Angel of Mons
What should we think of the First World War? My impression is that its finest advocates on the English and French side saw it primarily as a spiritual struggle, between (the remnants of) Christendom and (incipient) paganism. By ‘finest advocates’ I mean men who were impressive by a combination of faith, intelligence, a sense of what Europe had been and could be again, and an understanding of how ideas mould history: such men as Chesterton and Maritain, who both supported the war. But were they deluded? Or were there any men of similar calibre on the other side who would have offered an equally high-minded justification for their side? Maybe Notburga can tell us how the German and Austrian bishops spoke of the war at the time?
All that you hoped for, all you had you gave
To save mankind, yourselves you scorned to save.
True or false?
March 2, 2012 at 1:11 am
Beneath the shadow of the Second World War it seems difficult to understand how the epithets “Great War for Civilisation” or “War to End all Wars” could be applied to the 1914-18 conflict. It seems hard to see how the Kaiser could be such a terrible prospect when he is compared to Hitler. But then one wonders, given what the Germans did in the thirties and forties, how far did they have it in them already in 1914? Then one wonders how far we had it in us in 1914 or 1930 and how far the example of Germany turned us against it and made us forget how much similarity there was. I have quoted before on this blog Christopher Dawson’s words in 1940:
“[W]e have the hard task of carrying on simultaneously a war on two fronts. We have to oppose, by arms, the aggression of the external enemy, and at the same time to resist the enemy within – the growth in our society of the evil power we are fighting against. And this second war is the more dangerous of the two, since it may be lost by victory as well as by defeat, and the very fact that we are driven to identify the evil with that manifestation of it that threatens our national existence, tends to blind us to the more insidious tendencies in the same direction that are to be found in our own social order. The disintegration of Western culture under the moral and economic strain of war is not a danger that can be lightly dismissed. Nor can it be accepted by Christians in the same spirit in which they accepted the fall of the Roman Empire. For that was an external disaster that left the sources of spiritual vitality unimpaired, while this is a spiritual catastrophe which strikes directly at the moral foundations of our society, and destroys not the outward form of civilisation but the very soul of man which is the beginning and end of all human culture.”
Because we bombed Dresden and Hiroshima and allied ourselves with Stalin we surrendered our right to apply the epithets “Great War for Civilisation” or “War to End all Wars” to the 1939-1945 conflict and in doing so we failed to exorcise the growth in our society of the evil power we were fighting against. If it is true that the regime of Hitler lurked inside the Germany of 1914 (and in a way this was what Belloc was arguing) then the 1914-1918 war was worth fighting with the zeal he demanded. It seems to me there is something uniquely pathological about the Prussian State, about the first Protestant State, the first post Constantinian state to openly and unapologetically reject moral restraint and make its own power the absolute good, the successor to the Teutonic Knights who were willing to fight and die to prevent the conversion of the Lithuanians. Dom Gueranger saw the evil long before either of the world wars. In his praise of St Boniface he remarked,
“At the sight of thy works, and remembering the great popes and magnificent princes, whose glory is indeed derived from thee, our admiration equals our gratitude. But pardon us, dear saint, if the thought of those grand centuries of yore, so far removed, alas, from these our days, should mingle sadness with our joy. Viewed in the light of thy holy policy and its results, o glorious precursor of the confederation of Christian nations, how we must bewail the fatal errors of those princes and statesmen, so renowned in the seventeenth century, and so foolishly admired by a world whose ruin they were hastening! For, by the isolation of Catholic nations from one another, the ties that bound them to the Vicar of Christ became loosened: princes, forgetful of their true position as representatives of the divine King, made friends with heresy, in order to assert their independence of Rome. or to lower one another’s power. Therefore Christendom is no more. Upon its ruins, like a woful mimicry of the Holy Empire, Protestantism has raised its false evangelical empire, formed of nought but encroachments, and tracing its recognized origin to the apostasy of that felon knight Albert of Brandenburg.The complicities that rendered such a thing possible have received their chastisement. May God’s justice be satisfied at last! O Boniface, cry out with us unto the God of armies for mercy. Raise up in the Church servants of Christ, powerful in word and work, as thou wast. Save France from anarchy; and restore to Germany a right appreciation of true greatness, together with the faith of her ancient days.”
This was what Belloc hoped God was doing in 1914-18. But then we failed to remain true to the ideals that might have justified that war when the issue came into the open twenty-five years later. Tolkien’s comments about how the Lord of the Rings would have ended had it been an allegory of the Second World War are very instructive.
“The real war does not resemble the legendary war in its process or its conclusion. If it had inspired or directed the development of the legend, then certainly the Ring would have been seized and used against Sauron; he would not have been annihilated but enslaved, and Barad-dûr would not have been destroyed but occupied. Saruman, failing to get possession of the Ring, would in the confusion and treacheries of the time have found in Mordor the missing links in his own researches into Ring-lore, and before long he would have made a Great Ring of his own with which to challenge the self-styled Ruler of Middle-earth. In that conflict both sides would have held hobbits in hatred and contempt: they would not long have survived even as slaves.”
This is the world in which we live. The Culture of Death represents the triumph of the evil power we were fighting against clothed in the forms of Democracy. The dictatorial form of the evil in 1939-1945 was only one aspect of the evil. The Leviathan state that creates ‘gay marriage’ and experiments on unborn children asserts no lesser prerogatives than those claimed by National Socialism. The fact that it justifies them through elected representative bodies means that it has to act more slowly and prepare the ground more carefully but it also means society’s complicity is much worse and its corruption more total. Who knows what might have been had we eschewed the murder of civilians and followed up the destruction of Nazism with the destruction of the Soviet Union but Tolkien elsewhere said the conclusion of his actual work represented “the re-establishment of an effective Holy Roman Empire with its seat in Rome”. For Belloc, the Augustan Roman republican, the alliance of Britain, France and the United States in the crushing of both heads of the Hegelian monster could have had no greater conclusion.
March 2, 2012 at 3:18 pm
“It seems to me there is something uniquely pathological about the Prussian State, about the first Protestant State, the first post Constantinian state to openly and apologetically reject moral restraint and make its own power the absolute good, the successor to the Teutonic Knights who were willing to fight and die to prevent the conversion of the Lithuanians.”
Presumably that should be ‘unapologetically’? Are you thinking of a specific declaration? Or of Frederick the Great and Bismarck in general?
March 2, 2012 at 3:33 pm
Woops! yes unapologetically…..quick edit. I am thinking of the actions of Prussia beginning with the invasion of Silesia in 1740 and climaxing in the naval build-up at the beginning of the twentieth century which clearly had no other purpose than massive non-defensive conquest from other supposedly Christian nations (and on the ideological side the idea that the Prussian state was in fact, rather unexpectedly, God).