Sacred Causes

Michael Burleigh

• Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780061753442
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Storia del cristianesimo

Beginning with the chaotic post-World War I landscape, in which religious belief was one way of reordering a world knocked off its axis, Sacred Causes is a penetrating critique of how religion has often been camouflaged by politics. All the bloody regimes and movements of the twentieth century are masterfully captured here, from Stalin's Soviet Union, Hitler's Germany, Mussolini's Italy, and Franco's Spain through to the modern scourge of terrorism. Eloquently and persuasively combining an authoritative survey of history with a timely reminder of the dangers of radical secularism, Burleigh asks why no one foresaw the religious implications of massive Third World immigration, and he deftly investigates what are now driving calls for a civic religion to counter the terrorist threats that have so shocked the West.

CHAPTER 1

‘Distress of Nations and Perplexity’:
Europe after the Great War

I ‘HAVE YOU NEWS OF MY BOY JACK?’

Some future archaeologist, should all written records vanish, may speculate that early-twentieth-century Europe witnessed a regression to the age of megaliths and funerary barrows before it succumbed to a more general primitive fury. The extent of this commemorative enterprise can be gauged from the fact that each of France’s 35,000 communes erected a war memorial, mainly between 1919 and 1924, as did most of the parish churches, with a special chapel, plaque or stained-glass window dedicated to local representatives of the two million French war dead.¹ Such memorials proliferated across the continent and beyond, with memorial arches, cenotaphs, obelisks, ossuaries and crosses, and plinths peopled by eyeless poilus and tommies in bronze or stone. At Douaumont, Hartmanwillersdorf or Lorette, imposing memorials marked these vast necropolises for the dead. The continent’s culture was more generally permeated by the loss of nine million men in a conflict that had become maniacal in its relentless destructiveness. There were a further twenty-eight million wounded and millions too who had experienced captivity. The dead left three million widows, not including women they might have married, and, on one calculation, six million fatherless children, not to speak of tens of millions of grieving parents and grandparents, for the war burned its way up and down the generations with heedless ferocity. Total war also struck directly at civilians, whether in the form of burned villages, reprisal shootings and the sinking of merchant ships, or as naval blockades gradually decimated entire populations through calculated starvation.

Myriad individual griefs welled into a greater sense of public loss, in some quarters sentimentalised as a culturally significant ‘lost generation’—although plenty of butcher’s boys and postmen were ‘lost’ as well as minor painters and poets. The querulous homosexual Oxford don A. L. Rowse remembered an encounter from his schooldays during the unveiling of a war memorial:

A little man came up to me and started talking in a rambling way about his son who was killed. I think the poor fellow was for the moment carried away with sorrow. He said ‘Sidney Herbert—Sidney Herbert—you know they called him Sidney Herbert, but really he was called Sidney Hubert: he was my boy. He was killed in the War—yes: I thought you would like to know.’ And he went on like that till I dared not stay any longer with him.²

Rudyard Kipling lost his son John, a subaltern in the Irish Guards, at the battle of Loos in 1915. John’s (or ‘Jack’s’) body was never found; it was presumed to have disappeared during a German bombardment, along with half of the British war dead, whose bodies remained unrecovered. Kipling wrote ‘My boy Jack’ to express his desolation:

‘Have you news of my boy Jack?’

Not this tide.

‘When d’you think that he’ll come back?’

Not with this wind blowing, and this tide…

‘Oh, dear, what comfort can I find?’

None this tide,

Nor any tide,

Except he did not shame his kind—

Not even with that wind blowing, and that tide.

Possessed even in old age of indefatigable energy, fuelled by implacable hatreds not exclusively exhausted by the Germans, Kipling became a leading member of the Imperial War Graves Commission, overseeing the creation of decorous cemeteries and memorials to John and his kind. They include the Tyne Cot Memorial, where twenty-one-year-old Lieutenant James Emil Burleigh MC of the 12th Battalion Argyle and Sutherland Highlanders is remembered ‘with honour’, while my other uncle, Lieutenant Robert Burleigh, twenty-three years old, of the Royal Flying Corps, lies in Knightsbridge Cemetery at Mesnil-Martinsart. For others the war left no mortal remains to bury.

Powerful emotions once accompanied monuments experienced nowadays in a blur of traffic—such as the Artillery memorial in London’s busy Marble Arch or the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. Others are too modest to attract a second glance unless one consciously seeks them out, or they have disappeared into the uncertainty that eventually disperses the material effects of even the most scrupulous. For years after the war, reminders of this colossal tragedy lay in drawers or were displayed on mantelpieces and sideboards: photographs of sons, brothers, husbands, uncles in uniform; bundles of letters and field postcards; civilian clothes and juvenilia, augmented by fragments of the soldier’s life—perhaps a ring, wristwatch or lucky charm that had brought no luck—if relatives were so fortunate.

