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Catholicism and the Great War

This transnational comparative history of Catholic everyday religion in


Germany and Austria-Hungary during the Great War transforms our
understanding of the war’s cultural legacy. Challenging master narra-
tives of secularization and modernism, Houlihan reveals that Catholics
from the losing powers had personal and collective religious experi-
ences that revise the decline-and-fall stories of Church and state during
wartime. Focusing on private theologies and lived religion, Houlihan
explores how believers adjusted to industrial warfare. Giving voice to
previously marginalized historical actors, including soldiers and women
and children on the homefront, he creates a family history of Catholic
religion, supplementing studies of the clergy and bishops. His find-
ings shed new light on the diversity of faith in this period and how
specifically Catholic forms of belief and practice enabled people from
the losing powers to cope with the war much more successfully than
previous cultural histories have led us to believe.

p a t r i c k j . h o u l i h a n received his PhD in History from the Univer-


sity of Chicago in 2011. He is Assistant Director of Student Preparation
in the Career Advancement Office at the University of Chicago, where
he has also taught in the History Department.
Studies in the Social and Cultural History of Modern Warfare
General Editor
Jay Winter, Yale University

Advisory Editors
David Blight, Yale University
Richard Bosworth, University of Western Australia
Peter Fritzsche, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Carol Gluck, Columbia University
Benedict Kiernan, Yale University
Antoine Prost, Université de Paris-Sorbonne
Robert Wohl, University of California, Los Angeles

In recent years the field of modern history has been enriched by the exploration of
two parallel histories. These are the social and cultural history of armed conflict,
and the impact of military events on social and cultural history.
Studies in the Social and Cultural History of Modern Warfare presents the fruits of
this growing area of research, reflecting both the colonization of military history
by cultural historians and the reciprocal interest of military historians in social
and cultural history, to the benefit of both. The series offers the latest scholarship
in European and non-European events from the 1850s to the present day.

This is book 42 in the series, and a full list of titles in the series can be found at:
www.cambridge.org/modernwarfare
Catholicism and the Great War
Religion and Everyday Life in Germany and
Austria-Hungary, 1914–1922

Patrick J. Houlihan
University of Chicago
University Printing House, Cambridge CB2 8BS, United Kingdom

Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge.


It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of
education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence.

www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107035140

C Patrick J. Houlihan 2015

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the


provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part
may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 2015
Printed in the United Kingdom by Clays, St Ives plc
A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data
Houlihan, Patrick J., 1980–
Catholicism and the Great War : religion and everyday life in Germany and
Austria-Hungary, 1914–1922 / Patrick J. Houlihan, University of Chicago.
pages cm. – (Studies in the social and cultural history of modern warfare ; 41)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-107-03514-0 (alk. paper)
1. Catholic Church – Germany – History – 20th century. 2. Catholic Church –
Austria – History – 20th century. 3. Catholic Church – Hungary – History –
20th century. I. Title.
BX1536.H68 2015
282 .4309041 – dc23 2015003499
ISBN 978-1-107-03514-0 Hardback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of
URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication,
and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain,
accurate or appropriate.
To Bettina, Elisabeth, and Alexander
“If war is an act of force, the emotions cannot fail to be involved.”
– Karl von Clausewitz, On War, translated and edited
by Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1976 [1832]), 76

“The war is being conducted not only with guns and cannons
but also with weapons of piety and prayer.”
– Sven Hedin, Ein Volk in Waffen (Leipzig: F. A.
Brockhaus, 1915), 461
Contents

List of figures page viii


Acknowledgments ix
Note on the text xii
List of abbreviations xiii

Introduction 1
1 Catholicism on the eve of the Great War in Germany
and Austria-Hungary 20
2 Theology and catastrophe 50
3 The limits of religious authority: military chaplaincy
and the bounds of clericalism 78
4 Faith in the trenches: Catholic battlefield piety during
the Great War 117
5 The unquiet homefront 153
6 A voice in the wilderness: the papacy 186
7 Memory, mourning, and the Catholic way of war 215
Conclusion 254

