench Art, in the context of military memorabilia, takes a good deal of defining, and if this book has one fault it is the extensive categorising and sub-sub-categorising in which the authors have indulged. Aside from that, their declared aim is ‘to explore the human and cultural aspects of these objects and reclaim them for our understanding of the past.’ In that, Mark Dennis and Nicholas Saunders have certainly succeeded. This handsomely illustrated book reveals details of masonic trench art objects as diverse as the ceremonial sword used by the United Grand Lodge of England, a Napoleonic prisoner-of-war workbox, a masonic powder horn from the early nineteenth century and lodge jewels made in Changi Jail, Singapore. We learn of French prisoners-of-war in the Napoleonic wars petitioning Lord Moira for permission to form a lodge. We are given a fascinating insight into the involvement of masonic units in warfare. We are reminded too of the ambivalence of tools of war being used in Freemasonry, where peace and concord ought to reign. The power of military memorabilia to stimulate and evoke, nowhere more powerfully than in relation to Freemasonry, is well put here. ‘Written accounts of the history of events cannot capture that spark of immediacy. Only objects which can be touched, passed through the fingers and pondered evoke anything like true human emotion’. And yet, as the authors suggest, the ultimate example of masonic trench art is perhaps not any concrete object, but a phrase coined by Bro Rudyard Kipling with which to honour the anonymous fallen soldiers: ‘A Soldier of the Great War – Known unto God’. This is, at any level, a moving and compelling book. Read it.
   Julian Rees