Symes - Medieval Battlefields and National Narratives, 1830-1918.pdf

from Myth, Memory, and the First World War in Scotland: The Legacy of Bannockburn, ed. Gill Plain (Lewisburg: Bucknell, 2016) Carol Symes 5 Medieval Battleields and National Narratives, 1830–1918 BY THE TIME THE SIX HUNDREDTH ANNIVERSARY OF 83 Bannockburn was observed on 24 June 1914, the commemoration of landmark medieval battles had become an established and heavily freighted practice in modern Europe. The reasons for this are bound up with the growing prestige accorded to medieval precedents in the framing of national narratives during the nineteenth century—regardless of whether those narratives were intended to bolster the sovereignty of existing states or sought to advance the causes of stateless groups seeking autonomy. In either case, locating a “decisive” battle in the medieval past established a point of origin. The purpose of this chapter is to provide a European context for Bannockburn’s sexcentenary by placing it within this wider culture of competitive commemoration. In doing so, my argument reaches back to the paradigm-shifting creation of the kingdom of Belgium (1830–1831) as well as to the boundary-shifting uniication of Germany and the ensuing Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871). It considers the signiicance attached to medieval battles that became rallying points for nationalist and separatist movements, and goes on to sketch the ways that some medieval battlegrounds were reanimated during the Great War itself, when commemoration took on new and urgent meanings. Finally, this chapter suggests that the Great War itself 16_504_Plain.indb 83 8/11/16 5:43 AM A per ç us became medievalized, as its battleields were igured as “holy” sites and the rebuilding of “martyred” medieval landscapes became neomedieval projects. The Medieval Battlegrounds of National Identity 84 16_504_Plain.indb 84 In the century prior to the Great War, the entire period that we call the Middle Ages was igured as nostalgic terrain on which battles for national identity and cultural patrimony were perpetually waged. The adjective “medieval” and the proper noun “Middle Ages” emerged into common parlance in the 1820s and 1830s, indicating the need for a vocabulary to describe the era of modern Europeans’ emergence into the light of history.1 In Italy, that era was usually a halcyon, bygone one: classical antiquity, relected in the veneration of “the Renaissance” and the unifying political movement of the Risorgimento.2 But beyond the Alps, modern European nation-states had begun as either provincial colonies of the Roman Empire or benighted nonentities, tantamount to the peoples of their own African, Caribbean, and South Asian colonies. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, indeed, the shock of “discovering” the existence of outlandish peoples had been negotiated by associating them with the primitive “dark age” that Europeans themselves claimed to have escaped, giving them the right to colonize and civilize darker “others.”3 That conceptual momentum continued into the age of “Enlightenment.” But in the wake of revolutionary failures and Napoleonic wars, the redrawing of Europe’s political map, and a wave of renewed imperial ventures, Europe’s post-Roman and premodern past was opened up to new interpretations that could explain these achievements, bolster the heightened discourses of nationalism, and ill novel political entities with venerable cultural capital.4 When the sole manuscript of Beowulf was rediscovered, Scandinavian, German, and English scholars all tussled for national rights to its ownership. Meanwhile, French scholars strove to cover up the fact that the earliest literary witnesses to their national language—including the Song of Roland—had originated in medieval (Anglo-Norman) England or independent Flanders. The establishment of history as a professional discipline, subsidized by national libraries and imperial museums as well as universities, sharpened this 8/11/16 5:43 AM Myth, Memory, and the First World War in Scotland competition. The Monumenta Germaniae Historicae, an ongoing publishing enterprise started in 1826, counted as “monuments of German history” all historical and literary works produced in the lands of Charlemagne’s ninth-century empire—lands that were located in, or would soon be allocated to, France, Belgium, Switzerland, or Italy. Rival collecting and publishing projects followed suit in other countries, requiring a growing army of philologists, historians, and curators.5 In this context, the Franco-Prussian War that resulted in the creation of a uniied Germany can be understood as a more weaponized phase of already-entrenched disputes about the medieval origins of national sovereignty. Combatants on both sides were aware that the war was fought on a frontier created when the empire of the Frankish king Charles the Great (d. 814), Charlemagne, or Karl der Große, was divided among his three grandsons in 840. In 1870, France’s “loss” of the middle zone, Alsace-Lorraine—or, for the Germans, the (re)gaining of Lotharingia—was rendered all the more signiicant because this had been Joan of Arc’s homeland. The popular revival of her cult in France was an immediate result of this defeat: in 1874, the French government commissioned a gilded bronze equestrian statue of La Pucelle from her passionate devotee, the sculptor Emmanuel Frémier (1824–1910). It was meant to be prophetic of a future