Holy Warriors

by Jonathan Phillips

  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.61

  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.62

  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:

  Your son and my son, clean as new swords

  Your man and my man, now the Lord’s

  Your son and my son for the Great Crusade

  With the banner of Christ over them—our new knights made.63

  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:

  Would-be protector of the Muslim power,

  And Over-Lord of the whole rolling world,

  Ambition-led, o’er all men else he’d tower;

  But grasping all, will from his Throne be hurled.64

  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.”65

  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).66 In March 1918 the Department of Information released a forty-minute film called The New Crusaders: With the British Forces on the Palestine Front.67 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.68 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.”69 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.70 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.”71

  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.”72 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.

  In the aftermath of the campaign this would be heavily reinforced. One of Allenby’s troops, the actor Vivian Gilbert, embarked upon a North American lecture tour in 1923 and published his account of the war entitled The Romance of the Last Crusade: With Allenby to Jerusalem. To modern eyes this is a peculiar blend of a travelogue populated by music-hall cockneys, combined with genuinely harrowing descriptions of warfare, particularly the terrible moment when the legs of Gilbert’s servant were blown off, leaving his master to comfort the dying man and to compose a letter home to his family.73 Gilbert was certain that he had taken part in something with a medieval analogue: “were we not descendants of those same crusaders?” He imagined sharing identical hardships in the same lands as his forefathers; after the capture of Jerusalem he concluded: “In all, ten crusades [were] organised and equipped to free the Holy City, only two were really successful—the first led by Godfrey of Bouillon, and the last under Edmund Allenby.”74 Allenby, however, continued to try his utmost to dislodge the connection; in 1933 he argued: “Our campaign has been called ‘The Last Crusade.’ It was not a crusade. There is still a current idea that our object was to deliver Jerusalem from the Muslims. Not so. Many of my soldi
ers were Muslims. The importance of Jerusalem lay in its strategic position. There was no religious impulse in this campaign.”75 Such protestations aside, the appellation had stuck and, as we will see below, percolated into the Muslim world as well.

  In the aftermath of the war the word “crusade” sometimes came to take on a generic meaning for the conflict as a whole. Perhaps the best example of this was the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Westminster Abbey, created in 1920 and adorned with a medieval sword donated by King George V. The committee in charge of the burial fretted over public interpretation of the weapon and, as they feared, the popular press duly labeled it a “crusader’s sword.” In 1923 the Order of Crusaders, a group imitating the Military Orders, held a service in the abbey and, with the Duke of York among their number, laid a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and honored him as their Principal Knight and Supreme Head. Other memorials made reference to the notion of crusading: British Imperial war cemeteries were adorned with a Cross of Sacrifice, a design viewed “as a mark of symbolism of the present crusade” by the Imperial War Graves Commission architects; a significant number of local commemorative windows and statues made reference to the war in comparable terms. Images of King Richard—sometimes alongside Saint Louis of France to symbolize the Anglo–French alliance—and Saint George were used in places as diverse as Eton Chapel and the parish church of Hadlow in Kent. Crusading was defined as “freedom, mercy, righteousness and truth” in the fine memorial The Spirit of the Crusaders erected at Paisley, Scotland; this recognized a kindred spirit with the medieval warriors, although it noted that the ideal the contemporary soldiers strove for was similar, rather than identical, to that of their predecessors.76

  The Great War had brought horror on a scale unprecedented in human history and, in tandem with the stirring rhetoric, there was understandable criticism of the terrible losses and suffering. Again, one can find references to crusading, although in the case noted here, a specific parallel was drawn between the Children’s Crusade and the slaughter of young soldiers. Archibald Jamieson wrote a pamphlet called Holy Wars in the Light of Today and observed of the Children’s Crusade: “rightly do we condemn the ‘hallucination’ of 1212, why, therefore, did we recruit the boy-life of our nation, and organise our youth in school and church for military purposes in the sacred name of ‘patriotism’?”77 Siegfried Sassoon was less than impressed with the use of crusading motifs: “Bellicose politicians and journalists were fond of using the word crusade. But the chivalry (which I have seen in epitome at the Army School) had been mown down and blown up in July, August and September and its remnant finished the year’s crusade in a morass of torment and frustration.”78

  During World War II fewer links were made between crusading imagery and contemporary warfare. In the first instance, the utter carnage of World War I had, to a great extent, shattered any notions of warfare as a chivalric exercise. Between 1939 and 1945, genocides, mass civilian casualties, and the displacement of millions moved the scale of the conflict even further beyond previous reference points. The idea of the crusade did, however, appear on occasion, sometimes in a positive sense, on other occasions, most certainly not. Probably the best example of the former was General Dwight Eisenhower’s speech on D-Day, June 1944, when the Order of the Day read: “Soldiers, sailors and airmen of the Allied Expeditionary Forces, you are about to embark upon a Great Crusade, towards which you have striven these many months. . . . Let us beseech the blessing of Almighty God upon this great and noble undertaking;” his account of the war was entitled Crusade in Europe (1948). War memorials did not look to the medieval period as they had done decades before, although one lasting edifice from the aftermath of the war, the ultramodernist Coventry Cathedral, was envisaged to represent a form of crusading ideology, albeit one meant to gather people together and to heal the wounds of war. Basil Spence wrote: “The Chapel’s shape represents Christian Unity; in elevation it is shaped like a Crusader’s tent, as Christian unity is a modern Crusade.”79 For the American writer Kurt Vonnegut, however, the connection to be drawn with the crusades was negative; the subtitle of his bestselling Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) is The Children’s Crusade: A Duty Dance with Death, an ironic recognition of the youth of so many of the U.S. troops sent to Europe. As one character remarked when his new recruits arrived: “My God, it’s the Children’s Crusade.”80

