[ Music ]
>> Our first speaker today is
Philip Jenkins who will speak
on Christendom's Last Holy
War: The First World War
as a Religious Crusade.
Professor Jenkins has
published 25 books
which have been translated
into 16 languages.
His book "The Great
and Holy War:
How World War I Became a
Religious Crusade" offers the
first look at how
religion created
and prolonged the
first world war.
Professor Jenkins is a
distinguished professor
of history at Baylor University
and serves as co-director
for the programs on the
historical studies of religion
and The Institute for Studies of
Religion at Baylor University.
He received his doctorate
from Cambridge University.
He's one of the world's
leading religion scholars,
and his work has been lauded
in many different disciplines
including sociology,
criminology, and
religious studies.
His research includes
interest in the study
of global Christianity
past and present,
new and emerging
religious movements,
and the 20th century U.S.
history, particularly post 1975.
We are so glad to have Professor
Jenkins with us this morning.
Please welcome him.
[ Applause ]
>> Thank you very much for
that wonderful welcome.
We've received nothing
but hospitality here even
from the driver of the car
rental shuttle who asked
where we were from, and
we said Waco, and he said,
"I don't reckon much to Texas."
But other than that,
it's been excellent.
When you hear that idea of the
first world war as a holy war,
as a crusade, it, obviously,
sounds almost like a bad joke.
This was a war that
killed 10 million people
on the battlefield.
It led to a series of
disasters and plagues
that probably killed
another maybe 50 million.
What could be holy?
What could be a crusade here?
But I need to run
against the current, here.
I'm going to begin by telling
you a story, and if you look
at this picture, you'll see one
of the most famous
stories of the war.
This is something that
happened in 1914, and you'll see
that it is a British soldier
being guarded by angels.
And there's an interesting
history to this.
In 1914, there was
a battle at Mons
where an outnumbered
British force held off,
for a crucial time, a
much larger German force.
It was a heroic event
in its own right,
but immediately afterwards,
a British author called Arthur
Machen wrote a very short story
in a newspaper, and it's what
we would call a fantasy story.
And he imagines the soldiers
at Mons, and they know they're
about to die, and one of
them says, jokingly, "Well,
God and St. George save
us now.", and he finds
that he's accidentally raised
the spirits of English archers
from the middle ages who were
buried there, and they rise
to defend the modern
day British Army,
and they fight off the Germans.
And that's story is
called "The Bowmen".
It's a nice story, and shortly
afterwards Machen had an
interesting discovery.
He kept meeting people
who'd been at the battle
and seen the Bowmen,
and when he said, "No.
Excuse me.
I made it up."
Their response is,
"Well, no you didn't.
My brother was there.
He saw the arrow
wounds in the Germans."
And this becomes a little
kind of frustrating,
and that story goes
on to become one
of the most repeated
stories of the war.
People still, if you
go on the Internet,
people still believe it
today, and it morphs over time
from being about bowmen
to being about angels.
The Angel of Mons.
There are orchestral
pieces, the angel of mons.
There are paintings.
What I want to suggest is this,
government, media, churches,
armies create stories,
undoubtedly.
They create propaganda,
but there is no way
that propaganda could have
been effective did it not speak
to an audience that already
wanted to believe these stories.
And when you look at the stories
surrounding the First World War,
you realize that there
are so many examples of,
not just of supernatural ideas,
but certain key themes, angels,
the apocalypse, Armageddon.
Let me begin by presenting
a stereotype.
Here's a stereotype, and
this is what we should
logically believe.
Here's the stereotype.
When war breaks out, government
propaganda goes into overdrive.
It presents all these
powerful stories about holy war
about Armageddon in a way
of getting these ordinary
soldiers to go off and fight.
They don't really believe it.
It's very cynical, but it works.
It gets people into
their uniforms.
After a while, the soldiers
realize just how hollow the
pretense is.
They see the dreadful battles,
the dreadful violence
they're facing.
They become disenchanted, and
that disenchantment, then,
spreads after the war, and,
basically, cripples religion,
not just Christianity.
In the 1920s, 1930s in a sense,
that is the end of Christendom.
I think I'm right in
saying that's a pretty
common interpretation.
I want to suggest that's wrong.