resurgence: “France would not die because Joan would be reborn.”6 Meanwhile, nations who had lost the bid for statehood in the realignments of the modern era were turning to medieval battleields for meaning and inspiration. Serbians, for whom the Battle of Kosovo (15 June 1389) was the beginning of their subjection to the Ottoman Empire, would transfer that grievance to Austria-Hungary after 1878.7 (A young Serbian would strike a blow for the restoration of medieval rights in Sarajevo, on 28 June 1914, just four days after the anniversary of Bannockburn.) In partitioned Poland, to take particularly potent example, the battle of Grunwald (15 July 1410) was celebrated as marking the date when the united forces of Poland and Lithuania had roundly defeated an army of Teutonic Knights: a German crusading order that had expanded the deinition of holy war by colonizing Baltic and Slavic lands. For stateless Poles, in decades before the war, verbal and symbolic references to this order had become coded ways of referring to German 16_504_Plain.indb 85 85 8/11/16 5:43 AM A per ç us 86 16_504_Plain.indb 86 aggression and imperialism; while for Germans, this same vocabulary was used to express their racial and cultural superiority.8 The monument to the quincentenary of this battle in 1910, erected in Kraków—former capital of the medieval kingdom—was thus a nostalgic reminder of what Poland had once been and a blatant expression of nationalist aspirations for the future. Indeed, some sixty other Polish communities also sponsored the erection of Grunwald monuments.9 Four years later, during the early months of the Great War, the German high command saw a way to reverse the Polish claims to victory in this battle, whose very name the Germans disputed. (Its medieval chronicler, writing in the service of the Polish king, had called the site Grunenvelt; the German place-name was Tannenberg).10 In August 1914, when the German army prevailed over Russian forces in that region, some thirty kilometers from the medieval battleield, Major General Erich Ludendorff avenged his distant forebears by naming this victory the “Second” Battle of Tannenberg. The symbolic importance of the site, even after Germany’s ultimate defeat, was later cemented by the construction of an enormous military monument, dedicated in 1924 and completed in 1927; it became Hindenburg’s Gothic tomb.11 German disquiet over the reemergence of an independent Poland in 1919 also made reference to this battle, which provided the subtext for the advertising campaign of the Deutschnationale Volkspartei (DNVP, or German People’s Party) in 1920. Under the slogan “Free the East” (Rettet den Osten), it depicted a blond Teutonic Knight struggling in the grip of a red-capped socialist, while an ignoble Polish hussar takes a swing at him.12 Justiication for the Nazi doctrine of Lebensraum drew on this imagery too, representing Poland as the rightful ief of the Teutonic Order and its German successor state. In 1939, when the Germans marched into Kraków, the Grunwald monument was an early target of the occupation.13 It has since been rebuilt, and annual celebrations around Kraków now feature a reenactment of the medieval battle. The battle over another medieval battleield in the century before the war offers an especially instructive example of the ambiguity and divisiveness that commemoration could generate, in a context very similar to that of Scotland’s uneasy relationship with England and place within the United Kingdom. In 1830–1831, a new sovereign state was created 8/11/16 5:43 AM Myth, Memory, and the First World War in Scotland ex nihilo on the latlands where the united armies of Europe had inally defeated Napoleon. It was named after the Belgae, an indigenous group of uncertain ethnicity: were they Celts, like their Gallic neighbors, or Germans, like the Franks who later occupied the region and laid the foundations of Charlemagne’s empire? (This question, among many others, is still disputed.14) The task of inventing a shared and supposedly organic heritage for Belgium—an act of ethnopoesis to disguise the absence of ethnogenesis—eventually fell to a Francophone historian trained in Germany and teaching in Flemish-speaking Ghent: Henri Pirenne (1962–1935). But by the time Pirenne published the irst volume of his Histoire de Belgique, in 1902, it was clear that no narrative could effectively join French- and Flemish-speaking territories in a harmonious union. For one thing, they had never formed part of a single medieval polity. For another, the two linguistic communities were accorded a markedly unequal status: French being the oficial language, and that of the ruling party, while Flemish and its speakers were reduced to the role of subalterns in their own homeland. The harvest of the medieval past could not, consequently, yield a Belgian national holiday based on an iconic battle, especially since the battle most apt to capture the imagination reversed the prevailing power dynamics: the Flemish triumph over invading French forces at Kortrijk (Courtrai) on 12 July 1302. Like Bannockburn, Kortrijk was a victory of the humble over the great, fought on the home turf of poorly armed men against a massive and well-equipped invading cavalry. It had ended in the humiliating, mud-trampled defeat of the aristocrat-led French by the vastly outnumbered citizen militias of Brugge and Ghent. It became known, thereafter, as the Battle of the Golden Spurs, because hundreds