Th e G r e at a n d Ho ly Wa r

Ho w World Wa r I B e c a m e a R elig iou s C r u sade

PHILIp JENKINS

Conte nt s

List of Maps

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A Note About Terminology ix Introduction: From Angels to Armageddon one The Great War: The Age of Massacre two Gods War: Chris tian Nations, Holy Warfare, and the Kingdom of God three Witnesses for Christ: Cosmic War, Sacrice, and Martyrdom four The Ways of God: Faith, Heresy, and Superstition five The War of the End of the World: Visions of the Last Days six Armageddon: Dreams of Apocalypse in the Wars Savage Last Year seven The Sleep of Religion: Europes Crisis and the Rise of Secular Messiahs 1 29 63 87 109 135 163 189

I n t roduc t ion

From Angels to Armageddon

The war was another plastic work that totally absorbed us, which reformed our forms, destroyed the lines, and gave a new look to the universe. M arc Chagall

In the day when heaven was falling, the hour when Earths foundations ed... A. E. Housman

n 1914 , We l s h fa n ta s y writer Arthur Machen unwittingly invented a legend. In the compact twelve hundred words of The Bowmen, he told a story set during the Allied retreat across France that August, when British forces made a heroic stand against the advancing Germans at the village of Mons. When a soldier jokingly calls on Saint George for help, he is shocked to nd that he really has invoked an army of English archers from the great fteenth- century Battle of Agincourt, who rise to protect their descendants. The singing arrows ed so swift and thick that they darkened the air; the heathen horde melted from before them. This intervention

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saves the Allied cause, leaving Germany, a country ruled by scientic principles, to determine what kind of gas or secret weapon the British might have deployed.1 Machens ction ran out of control. He was soon meeting p eople who claimed to have participated in the battle and seen the visionary bowmen, or witnessed arrow wounds in German corpses. Hawkish critics were appalled at Machens unpatriotic attempts to describe the tale as a mere ction. Denying his authorship, they claimed that he had acted only as an intermediary in leaking the story, which must have come from the highest political or military circles. Why was he conspiring to suppress the truth? Religious and occult writers further elaborated the tale over the next few months until the bowmen morphed into an angel or angels, and in that form the story won global fame. Through the war years, the Angel of Mons was regularly depicted in propaganda posters and works of art, and it inspired musical compositions. Machen was at once amused and bemused. How is it, he asked, that a nation plunged in materialism of the grossest kind has accepted idle rumors and gossip of the supernatural as certain truth?2

Religion and the War

M ac h e n s r e m a r k a b ou t gro s s materialism ts many accounts of the First World War, by authors both at the time and subsequently. The war, we often hear, marked the end of illusions, and of faith itself. In this account, the ideals and chivalry that rode so high at the start of the conict perished miserably in the mud of France and Belgium. They vanished in a world of artillery and machine guns, of aircraft, poison gas, and tanks, as hell entered the age of industrialized mass production. A striking commentary on the war was offered by Britains Harry Patch, the last soldier actually to have fought in the wars

Introduction

trenches and who died in 2009 at the age of 111. He felt the war had not been worth a single life (although he might have shot the kaiser, if the opportunity had arisen), and he had no criticism of anyone who had deserted. He recalled seeing half- savage dogs ghting over biscuits taken from dead mens pockets and wondering, What are we doing thats really any different? Two civilized nations, British and German, ghting for our lives. In summary, he commented, What the hell we fought for, I now dont know. That last line epitomizes what many modern p eople think about the war. All that butchery, they believe, took place for narrow national rivalries and selsh imperial interests.3 In such a picture, religion and spirituality seem irrelevant, except as the window dressing offered by states invoking divine justice before sending their young men off to slaughter. Each side cynically appropriated God to its own narrow nationalist causes. As J. C. Squires despairing rhyme noted, God heard the embattled nations sing and shout, Gott strafe England! and God save the King! God this, God that, and God the other thing. Good God! said God, Ive got my work cut out!4 But such a wholly secular account makes it impossible to understand the mood of the era and the motivations of states and policy makers. For one thing, contemporary enthusiasm for the war was much greater than we might imagine from what Harry Patch wrote with ninety years of hindsight after the event; it would be instructive to read anything he might have written during the conict itself. In recent years, historians of the Great War have paid special attention to the attitude of frontline combatants, to try to under-

