Holy Warriors (57 page)

Britain made some use of crusading imagery during the nineteenth century; hardly a surprise given the impetus from literature, drama, and art we noted above. Not every conflict, however, was appropriate to such ideas, or produced a significant outburst of crusade-connected comment. The Crimean War (1854–56), fought between Russia and a coalition of the Ottomans, British, French, and the kingdom of Sardinia, was one such scenario. It was a matter of some irony that the “crusading” lands of Britain (itself Protestant, of course) and France fought on behalf of the Muslim Ottomans against another Christian power, Russia.
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By contrast, events in Bulgaria during May 1876 produced a surge of crusading rhetoric. The Ottomans suppressed an insurrection in which perhaps twelve thousand Christians were slaughtered. In spite of this Prime Minister Disraeli continued his alliance with Turkey and in doing so he provoked the anger of many, including the former prime minister and recently resigned leader of the Liberal Party, William Gladstone. The latter wrote a pamphlet entitled
Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East
, which sold 200,000 copies. “Vindictive and ill-written—in that respect, of all the Bulgarian horrors, perhaps the greatest,” was Disraeli’s tart response.
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In contrast, Gladstone’s magnificent rhetoric condemned “a murderous harvest from soil soaked and reeking with blood.” He claimed that the Turks were responsible for scenes “at which Hell itself might blush,” and he concluded that “no Government ever has so sinned; none has proved itself so incorrigible or, which is the same, so impotent for reformation.”
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A group of clerics and men of letters formed the Eastern Question Association and held over five hundred public meetings to deplore the moral detachment of the government. High Churchmen and Catholics alike thundered against the government policy. William Stead, a northern newspaper editor, felt the “clear call of God’s voice” and did much to inflame the agitation. He wrote that the crusades were no longer an enigma to him; the historian Edward Freeman was accused of “crusading bluster” and several contemporaries such as the MPs Joseph Chamberlain, John Bright, and George Russell (nephew of former prime minister John Russell) described Gladstone’s efforts as a crusade.
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A
young Oscar Wilde, then at Oxford, wrote a sonnet on the massacres and lamented “Over thy Cross the Crescent moon I see” and urged Christ to return “Lest Mahomet be crowned instead of thee.”
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For crusading—a creation of the papacy—to survive in a Protestant country required more than an occasional resonance in foreign affairs. There was, of course, a substantial Catholic minority in Britain, but the perceived tie between crusading and Rome was partially dismantled through the cult of Christian militarism. In the course of the nineteenth century the manly virtues of fighting to extend the empire were linked to Protestant teaching—the notion of “muscular Christianity” so integral to the English public school system. Warrior-saints were important in the teachings of the Church, and the heroes of history—including Richard the Lionheart—became popular material for stories of great deeds; hymns such as “Onward, Christian Soldiers,” composed in 1864, set out a similar message.
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The most obvious contemporary candidate to be labeled a crusader was General Charles Gordon, killed by Muslims at Khartoum in 1885. Even before his death he had been identified as a Christian knight and his “martyrdom” only confirmed this. In 1909 he featured in a book,
Heroes of Modern Crusades: True Stories of the Undaunted Chivalry of Champions of the DownTrodden in Many Lands
. Links between the spirit of the empire and the higher purpose of the crusades were explicitly set out by Professor J. A. Cramb of the University of London in 1909: “This ideal of Imperial Britain—to bring to the peoples of the earth beneath her sway the larger freedom and the higher justice—the world has known none fairer, none more exalted, since that for which Godfrey and Richard fought, for which Barbarossa and St Louis died.”
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When it came to World War I, it was almost inevitable that the emotive pull of a crusade came to form a part (and one must keep a due perspective on this) of the Allies’ propaganda effort, although the Germans made a particular play on holy war too. In spite of the apparent paradox of Anglican clergy using the ideology of Catholic holy war, several churchmen wholeheartedly adopted the language of crusading. Presumably they felt that the moral force of their case was an appropriate parallel to that of the medieval age and this, combined with its demonstrable currency in popular and political culture over the previous hundred years, meant that it was a potent and recognizable theme.
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Lord Halifax called for a formal declaration of holy war against Germany,
and Anglican clergy such as the bishop of London spoke of “a great crusade . . . to save the world.” Prime Minister David Lloyd George made a speech at Conway in May 1916 in which he claimed men were flocking to join “a great crusade” for justice and right and his collected speeches were entitled
The Great Crusade
. Others drew parallels of martyrdom and compared the sacrifice and the fears of soldiers leaving their families to those of the medieval crusaders. A young Harold Macmillan, future prime minister, fighting at Ypres in May 1916, described both the devastation of war and “the thrill of battle;” he reminded the reader (his mother) that it was easy to lose sight of the moral and spiritual strength of the Allies: “Many of us could never stand the strain and endure the horrors which we see every day, if we did not feel that this was more than a war—a Crusade. I never see a man killed but think of him as a martyr. All the men (tho’ they could not express it in words) have the same conviction—that our cause is right and certain in the end to triumph. And because of this unexpected and almost unconscious faith, our allied armies have a superiority in morale which will be (some day) the deciding factor.”
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Austen Chamberlain, then president of the Liberal Unionist Association, sketched out a detailed concept of the crusading cause, covering chivalry, morality, justice, and economic and political advantage: “[We should be wrong] if we thought we are merely embarked in a chivalrous crusade on behalf of another nation, without our interests being engaged . . . it is not for Belgium only we are fighting. It is not merely a crusade for right and for law against wrong and brute force—though it is all of that—but it is a struggle for the vital interests of this country.”
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Aside from directly invoking God, these points are all shared with the medieval crusades and represent an idealized, secular version of its forerunner.