The final British war memorial was unveiled in July 1939 at the seaside resort of Mumbles in Wales, the last summer before Europe’s civil war resumed on a larger scale. Memorials included simple stone markers in obscure villages; plaques in Oxford college chapels and public schools (at Repton alone 355 alumni had perished) or on the walls of metropolitan stations, recalling 19,000 dead railwaymen; and last, but not least, the two and a half thousand cemeteries that transformed French hectares into permanent corners of England and its dominions.³

Memorialising the dead evolved from practices that initially accompanied armies of the willing. In Britain, rolls of honour, recording the names of pre-1916 volunteers, mutated into lists of the dead, whose names appeared on separate tablets, or proliferated below an ominous black line separating them from men still alive. Primitive street shrines were created in the East End of London, often at the prompting of the same Anglo-Catholic clergy who had introduced settlements into those dismal areas. These were simple affairs of names, illustrative kitsch clipped from the newspapers, and arrangements of wilting flowers, to which more puritanically minded clerics would object at their peril, for the shrines protected men at the front. Permanent memorials, intended to focus mass bereavement, superseded these impromptu shrines, although resort to spiritualists, to which modern technologies had given an enormous fillip since the late nineteenth century, suggests a reluctance to accept that the dead were beyond human contact regardless of disapproval by the Church of England.

In purely artistic terms, the greatest of these shrines was Edward Lutyens’s Cenotaph in London’s Whitehall, a stark ‘empty tomb’ that replaced a plaster and timber affair erected to focus the marching veterans’ salute on Peace Day in July 1919. The randomly selected Unknown Warrior was interred in Westminster Abbey, an interior already so cluttered with illustrious dead that it could provide no clear focus as the Arc de Triomphe did in Paris, in a ceremony involving the king walking to Westminster from Whitehall. A representative war widow, a father who had lost a son, and a child who had lost its father accompanied the French unknown soldier to his final resting place. The Cenotaph reaches its considerable affective power not only through its emptiness, but by inviting the spectator to project his or her thoughts and emotions on to its largely unadorned surfaces. Quiet reflection was encouraged by the accompanying Great Silence—the culminating point of Armistice Day—although surrounding the Cenotaph with a section of rubber road to enhance the silence did not prove a success. Well into the 1930s men doffed their hats as they passed. Respect was something owed to other people, not something on demand. Remembrance Sunday was, and remains, one of the few occasions when the Church of England—in the form of the Bishop of London—is at the centre of national affairs, addressing matters of import to most citizens.

The Cenotaph, copied up and down the country where people did not opt for chapels, crosses or non-denominational obelisks, became the focus for a very British, reticent form of public grief, in which, as the newspapers reported, sobs were muted, voices cracked, and tears flowed silently. Some places opted for more utilitarian reminders of the war, in the form of memorial bowling greens and hospital wings, a solution much favoured in the US too. In Paris, enterprising clergy constructed a memorial housing estate, where the children of the war dead would be raised surrounded by their memory. War memorials, which were the outcome of discussions involving more than the customary range of local worthies, reflected a collective sense of what the war had been for, a consensual minimum beyond which lay more contentious expectations in the new mass democracies where sacrifice brought a sense of entitlement. The overwhelming majority of these memorials drew on traditional classical or romantic imagery, although Catholic countries employed a greater range of religious exemplars such as a grieving mother cradling a dead son. Parallel with this public art, artists of considerable distinction brought their talents to bear on the greatest event of those times. Quite possibly the finest example of this tradition was the cycle of etchings Miserere produced by the intensely religious Georges Rouault between 1916 and 1928, but made public only in 1948, in which works of small compass achieve the monumentality of images on a medieval cathedral, while encapsulating something essential about the war from a Christian perspective.⁴

War memorials were not simply constructed to focus grief, but often carried a moral message to the future. In bronze or stone, at least, the dead became pensive paragons of service and sacrifice, no longer caked with mud, crawling with lice or numbed by serial percussive detonations, but hidden beneath sculpted helmets and the stone folds of trench coats. An acceptable narrative was imposed on an experience that defied most imaginations except those of the men who had been to hell and back.

Many writers, whether consciously creating art or not, chose to transpose hell into the made-to-measure clothing of received literary traditions in which birdsong, poppies, roses and warriors prettified the reality of industrial-scale slaughter involving barbed wire, bombardment, gas and machine gun that in some respects prefigured the Holocaust. Everyday speech was contaminated by terms only explicable from that era, although nowadays it comes more readily to those who write for tabloid newspapers than it does in normal intercourse, where it strikes a false note.⁵ While grief remained a presence at commemorations—and does so every 11 November—so participants were encouraged to see themselves as guardians of the unfinished legacy of the dead, whether fulfilling some real yet inchoate vision of a better world, or by imagining that blood spilled had ended bloodlust, a theme reflected in a naive enthusiasm for the inter-war League of Nations.