of these opulent accessories had been torn from the boots of the fallen French and dedicated to the Blessed Virgin in her church nearby.15 In 1838, this battle was featured in the irst of many historical novels by Hendrik Conscience (1812–1883), a pioneer promoter of Flemish literature who wrote in his mother tongue, to the horror of his Francophone father.16 In 1847, the novel’s popularity inspired a play with similar themes (a prequel to the story of Kortrijk) that premiered in Ghent and probably introduced the rousing “De vlaamse Leeuw” (The Flemish lion), an anthem so evocative of a “medieval” Flemish nationalism 16_504_Plain.indb 87 87 8/11/16 5:43 AM A per ç us 88 that it was (and is) believed to be a folk song.17 It later underscored the burgeoning Flemish separatist movement that gathered momentum after 1893, when a general strike of disenfranchised laborers (mainly Flemish) had unsuccessfully rallied for universal male suffrage, which was oficially introduced only after a series of deadly riots followed the elections of 1912. In 1902, in the midst of this tumultuous period, the memorial monument to Kortrijk/Courtrai was designed to be carefully anodyne: a generic allegory, the “Maiden of Flanders,” lifting her banner beside a pacing lion.18 By contrast, the campaign for Flemish national rights, launched by the Algemeen Nederland Verbond (United Dutch Association), featured a trio of grim-faced medieval soldiers—the heroes of Kortrijk—chained to one another in solidarity over the legend Wij willen! In Vlaanderen Vlaamsch! (We will! Flanders for the Flemish!).19 Strategically, German propaganda before and during the Great War stressed the importance of the Flemings’ shared Germanic ancestry and language: a policy known as Flamenpolitik.20 In 1917, Flemish prisoners of war in the German camp at Göttingen were even able to organize a formal celebration of their national holiday on the anniversary of Kortrijk.21 An existing photograph of unknown provenance shows members of the Vlaamse Werkkring (Flemish Work Detail) on that occasion, with a rough placard displaying the Lion of Flanders.22 The printed program of the day’s proceedings announces a special address by one of the camp’s prominent prisoners, René Gaspar (1893–1958), a young professor of Germanic philology at Leuven (Louvain) who had been captured after the German occupation of the city and the deliberate destruction of the university’s medieval library and church.23 The title of his lecture was “Het Vlaamse Volkslied” (The Flemish folksong). He’s fought a thousand years by now for freedom, land, and God, And still his strength is ever young, sprung from his native sod. Should someone think him beaten or taunt him with a blow, He’ll rise right up again in might and lay tormentors low. 16_504_Plain.indb 88 Hij strijdt nu duizend jaren voor vrijheid, land en God; En nog zijn zijne krachten in al haar jeugdgenot. Als zij hem machteloos denken en tergen met een schop, Dan richt hij zich bedreigend en vrees’lijk voor hen op. 8/11/16 5:43 AM Figure 5.1. “We will! Flanders for the Flemish.” Postcard reproduced courtesy of the Algemeen-Nederlands Verbond. Courtesy of Carol Symes. 16_504_Plain.indb 89 8/11/16 5:43 AM A per ç us Chorus: 90 16_504_Plain.indb 90 No they will never tame him, not while one Fleming lives Not while the Lion can claw, and not while his teeth can grip. Zij zullen hem niet temmen, zolang een Vlaming leeft, Zolang de Leeuw kan klauwen, zolang hij tanden heeft. The warning-sign is given: he will take the bait no more With irey eyes, in battle-rage, he leaps upon his foe. He tears, destroys, dismembers— muddied, blooded in the fray! In victory he’ll grin over the entrails of his prey. Chorus24 Het wraaksein is gegeven, hij is hun tergen moe; Met vuur in’t oog, met woede springt hij den vijand toe Hij scheurt, vernielt, verplettert, bedekt met bloed en slijk En zegepralend grijnst hij op’s vijands trillend lijk. In 1919, Gaspar would head the committee charged with translating the pamphlet Pro Flandria servanda: Flanders’ Right and Claim for Autonomy; Formulated, Explained, Justiied, which was sent to Woodrow Wilson in Paris, as part of the oficial (and ultimately futile) petition for Flemish self-determination.25 Its author, Willem Lodewijk de Vreese (1869– 1938), was an eminent Flemish scholar and professor of medieval Dutch philology at the Universiteit Leiden.26 Not only is the historical signiicance of Kortrijk/Courtrai strikingly similar to that of Bannockburn, but also so are the politics of their respective commemorations on the eve of the Great War. Since both were famously fought by relatively small numbers of soldiers against a larger invading force, a reputation for warlike valor continued to sustain the collective memory of the victors’ descendants when the territories that had been successfully defended in medieval wars became subjected to the dominion of neighboring states. The hegemony of the Francophone aristocracy and bourgeoisie in Belgium, and their dominance over the laboring classes and provincial Flemish elites, could also be compared to the divisions between speakers of English and Gaelic, or between lowland and Highland (or urban and rural, or merchant- and working-class) Scots. The potency of folk tradition, and of folk songs (authentic or spurious), is another parallel: the nineteenth-century “De vlaamse Leeuw” is directly analogous to Robert Burns’s “Scots Wha Hae” of 1793, or to “folk” songs of more