Fields of Blood (56 page)

In the
United States, however, the urban
elite had been appalled by the violence of the French Revolution and used Christianity to promote the social reform that would hold such turbulence at bay.
Lyell’s revelations had caused a brief panic, but most Americans remained convinced by
Newton’s vision of a design in the universe that proved the existence of an intelligent, benign Creator. These more liberal Christians were open to the
Higher Criticism and willing to “christen”
Darwinism, largely because they had not yet fully absorbed its implications. Evolution was not yet the bogey in America that it would become during the 1920s. At this point the liberal elite believed that God had been at work in the process of natural selection and that humanity was gradually evolving to a greater spiritual perfection.
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After the Civil War, demoralized by their failure to resolve the
slavery question, many of the Evangelicals withdrew from public life, realizing that they had marginalized themselves politically.
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Their religion thus became separate from their politics, a private affair—just as the Founders had hoped. Instead of bringing a Christian voice to the great questions of the day, they turned inward, and perhaps because the
Bible had seemed to fail them in the nation’s darkest hour, they became preoccupied with the minutiae of biblical orthodoxy. That retreat was in some ways a positive development. Evangelicals were still staunchly anti-Catholic, and their withdrawal made it easier for Catholic immigrants to be accepted into the American nation, but it also deprived that nation of salutary
criticism. Before the war, preachers had concentrated on the legitimacy of slavery as an institution but had neglected the issue of race. Tragically, they would remain unable to bring the gospel to bear on this major American problem. For a hundred years after the abolition of slavery,
African Americans in the South would continue to suffer segregation, discrimination, and routine
terrorism at the hands of white supremacist mobs, which the local authorities did little to suppress.
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Shaken by the catastrophe of the Civil War, Americans dismantled their military. Europeans meanwhile came to believe that they had discovered a more civilized and sustainable mode of warfare.
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Their model for this supposedly efficient warfare was the
P
russian chancellor
Otto von Bismarck (1815–98), who had invested heavily in railways and telegraph systems and issued his army with new needle guns and steel cannons. In three relatively short, bloodless, but spectacularly successful wars against states that did not have this advanced technology—the
Danish War (1864), the
Austro-Prussian War (1866), and the
Franco-Prussian War (1870)—Bismarck created a united
Germany. Fired by their national myths, the nation-states of Europe now embarked on an arms race, each convinced that it too could fight its way to a unique and glorious destiny. The British writer
I. F. Clarke has shown that between 1871 and 1914, not a single year passed in which a novel or short story about a future catastrophic conflict did not appear in a European country.
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The “Next Great War” was invariably imagined as a terrible but inevitable ordeal, after which the nation would rise to enhanced life. This would not be as easy as they imagined, however. What each power failed to reckon was that when all nations had the same new weapons, none would have an advantage and that Bismarck’s victories were, therefore, not replicable.

As
Lord Acton had predicted, this aggressive
nationalism made life even more problematic for minorities. In the nation-state,
Jews increasingly appeared chronically rootless and cosmopolitan. There were pogroms in Russia, condoned and even orchestrated by the government;
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in Germany anti-Semitic parties began to emerge in the 1880s; and in 1893
Captain Alfred Dreyfus, the only Jewish officer on the French General Staff, was convicted on false evidence of transmitting secrets to Germany. Many were convinced that Dreyfus was part of an international Jewish conspiracy that was plotting to weaken
France. The new
anti-Semitism
drew on centuries of Christian prejudice but gave it a scientific rationale.
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Anti-Semites claimed that
Jews did not fit the biological and genetic profile of the Volk, and some argued that they should be eliminated, in the same way as modern medicine cut out a cancer.