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stand just why they were prepared to withstand the dreadful conditions so long, and the greatest surprise is how thoroughly many reected the attitudes that we might think of as elite propaganda. Even when they were writing in diaries or journals that were never intended to be read by ofcial eyes, soldiers expressed very standard views about God and country and the virtues and vices of the respective sides. The words of ordinary British soldiers show how many really did believe they were engaged in a war for righ teous nesss sake, in issues such as the defense of outraged Belgium. German or French soldiers likewise needed little urging to see their war as a desperate defense of national survival, while the letters of ordinary Russian soldiers regularly asserted their belief in Faith, Tsar, and Fatherland, in that order. Judging from the abundant evidence of letters and diaries, soldiers commonly demonstrated a religious worldview and regularly referred to Chris tian beliefs and ideas. They resorted frequently to biblical language and to concepts of sacrice and redemptive suffering. The sizable Jewish minority in the respective armed forces turned to their own religious traditions.5 Contrary to secular legend, religious and supernatural themes pervaded the rhetoric surrounding the war on all sides and these clearly had a popular appeal far beyond the statements of ofcial church leaders. If the war represented the historic triumph of modernity, the rise of countries ruled by scientic principles, then that modernity included copious lashings of the religious, mystical, millenarian, and even magical. Discussions of the Great War, at the time and since, have regularly used words such as Armageddon and apocalypse, although almost always in a metaphorical sense. Yet without understanding the widespread popular belief in these concepts in their original supernatural terms, we are missing a large part of the story. As Salman Rushdie remarks, Sometimes legends make reality, and become more useful than the facts.6 The First World War was a thoroughly religious event, in the sense that overwhelmingly Chris tian nations fought each other in

Introduction

what many viewed as a holy war, a spiritual conict. Religion is essential to understanding the war, to understanding why people went to war, what they hoped to achieve through war, and why they stayed at war. Not in medieval or Reformation times but in the age of aircraft and machine guns, the majority of the worlds Chris tians were indeed engaged in a holy war that claimed more than ten million lives. Acknowledging the wars religious dimensions forces us to consider its long- term effects. In an age of overwhelming mass propaganda and incipient global media, nations could not spend years spreading the torrid language and imagery of holy warfare without having a potent effect, although not necessarily in any form intended by the nations responsible. Often, too, these messages appealed to audiences quite different from the expected ones. In consequence, the war ignited a global religious revolution. However thoroughly Eurocentric the conict might appear, in the long term, it transformed not just the Chris tian ity of the main combatant nations but also other great faiths, especially Judaism and Islam. It destroyed a global religious order that had prevailed for the previous half millennium and dominated much of the globe. The Great War drew the worlds religious map as we know it today.

Holy War
Th e conc e p t of s a nc t i f i e d warfare is familiar enough in history; but can we legitimately describe the events of 1914 as a holy war in anything like the same sense as the medieval Crusades or Europes confessional wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries? Surely, we might assume, the Great War was a highly material conict fundamentally concerned with great power rivalries, with economic grievances and imperial ambitions. The crusading analogy is instructive, because in those earlier

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ages, too, historians can nd plenty of reasons for the campaigns beyond the religious ideology of the time. Depending on ones interpretation, we might suggest that Crusaders fought because of land hunger, population pressures, or a desire to escape from restrictive state mechanisms. A great many combatants fought out of simple greed or because more powerful neighbors forced them to participate, and they gave next to no thought to the weighty issues supposedly motivating the holy cause. Yet most scholars are comfortable in accepting the wars religious justications at their face value and asserting that Chris tian warriors really thought they were engaged in a holy struggle against enemies of their faith. This was certainly true of governing elites and, as far as we can reconstruct their views, of many humbler followers. And the same argument can be made about their distant descendants at the start of the twentieth century descendants who themselves sometimes boasted the archaic title of Crusaders.7 The issue of denition is critical. To speak of a holy war, it is not enough to nd national leaders deploying a few pious rhetorical ourishes or claiming that God will see the nation to a just victory. Instead, the states involved must have an intimate if not ofcial alliance with a particular faith tradition, and moreover, the organs of state and church should expressly and repeatedly declare the religious character of the conict. Not just incidentally but repeatedly and centrally, ofcial statements and propaganda declare that the war is being fought for Gods cause, or for his glory, and such claims pervade the media and organs of popular culture. Moreover, they identify the state and its armed forces as agents or implements of God. Advancing the nations cause and interests is indistinguishable from promoting and defending Gods cause or (in a Chris tian context) of bringing in his kingdom on earth. Speaking of such a conict in religious terms does not preclude the state having other motives or causes, such as naval rivalries or struggles over natural

