To Arms

by Hew Strachan

  The crux of such pronouncements was their identification of church with state. Nowhere was this more evident than in the only formal declaration of holy war, that made in Constantinople and issued in the name of a spiritual leader, the Caliph, who, as Sultan, was also a temporal ruler. In Russia the Orthodox church fused its own proselytization with the Russification of the empire’s ethnic communities. Under the leadership of the minister of religion, the church used the opportunity of the war not only to intensify its persecution of Jews and Muslims but also to root out Lutherans in the Baltic states, Catholics in Poland, and above all, Uniates (or Greek Catholics) in the Ukraine.12 In a series of fourteen lithographs entitled Mystical Images of War Natalia Goncharova subscribed to this fusion of Russia’s history with its religion, her final print showing the spirit of St Alexander Nevsky, who routed the Teutonic knights in 1242.13 Significantly, the lubok, a traditional form of popular broadside, was revived in Russia in 1914–15. Although the lubki rarely referred to the church, they used iconic elements to emphasize the holiness of the struggle, with the Entente as the Trinity and Russia and the Russian soldier as mother and child.14

  In western Europe the fact that Catholics were committed to both sides reduced the Vatican to virtual silence. But the German invasion of Belgium and northern France acquired the trappings of a holy war with almost immediate effect. The German army was heir to two traditions. The first, forged by the French army in the Vendee and in the Peninsular War, saw Catholic priests as the orchestrators of local guerrillas and resistance movements. The second was Bismarck’s anti-Catholic Kulturkampf. The stories of German atrocities often had priests and nuns as their victims. If they accepted the accusations, German soldiers excused their actions as responses to ‘conspiratorial Catholicism’;15 if they denied them, their prosecutors cited as evidence the physical destruction suffered by churches, notably at Louvain and Reims.

  For the Catholics themselves, their sufferings were an opportunity to reestablish the links between church and state. In Belgium Cardinal Mercier, archbishop of Malines, became a symbol of resistance. In his 1914 Christmas message he told his flock that, ‘The religion of Christ makes patriotism a law: there is no perfect Christian who is not a perfect patriot.’16 In occupied France the mobilization of teachers and then the severance from Paris could leave the curé as the most important local figure. Indeed, the Germans’ victimization and even execution of the clergy may have reflected the latter’s exercise of secular rather than spiritual leadership. The archbishop of Verdun told Baudrillart of one curé who had been stripped and flogged in front of his parishioners, and of another who had been clothed in his vestments and then forced to watch the rape of his maid.17 However much exaggerated by French and British propaganda, such stories were almost certainly not without some foundation.18 More importantly, they were believed at the time. Baudrillart established a Catholic committee to produce anti-German propaganda, and in April 1915 it published La Guerre allemande et le catholicisme. Thus the war provided the opportunity for France’s Catholics both to challenge republican aspersions on their loyalty, and to win back Frenchmen for Rome.

  In 1429 Joan of Arc had passed through Auxerre on her way to raise the siege of Orléans. In 1914 the city’s cathedral church of St Etienne commissioned a stained glass depiction of the maid directing operations: it carried the words attributed to Joan—’I have been sent by God the King of Heaven to drive you out of all France.’ The ambiguity as to whom her words were addressed proved helpful. A declaration directed at the English in 1429 could in 1914 be targeted at the Germans. Before the First World War’s outbreak the cult of Joan of Arc promoted political division more than patriotic unity. The campaign for her canonization and for her appropriation as a national symbol was orchestrated by the Catholic right. But there existed another image of Joan, not of the church militant or of martial success, of Joan clad not in armour but in a dress; this was a peasant girl betrayed by the king whose coronation she had achieved and burned at the stake by the church which she had served. Both images carried patriotic overtones, even if the second was of a revolutionary France rather than a royalist one. The outbreak of the war, and particularly the bombardment of Reims cathedral, where Charles VII had been crowned under a standard held aloft by Joan, permitted these divergent interpretations to be integrated. At one level, therefore, the iconography of Joan in late 1914 was simply further evidence of the union sacrée and its capacity for reconciliation. But it carried a further message. The posters and postcards bore a legend that was both a reminder and a promise: ‘Dieu protège la France.’19

  Catholicism was hardly the monopoly of the Entente. Austrian fealty to the Vatican contrasted strongly with the anticlericalism of the Third Republic. And the latter made France an even greater threat in the adjacent territories of Catholic south Germany. Efforts were made to render Freiburg’s cathedral as symbolic as those of Reims or Louvain. Illustrierte Zeitung, a Leipzig journal, highlighted its vulnerability with a picture of a French air raid over the city on 13 December 1914. Alsatian priests were not martyrs but traitors; the number reported by the German press as having been executed for treason proved to be double the number actually in orders. Thus, the themes of allied propaganda and the accusations of Entente Catholics were turned. The fact that Germany’s propaganda in neutral states was entrusted to the leader of the Catholic Centre party, Matthias Erzberger, reinforced the specifically Catholic dimension to the German riposte. The charges levelled by Baudrillart’s committee received a point-by-point rebuttal in a volume written by A. J. Rosenberg at Erzberger’s request, and Georg Pfeilschifter presided over a collaborative volume, Deutsche Kultur, Katholizismus und Weltkrieg (German culture, Catholicism, and world war). Significantly Pfeilschifter’s contributors, like Rosenberg himself, were predominantly academic theologians rather than clerics. The Vatican had asked Erzberger to keep the episcopate out of the controversy.20