I want to suggest that
unless you take a count
of very seriously held, honestly
held beliefs at all levels
of society, it is very hard
to determine why the
war actually happened,
why people fought,
and also, critically,
why they sustained that belief.
It is not the case that
in 1914 everyone goes
into this war frenzy and
speaks this holy war,
but they pretty soon forget it.
The religious elements of
the war grow during the war,
and they reach a
climax in 1917 and 1918,
and that religious movement has
its great impact after the war.
Now, I can talk about this
at any number of levels,
but let me suggest
if you want to look
at why did the nations fight.
Well, there were any number of
conflicts of economic interests,
territorial interests, we've got
a bigger navy than you've got,
and all these, all these
issues, but if you look
at the key players in the war,
they are very strongly motivated
by ideologies that are
religious and supernatural.
That is most strongly evident
in the case of Germany where,
for 40 years the dominant
Protestant church has presented
a very strongly religious
nationalist ideology
that presents the
Keizer's government
as literally being the seed of a
coming kingdom of God in Europe,
of being a Messianic
state, a Messianic kingdom,
and that message is
presented week by week
in every Protestant
pulpit in Germany.
That, in turn, sets
a very high bar
for other religious
organizations who can't be,
who can't let the
Protestants beat them.
So, Catholics, then, develop a
strong holy war ideology, and,
interestingly, German
Jews become some
of the most fervent
exponents of this ideology
of Germany being a holy
kingdom engaged in a holy war.
So, Germany is a holy kingdom
and Russia is also
a holy kingdom.
Russia is a completely
fused church and state.
It has this Messianic
apocalyptic vision at the heart
of its official ideology that
also take account of a lot
of texts that we've forgotten.
If you look at Russian
intellectuals around 1914,
then the texts they're
reading are things
like The Apocalypse of Daniel.
Do not go looking in your Bible
for the Apocalypse of Daniel.
It's an apocryphal work
that circulated separately,
and it describes how
a new Constantine,
a new Roman Emperor will arise,
will conquer the Muslims,
will dominate and restore the
old Roman and Byzantine Empire,
and there's no doubt
among Russian elites
that this is what is going
to happen in their lifetime.
I don't know how many of you
have ever seen plays or films
about the outbreak of World
War I and you see something
in what we might call, like
a "Downton Abbey" setting
where somebody comes in with
a message and saying, "Oh,
an archduke has been
assassinated.
Well, no problem there."
and you know something
horrible is going to happen.
And the suggestion is that
the war becomes, literally,
out of a clear blue sky.
The myth of the summer
of 1914 is very strong.
I just want to point out
that is absolutely incorrect
in the sense that for the
five years before 1914,
if you are a European
intellectual, you are immersed
in apocalyptic speculation.
This is what the books,
this is what the novels,
this is what the
paintings are all about,
and if you are a
German intellectual,
an Austrian intellectual,
a Russian intellectual,
and you are in your 20's,
you know war is coming.
You know it's going to be
the apocalypse, and you know
that you're going to
be hearing the hooves
of the apocalyptic horsemen and
the wings of angels very soon.
That language is so strong.
How much of it is a metaphor?
I never know.
Part of it's a mistranslation
thing.
One of the great artistic
schools in Europe,
at this point, is
called Blue Rider,
and it's this very experimental
art, and it brings in Germans
and Austrians and Russians.
It's not a Blue Rider.
It's Blaue Reiter, horseman,
and they're hearing the
horsemen of the apocalypse.
What I'm suggesting is that from
all sorts of different points
of view, Protestant, Catholic,
Orthodox there is an expectation
of apocalyptic change,
and when it finally,
in 1914 war breaks out, and
it is so, and I'm trying
to avoid overusing the
word, so apocalyptic.
This is precisely what they
expect, and the language
of Armageddon becomes absolutely
standard, absolutely mainstream.
The question, then, is how
many people believed that.
Well, at the level of elites,
it's very strong indeed.
They don't just say, well, let's
present this propaganda as a way
of drafting foot soldiers.
They believe it.
The German commander
on the invasion
of France is Hermuth von Moltke,
and Hermuth von Moltke has
in his possession, has in
his uniform many mantras
and saying predicting the
glorious future of Germany
that have been given to him
that have been channeled for him
by Europe's greatest mystic
and medium Rudolf Steiner.