recent vintage (such as The Corries’ “Flower of Scotland” or “Scotland the Brave,” both dating from 8/11/16 5:43 AM Myth, Memory, and the First World War in Scotland the mid-twentieth century). The heraldic devices of red lions rampant brandished by Flemish and Scots patriots are also remarkably similar. Although the anniversary of the Battle of the Golden Spurs was not widely reported outside Flanders in 1902, the London Times was quick to reference it as a precedent in the breathless days before the fall of Liège (16 August 1914). On 10 August, the fourth day after the German attack on the city and its medieval fortress, the Times’ war correspondent reached back into Belgium’s storied past for a hopeful precedent. “‘Shield and friend’ was the motto of the Flemish in the great battle at Courtrai, in which they laid low the chivalry of France. ‘Shield and friend’ after 600 years may well be the motto of their sons to-day. They are ighting in the same cause.”27 Presumably, that cause was freedom, and yet the Flemings’ eventual loss of the sovereignty for which they had fought in 1302 made the comparison an awkward one. So did the fact that Liège was in Francophone Wallonia, not in Flanders. Mobilizing Medievalism in a Modern War, 1914–1918 91 The powerful ideas and identities that came to be associated with the Middle Ages matter very much if we are trying to understand what is usually regarded as a quintessentially modern conlict. Yet the vast historiography of World War I almost entirely ignores the importance of medievalism, perhaps because its very ubiquity seems either banal or invisible to those not trained to examine its meanings.28 For nearly a century before August 1914, as I have argued above, passionate attachments to the medieval past, its cultural monuments, and its “decisive” battles had already been cultivated in Europe by rival groups ighting proxy wars on medieval soil. The prevalence of medievalism is discernible across the social, political, cultural, and economic spectrum in Europe, and even across the globe, and was relected in every artistic genre, popular entertainment, intellectual pursuit, academic discipline, and political ideology.29 Medievalism fostered a visual and narrative vocabulary—and an array of visceral and nostalgic responses—that could be powerfully mobilized on all sides when the war broke out. In July 1913, an editorial in the Times of London had scoffed at the enthusiasm with which Americans celebrated their Independence Day: “If the Americans, or any other people with their gifts of melodramatic 16_504_Plain.indb 91 8/11/16 5:43 AM A per ç us 92 fervor, owned the British Empire. . . . The anniversary of Agincourt would be a recurring festival.”30 But just the following year, the events of August 1914 meant that Agincourt and other battlegrounds of the Hundred Years’ War were no longer places in the history books of schoolchildren: they were, and were perceived to be, on the frontlines. “An English army is once again on its way to the Low Countries,” announced the Times on 18 August. “What deeds, what names, the news calls up!” Joan of Arc, Crécy, Poitiers, and Agincourt were all immediately invoked.31 On 25 October, the anniversary of Agincourt, a front-page editorial entitled “Agincourt and the Modern Soldier” mused on “the difference between battles in the past and battles now.” It concluded, “We cannot, and we do not, hope for an Agincourt against [the Germans]; but we and our allies have no fear that, in this conlict of national qualities, the inal result will be against us.”32 Rumors that angelic English bowmen from nearby Agincourt had helped to reverse a desperate situation during the British Expeditionary Force’s irst major engagement, at Mons (22–23 August), were widely circulating; Arthur Machen’s story on that theme had been published in the London Evening News on 29 September, and it quickly passed into popular legend.33 A year later, when the quincentenary of Agincourt arrived, the Times acknowledged it by quoting the whole of Shakespeare’s “St. Crispin’s Day” speech from Henry V, under the headline “1415. October 25. 1915.” Nothing more was said. Meanwhile, across the Channel, French oficers seized on this day as an occasion to revisit the actual site of the battle with their English counterparts. The new French weekly, L’Illustration, printed a photograph of a French Light Infantry Battalion commander delivering a lecture to a delegation of English oficers, who are shown studying maps of the medieval (now modern) battleield. Five centuries ago, the French and English armies met on the ield of Agincourt. . . . The French nobility, victim once more of their own audacity, was torn in pieces by the soldiers of Henry V. Today, on the battleields of the Artois, the two armies are brothers in the same ight, inseparably united by the shared memory of past antagonisms. . . . And at the same time, the English can also pay sincere homage to Jeanne d’Arc . . . for on the identical spot of yesteryear’s battle, [French infantrymen] invite their Britannic neighbors to join together in calling forth a memory of mutual esteem.34 16_504_Plain.indb 92 8/11/16 5:43 AM Myth, Memory, and the First World War in Scotland The reference to Joan stops just short of reminding the English that it was their medieval predecessors who had burned her at the stake in 1431. Joan inally came into her sanctity during this war. Oficially beatiied in 1909, the miracles necessary to