The Great and Holy War

The Great and Holy War Also by Philip Jenkins Laying Down the Sword Jesus Wars The Lost History of Chris tian ity God’s Continent The New Faces of Chris tian ity The Next Christendom Hidden Gospels The Great and Holy War How World War I Became a Religious Crusade PhiliP Jenkins the great and holy war: How World War I Became a Religious Crusade. Copyright © 2014 by Philip Jenkins. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or repro- duced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address Harper Collins Publishers, 10 East 53rd Street, New York, NY 10022. Harper Collins books may be purchased for educational, business, or sales promotional use. For information please e- mail the Special Markets Department at [email protected]. Harper Collins website: http://www.harpercollins.com Harper Collins®, ®, and HarperOne™ are trademarks of Harper Collins Publishers. first edition Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data Jenkins, Philip, 1952– The great and holy war : how World War I became a religious crusade / Philip Jenkins. — First Edition. pages cm ISBN 978–0 –06 –210509–7 1. World War, 1914–1918 — Religious aspects. 2. World War, 1914–1918 — Religious aspects— Chris tian ity. 3. Nationalism— Religious aspects— History—20 th century. 4. Nationalism— Religious aspects— Chris tian ity— History—20 th century. 5. Messianism. 6. Eschatology. I. Title. D639.R4J56 2014 940.3'1- - dc23 2013041013 14 15 16 17 18 rrd(h) 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Contents List of Maps vii A Note About Terminology ix Introduction: From Angels to Armageddon 1 one The Great War: The Age of Massacre 29 two God’s War: Chris tian Nations, Holy Warfare, and the Kingdom of God 63 three Witnesses for Christ: Cosmic War, Sacrifice, and Martyrdom 87 four The Ways of God: Faith, Heresy, and Superstition 109 five The War of the End of the World: Visions of the Last Days 135 six Armageddon: Dreams of Apocalypse in the War’s Savage Last Year 163 seven The Sleep of Religion: Europe’s Crisis and the Rise of Secular Messiahs 189 vi Contents eight The Ruins of Christendom: Reconstructing Chris tian Faith at the End of the Age 217 nine A New Zion: The Crisis of European Judaism and the Vision of a New World 235 ten Those from Below: The Spiritual Liberation of the World’s Subject Peoples 269 eleven Genocide: The Destruction of the Oldest Chris tian World 287 twelve African Prophets: How New Churches and New Hopes Arose Outside Europe 315 thirteen Without a Caliph: The Muslim Quest for a Godly Political Order 333 Conclusion 369 Acknowledgments 379 Illustration Credits 381 Notes 383 Index 419 List of Maps The Western Front 50–51 European State Borders Before and After World War I 192 Main Centers of Jewish Population in 1914 237 The Ottoman Empire Before and After World War I 294 Africa 1914 319 A Note About Terminology Throughout this book, I refer to ideas about the end times, or “eschatology.” In particular, the apocalyptic vision tells a story of increasing chaos, marked by war, plague, famine, and disaster, culmi- nating in a divine act of judgment that ends the existing world order and begins a wholly new creation. In Western cultures, those ideas are commonly associated with the New Testament book of Revela- tion, which in its Greek original bears the name Apocalypse. Yet such ideas are by no means a Chris tian preserve, as they originated in Juda- ism and are the common inheritance of Islam. I will therefore use the term “apocalyptic” without limiting it to its Chris tian context. I will also use “millenarian,” another term that stems from the New Testament, to describe Christ’s utopian thousand- year rule on earth. Yet many societies throughout history have imagined an im- minent revolutionary crisis after which the purged world will enjoy an unprecedented era of peace and prosperity. The fact of being human, and knowing the circumstances of birth, means that societies naturally assume that any new age must be born amidst blood and peril. Despite its Chris tian roots, then, we can refer to millenarian impulses in other faiths and traditions. In speaking of the early twentieth- century world, I use the term “India” in its larger sense at that time, namely the British- dominated territories of South Asia, including the modern nation- states of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. The legend of the Angel of Mons, as imagined in a 1920 painting Introduction 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. — Marc Chagall In the day when heaven was falling, the hour when Earth’s foundations fled . — A. E. Housman in 1914, Welsh fantasy 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 find that he really has invoked an army of English archers from the great fifteenth- century Battle of Agincourt, who rise to protect their descendants. “The singing arrows fled so swift and thick that they darkened the air; the heathen horde melted from before them.” This intervention 2 The Great and Holy War saves the Allied cause, leaving Germany, “a country ruled by scien- tific principles,” to determine what kind of gas or secret weapon the British might have deployed.1 Machen’s fiction ran out of control. He was soon meetingpeople 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 Machen’s unpatriotic attempts to describe the tale as a mere fiction. 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 writ- ers 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 Machen’s remark about gross materialism fits many ac- counts 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 conflict perished miserably in the mud of France and Belgium. They vanished in a world of artillery and ma- chine 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 Britain’s Harry Patch, the last soldier actually to have fought in the war’s Introduction 3 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 fighting over biscuits taken from dead men’s pockets and wondering, “What are we doing that’s really any different? Two civilized nations, British and German, fighting for our lives.” In summary, he commented, “What the hell we fought for, I now don’t know.” That last line epitomizes what many modern people think about the war. All that butchery, they believe, took place for narrow national rivalries and selfish 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. Squire’s 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, “I’ve got my work cut out!”4 But such a wholly secular account makes it impossible to under- stand 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 instruc- tive to read anything he might have written during the conflict itself. In recent years, historians of the Great War have paid special attention to the attitude of frontline combatants, to try to under- 4 The Great and Holy War stand just why they were prepared to withstand the dreadful con- ditions so long, and the greatest surprise is how thoroughly many reflected the attitudes that we might think of as elite propaganda.

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