It was intended that he disembark at Le Havre, but the uncertainties of the early few weeks of the War saw a change of plan, and Burrows and six other chaplains landed further south at St Nazaire.
In September, 1914, Burrows went with 'the first motor ambulance' (6-cylinder Wolseley cars), taking wounded soldiers to Le Mans.
On 16 December, Bishop Gwynne, a future Deputy Chaplain-General, noted that Burrows ‘... is only just recovering from a bad sprain in the leg from a fall into a grave while he was burying one of our soldiers in another.
Following these stresses he had hallucinations of vision and hearing, excitement, noisy, violent, clouding of consciousness'[7] Hedley's brother, Leonard, had been one year younger, and they must have been raised together as close friends as well as relatives.
Leonard had been a 2nd Lt in the Northumberland Fusiliers when he was killed on Hill 60 near Ypres on 2 October 1915[8] By 1916, Burrows had been granted an annual pension of £150p.a.
[11] He was recommended for the bishopric of Lincoln when it fell vacant in 1946, a tribute to the enormous impression he had made a decade earlier in Grimsby, but the Archbishop of York found him 'nervy and jumpy', his Great War Medical issues remaining with him.