  The Germans were portrayed not merely as anti-Catholic but frequently also as anti-Christian. The root of this second charge was liberal theology. In Germany biblical scholarship had neglected faith in favour of research, religion in favour of rationality, and so removed the moral force from Christian teaching. The invasion of Belgium was cited as evidence, the act of a society which denied the natural law of the civilized world. Adolf von Harnack and Ernst von Dryander, the primate of the German Evangelical church, rejected these allegations. In late August the first of a succession of manifestos was drawn up under their aegis, and addressed to Evangelical churches abroad— particularly in the United States. Its distribution was entrusted to the Deutsche Evangelische Missions-Hilfe, created in December 1913 to promote missionary work in the German colonies. The fusion of Evangelism and propaganda, the broadening in focus from Germany’s own overseas possessions to the world as a whole, helped redefine the church’s mission in political and cultural as well as religious terms.21

  The result was a new theology. The war enabled orthodox Lutherans and liberal theologians to converge. Both saw victory as the means to the application of the kingdom of God within an ethical community; Protestantism could be confirmed as the religious bedrock of the German cultural state.22 The Lutheran church’s evangelism, therefore, embraced the spirit of 1914 as an opportunity to relaunch itself not only in the wider world but also at home. Preachers did not move from their texts to contemporary life, but vice versa, addressing their parishioners’ immediate experiences and using the Bible to reinforce the message. The Old Testament acquired a fresh relevance—evidence of God’s use of war as judgement, and of his endorsement of a chosen people seeking a political and cultural independence.23

  Luther himself became a hero—the fusion, like Joan of Arc in France, of religion, nationality, and historical identity. The Reformation joined the wars of unification in the historical foundations of the German state. The early Protestant church had relied on the secular powers for its survival, and was thus prey to state intervention from the outset of its
existence.24 Luther had recognized the dangers by propounding his doctrine of the two kingdoms. But, in seeking to separate the spiritual from the temporal, he had curtailed the church’s role in national life while not preventing its appropriation for the purposes of nationalism. The Pan-German League and, particularly, the Army League were overwhelmingly Protestant in composition.25

  God, therefore, became an active participant in the historical process. His nature in these circumstances was not determined by the needs of private morality but of public. The crowds on 1 August 1914 sang Luther’s great hymn, ‘Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott’, a song that was at once both national and religious. Ernst Troeltsch moved under the impact of the war from theology to history, because the German form of Christianity was Lutheranism and the German state embodied the best form of Lutheranism in political practice. Patriotism, therefore, became both a source of faith and a Christian duty.26

  On the occasion of the opening of the Reichstag on 4 August 1914 Ernst von Dryander preached in Berlin cathedral. The Kaiser was in the congregation. Dryander was entirely persuaded of the significance of this marriage of church and state. As he was later to say, ‘I owe the best that I have to my fatherland not in spite of, but because of, my being a Christian—the best not only in time, strength and wealth, but also in the marrow of my strength, my relationship to God and to my faith’.27 His text on 4 August was St Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, chapter 8, verse 3: ‘If God be for us, who can be against us?’ His assumptions were cultural, in his rejection of materialism and his hopes of national regeneration, and they were historical. He cited Treitschke, and he summoned up Luther and ‘the old heroes of 1813’. ‘We march to the fight for our culture against unculture, for German morality against barbarity, for the free, German, God-fearing person against the instincts of the uncontrolled mass . . . We know that we fight not only for our existence but also for the existence of the most holy of possessions that we have to perpetuate.’ The key issue, he concluded, was not ‘whether God is with us, but whether we are with God’.28

  Dryander explored themes which became central to Germany’s sense of purpose, whether expressed by believers or agnostics. Bernhardi, the military publicist, wrote in Internationale Monatsschrift in November 1914: ‘God reveals himself in victory by which He makes truth defeat appearance. It is God’s law that condemns the vanquished, and it is, therefore, His will that the conqueror should dictate such peace terms as shall display his inner strength by his external power and greatness.’29 The philosopher and, in due course, founding father of sociology Max Scheler, who was the son of a Protestant and a Jew, but who later converted to Catholicism, contended that the war was a holy war precisely because it was about fundamental issues associated with the existence of the nation. War was the moment when God passed judgement, and the mobilization of the state’s resources as it put its fate in God’s hands in itself made the war a just one.30

  For thinkers in France and Britain the Nietzschean spin in this sort of thought—’the religion of valour, the religion of might is right’, in the words of The Times on 10 September 191431—suggested not a reworked Christianity but a departure from it. Baudrillart’s Institut Catholique saw the root of the problem as Kant, Nietzsche’s logical predecessor. In asserting that God was beyond human comprehension and that man could know only himself, Kant had, in the eyes of French Catholics, elevated man and with him the law and the moral authority of the state. For republicans, socialists, and anti-Catholics in France, Kant’s emphasis on rationality was of course right and Catholicism superstitious and wrong. Conveniently too, Kant had written about perpetual peace.32

