This is not a book that blesses every flag, and it is not a book that tells every Christian to leave the army. It is the Church’s actual teaching, walked through slowly: why peace comes first, when defence may be allowed, and what remains forbidden even after the fighting has begun.
The title comes from Saint Martin of Tours, who cut his military cloak in half for a beggar on a winter road. From that cloak the Church later took the words chapel and chaplain. The same man, on another day, said he was a soldier of Christ and would not fight. The Church kept both halves of his life. She still does.
Inside you will find the four conditions of the Catechism, the surprising medieval ban on the crossbow, the reason Veterans Day and Martinmas share a date, Camillus’s red cross in a burned tent, and the paragraph that asks governments to make room for conscience. The language is plain. The facts have been checked. The book is written for families with someone in uniform, for veterans who still wake at night, and for anyone who has watched the news and wanted a Catholic sentence that was neither a cheer nor a slogan.