Sources 266
Index 285

vii
Figures

1 Honvéd Chapel (Lipusch) page 61


2 Mass in the trenches (Lipusch) 95
3 Field chapel, LIR 13 (Lipusch) 100
4 Trench grotto (BfZ) 129
5 Christ and the dying soldier (Rudl) 135
6 Field-altar Madonna (Lipusch) 136
7 Female mourners, All Souls’ Day 1916 (BfZ) 169
8 Caritas hospital network (BfZ) 181
9 Destroyed church in Biglia (Lipusch) 193
10 Bricolage grave, St. Barbara (Lipusch) 229
11 Snowstorm burial (Lipusch) 231
12 Church service, Weimar Republic (BfZ) 261

SOURCES
Bibliothek für Zeitgeschichte (Stuttgart), Ktn. 214.
Lipusch, Viktor, ed. Österreich-Ungarns katholische Militärseelsorge im Weltkriege.
Vienna: Verlag für Militär- und Fachliteratur Amon Franz Göth, 1938.
Rudl, Siegmund. Kriegsvaterunser: Andenken an den Weltkrieg für alle Mitkämpfer
und ihre Angehörigen. Prague: Bonifatia Verlag, 1917.

viii
Acknowledgments

This book benefited from the support of many people and institutions,
and it is a pleasure to thank them in print. I only regret that I will not
be able to name all the people involved and inevitably will have to stop
writing at some point, for which I apologize.
This project began as a dissertation at the University of Chicago, and I
had a stellar committee. John W. Boyer, my dissertation chair, offered an
inspiring model of a scholar/teacher/administrator, always making time
for me amid his myriad other responsibilities. Michael Geyer and Leora
Auslander were incredible dissertation committee members and attentive
readers. As a whole and as individuals, this committee constantly gave
advice that challenged and improved my scholarship on all levels. Words
cannot fully express how grateful I am for such a wonderful dissertation
committee.
Jay Winter, whose work has deeply influenced my own and many others
in Great War studies, took an early interest in my project and has offered
supportive feedback throughout the process. Michael Watson, Executive
Publisher at Cambridge University Press, and the Press support staff
worked with a combination of patience and efficiency that reflects the
high standards of academic publishing. In particular, copy editor Tim
West saved me from multiple stylistic and grammatical infelicities. Two
anonymous referees for the Press offered incredibly helpful criticisms that
vastly improved the draft. Among the numerous colleagues to whom I
sent parts of the manuscript, Roger Chickering and Benjamin Ziemann
offered particularly superlative feedback. I alone bear responsibility for
any errors of fact or interpretation that remain.
The research for this project has been supported by grants and fellow-
ships from the University of Chicago, the Fulbright Program, and the
American Philosophical Society. Without the financial support of orga-
nizations like these, this book would not exist, and I am truly grateful. I
also thank the Office of Career Advancement, and its Executive Director,
Meredith Daw, for allowing me opportunities to complete the research
and writing of the book.
ix
x Acknowledgments