General von Moltke dies
in 1916, and his role
in public affairs increases
dramatically after that
because Steiner spends the
next two years channeling
in a mediumistic way what
[inaudible] is saying
from the beyond and distributing
that to every author and general
and commander in Germany.
He has a, I feel like, a
mighty postmortem influence,
and across the board, you see
this language, and you begin
to think that elites are
taking it very seriously.
There is a famous French
author called Celine,
and he writes a book called
"Journey to the End of Night",
and Celine is a very, what shall
I say, a very cynical character,
and so he joining the army and
is very likely to be killed.
But he's absolutely
shocked to find how many
of the people surrounding
him have got completely
religious ideologies.
This is in France which is a
secular, republican country
where religion is
strongly discouraged,
and he has one line,
"Decisively,
I realized I joined an
apocalyptic crusade",
and wherever we go in the
war, we find this language
and we find an interesting
phenomenon
which runs contrary
to the stereotype.
We find that far from
trying to encourage these,
what shall we call them,
superstitious ideas,
governments were working
very hard to suppress them.
Why are they doing that?
Well, think about it.
Apocalyptic is very
good because it means
that the angels are going
to intervene on the side
of the forces of good, but
people have got a bad idea
of believing that the angels
are going to intervene
and destroy all governments
including ours.
So, governments aren't
too fond of that.
The other one is many of
the European governments,
the British, the
French, the Italians,
the Russians have got
large Muslim populations.
They don't want any talk of
crusade, and the British,
for example, issue
security notices,
censorship notices saying,
"We don't want anyone
using the phase crusade.
You can go to prison for this.",
and that works abominably badly.
Nobody pays attention,
and throughout this,
we get the language of what,
angels, apocalyptic, crusade.
You know, so much of our image
of the First World War is formed
from the writing
of intellectuals
and a fairly select
band of intellectuals.
Like in English,
who do you have?
Robert Graves, Siegfried
Sassoon, Wilfred Owen
who are writing, Owen,
of course is killed,
in a more cynical
mood after the war.
During the war, people tend
to believe these religious ideas
much more than we may think.
If you ever want to
read this, there is a,
there's a wonderful Swiss author
by the name Hans
Bechtold [phonetic],
and Hans Bechtold carried
out an ethnography,
like a social survey of German
and Austrian soldiers in the war
in 1915, and I stress that
because when you read it,
you have to keep looking back to
see he isn't talking about 1615
because if you look at the
ideas that people have,
the rituals they go through,
the little symbolic figures
and idols and saints that
they have in the trenches,
you think you're back
in the 17th century.
They or their wives and kids
back home are doing magic spells
to keep them safe.
They're using amulets, and you
think when the armies that go
to war in 1914 are
not made up of poets
and intellectuals, largely.
They're made up of peasants
and peasants who are very used
to accepting ideas of
angels and the virgin.
Let me illustrate a
couple of these ideas.
Imagine a world where you
have these very, kind of,
supernatural ideas, and then
you have these monstrous,
inconceivable images
of war and destruction.
You know, we, today, interesting
how language has changed.
We, today, look at
these, and we think, well,
these look like they're
of science fiction.
Back in 1914, they don't talk
about them as science fiction.
They talk about them as
being out of the apocalypse.
They talk about them in the
sense of religious language.
Throughout the war,
you get the image
of crucifixion and crucifixes.
This is a very famous
one, famous image.
Much of the war on the
Western front takes place
in a highly catholic area of
Northern France and Belgium.
Every village has its
crucifix, its shrine.
During the war, many
of those crucifixes
and shrines are destroyed
utterly,
but some of them survive
partially to make it look
as if Christ is on
the battlefield.
And we get the creation
of a world of shrines
and devotions through the war.
If you imagine the trenches
of the very secular French,
of the very secular Italians,
when we map the trenches,
as we often do.
We show, there's a
machine gun post here,
and there's a backup line here.
We always forget one thing
which is they've got shrines
of the virgin at set distances.
This is an extremely
religious war where people are,
as it's sometimes
said, are prepared
to believe absolutely
anything except what is passed
on from the higher command.
And this is, this is typical.
This is the interesting
difference
from the Second World War,
a fundamental difference.
Christ makes many appearances
in First World War symbolism,
not just as, if you
like, a disembodied hand
or a disembodied
voice, but Christ.
