4 - Faith in the trenches: Catholic battlefield piety during the Great War

Summary

In the early phase of the war, Constantin Schneider, an Austro-Hungarian infantry officer with the 8th Division, 4th Army, noted in his diary a brief religious scene that made a strong impression in his memory. After the division's “baptism of fire” near the town of Belz in Galicia in August 1914, Schneider observed a group of Austro-Hungarian soldiers praying together: “On a tree near a small meadow hung a squalid picture of a saint. Here the men crowded together and murmured prayers. Since the first battle, did the men become God-fearing, or from belief did a secret power actually spring forth that was more powerful than death?” Schneider never answered the question, but he touched on important parts of religious faith: for some soldiers, the experience of battle and its brush with existential chaos made them discover (or rediscover) religious feelings. In many instances, soldiers’ preexisting religious faith helped them to cope with the horrors of battle. Schneider did not mention, however, that combat also caused soldiers to abandon their religious faith – a subject that for many Great War histories is the sole way of representing religious believers’ reactions to industrial warfare.

Much ink has already been spilled on the topic of disenchantment. Contrary to believers’ stereotypes about the rush to religion during time of war, there certainly were atheists in foxholes, and moreover, it was precisely the encounter with industrialized mass carnage that made some religious believers abandon their religious faith. The archetypal hellish landscape of the Western Front served as the potent symbol of a loss of faith, the shattered illusions of the pre-1914 world. The English artist Paul Nash succinctly described his impressions of the trench setting: “No pen or drawing can convey this country – the normal setting of the battles taking place day and night, month after month.