Numerous individuals and institutions offered perspectives that vastly


improved the work. At the University of Chicago, the Modern Europe
Workshop provided an incredible scholarly forum. Centered in this com-
munity, but going beyond it, I have benefitted from the friendship and
scholarship of Jennifer Amos, Morgan Aycox, Michael Baltasi, Doris
Bergen, Jim Bjork, John Deak, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Thomas Grischany,
Jonathan Gumz, Joachim Häberlen, Paul Hanebrink, Derek Hastings,
Maureen Healy, Cynthia Hillman, Ke-chin Hsia, Lonnie Johnson, Ari
Joskowicz, Dan Koehler, Thomas Kselman, Lesley Lundeen, Corinne
Lyon, Lynn Page, Sara Panzer, Mearah Quinn-Brauner, Richard Rosen-
garten, Jake Smith, Michael Snape, Ronen Steinberg, Allie Tichenor,
and Kati Vörös. Francis Cardinal George and Justin Cardinal Rigali
provided letters of support that opened some archival doors for me.
Many archivists and libraries in Europe and America patiently dealt with
numerous requests and offered generous assistance. Martin Geyer and
Lothar Höbelt were gracious sponsors during my Fulbright time in Cen-
tral Europe. In Europe and America, my family was fortunate to find
supportive communities, including Collegium Sapientiae in Freiburg and
St. Thomas the Apostle Parish in Hyde Park, Chicago. We also benefit-
ted from the University of Chicago undergraduate community, both in
my classes and particularly in Coulter House (“Which House?”), our
residence. Friends who have stayed with me for the long haul include
Matt Fesak, Lindsay Fraschilla, and, last but not least, my friend since
we were seven years old, Chris Maston.
Conference participants at many venues offered disparate perspec-
tives that improved my work. These forums included the American His-
torical Association, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the
National World War I Museum (Kansas City, MO), the UK Armed
Forces Chaplaincy Center, the German Studies Association, Interna-
tionales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften (Vienna), the Polish
Academy of Sciences, New York University Kandersteg Seminar
(Switzerland), and the University of Notre Dame (London Centre).
The journals Central European History and First World War Studies gra-
ciously allowed me to reprint earlier published materials. The flood of
publications will only increase as the Great War centenary anniversaries
continue. Looking backward 100 years since the assassination in Sara-
jevo, I have tried to incorporate material published through July 2014,
when this manuscript went to press.
As any scholar of the Great War knows, homefront and battlefront
are inextricably linked. For my bookish battle, my family has pro-
vided love and support beyond measure, without which this project
would not be possible; from the beginning, we were together “in the
Acknowledgments xi

trenches,” as it were. My parents, Pat and Mary Houlihan, and my sister,


Jessica, provided a loving family environment and happy childhood. My
extended family, most particularly my maternal grandparents, Alexander
and Dorothy Poplawsky, inspired my love of Europe, history, and culture:
a project that has established transnational connections with my in-laws
in Europe, particularly Joachim and Traute Domnick.
Ultimately, from the perspective of everyday life, this project directly
benefitted most from the love and support of my wife, Bettina, and our
children, Elisabeth and Alexander. They keep me focused on what is
truly important. Consequently, it is to them that the present work is
dedicated.

PJH
Chicago USA
July 28, 2014
Note on the text

Geographic naming is a perennial issue in European history, and there is


no singular satisfactory solution that will account for all contingencies of
identity politics. My imperfect method has been to remain close to the
archival sources, replicating the names most prevalent in the documents
that I have read. I hope that this will help future researchers effectively
follow up on the paths I have trodden. I make exceptions, however, for
place names that are widely known in English, such as Vienna (not Wien)
and Prague (not Praha/Prag).
Except as noted, scriptual references derive primarily from Donald
Senior and John J. Collins, eds., The Catholic Study Bible, 2nd edn. (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2006).

xii
Abbreviations

AAS Acta Apostolicae Sedis


AASI Archivum Provinciae Austriae Societatis Iesu
ABF Archiv der Bayerischen Franziskaner
AFV Apostolisches Feldvikariat
AOK Armeeoberkommando
ASV Archivio Segreto Vaticano
BA-MA Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv
BHStA Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv
BfZ Bibliothek für Zeitgeschichte (Stuttgart)
DAG Diözesanarchiv Graz
DLA Dokumentationsarchiv Lebensgeschichtlicher
Aufzeichnungen (Vienna)
DTA Deutsches Tagebucharchiv (Emmendingen)
EAF Erzbischöflichesarchiv Freiburg
EAK Erzbischöflichesarchiv Köln
EAM Erzbischöflichesarchiv München-Freising
EAW Erzbischöflichesarchiv Wien
KAS Konsistorialarchiv Salzburg
KBKM Königlich-Bayerisches Kriegsministerium
KM Kriegsministerium
k.u.k. kaiserlich und königlich
MKSM Militärkanzlei Seiner Majestät
NL Nachlass
NFA Neue Feldakten
ÖStAKA Österreichisches Staatsarchiv-Kriegsarchiv
PH Preussisches Heer
TLA Tiroler Landesarchiv
TLVA Tiroler Landesverteidigungsakten