This is Christ blessing
German forces, and the prayer
at the bottom is,
"Lord, your kingdom come.
Your will be done on
earth as it is in Heaven",
and the German forces are
going to institute this.
Christ and the destruction
of crucifixes, and, you know,
this is, this is something,
this is somebody I'm going
to be talking about quite a lot.
This is the archangel Michael
who I always say is one
of the insufficiently heralded
stars of the First World War.
Let me explain that.
In 1813, there was
a great battle
in which the Allied nations led
by Germany defeated Napoleon
at a great battle near Leipzig
in Germany called the
Battle of the Nations.
Centennial 1913, Germany built
a memorial to that battle,
and if you want to understand
German national ideology
in the first world war
and the second world war,
go to that monument,
and everywhere you will see the
imagery of pagan heroes of--
but also of Christian angels
and archangels depicted
as almost symbolic
warlords of the German army.
Michael runs through the war.
In 1918, in the spring of 1918
when the German forces launched
their great final throw to try
and defeat the allies before
the Americans can get in,
what is it called?
Obviously, Operation Michael.
Michael is everywhere
in the war.
There was, there's a wonderful
book you can read by a woman
who was a nurse in the war
called, it's called "Testament
of Youth" by Vera Brittain.
And Vera Brittain, by 1918 was
probably the only cynic left
on the Western front, and
she has this passage and she,
everyone she, every
British soldier she talks
to is absolutely convinced
that A, this is a holy war, B,
that all the soldiers who
have been killed in the war
so far are actually
walking, marching with them,
that there are ghost armies and
ghost legions going with them
to fight the Germans, and also,
that angels are leading them.
And I don't know if you're
familiar with this concept.
You've heard of folk
tales, right?
There's also stories that
are told to you by a friend
of a friend, FOAF that
are called foaf tales.
She knows so many foaf tales.
Every soldier in her
care says, yes, well,
a colonel that was
killed two years ago,
but he came back
to fight with us.
And she has this despairing
fantasy which is, well,
just suppose the Angel of
Mons was fighting on our side
and Michael was fighting on the
German side, and they both went
out into no man's
land to duke it out.
Who would win?
And she didn't believe it, but
probably if she'd raised it
with her soldiers,
they'd have said, yeah,
that's an interesting question.
Angels are everywhere.
The language of crusade is very
strong, and you might be saying,
well, you know, you have
crusades that are so described,
and not every soldier
believes in them.
I wonder in the medieval
crusades
if every soldier believed that
they actually were fighting for,
fighting for the kingdom of
God, that they were fighting
for Christ, or if they were
just doing something different,
doing something because
they'd been told to fight.
Whenever you see Austrian
or German propaganda,
you get these knightly,
medieval images
which are, which are so strong.
I just like that one.
This is not actually an angel.
This is more of a Valkyrie.
This is the spirit of
Germany in August 1914.
I just like that.
That is a terrifying lady,
but the way in which
people portray the country.
We sometimes think,
you know, we today live
in the great age of mass media.
Please remember, in the
First World War in 1914,
this is already an
age of global media.
When something happens, when
a story happens like the Angel
of Mons, it reaches every corner
of the British Empire,
of the French Empire.
It is translated
around the world.
Some of the most powerful
images of sacrifice, angels,
apocalyptic, are
translated through film,
and they have a great advantage.
These are silent films.
They can be shown anywhere.
Oh, yeah. Everywhere
you go, you get images
of George and the dragon.
Yeah, George is very
poly faceted figure.
And then the Americans join
in 1917, and it's interesting.
America is notionally
a secular constitution.
Try telling that to
every minister, it seems,
every clergyman in America in
1917 who adopts the language
of holy war of crusade at a much
higher level than the Germans
or the British or the
Russians had used in 1914.
And I think there's a reason
for that because by this point,
America has been so swept by
particularly Allied propaganda,
they know it's a holy war, and
they are aching to fight in it,
and some of the language
that they used,
some of the discussion is,
it strikes us as grotesque.
So, there is actually, there are
two debates I find interesting.
One is if, I'm sure you all
know What Would Jesus Do.
Well, they have a big debate
in what Jesus would do.
A, we know he'd fight
on the front,
but would he use the bayonet?
This is very, this
is very serious,
and there's a sizable
coalition of clergy who say,
undoubtedly yes, because
that is the only way
to destroy the satanic
evil that is Germany.