her canonization in 1920 were accruing rapidly. When the cathedral of Reims was largely destroyed by German shellire on 19 September 1914, Joan appeared on countless postcards and placards to remind the horriied world—unused as yet to the targeted destruction of cultural patrimony—that this had been the place of the irst French king’s baptism (Clovis, in 496) and the place where she herself had led the Dauphin to be crowned in 1429. In one such image, she confronts a complacent Kaiser Wilhelm, brandishing her white banner and pointing at the burning Gothic ediice with her sword: “Nothing satisies you, murderer of babies, you king of bandits and vandals . . . you blaspheme and you destroy our beautiful cathedrals.”35 It was said that she would appear to rally the timid and soothe the dying,36 or that she could be glimpsed at the head of an army of historic heroes that would appear to avenge the loss of her homeland to the Germans in 1870. A color lithograph printed in 1914 showed a newly widowed mother in the traditional dress of Alsace, standing with her orphaned children beside the grave of her fallen husband, whose spirit rises to join the forces of medieval warriors surging across the sky: “Arise! Ours who have died for the fatherland. . . . Behold France!”37 On the Eastern front, a similar medieval army was conjured on the occasion of the British general Sir Edmund Allenby’s ceremonial entry into Jerusalem on 11 December 1917, two days after the Ottomans’ oficial surrender. In London, a Times news sheet showed a doctored version of a now-famous stereograph of the entry, under the legend Cross Replaces Crescent in Holy City for Which Crusaders Fought and Died. Above the scene, the viewer can discern an interpolated image of ghostly medieval warriors, which the caption explains by saying, “His mind might well have recalled such a vision of the Crusaders as shown above depicted by the German painter [Wilhelm] von Kaulbach.” That a British paper would celebrate the painting Crusaders before Jerusalem by a nineteenth-century German artist suggests that, when in the Orient, it was acceptable for Europeans to share the medieval heritage they were disputing at home.38 The weekly magazine Punch made that connection 16_504_Plain.indb 93 93 8/11/16 5:43 AM Figure 5.2. Postcard commemorating the destruction of Reims cathedral. Photomontage by Boulanger/Gloria, 1914. Courtesy of Carol Symes. 16_504_Plain.indb 94 8/11/16 5:43 AM 16_504_Plain.indb 95 Figure 5.3. “Arise! Ours who have died for the fatherland. . . . Behold France.” Lithograph courtesy of the 8/11/16 5:43 AM Library of Congress, LC-USZC2-3982. Courtesy of Carol Symes. A per ç us 96 Figure 5.4. Enhanced stereograph showing Allenby’s entry into Jerusalem (Underwood & Underwood/Times News Bureau). The ghostly vision is derived from the painting Crusaders before Jerusalem by Wilhelm von Kaulbach (1804–1874). Courtesy of Carol Symes. explicit in a full-page cartoon insert that showed King Richard I “the Lionheart”—whose bid to recapture Jerusalem during the Third Crusade (1189–1192) had been a spectacular failure—“gazing down on the Holy City” and exclaiming “MY DREAM COMES TRUE!” It was entitled THE LAST CRUSADE.39 16_504_Plain.indb 96 8/11/16 5:43 AM Myth, Memory, and the First World War in Scotland The Great War’s Medieval Battlefields In October 1918, the cover of Red Cross magazine featured George Washington riding out with his medieval allies, St. George and Joan of Arc, into the breach of the retreating German army. The war was nearly over, and debates were already raging over about how best to commemorate its battles and their human and cultural costs. Should the ruined medieval town of Ypres (Ieper) be rebuilt or remain a 97 Figure 5.5. George Washington rides into battle with St. George and Joan of Arc. Courtesy of Carol Symes. 16_504_Plain.indb 97 8/11/16 5:43 AM A per ç us 98 16_504_Plain.indb 98 sanctuary to the thousands of British dead— as Lieutenant Colonel Henry Beckles Willson, its last military governor, argued so eloquently?40 This “holy ground” should be a site of “pilgrimage,” he insisted; rather than allow it to be treated as a vulgar attraction, its medieval rubble should be refashioned into a vast tomb. Similar arguments were taking place around all the “murdered” and “martyred” towns of the Western Front. Michelin’s guide to the battleields, published just months after the Armistice, used the same vocabulary: the “visit should be a pilgrimage . . . seeing is not enough: the visitor must understand; ruins are more impressive when coupled with knowledge of their original destruction. A stretch of country which might seem dull and uninteresting to the unenlightened eye, becomes transformed at the thought of the battles which have been raged there.” We can almost see the ghostly medieval towns rising up.41 In Arras—another salient that, like Ypres, had been defended at the cost of many thousands of British lives and its entire medieval cityscape—an advertising campaign sponsored by the local tourist bureau promised visitors ghoulish glimpses of “the most moving ruins of the war” (“les plus émouvantes ruins de la guerre”).42 Not everyone relished the Gothic picturesque, however. The American artist John Singer Sargent, embedded with a British infantry detachment in Arras, resisted the zeal of his fellow painter Englishman Henry Tonks, who later recalled, “I never could persuade him to work in the evening, when the ruined town looked