xiii
Introduction

On August 20, 1914, the invading German Army entered Brussels,


marching through Belgium and into northern France. Also on that day,
Pope Saint Pius X, the declared anti-modernist “peasant pope,” died
suddenly after a short illness. Soon after, in the midst of unfolding war,
cardinals from across Europe gathered in Rome to elect the new supreme
pontiff, and the mood was anxious. At the conclave in the corridors of
the Vatican, Cardinal Felix von Hartmann of Germany greeted his col-
league Cardinal Désiré Mercier of Belgium, saying, “I hope that we shall
not speak of war.” Mercier responded, “And I hope that we shall not
speak of peace.”1 The national rancor between bishops would escalate as
the war dragged on, and episcopal enmity and clerical nationalism have
become cultural shorthand for the religious experience of the Great War.
However, the sound and fury of the bishops has helped to conceal the
experiences of ordinary religious believers.
This book argues that, seen through the religious experiences of every-
day Catholics from the losing powers, the Catholic story of the Great War
challenges standard interpretations of the war’s disillusioning legacy. In
particular, the study of lived religion for people from the losing pow-
ers provides counter-narratives to stories of secularization and artistic
modernism. Specifically Catholic forms of belief and practice allowed
Catholics in the losing powers to cope with the war’s devastation remark-
ably better than standard cultural histories of secularization and liter-
ary modernism would have readers believe. This Catholic spirituality
included intercession, sacramentality, dolorous cyclical history in the
long term, and worship of female spirituality. These modes of faith pro-
vided relief and comfort in extreme situations of distress. Catholic spiri-
tuality, both liturgically and theologically, provided traditional means of

1 The exchange between the cardinals is recounted in Michael Burleigh, Earthly Powers:
The Clash of Religion and Politics in Europe from the French Revolution to the Great War
(New York: HarperCollins, 2005), 457. For the official documents on the conclave, see
Anon., Acta Apostolicae Sedis: Commentarium Officiale (Rome: Typis Polyglottis Vaticanis,
1909–), 6:473–500.

1
2 Catholicism and the Great War

understanding tremendous upheaval, allowing the Great War’s devastat-


ing new horrors to be relativized as one episode in the story of human
existence. Catholicism portrayed war as necessary suffering, diminished
belief in divine-right nationalism, and created a nostalgic vision of idyllic
domesticity. While the homefront vision may have been delusive, it was
nonetheless a powerful motivator and source of hope, especially in the
war-torn world struggling to rebuild itself during the interwar period.
This book goes beyond instrumental and functional analyses that
reduce religion to an epiphenomenon. Instead, it argues that Catholics
from the losing powers had a wide and deep variety of autonomous,
meaningful, and irreducible religious experiences. Using a personalized
source base of reports, letters, diaries, and memoirs, the book explores
how religious believers adjusted to the new industrial warfare in various
contexts: ecclesiastical, imperial, national, local, and personal. Revising
Church-oriented histories of the bishops and clergy that focus on cleri-
cal nationalism and “just war” theology, it incorporates the perspectives
of not only soldiers at the battlefront but also women and children on
the homefront, viewed comparatively and transnationally in the context
of two different empires, with Catholics a favored majority in Austria-
Hungary and a suspect minority in Germany.
Throughout history, religion’s relation to violence and war can be seen
as both classical and contemporary.2 With reference to the Great War, the
study of religion taps into historiographical debates about the nature of
consent and coercion; enthusiasm and remobilization after the failure of
an early decisive victory; and the nature of ideology as both incitement
of hatred and source of social pacification. As Hew Strachan and Jay
Winter, among others, have argued, the historiography of the Great War
has reached a new transnational threshold, but national histories remain
deeply entrenched.3 For Austria-Hungary, condemned to declining irrel-
evance before the conflict began, the war provides a convenient narrative
end point for the shattering of a seemingly incoherent jumble of eth-
nicities. For Germany, the Great War is a prelude to the destructive
vengeance of the Nazi movement.4