Oh, one thing I do
find interesting there.
The clergy who have the most
high flown, advanced views
of holy war and crusade, they
have one thing in common.
The clergy who were the
most progressive social
gospel reformers.
All the main liberal clergy
before the war including Quakers
and Unitarians are the most
fervent crusaders in 1917.
It's not just the Episcopalians
who are, who might be expected
to be pro-British,
but it's people
who are often from
German churches.
And, as I say, the language is
very consistent and very strong.
And it's interesting, this is
an official American publicity
poster which I believe is, yes,
the first official
American war picture is
about Pershing's Crusaders.
It is a crusade.
I said there were two issues.
One is would Jesus
use the bayonet,
what would Jesus,
who would Jesus kill?
The other part of it is if
an Allied soldier is killed
in combat, does he automatically
qualify for Heaven?
And, again, there's
a lot of debate,
and there are many evangelicals
who say, well, this really gets
into some serious issues
of Christian theology,
and they issue barely tentative
pamphlet saying we really would
rather you didn't say this,
but a lot of clergy do say it.
They use a, what would
we call it today?
A jihadi ideology.
They speak the language of holy
war, holy death, and martyrdom.
But I do commend that to you.
Oh, by the way, and if you
want to put this in context,
please remember how much
the language of knighthood,
the cross, the crusade
is around at this time.
What happens in 1915
is the formation
of the second Ku Klux
Klan and all its images.
They're all, of course,
taken from the film "Birth
of a Nation" are of knights
on horseback with red crosses.
That is such a powerful
archetype at that point.
Oh, yeah. This is one I
find very interesting.
I came across this, and nobody
who was selling it had
a clue what it was,
and they knew it was some
kind of propaganda thing.
Allow me to help you.
This is a Russian card, and
it represents the enemy forces
of Germany and Austria, and you
will notice well, let's see.
Germany, Austria, Hungary,
well, how many is that?
And the answer is seven
because we have to have,
in the apocalypse a
beast with seven heads.
And they get that by
having the king of Germany
but also including the
remaining subkings like the king
of Bavaria and the king of
Saxony, and come on work,
we have to get to seven.
But they eventually do.
What are they fighting?
They're fighting
satanic apocalyptic evil,
and here's an interesting
issue for you.
If we are Christian, whoever we
are, and the enemy is Christian,
how do we fight a
crusade against them?
And how we do it is by showing
that, although they claim
to be Christian,
they're really not.
They're really satanic,
and on both sides,
there is a huge literature
proving
that whatever the enemy claims,
they are not really Christian.
For instance, in 1914
the Germans, initially,
worked very hard to say
the British, the French,
they claim to be Christian,
but what they're actually
doing is they're bringing
in all these hundreds
of thousands of Muslim
and Hindu soldiers into
Europe to fight Christians.
They are absolutely fakes.
They're not Christian at all,
and that propaganda
theme lasts precisely
until Germany forms an
alliance with Ottoman Turkey,
and then there's a
collective never mind.
[ Laughter ]
But the other thing they do
is war propaganda to show
that the enemy is not just bad,
not just out of control,
but actively satanic.
A couple of shocking
images follow.
This is from George Bellows
who's probably the greatest
American painter of the age.
He did a series of, basically,
why we fight paintings,
and what you see here is this
supposedly was an incident
in Belgium where there were
many grave German atrocities
where the German soldiers
are using the bodies
of Belgian civilians
as body guards.
You get all the stories
of the mutilation
of Belgians the people in
occupied countries of mass rape,
and this exists on both sides.
And, of course, we have to
make fun of the enemy's claim
to be Christian, so there
we have a nativity scene
with the kings of
Germany, Austria, Hungary,
and the Ottoman Empire and
they're bringing useful shells
and useful things
for the newborn.
It's a parody of
their Christianity.
This is a classic story.
Allegedly, allegedly,
remember this is one
of the most important
stories I will tell you.
In 1915, there was a story
that the Germans had
captured a Canadian officer
at the battle front, and they
had crucified him in front
of his horrified fellow soldiers
on the other side of the line.
That story, as we
say, goes global.
That is a still from a
film which shows the story
of the crucified Canadian,
and that theme runs
through sculpture.
It becomes like a
national story.
Why am I saying that's
so important?
