This year, we are of course commemorating the centennial of the First World War, and specifically the titanic battles of Verdun and the Somme. My 2014 book The Great and Holy War discusses the religious aspects of the war, but one thing that really struck me about that theme was the very large range of behaviors that I genuinely did not know how to classify as religious or not. That brings me to one wonderful source that still remains woefully under-studied in the English-speaking world.
On all sides, soldiers followed what Paul Fussell has termed “a plethora of very un-modern superstitions, talismans, wonders, miracles, relics, legends, and rumors.” In the words of frontline officer Marc Bloch—later to become one of France’s greatest historians—“The prevailing opinion in the trenches was that anything might be true, except what was printed.”
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