Other countries employed the crusading theme too. When the Americans entered the war their troops were led by General John “Black Jack” Pershing and the first official government war picture, filmed by the U.S. Signal Corps as a report of his activities, was titled
Pershing’s Crusaders
. The advertisement showed the general riding at the head of his troops with the Stars and Stripes fluttering beside him; in the background ride two ghostly medieval crusaders, both clearly bearing the cross upon their shields as they watch over the American troops.
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In France, perhaps unsurprisingly, the idea was invoked as well: one recruiting poster proclaimed:
“Pour achever la croisade au droit”
(“To finish
the crusade for right”); Germany also called upon a medieval and crusading past, and victory over the Poles in August 1914 was seen as revenge for the defeat of the Teutonic Knights at the Battle of Tannenberg in 1410. The Germans created a massive memorial on the battlefield and this came to be the burial place of the revered German commander of the day, General Paul von Hindenburg, who was depicted as a medieval knight. In later decades Adolf Hitler and the Nazis adopted these concepts and staged nationalist ceremonies at the site.
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Poetry, such an integral part of the public conduct of World War I, made reference to the crusades. The Irish poet Katharine Tynan believed in the cause:

Frederick Orde Ward, St. John Adcock, and Gordon Alchin all composed poems with crusading themes, with the third of these authors included in the very popular anthology
The Muse in Arms
. Some poetry criticized the Germans, rather than simply extolling the virtues of the Allied troops; an idea that can be found beyond the leading poets of the age and among schoolchildren too. In June 1916 a pupil at the prestigious Charterhouse school compared the nobility and valor of Godfrey of Bouillon with the ambitions of the kaiser in the East:

Probably the most famous poet to invoke crusading imagery, albeit in a letter rather than verse, was Rupert Brooke, who died of blood poisoning in April 1915 as he traveled to Gallipoli. In a somewhat naive expression of enthusiasm, he wrote to a friend: “This is probably the first letter you ever got from a crusader. The early crusaders were very jolly people. I’ve been reading
about them. They set out to slay the Turks and very finely they did it when they met them.”
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In the public perception, by far the most appropriate episode to be clothed in crusading imagery was General Edmund Allenby’s Palestine campaign, which culminated in the recovery of Jerusalem on December 9, 1917. A famous
Punch
cartoon showed Richard the Lionheart gazing at Jerusalem with the caption “At last my dreams come true;” a reference to the king’s failed attempts to take the city on the Third Crusade (1189–92).
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In March 1918 the Department of Information released a forty-minute film called
The New Crusaders: With the British Forces on the Palestine Front.
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Victory in the Near East provided a real opportunity to celebrate an Allied success and to distract public attention from domestic economic problems and the horrors of the Western Front. Officials sensed a chance to play upon the “sentimental, romantic and religious” connections of the Holy Land; the director of government propaganda was the thriller writer John Buchan, no less. Yet in spite of this seemingly propitious moment there were compelling reasons not to stress the “Last Crusade” theme too heavily. Britain’s nearest ally in the region was the Muslim ruler of the Hejaz, and panicked officials insisted how utterly “ill-advised” it would be to label the campaign a crusade. Allenby himself was acutely aware of this sensitivity because some of his troops were Muslims who refused to fight their coreligionists.
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Even more serious, perhaps, was the legacy of German encouragement for the proclamation of a jihad against the British and their allies, an effort to arouse a holy war across India and the Middle East. As we will see below, this was largely a failure, but it remained, in theory at least, a terrifying prospect. In consequence of these concerns the Department of Information issued a D notice to the press restricting coverage due to national security concerns on November 15, 1917: “The attention of the Press is again drawn to the undesirability of publishing any article, paragraph or picture suggesting that military operations against Turkey are in any sense a Holy War, a modern Crusade, or have anything whatever to do with religious questions. The British Empire is said to contain 100 million Muhammadan subjects of the king and it is obviously mischievous to suggest that our quarrel with Turkey is one between Christianity and Islam.”
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From an official perspective, therefore, a crusading comparison was erased.

Once Allenby had secured Jerusalem there was a need to strike a balance
between a military triumph and the wider political and religious agenda; this explains Allenby’s modest entrance into the city. He marched in through the Jaffa Gate—a carefully considered contrast to the staged splendor of Kaiser Wilhelm II’s arrival on horseback through a special breach in the walls in 1898. Allenby’s approach was meant to highlight the kaiser’s immense arrogance rather than trumpet an act of Christian symbolism. The general emphasized free access to Jerusalem for all faiths and showed overt respect to Muslim interests; perhaps, in part, as a way of trying to soften the impact of the Balfour Declaration (November 2, 1917), which marked a major step toward the creation of a Zionist state, Israel.
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The press drew parallels with a metaphorical crusade against the Germans, rather than the Muslims: “In its essence it is a vindication of Christianity. At a moment when Christendom is torn by strife, let loose through the apostate ambitions of those who have returned in practice to the sanguinary worship of their ‘Old German God,’ it stands forth as a sign that the righteousness and justice that are the soul of Christian ethics guide Christian victors even in the flush of triumph.”
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Yet the more obvious ties to the medieval age, combined with a sense of national pride, soon surfaced as well: “During the British occupation of Palestine we have been very sedulous in considering the feelings of others . . . some have wondered whether we had any religion of our own. This Easter in Jerusalem has been the answer. The British Army has celebrated the greatest festival of the Church in a place where the English under arms have never before prayed at Easter. King Richard never reached the Holy City but King George’s men communicated and sang the Easter hymns.”
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For the troops in Palestine it seems that a sense of biblical culture rather than a crusading ethos drew them onward, but in the wider popular memory the label of a crusade became firmly attached.