Because after the war,
people felt very widely, hey,
that was a bogus atrocity story.
We don't believe any of
this nonsense anymore.
Don't try and fool
us with that again.
Move the film forward to 1942,
where people come
and we have evidence.
The Germans are rounding
up hundreds
of thousands of Jews in Europe.
They're putting them in
camps and gassing them,
and what a number of
politicians and media people say
in the West is, oh, yeah, is
this another crucified Canadian?
And one reason they are
slow to believe the stories
in 1942 is they think they
don't want to get fooled again.
Oh, and wonderful footnote.
We now know that the
crucified Canadian story was
actually true.
That is from a poster,
talk about global.
It's buy Liberty Bonds.
Why is it in Spanish?
Because it's a poster intended
to raise support
in the Philippines.
We often forget how
global this war was.
I'm sure some of my
colleagues here are going
to be talking about this.
How global was it?
The British used
the Japanese navy
to protect the shores
of Western Canada.
Some of the key naval battles
in the war were fought off the
coast of Chile and Argentina.
There were battles in China.
There are battles in Africa.
This is the Philippines.
What is it?
It's a story of crucifixion.
This is a beauty.
If you want to attract, and this
is going to sound very cynical,
but if you want to
attract attention,
not just do you use an image
of blood, but if you can use,
if you can fit a scantily
clad woman into the picture,
and so many of the
images are like this.
What is wrong with the Germans?
They crucify.
It is a call to honor
American manhood.
Enlist. You're dealing
with a world where even
if people are not
actively Christian,
I'm talking [inaudible]
Christian societies,
they are absolutely soaked
in, what is sometimes called,
diffusive Christianity.
They know the idea of sacrifice.
They know the idea
of crucifixion.
They have some knowledge of the
Bible, even if they only know it
to quote it in mockery.
The idea of sacrifice.
If you are appealing to a kind
of diffusive Christianity,
you do it by using
this kind of imagery.
And the language that emerges
in the war, and, again,
I stress on all sides.
If I was just talking about
the British or the Americans,
this would be very partial,
very inaccurate, on all sides.
And some of the language
that emerges,
it reads so painfully,
in retrospect.
Some of the, probably some of
the worst military commanders
of the war were in
the Italian army,
and they had a very bad
habit of sending, basically,
human wave assaults against
well-fortified Austrian
and German positions.
How did they justify that?
They used a phrase
"necessary holocausts",
and they used the language
of holocaust, sacrifice.
In other words, we
must sacrifice in order
to win victory, and that
sacrificial ideology emerges
in many of the attempts
to justify what, to us,
look like some of the
suicidal and, dare I say,
stupid, acts of the war.
Angels are everywhere
in the war.
Angels have many kinds
of characteristics.
They are what you might
call hallmark angels,
but angels are also
integral to the whole story
of revelation of the apocalypse.
The fact that angel
wings are around us means
that we are close
to the end times.
When soldiers die, you
know, here is a, basically,
a greeting card, and
commemorating a death or angels,
and you have British soldiers
being suckered by these nurses,
and behind them,
what do you have?
A crusader with a cross.
Oh, every army has
reports of visions,
and did the people
themselves see visions?
No. But a friend of a
friend told me about it.
Commonly, the virgin.
Often, Joan of Arc.
The French did a very
interesting range of posters,
basically, having
Joan of Arc appear
and explain why she
was no longer mad
that the British had burned
her, and they were now
on the same side, honestly.
So, this is Joan of Arc
leading the British.
He's very broad minded.
This is the Russian icon
showing the appearance
at Augustavo [phonetic].
Was any country more or
less holy war oriented
than any others?
I would put the Germans and
the Russians at the top,
but the Americans are
very, very close, indeed.
And in every country, even
when governments do not
accept the ideology,
there are clearly mass movements
that are trying to push
for a more religious
orientation.
So, for example in
France, which is as secular
as you get, they have tricolor.
They have the red,
white, and blue,
and there's a mass
movement in the war
to make sure you have the figure
of the sacred heart
restored to the tricolor.
The government says
no, but millions
of French women spend the
war sewing sacred hearts
onto French flags and sending
them to their sons in battle.
Our Lady of the Trenches.
Oh, yeah, and Christ
is everywhere.