It was perhaps inevitable that, correctly anticipating an anti-Semitic disaster, some Jews would develop their own national mythology. Loosely based on the Bible,
Zionism campaigned for a safe haven for Jews in their ancestral land, but Zionists also drew on varied currents of modern thought—
Marxism,
secularism,
capitalism, and
colonialism. Some wanted to build a socialist utopia in the Land of
Israel. The earliest and most vociferous Zionists were atheists who were convinced that religious Judaism had made Jews passive in the face of persecution: they horrified
Orthodox Jews, who insisted that only the Messiah could lead Jews back to the
Promised Land. Like most forms of
nationalism, though, Zionism had a religiosity of its own. Zionists who settled in agricultural colonies in
Palestine were called
chalutzim,
a term with biblical connotations of salvation, liberation, and rescue; they described their agricultural work as
avodah,
which in the Bible had referred to temple worship; and their migration to Palestine was
aliyah,
a spiritual “ascent.” Their slogan, however, was “A land without a people for a people without a land.”
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Like other European colonists, they believed that an endangered people had a natural right to settle in “empty” land. But the land was not empty. Palestinians had their own dreams of national independence, and when the Zionists finally persuaded the international community to create the State of Israel in 1948, the Palestinians became a rootless, endangered people without a land of their own in a world that now defined itself by nationality.

The
First World War (1914–18) destroyed a generation of young men, yet many Europeans initially embraced it with an enthusiasm that shows how difficult it is to resist those emotions long activated by religion and now by nationalism, the new faith of the secular age. In August 1914 the cities of Europe were swept up in a festival atmosphere that, like the rituals of the
French Revolution, made the “imaginary community” of the nation an incarnate reality. Total strangers gazed enraptured into each other’s eyes; estranged friends embraced, feeling a luminous cohesion that defied rational explanation. The euphoria has been dismissed as an
outbreak of communal madness, but those who experienced it said that it was the “most deeply lived” event of their lives. It has also been called an “escape from
modernity” since it sprang from a profound discontent with industrialized society, in which people were defined and classified by their function and everything was subordinated to a purely material end.
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The declaration of war seemed a summons to the nobility of altruism and self-sacrifice that gave life meaning.

“All differences of class, rank and language were flooded over at that moment by the rushing feeling of fraternity,” the Austrian writer
Stefan Zweig recalled. Everyone “had been incorporated into the mass, he was a part of the people, and his person, his hitherto unnoticed person, had been given meaning.… Each one was called upon to cast his infinitesimal self into the glowing mass and there to be purified of all selfishness.”
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There was a yearning to cast aside an identity that felt too lonely, narrow, and confining and to escape from the privacy imposed by modernity.
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An individual “was no longer the isolated person of former times,” said Zweig.
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“No more are we what we had been so long: alone,” declared
Marianne Weber.
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A new era seemed to have begun. “People realized that they
were
equal,” remembered
Rudolf Binding. “No one wished to count for more than anyone else.… It was like a rebirth.”
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It “transported the body as well as the soul into a trance-like, enormously enhanced love of life and existence,” recalled
Carl Zuckmayer, “a joy of participation, of living-along-with, a feeling, even, of grace.”
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The triviality of the “petty, aimless lounging life of peacetime is done with,”
Franz Schauwecker exulted.
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For the first time, said
Konrad Haenisch, a lifelong critic of German
capitalism, he could join “with a full heart, a clean conscience, and without a sense of treason in the sweeping, stormy song: Deutschland, Deutschland über alles.”
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In the trenches, however, volunteers discovered that far from escaping
industrialization, they were entirely dominated by it. Like a sinister religious revelation, the war laid bare the material, technological, and mechanical reality that twentieth-century civilization concealed.
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“Everything becomes machine-like,” one soldier wrote; “one might almost term the war an industry of professionalized human slaughter.”
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It is a telling indictment of the loneliness and segmentation of modern society that many of these soldiers never forgot the profound sense of community they experienced in the trenches. “There enwrapped us, never to be lost, the sudden comradeship of the ranks,”
T. E. Lawrence
recalled.
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One of
Simone de Beauvoir’s professors “discovered the joys of comradeship which overcome all social barriers” and determined never again to submit to “the segregation which in civil life separates young middle-class men from working chaps … something he felt like a personal mutilation.”
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Many found that they could not even hate the invisible enemy and were shocked when they finally saw the people they had been shelling for months. “They were showing themselves to us as they really were, men and soldiers like us, in uniform like us,” an Italian soldier explained.
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