  The divisions in French approaches to Kant highlighted not only the split between church and state in the republic but also the pre-war French conviction that there were two Germanies. Kant personified the cerebral, spiritual, and reasoned Germany; Hegel the materialist, militarist, and nationalist. During the war itself this division would find another, more practical interpretation, that of a German people (presumably Kantian) being guided, gulled, and misled by a German leadership (presumably Hegelian). In due course much Entente propaganda came to rest on the conviction that the German masses were fundamentally liberal and rational. But the corollary of such a belief was that the allied purpose was itself revolutionary. Its task was not only to clear the Germans out of France and Belgium but also to overthrow the Kaiser and establish a German republic. Guided by their hopes of internationalism and perpetual peace, French socialists were as intellectually committed to the dismemberment of Germany—and therefore to a big war for big ideas—as were French Catholics and German Protestants.33

  For many French intellectuals the notion of the two Germanies was scuppered by the manifesto of ninety-three German university teachers published by the Berliner Tageblatt and other major newspapers on 4 October 1914. Provocatively addressed ‘An die Kulturwelt’ (to the world of culture), it made clear that the unity of orthodox Lutherans and academic theologians which underpinned the August manifesto had now been extended. The ideas embraced by the church were endorsed by professors from throughout the Reich, of all religions and of all disciplines. Most claimed to be apolitical in the sense of being above party, but all parties bar the SPD were represented.

  The signatories had international reputations as well as international contacts. Their pre-war assumptions were neither insular nor chauvinist. One of the most distinguished was the classicist Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff. Wilamowitz orchestrated the preparation of a further manifesto published on 16 October 1914 in English, French, Italian, and Spanish as well as German. Thanks to the efforts of Dietrich Schäfer, professor of history, pupil of Treitschke, and pre-war stalwart of the Army League, virtually the entire German academic profession—over 4,000 names, including almost every professor at every German university—endorsed the declaration. Numbered among them were closet socialists, future pacifists, and sceptics, including Max Weber and Albert Einstein. The professors rejected the accusations that Germany had caused the war, had broken international law in its invasion of Belgium, and had committed atrocities against the civilian populations of that country and of France. Their list of denials concluded with two assertions: first, that the future of European culture rested on the victory of German so-called ‘militarism’; and secondly, that in defining this militarism there was no distinction to be made between Prussia and the rest of Germany, or between the German army and the German nation: ‘both are one.’34

  A third manifesto, emanating from the University of Tübingen and entitled ‘Appel au monde civilisé’, was published on 17 October. In the long run their combined effects were counter-productive: they disseminated the charges against Germany by repeating them. But the immediate consequences arose from their association of German Kultur with German militarism.

  The world of scholarship and the arts fragmented into national components. Sigmund Freud, writing in the spring of 1915, mourned science’s loss of ‘her passionless impartiality’.35 The Institute de France dismissed from its honorary membership all those German professors who had signed the manifesto, and on 3 November 100 members of the French literary and artistic world countered with their own declaration. The signatories, who included representatives of the left like Georges Clemenceau, and of the right like Maurice Barrés, as well as Debussy, Gide, Matisse, and Monet, declared that ‘the intellectual and moral richness of humanity is created by the natural variety and independence of all nations’ gifts’. The Académie des Sciences replied on the same day in terms which were both more chauvinistic and more questionable: ‘Latin and Anglo-Saxon civilisations are those which have produced the majority of the great discoveries in the mathematical, physical and natural sciences in the last three centuries.’ It was left to historians like Ernest Lavisse, director of the École Normale Supérieure, to explain the roots of pan-Germanism and to work out the implications of German culture for the German ‘theory and practice of war’.36

  On 12 December 1914 Henri
Bergson, the doyen of French philosphy, delivered his presidential address to the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques. For Bergson the union of the two Germanies had been effected not in 1914 but in 1871. Germany had opted not for an organic, natural unification, but for a mechanical and artificial form derived from Prussia. The basis of Germany’s victories was material prosperity, and the ideas that followed did so as an effect of unification, not as its cause. Germany’s philosophy was ‘a translation into intellectual terms of her brutality, her appetites, and her vices’. German atrocities, and the belief of German academics that the ends justitifed such means, were evidence of ‘barbarism reinforced by civilisation’.37

  For Bergson individually, and for French academics collectively, herein was the key to the war’s purpose. The defence of France was transformed into the defence of civilization. Once again the Huns were at the gates, and this time the threat was far greater because they had harnessed to the cause of barbarity the machinery of the state and the material advantages of industrialization. For those on the left the civilization which they were protecting was the legacy of 1789, equality and fraternity, principles of universal application. For those on the right the sources lay further back, with Charles Martel and Charlemagne. Common ground was a recovery of classicism. Athenian republicanism appealed to the left, the reinvigoration of Latin teaching favoured the church. Both saw in the classics an enduring and international definition of civilization which endorsed France’s mission.38