This is actually a very
nice journey to Emmaus one,
and it's Easter dawn,
and it's two soldiers
with Christ behind them.
I go through this very quickly.
It's kind of a lengthy story,
but you, everywhere you go
in the war, you get
images of Christ appearing
to German forces, Russian
forces, British forces which,
dare I say, he wouldn't do
if their cause was
not the holy cause.
This is the last march.
This is Christ gathering up
the souls of the German dead
and taking them to Heaven.
I told the story of
the Angel of Mons.
This is an interesting
version alternative to that.
There was a moment in 1915.
We had heavily outnumbered
French force.
It was facing destruction
from the Germans,
and an officer said,
basically, "May the dead arise.
Debout les morts!"
And that meant, I don't care
how badly wounded you are,
pick up a rifle and come fight.
And the story got told
and told and retold.
And in about three tellings,
it was, and the officer said,
"Debout les morts," and
the souls and spirits
of the dead French soldiers came
to fight, and they took weapons,
and they defeated the Germans.
And that story continues as an
ideology of radical nationalism
for the French, for the Germans
in all European countries,
really through the
20's and 30's.
It's a very supernatural idea.
That's the most famous
British soldier
of the war, Raymond Lodge.
You've never heard
of Raymond Lodge.
Raymond Lodge is killed in 1915.
Between 1915 and 1918, his
father undertook a series
of séances in which Raymond
passed on many messages
about the war and the afterlife.
His dad was England's,
probably best known scientist
of the time, a man
called Oliver Lodge,
one of the pioneers
of electromagnetism.
And that book was probably
the British best seller
of the First World War.
All the way through the 19 teens
and the 1920s the churches
are struggling desperately
to take account of this
mediumistic, spiritualist world.
Here's Rudolf Steiner,
enormously influential
in the German mystical world,
and, as I say, he's the one
who supplies these
messages from the beyond.
He supplies mantras.
He supplies sacred
texts, meditative texts
for leading generals
and politicians.
He has a very substantial
role in, actually,
military policy making.
We come to 1917.
In theory, remember I
said the stereotype.
You have all these religious
ideas, and the soldiers go off
to the front and
pretty much realize,
well, that was nonsense.
Let's see if we can
get out of here alive.
Well, no. By 1917, the world
believes that the war has gone
on far longer than
it should have done.
Many nations are starving.
Many nations face disaster.
We know that there are bloodier
and bloodier battles afoot,
and in 1917, apocalyptic
expectation reaches a height.
It has many aspects.
One of the great stories
happens in Fatima in Portugal
where a couple of
peasant children claim
to have had a vision
of the Virgin Mary.
Portugal, at that
time, is very divided
between very strongly
Catholic people and people
who are very strongly
anti-religious, and hundreds
of thousands of both
sides go off
to see the next promised vision.
And the, you know, the
secularists are there
with popcorn, and they're
ready to, you know.
They wrote dreadful things.
And then something happens
that we still don't know what
happened, but, according to most
of the people there, the
sun did something odd.
What they actually say
was, well, the sun came
out of the heavens,
did a pirouette,
and we thought it was going
to crash down on earth.
If you have an explanation on
this, please send it immediately
to the Portuguese government.
They're still trying
to figure it out.
But the vision of Fatima,
basically, sends a message
that the end times are near,
and Catholics, of course,
still celebrate, commemorate
the miracle of Fatima which,
of course, if proceeded
in a vision from,
you probably figured it out
by now, the archangel Michael.
In the fall of 1917, we
have the 400th anniversary
of Luther beginning
the Reformation.
There's a great Luther
celebration
in Wittenberg in Germany.
Good German Protestants,
Lutherans, they're not going
to visions of the
Virgin, and they launch it
into a great celebration
of the coming
of the German Messiah,
Martin Luther.
And it is a very
Messianic occasion.
It is also, by the
way, the first time
within the Lutheran Church
that you get people
actively campaigning
for a radical separation
between Jews and people
of Jewish descent and
Christians in the church
and even the suppression
of the Old Testament
as a Jewish Testament.
It shows how radically
people believe, at this time.
Okay. I told you
that the British
and the French are trying
very hard to prevent the war
in the Middle East
being called a crusade.
Nobody calls it a crusade.
Well, here's a picture
of a British soldier being
represented in a cartoon
at the time, sort of,
as a would be crusader.