so enchanting.”43 Like the relics of despoiled medieval abbeys that had so delighted the poets and painters of a century earlier, those of medieval towns could become aestheticized. In fact, this was necessary to their resuscitation: in the end, both Arras and Ypres would be entirely restored to simulacra of their former selves, as would Reims cathedral and many other “martyred” medieval monuments. Alongside these efforts to decide what the Great War’s monumental legacy should be, new medieval narratives were being forged. For colonial populations in aspiring nation-states, the battleields of the Great War would become what medieval battleields had been for European nationalists. In Canada, the story of Vimy’s capture in 1917 is still the story of national self-recognition, the moment of becom- 8/11/16 5:43 AM Myth, Memory, and the First World War in Scotland ing, as evinced by the Canadian National Vimy Memorial and a lood of popular histories and scholarly revisionisms.44 For the peoples of Australia and New Zealand, a similar process apotheosized “sites of memory, sites of mourning,” to use Jay Winter’s phrase.45 In commemoration as in combat, the way these battleields became meaningful owed as much to nostalgia for the medieval past as it did to contemporary political and cultural aspirations. Across Europe, as in Scotland, the overwhelming majority of memorials erected to honor the dead of the Great War and to mark its battles drew on medieval (Celtic, Romanesque, or Gothic) architectural motifs, imagery, or narratives.46 One of the war memorials fashioned by the French sculptor Maxime Real del Sarte (1884–1954), who had lost an arm in the war, shows Joan of Arc cradling the body of a fallen soldier (from her own region of Lorraine) and revealing to him, as in a vision, the medieval cathedral of recaptured Strasbourg, the symbol of the national narrative he had died to protect (see igure 5.6). In the town square of Paisley, Scotland, local infantrymen trudge toward the ields of Flanders at the lanks of a warhorse that carries a mounted medieval knight to the Somme. ” Entitled “The Spirit of the Crusaders,” it might just as well be “The Spirit of Bannockburn” (see igure 5.7). 99 Figure 5.6. War memorial (bas-relief in bronze) by Maxime Real del Sarte, Briey, France. Courtesy of Carol Symes. 16_504_Plain.indb 99 8/11/16 5:43 AM Figure 5.7. “The Spirit of the Crusaders”: war memorial by Sir Robert Lorimer at Paisley, Scotland. Courtesy of Carol Symes. 16_504_Plain.indb 100 8/11/16 5:43 AM Myth, Memory, and the First World War in Scotland Notes 1. Carol Symes, “When We Talk About Modernity,” American Historical Review 116 (2011): 715–26. See also Patrick J. Geary, The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002). This is not to say that there had not been conceptualizations of what we call the “medieval” past in previous centuries; see, for example, Peter Damian-Grint, ed., Medievalism and Manière Gothique in Enlightenment France (Oxford, UK: Voltaire Foundation, 2006). 2. That said, medievalism mattered in Italy too. See, for example, Tommaso di Carpegna Falconieri, “Il Mediavalismo et la Grande Guerra,” Studi storici 56, no. 2 (2015): 49–77. 3. The essential study is that of Kathleen Davis, Periodization and Sovereignty: How Ideas of Feudalism and Secularization Govern the Politics of Time (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008). See also Kathleen Biddick, The Shock of Medievalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998). 4. See the essays in Florin Curta, Patrick J. Geary, and Gábor Klaniczay, eds., Manufacturing Middle Ages Entangled History of Medievalism in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2013). 5. Carol Symes, “Manuscript Matrix, Modern Canon,” in Middle English, ed. Paul Strohm, 7–22 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 6. Jacques de Biez, E. Frémiet (Paris: Jouve, 1910), 140: “La France n’était morte parceque Jeanne venait de renaître.” Joan was not formally beatiied until 1909; prior to 1870 and the Catholic revival in France, she had largely been forgotten. 7. Ljubica D. Popovich, “Medievalism in Serbian Painting of the Nineteenth Century,” in Medievalism in Europe, ed. Leslie J. Workman, 208–24 (Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 1994). Lonnie Johnson, Central Europe: Enemies, Neighbors, Friends (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 24–25, 172–75. 101 8. Johnson, Central Europe, 44; David Welch, Germany, Propaganda and Total War, 1914–1918: The Sins of Omission (London: Athlone, 2000), 210–12; Christopher Clark, The Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600–1957 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2006), 655–70. 9. On the histories generated by this battle, see M. Jučas, The Battle of Grünwald (Vilnius, Lithuania: National Museum, 2009); Sylvain Gouguenheim, Tannenberg: 15 Juillet 1410 (Paris: Tallandier, 2012); Werner Paravicini, Rimvydas Petrauskas, and Grischa Vercamer, eds., Tannenberg, Grunwald, Žalgiris 1410: Krieg und Frieden im Späten Mittelalter (Wiesbaden, Germany: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2012). On the context of its commemoration in Polish lands, see Keely Stauter-Halsted, “Rural Myth and the Modern Nation: Peasant Commemorations of Polish National Holidays, 1879– 1910,” in Staging the Past: The Politics of Commemoration in Habsburg Central Europe, 1848 to the Present, ed. Maria Burur and Nancy M. Wingield, 153–77 (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2001); Patrice M. Dabrowski, Commemorations and the Shaping of Modern Poland (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 165–83. 