  The Allies’ wartime approach was in contrast to that of the Germans. While the latter had used elements of imagery derived from the crusades in World War I, the Nazis extended this substantially, albeit in a strictly secular and ritualistic form and usually in connection with the Teutonic Knights, who, as we saw earlier, had conquered large areas of northern Europe. In Mein Kampf Hitler urged Germans once again to set out “on the march of the Teutonic Knights of old” to Russia.81 SS leader Heinrich Himmler was fixated on the ceremonies and hierarchy of this venerable organization and he drew links between the SS and the history of the Teutonic Knights in various chambers of his castle of Wewelsberg, along with other spurious ties to, for example, the legend of the Holy Grail. Fortunately, his plans for the castle were never completed and the surviving parts of the fortress now house a museum to the bishops of Paderborn.

  CRUSADING AS A METAPHOR

  With the revival of the idea of crusading as a force for good during the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, the word “crusade,” with its complex legacy of moral justification, was taken out of a military and cultural context and also became used in a looser, more metaphorical sense, albeit one that could have a high profile. To give but two examples: the Women’s Temperance Crusade in the United States during the 1870s and the Jarrow Crusade in England of 1936. Both movements closely engaged with the language and imagery of the medieval period. In the case of the former, the religious zeal of its advocates was easily comparable to the medieval preachers. A founder of the Temperance Crusade, Mrs. Mildred Carpenter, wrote of “a fight against organized evil” and argued passionately that “it is a glorious heritage to leave our children, to be able to say ‘I was a crusader in Washington Court House.’” She described one of the preachers as an “Apostle of Temperance,” his followers as being “aflame with the Master’s zeal,” and the whole episode as “a whirlwind of the Lord.”82

  The Jarrow Crusade has some interesting parallels with medieval crusading, not least because it had a sense of a pilgrimage—although in this case the destination was a very secular one: the Houses of Parliament, rather than the Holy Sepulchre. The march was a protest against the government’s closure of the local shipyard and the refusal to construct a new steelworks; it was designed to create a wave of popular support across the country and to save the jobs of the people of Jarrow. It began with a nonreligious character but the marshal of the march decided the metaphor was appropriate and photographs of the campaign show people carrying banners proclaiming “Jarrow Crusade.” Once underway a religious dimension started to emerge because the “crusaders” received the blessing of the bishop of Jarrow and many Church of England clergy offered their backing too.83 By a neat irony, five years earlier Pope Pius XI had linked crusading and unemployment with a call to Catholics to ameliorate the effects of this rising problem.84 Given Spanish General Franco’s almost exactly contemporaneous use of crusading—with a far more deadly purpose—the preferred term of one Tyneside newspaper of “pilgrimage” may have been more apt. In the event, in spite of considerable publicity and a rousing reception on their return home, the marchers entirely failed in their purpose.85

  ISLAM, JIHAD, AND THE CRUSADES

  While an idea of crusading—in real or metaphorical form—has survived and, in some respects, flourished in the West over the last two hundred years, its status and perception in the Muslim world has been less clear-cut: sometimes almost invisible, at others, a stridently proclaimed byword for hatred and oppression. As we have seen, some in the West, regardless of accuracy, have looked to the crusading era for parallels to their own situation; Muslims
too have sought exemplars or to legitimize their actions. Comparisons to Saladin often provide our most illuminating insight into many contemporary understandings of the past and also the agendas of the present day. As the victor at Hattin, the man who recovered Jerusalem for Islam and then resisted the might of Richard the Lionheart and the Third Crusade, he is an alluring figure across the Muslim world. Saladin’s achievements have been matched to the aspirations of a remarkable variety of individuals, countries, and causes. His legacy has been interpreted and appropriated by figures as diverse as the pan-Arabist President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, the totalitarian dictatorship of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, and the Islamist Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda organization.

  Muslim relations with the West, from an Arab nationalist or an Islamist perspective, have had a disturbing tone over the last two hundred years or so. Prior to this, in the form of the Maghrebi Muslims, the Mamluks, and most especially the Ottomans, Muslim rulers had been of comparable, or greater, power than many of their western contemporaries. In contrast, beginning with Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798 and, the following year, the defeat of Mysore, the last important Muslim barrier to British power in India, the next 120 years saw the majority of the Islamic community (umma) brought under the direct control, or close authority, of the West.86 Only Yemen, Afghanistan, the Hejaz region (western edge of the Arabian Peninsula), and central Arabia remained free; Iran had a form of independence and Ataturk founded the state of Turkey. After World War I the Middle East was divided between the British and the French, and western initiatives created conditions for the emergence of the state of Israel. From the 1920s to the 1960s, the majority of Muslim societies escaped from direct western rule (except Mongolia and central Asia, which had to wait for the fall of the USSR in the 1990s), although western intervention has been prominent in the political affairs of Iran, Pakistan, Egypt, and Algeria, among others. Furthermore, the United States continues to influence the countries of the Arabian Peninsula, home to the sacred cities of Mecca and Medina. Russian involvement in Afghanistan and Chechnya, the British and the French in Egypt, and the British and U.S. invasion of Iraq have represented acts of aggression by the West and in the course of these struggles many thousands of Muslims have died.