Individuals in Britain or France may have relished the war experience, but this did not translate into a ‘political religion’ that subsumed the myth of the Great War into an apocalyptic and redemptive politics. The war temporarily shook these societies, but it did not destabilise their institutions or shatter their forms of government. For that we have to turn to Germany and Italy. The German empire was one of four major European empires not to survive the war. Its first democratic republican experiment lasted a mere fifteen years before conflicts that the war exacerbated and which peace did not resolve resulted in a totalitarian tyranny. Italy’s liberal regime barely survived the war, to be blamed for a ‘mutilated peace’ and was hijacked by Mussolini’s Fascists a mere four years after the war ended.⁶

Although Germany had its memorial to the Unknown Soldier—installed in Berlin’s Neue Wache—there was no single national monument to the dead equivalent to the Cenotaph or the French necropolis at Douaumont, commemorating huge losses incurred during the victory at Verdun. The Weimar Republic eventually managed to construct the Tannenberg memorial in East Prussia, an ugly series of squat towers enclosing an immense space, which was opened in 1927 in the presence of President von Hindenburg, but no agreement was reached regarding where to site a single memorial to Germany’s war dead, and Tannenberg commemorated two mythically connected victories, defeat by the Poles in 1410 and victory over the Russians in 1915. Put slightly differently, one could argue that the Republic failed to capture the symbolic representations that are essential if any regime is to survive.⁷ Since the experience of grief was universal, local memorials served German mourners in the same ways as their British or French equivalents. But in the circumstances of what to many seemed inexplicable defeat and post-war chaos, they were overshadowed by the war as part of a nationalist myth, in which the dead were restless rather than deeply sleeping, waiting to join Germany’s self-appointed political saviours. Vivid myths were stronger than the quotidian complexities of operating a democratic regime in unpropitious circumstances.

British and French veterans may have hoped that this terrible conflict had been the war to end all wars, but in both Italy and Germany such resolve was often trumped by the rival view that the war was the prelude to the triumphal resurrection of the fatherland.⁸ Writing in 1925, Ernst Jünger exclaimed that ‘this war is not the end, but the chord that heralds new power. It is the anvil on which the world will be hammered into new boundaries and new communities. New forms will be filled with blood, and might will be hammered into them with a hard fist. War is a great school, and the new man will be of our cut.’ In the space left vacant by a stridently pacifist left, the political right successfully represented its own fighting formations, whose first incarnation were the Freikorps bands of demobilised veterans and radicalised students, as the apostolic successors of the men who had fought and died in the trenches. These units of paramilitary freebooters evolved from the elite units that general Erich Ludendorff had created to break the tactical deadlock created by the clash of conscript armies whose training was almost designed to stifle individual initiative. Men were ordered and trained to attack in waves, since to duck, weave and zigzag was deemed beyond their limited capabilities and intelligence. By contrast, the stormtroopers were armed for close-quarter combat and were expected to range opportunistically around the battlefield so as to identify weak points in massed positions. These units were relatively democratic, in the sense that distinctions between officers and men were based on ability rather than convention or class, and they consisted of men who went about carnage with excitement as well as grim determination: ‘gathering men about us and playing soldiers with them; brawling and drinking, roaring and smashing windows—destroying and shattering what needs to be destroyed. Ruthless and inexorably hard. The abscess on the sick body of the nation must be cut open and squeezed until clear red blood flows. And the blood must be left to flow for a good long time till the body is purified.’⁹

After the war, the Socialist-dominated republican government unleashed these marauders upon Bolsheviks in the Baltic States, upon Poles in Upper Silesia and upon the revolutionary left throughout post-war Germany. This was rather like sowing the dragon’s teeth, since Freikorps veterans subsequently flooded into anti-republican conspiratorial organisations or the paramilitary arms of the Nazis. Inevitably the literary imagination—for left-wing writers have no monopoly of glorifying political violence—was drawn to these gaunt figures, many of whom, like Ernst von Salomon, were themselves passable writers. Salomon described these armed bohemians in idealised terms: ‘We were cut off from the world of bourgeois norms…the bonds were broken and we were freed…We were a band of fighters drunk with all the passion of the world; full of lust, exultant in action.’ These men had overcome human sympathy, which was routinely dismissed in such circles as insipid sentimentality. This overcoming gave the stormtroopers the narcissistic delusion, common among psychopaths, that they themselves were a new predatory type of being in whom hardness trumped humanity. According to Ernst Jünger, a former stormtrooper himself, they were ‘magnificent beasts of prey’, for whom war was not sporting, and whose soldierly contempt for civilian existence tipped over into murderous rage towards republicans and revolutionaries. These were fierce figures. As Arnold Zweig wrote in 1925: ‘We have become a wrathful people / committed to the waging of war / as a bloodied and enraged knighthood of men / we have sworn with our blood to attain victory.’¹⁰

Values engendered by total war—notably the inward-focused camaraderie of what the British called ‘bands of brothers’—were perpetuated and turned outwards in what became a murderous war against the weak Weimar Republic, political parties that camouflaged vested interests, Jews and socialists, overlooking the fact that large numbers of Jews and men of all political persuasions had made their own patriotic sacrifices. If in Britain local worthies worried about whether having statues of men armed with rifles and bayonets conjured up a killer instinct that many wanted to forget, in both Italy and Germany elite fighting units (the Italian arditi) who had brought fanatical courage and tenacity to the wartime battlefields, provided the prototypical ‘new man’ who, despite his self-professed dehumanisation, was supposed to be the nat...