10. Sven Ekdahl, “Die Flucht der Litauer in der Schlacht bei Tannenberg,” Zeitschrift für Ostforschung 12 (1963): 11–20 (“in loco conlictus nostri, quem cum Cruciferis de Prusia habuimus, dicto Grunenvelt”). 11. It was later razed. On its interwar signiicance, see Jesko von Hoegen, Der Held von Tannenberg: Genese und Funktion des Hindenburg-Mythos (Cologne, Germany: Böhlau Verlag, 2007). See also Clark, Iron Kingdom, 658; Welch, Germany, Propaganda, 85–87, 194–95. 12. It is accessible via the UMedia Archive of the University of Minnesota: “Rettet den Osten, Wahlt: Liste 5, Deutschnational,” accessed 7 February 2015, http://umedia.lib.umn.edu/node/43633. 16_504_Plain.indb 101 8/11/16 5:43 AM A per ç us 13. Dabrowski, Commemorations, 231–33. 14. For a cogent introduction to the issues and their current signiicance, see Samuel Humes, Belgium: Long United, Long Divided (London: Hurst, 2014). 15. For a history of the battle and its reception, see R. C. van Caenegem, Marc Boone, and An Blockmans-Delva, eds., 1302, Le Désastre de Courtrai: Mythe et Réalité de La Bataille Des Éperons D’or (Antwerp, Belgium: Fonds Mercator, 2002). 16. Hendrik Conscience, De Leeuw van Vlaenderen; of, De Slag Der Gulden Sporen (1302) [The lion of Flanders; or, the Battle of the Golden Spurs] (Brussels: Academic & Scientiic Publishers, 2012). See Theo Hermans, “The Highs and Lows of Hendrik Conscience,” Low Countries: Arts and Society in Flanders and the Netherlands 22 (1914): 162–69. 102 17. Willem van Dampierre was written by Hippoliet Jan Van Peene (1811–1864), who had just collaborated with the composer Karel Miry (1823–1899) on an operetta, Brigitta of de Twee Vondelingen (Brigitta or the three foundlings), which had premiered in Ghent the previous July (Ghent, Belgium: Snoeck-Ducaju, 1847). “De Vlaamse Leeuw” was not included in the published script of the play (Ghent, Belgium: H. Hoste, 1850), suggesting that its initial circulation was via the quasi-medieval formats of manuscript and oral transmission. When it did surface in print, it was in the Volks-Almanak voor 1854, bevattende Verhalen, Liedjes, Anekdoten Enz (Ghent, Belgium: I. S. van Doossalaere, 1854), 94–95, with music inserted on a separate leaf and attributed to Miry. See the Flemish-Dutch website Musikum, http://muzikum.eu/nl (accessed 12 February 2015) and the recording and lyrics at http://www.stedeninfo.be/ (accessed 13 February 2015). It has since become the popular national anthem of Belgium, drowning out the oficial French Brabançonne composed in 1830. 18. The Groeninghe monument, designed by Godfried Devreese, was not completed and erected until 1906. See Bert Cardon and Bart Stroobants, “L’iconographie de la bataille des Éperons d’or,” in van Caenegem, Boone, and Blockmans-Delva, 1302, 170–94, at 189–90; Philippe Despriet, De Iconograie van de Guldensporenslag: Een Kritisch-Vergelijkende (Kortrijk, Belgium: Archeologische Stichting voor Zuid-West-Vlaanderen, 2002). 19. Jo Tollebeek, “Le culte de la bataille des Éperons d’or,” in van Caenegem, Boone, and BlockmansDelva, 1302, 194–239, at 224. The artist was Alfred Ost (1884–1945), a popular Flemish artist and illustrator known for powerful, muscular igures. 20. Sophie de Schaepdrijver, “Violence and Legitimacy: Occupied Belgium, 1914–1918,” Low Countries: Arts and Society in Flanders and the Netherlands 22 (2014): 46–55. 21. Tollebeek, “Le culte,” 226. On the broader context, see Sophie de Schaepdrijver, “Occupation, Propaganda, and the Idea of Belgium,” in European Culture in the Great War: The Arts, Entertainment, and Propaganda, 1914–1918, ed. Aviel Roshwald and Richard Stites, 266–94 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 22. It can be found at “Battle of the Golden Spurs,” Wikipedia, last updated 9 March 2016, accessed 9 March 2016, https://en.wikipedia.org/. 23. Jeff Lipkes, Rehearsals: The German Army in Belgium, August 1914 (Leuven, Belgium: Leuven University Press, 2007), 444–52. 24. I have translated stanzas three and ive of “De vlaamse Leeuw,” to represent the tenor of the whole. Only the more generically deiant irst and second stanzas are still part of the Belgian anthem. 25. Willem de Vreese, Pro Flandria servanda: Vlaanderen’s recht en eisch tot zelfstandigheid gesteld, toegelicht, gestaafd (The Hague, Netherlands: Het Vlaamsch Comité, 1919). 16_504_Plain.indb 102 8/11/16 5:43 AM Myth, Memory, and the First World War in Scotland 26. “Bibliotheca Neerlandica Manuscripta,” Universiteit Leiden, accessed 14 February 2015, http:// www.bibliotheek.leidenuniv.nl/. 27. “The Lessons of Liége,” Times, 10 August 1914, 7. 28. On the inherent modernity of the Great War, see, for example, Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975); Romy Golan, Modernity and Nostalgia: Art and Politics in France between the Wars (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995). Even those who disagree with Fussell’s classic characterization accept the premise that wartime nationalism and propaganda were fueled entirely by modern phenomena, for example, Jay Winter and Hew Strachan. Indeed, there is virtually no attention to medievalism in such landmark cultural studies as Roshwald and Stites, European Culture; and Joep Leerssen, National Thought in Europe: A Cultural History (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006). To date, the only study devoted to medievalism during the war is that of Allen J. Frantzen, Bloody Good: Chivalry, Sacriice, and the Great War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). 