In 1917, British Imperial Forces
are advancing fast on Jerusalem,
and the British government is
agonizing over what to do if,
God forbid, they
actually take it.
Because if they actually
take it,
it's going to send
off these Messianic,
crusading ideas around
the world.
And so, they Khaki Crusaders.
Good luck.
And so the general Allenby
works very hard to say, well,
we're going to take the city,
but please, let's not do it
in any way that's going to
send a crusading message.
So, he looks in his calendar.
Is it any kind of symbolic date?
No. We can do it safely.
Okay. But let's be respectful.
We take Jerusalem.
I will walk in, not riding a
horse, to show my humility.
We don't want anything grand.
What's the one mistake he makes?
He asks every Christian for
special dates but doesn't bother
to ask the Jews, and he
takes Jerusalem on Hanukah.
[ Laughter ]
And that is a card
at the time which,
you know, this says it all.
Here's Allenby trying to be
modest and not a crusader.
"And there will come
for Zion a redeemer."
It's comparing Allenby
to Judas Maccabeus.
You see President
Wilson up above,
and you'll see a Zionist
flag up above there.
That is so influential
world-wide,
it sets off apocalyptic,
end times expectation.
Does that have a
practical consequence?
Oh, yeah. The British
government, at this point,
is loaded with very evangelical
people, and it's round
about this time that they say,
well, it's time for the Jews
to return to Jerusalem that they
issued the Balfour Declaration
that is the foundation
of the State of Israel.
I'm certainly not going
to go for much longer
in case people are
panicking, but let me move
on to a couple of, just
couple of points very quickly.
That bizarre picture, 1918.
Well, we've had famine,
death, and war.
What is the other horseman?
Plague. The war kills
10 million people.
The influenza epidemic of
1918 kills probably between 50
and 100 million people.
If you don't believe
the apocalypse is nigh
by this point, you have
not been reading the news,
and expectations run very high.
This is reflected very strongly
in so many of the films that go
around the world,
and if you want
to understand what
ordinary people believed,
ordinary people thought
about the war, look at films.
I will describe three
very quickly.
"Civilization" by Thomas Ince is
about a German soldier,
or, excuse me.
It's a kingdom that is not named
but has the main character
is called Ferdinand,
and it's ruler is a, the
mirror image of a Keizer.
Ferdinand is executed for
refusing to commit atrocities,
and he returns as Christ.
And Christ in a film, one of the
biggest Hollywood films ever,
leads the Keizer
through the battlefield
to show him the atrocities
he's committed.
"Intolerance" is the great
D.W. Griffith film which is
about various aspects of the
violence and conflict in history
which culminates with an
image of the armies fighting
on either side of the Western
front until angels appear
in the sky and bring
in the end times.
And the third film,
the most popular film,
the biggest budget film of
the era, the "Star Wars"
of its day which, of course,
was called "The Four
Horsemen of the Apocalypse".
Bestselling book of the war was
"The Four Horsemen
of the Apocalypse".
This is the film.
If you ever watch it these days,
it actually has the four
horsemen regularly riding
over the battles.
It has the great beast.
It has people reading
the scriptures.
That was the biggest film
ever made up to that point,
the most profitable, made a
star of Rudolph Valentino,
and all we remember
it for today is
that it made a hit of the Tango.
There was more to
it than the Tango.
I can, I can talk about
this at great length.
I could write a book about it.
Oh, yeah, I did, but
my point is this.
When you look at the First World
War, it is very easy to look
at these claims about angels,
apocalypse, Armageddon,
holy war, crusade as if
they are empty propaganda
that is imposed from above.
Governments spend far more time
trying to stop people believing
in that than they do trying to
start them believing in that.
At all levels of society,
you have very intense
religious belief,
often of an extremely
unconventional character, and,
as I say, illustrate that at
any different number of levels.
Final question.
You've heard of holy war,
and there are two things you
can do that are very bad.
One is win it because if you win
a holy war how come everything
isn't perfect?
And losing a holy war,
and if you lose a holy war
that means you did
something wrong.
Maybe, we failed to take account
of the traitors in our midst,
and when we fight it next
time, we're not going
to make that mistake again.
And if you want to understand
European politics from the 1920s
and 1930s, remember this is
after a failed holy
war and crusade.
Thank you very much.
[ Applause ]