Introduction

resources. Nor does it demand that each and every participant support these goals, or indeed treat them seriously. Beyond this, the holy war framework denes attitudes to the role of the armed forces and the conduct of combat operations. That nation should broadly accept the idea that military action has a sanctied character, equal or superior to any of the other works approved by that religion. The nation is struggling against an enemy that dees or violates the godly cause, so that such a foe is of its nature evil or represents satanic forces. Death in such a righ teous cosmic war represents a form of sacrice or martyrdom, elevating the dead soldier to saintly status. The state and the media might even claim that the nation and its armed forces are receiving special supernatural assistance. By these criteria, we can condently speak of a powerful and consistent strain of holy war ideology during the Great War years. All the main combatants deployed such language, particularly the monarchies with long traditions of state establishment the Russians, Germans, British, Austro- Hungarians, and Ottoman Turks but also those notionally secular republics: France, Italy, and the United States. More specically, with the obvious exception of the Turks, it was a Chris tian war. With startling literalism, visual representations in all the main participant nations placed Christ himself on the battle lines, whether in lms, posters, or postcards. Jesus blessed German soldiers going into battle; Jesus comforted the dying victims of German atrocities; Jesus personally led a reluctant kaiser to confront the consequences of his evil policies. Apart from the obvious spiritual gures Christ and the Virgin most combatant nations used an iconography in which their cause was portrayed by that old Crusader icon Saint George, and their enemies as the Dragon. When in November 1914 the Ottoman Empire formally declared war, the regimes language was powerfully religious was

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not the emperor also the caliph of all Islam? The sultan- caliph proclaimed that
right and loyalty are on our side, and hatred and tyranny on the side of our enemies, and therefore there is no doubt that the Divine help and assistance of the just God and the moral support of our glorious Prophet will be on our side to encourage us. ... Let those of you who are to die a martyrs death be messengers of victory to those who have gone before us, and let the victory be sacred and the sword be sharp of those of you who are to remain in life.8

Yet these words seem pallid when set against the fevered pronouncements emanating from Berlin and Paris. Swords and prophets, divine guidance and holy martyrdom? In Chris t ian Europe, such notions were already clichs. If Russia or Germany or Britain had been Islamic states in 1914, would their rhetoric have differed signicantly? I am not arguing that each combatant nation in the war possessed anything like the same degree of religious zeal, or that any nation entered the war exclusively because of a religious cause, in the sense of seeking to destroy the heretics or indels in an opposing state. In two crucial cases, though Germany and Russia religious motivations were so inextricably bound up with state ideology and policy making that it is impossible to separate them from secular factors. Each of these Chris tian empires, in its way, regarded itself as a messianic nation destined to fulll Gods will in the secular realm. Each, moreover, had networks of allies that were destined to clash with each other, making it virtually certain that the whole continent would be dragged into conict. The war began as a clash of messianic visions. Other states, such as France or Britain, might initially have had no such religious motives, but once at war, those themes became increasingly powerful. At a very early

Introduction

stage in the war, also, the full panoply of holy war rhetoric came to dominate media and propaganda in all the combatant states.

Enemies of God
I n e ac h of t h e combatant powers, holy war ideas produced a substantial and diverse literature, in high and low culture, in literature, art, and lm. One of Frances greatest modern writers was Paul Claudel, who portrayed the struggle in his 1915 play La Nuit de Nol de 1914 (Christmas Eve 1914 ). His play depicts the gathering of the souls of French p eople killed by the Germans, including soldiers but also many civilians slaughtered in German mass executions. All are among the blessed, martyrs in a holy Catholic struggle against German aggression and against that countrys pagan worship of naked state power. At the Battle of the Marne, says Claudel, French armies stood anked by Saint Genevieve and Joan of Arc. Even so, Frances best hope was the Virgin Mary, who had led their armies so often through the centuries. As a dead soldier reports from beyond the grave,
Its not a saint or a bishop, its Our Lady herself, its the Mother of God- made- Man for us, who endures the violence and the re. Shes the one we saw burning at the center of our lines, like the virgin of Rouen once upon a time. Shes the one theyre trying to slaughter, the old Mother, the one who gives us her body as a rampart. At the center of our lines, shes the one who stands as the rampart and the ag against Black Luthers dark hordes.9

The play culminates in a Midnight Mass conducted in this heavenly setting, with the noise of the German shelling of Reims Cathedral substituting for the customary midnight ringing of bells.

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Reims Cathedral hit by German artillery re, September 20, 1914

For both sides, the Great War was a day- and- n ight conict against cosmic evil. When the United States entered the conict in 1917, Randolph McKim, Episcopal rector of Washingtons Church of the Epiphany, proclaimed that
it is God who has summoned us to this war. It is his war we are ghting. ... This conict is indeed a crusade. The greatest in history the holiest. It is in the profoundest and truest sense a Holy War. ... Yes, it is Christ, the King of Righ teous ness, who calls us to grapple in deadly strife with this unholy and blasphemous power [Germany].10

American clergy produced some alarming assertions of cosmic war rhetoric. One prominent American liberal was Congregational minister Lyman Abbott, for whom the war was a literal crusade. In his best- k nown article, To Love Is to Hate, he declared an explicit Chris tian duty to hate imperial Germany and all its works. American preachers frankly accepted the literal and material aspects of the sacred conict, which was no mere spiritual battle. Even Albert