29. In addition to the multiple volumes of Studies in Medievalism published by D. S. Brewer, there is a journal devoted to medievalism and related phenomena: postmedieval, published by Palgrave. Important works include Stephanie Trigg, ed., Medievalism and the Gothic in Australian Culture (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2005); Kathleen Davis and Nadia Altschul, eds., Medievalisms in the Postcolonial World: The Idea of “the Middle Ages” outside Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009); Zrinka Stahuljak, Pornographic Archaeology: Medicine, Medievalism, and the Invention of the French Nation (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013); Elizabeth Emery and Richard J. Utz, eds., Medievalism: Key Critical Terms (Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 2014). For medievalism in the era immediately prior to the war, see Liana Cheney, ed., Pre-Raphaelitism and Medievalism in the Arts (Lewiston, NY: Mellen Press, 1992); Maurice Samuels, The Spectacular Past: Popular History and the Novel in Nineteenth-Century France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), esp. 151–94; and Bonnie Effros, Uncovering the Germanic Past: Merovingian Archaeology in France, 1830–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 103 30. “Independence Day,” Times, 4 July 1913, 9. Ironically, the paper devoted nearly two columns to a retrospective of the English victory over the Scots at the Battle of Flodden, on 9 September 1513, while notice of the Bannockburn commemoration the following year was afforded only a couple of paragraphs: “Flodden, Sept. 9 1513,” Times, 9 September 1913, 6; “Bannockburn,” Times, 24 June 1914, 9. 31. “Our Army in France,” Times, 18 August 1914, 8. 32. “Agincourt and the Modern Soldier,” Times, 25 October 1914, 3. 33. On this phenomenon, see David Clarke, The Angel of Mons: Phantom Soldiers and Ghostly Guardians (Chichester, UK: Wiley, 2004). 34. L’Illustration, 27 November 1915, 1: “Il y a cinq siècles, les armées française et anglaise se recontraient dans la plaine d’Azincourt. . . . La noblesse française, victime une fois de plus de son orgueilleuse témertité, y était taillée en pièces par les soldats d’Henri V. Aujourd’hui, sur les champs de bataille de l’Artois, les deux armées fraternisent dans une même lutte, inséparablement unies par la mémoire même des antagonismes passés, ardents mais loyaux. Et de même que les Anglais, cette année, ont pu rendre à Jeanne d’Arc un hommage sincère . . . sur le lieu même de la bataille de jadis, invitèrent leurs voisins britanniques à évoquer communément un souvenir d’estime mutuelle.” 35. See Laurent Bihl, “Le bombardement de la cathédrale de Reims et son traitement médiatique,” 14-18: Mission Centenaire, 6 May 2014, accessed 14 February 2015, http://centenaire.org/. For numerous other images that link Joan with the burning cathedral, see Marc Bouxin, “Le Martyre 16_504_Plain.indb 103 8/11/16 5:43 AM A per ç us de la cathédrale: la riposte de la satire,” and Yann Harlaut, “L’incendie de la cathédrale de Reims, 19 septembre 1914: fait imagé . . . fait imaginé,” both in Mythes et réalités de la cathédrale de Reims de 1825 à 1975, ed. Marc Bouxin and Sylvie Balcon, 70–95 (Paris: Somogy, 2001). 36. One famous example is the story retold by Henry van Dyke, The Broken Soldier and the Maid of France (New York: Harper, 1919). 37. “Debout! Nos morts pour la patrie . . . voici la France!” (Paris: Imp. J. Cussac, [1914]). 38. The original painting is now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York: Crusaders before Jerusalem, The Met, accessed 25 May 2015, http://www.metmuseum.org/. On crusading rhetoric and imagery during the war, see Elizabeth Siberry, The New Crusaders: Images of the Crusades in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2000), 86–103. 39. Punch, or the London Charivari, 19 December 1917. 40. Henry Beckles Willson, Ypres, the Holy Ground of British Arms (Brugge, Belgium: Beyaert, 1920). 41. Foreword to the American edition of the Michelin Guide to the Battleields of the World War, vol. 1, The First Battle of the Marne (Milltown, NJ: Michelin et Cie, 1914), 7. 42. Archives départementales du Pas-d-Calais, série 17 Fi b901: Arras et les Champs de Bataille de l’Artois [poster]. 43. Quoted by Evan Charteris, John Sargent (London: Scribner’s, 1927), 212. 104 44. See, for example, D. E. Macintyre, Canada at Vimy (Toronto: P. Martin Associates, 1967); N. M. Christie and S. Hickman, The Canadians at Vimy: April 1917, Arleux, April 28, 1917, Fresnoy, May 3, 1917: A Social History and Battleield Tour (Winnipeg, MB: Bunker to Bunker Books, 1996); Theodore Barris, Victory at Vimy: Canada Comes of Age, April 9–12, 1917 (Toronto: Thomas Allen, 2007); and Geoffrey Hayes, Michael Bechthold, and Andrew Iarocci, eds., Vimy Ridge: A Canadian Reassessment (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2007). A lood of new contributions is anticipated in 2017. 45. J. M. Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 46. Stefan Goebel, The Great War and Medieval Memory: War, Remembrance and Medievalism in Britain and Germany, 1914–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 16_504_Plain.indb 104 8/11/16 5:43 AM