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Dieffenbach, a liberal Unitarian with a proud German heritage, had no doubt that Jesus himself would join the fray directly if he could: There is not an opportunity to deal death to the enemy that [ Jesus] would shirk from or delay in seizing! He would take bayonet and grenade and bomb and rie.11 Another Congregationalist, Newell Dwight Hillis, took holy war doctrines to their ultimate conclusion, advocating the annihilation of Satans earthly servants and the extermination of the German race. In 1918, he urged the international community to consider the sterilization of the ten million German soldiers, and the segregation of their women, that when this generation of German goes, civilized cities, states and races may be rid of this awful cancer that must be cut clean out of the body of society. Americas Liberty Loan Committee distributed a million and a half extracts from Hilliss book.12

Gods Mailed Hand

Ac t i v i st s i n mo s t c ou n t r i e s spoke the language of Chris tian warfare, but the German approach to the war still stands out for its widespread willingness to identify the nations cause with Gods will, and for the spiritual exaltation that swept the country in 1914. We are not just dealing with a few celebrity preachers. Of course, any statement about national mood has to be made with care. A generation of scholars has combated the myth that European nations experienced total national solidarity in support of the coming war. More people had doubts than we would guess from the media of the time, and those doubts were more openly expressed as time went by. Yet having said this, educated and elite opinion in Germany in 1914 assuredly did have a deeply patriotic and pro- war tinge, and that ideology had a strong religious coloring. The constant repetition of such ideas in propaganda over the following years made them absolutely commonplace.13

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German artillery passing through the Brandenburg Gate, summer of 1914

Germanys Protestant preachers and theologians frankly exulted in the outbreak of war. Chris tian leaders treated the war as a spiritual event, in which their nation was playing a messianic role in Europe and the world. Educated Chris tians saw the spiritual exhilaration that greeted the war as a foretaste of eternal bliss. War, it seemed, was a heavenly revelation, even a New Pentecost. Regularly appearing in the texts of the time is the word Offenbarung, Revelation (this is the German title of the book known in English as Revelation). So is Verklrung, transguration or glorication, the word that preachers commonly used to describe the wars effects on the national mood. As Thuringian minister Adam Ritzhaupt asked, When did peacetime ever offer us the heavenly exaltation that we are feeling in war?14 Allied propagandists had no difculty in nding embarrassing sermons and essays by German leaders that assumed their empire was engaged in a sacred war. In 1914, one notorious pastor, Dietrich Vorwerk, praised the God who reigns on high, above Cherubinen und Seraphinen und Zeppelinen (Cherubim and Seraphim and Zeppelins). Vorwerk even rewrote the Lords Prayer:

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Our Father, from the height of heaven, Make haste to succor Thy German people. Help us in the holy war, Let your name, like a star, guide us: Lead Thy German Reich to glorious victories. Who will stand before the conquerors? Who will go into the dark sword- grave? Lord, Thy will be done! Although wars bread be scanty, Smite the foe each day With death and tenfold woes. In thy merciful patience, forgive Each bullet and each blow That misses its mark. Lead us not into the temptation Of letting our wrath be too gentle In carrying out Thy divine judgment. Deliver us and our pledged ally [Austria- Hungary] From the Evil One and his servants on earth. Thine is the kingdom, The German land. May we, through Thy mailed hand Come to power and glory.15 However tempted we may be to consign such militaristic pastors to the demagogic fringe, we nd near- identical sentiments from some of Germanys greatest thinkers and theologians, and this at a time when the country plausibly could claim cultural and spiritual leadership of the Chris tian world. But in all the main combatant powers, holy war views were advocated by the most respected mainline clergy. Clerics who deviated from these doctrines and

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many did, as individuals found themselves persecuted or forced into silence. In modern times, radical Muslim clergy and activists have often cited religious justications for violence, to the extent that many Jews and Chris tians even doubt that Islam is a religion, rather than a militaristic doomsday cult. Yet Chris tian leaders in 1914 or 1917 likewise gave an absolute religious underpinning to warfare conducted by states that were seen as executing the will of God, and they used well- k nown religious terms to contextualize acts of violence. Modern Shiites recall the bloody sacrice of the Battle of Karbala; Chris tians spoke of Gethsemane and Golgotha. Chris tians then, like Islamists today, portrayed their soldiers as warriors from a romanticized past, with a special taste for the Middle Ages. Both shared a common symbolism of sword and shield. Both saw heroic death as a form of martyrdom, in which the shedding of blood washed away the sins of life and offered immediate entry to paradise. We have no problem granting the title of crusade to the medieval Chris tian movements to reconquer Palestine, because that was the ideological framework that contemporaries used to justify their cause. Why, then, should we deny holy war status to the conict of 1914- 18?

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