2 For an excellent overview, see Mark Juergensmeyer, Margo Kitts, and Michael Jerryson,
eds., The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Violence (New York: Oxford University Press,
2013).
3 Hew Strachan, “Epilogue,” in The Legacy of the Great War: Ninety Years On, ed. Jay Winter
(Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2009), 185–98; Jay Winter, “Approaching the
History of the Great War: A User’s Guide,” in Winter, The Legacy of the Great War, 1–17,
esp. 6–7.
4 For a superlative historiographical overview, see Jay Winter and Antoine Prost, The Great
War in History: Debates and Controversies, 1914 to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2005).
Introduction 3

The First World War had a Catholic dimension that has not received
attention as a pan-European phenomenon, especially for the losing pow-
ers of Central and Eastern Europe. Aside from high-level diplomacy and
research on the radical right-wing fringe, very few studies of the Great
War view Germany and Austria-Hungary together as related but distinct
entities.5 Although religiosity is difficult to quantify, even the sheer empir-
ical data on nominal religious affiliation suggest the need to examine a
Catholic experience of the war: according to one set of figures from 1920,
those nominally identified as Catholics made up 194.83 million of a total
European population of 353.57 million people, or 55.10%. The regional
data are even more pronounced, especially viewed in terms of Protestant–
Catholic differences. In Central Europe, Catholics made up 59.99 mil-
lion out of a total of 114.90 million people, or 52.21%, while Protestants
made up 44.90 million, or 39.08%. Regional disparities in Eastern and
Southern Europe, long-neglected areas of First World War studies, are
more lopsided. In Eastern Europe, Catholics represented 12.93 million
out of 43.08 million total inhabitants, or 30.01%, whereas Protestants
made up 3.61 million, or 8.38%. In Southern Europe, Catholics formed
66.28 million out of a total of 75.41 million, or an overwhelming 87.89%,
whereas Protestants numbered around 168 000, or a mere 0.22%.6
Why, then, does one find this neglect of a major component of belief
during a transformative global event? As Michael Snape has argued, the
Christian history of the First World War remains understudied because
of a narrow national or denominational focus;7 the present book aims
to correct this for the losing powers. There is also the issue of the war’s
cultural legacy, in large part dominated by representations of avant garde
modernism. Many cultural histories of the war argue that the domi-
nant master-narrative of its cultural legacy is, in the pointed words of
Modris Eksteins, the emergence of “orgiastic-nihilistic irony,” with

5 The neglect of comparative studies of the losing powers is striking, especially in com-
parison to works about Britain and France. For a pioneering countervailing work, see
Holger H. Herwig, The First World War: Germany and Austria-Hungary, 1914–1918 (Lon-
don: Arnold, 1997). An important recent transnational study of counter-revolutionary
movements in Central Europe is Robert Gerwarth, “The Central European Counter-
Revolution: Paramilitary Violence in Germany, Austria and Hungary after the Great
War,” Past and Present 200, no. 1 (2008): 175–209.
6 These statistics are taken from Gabriel Adriányi, ed., History of the Church, vol. 10: The
Church in the Modern Age (New York: Crossroad, 1981), 5–6. Figures originally taken
from H. A. Krose, ed. Kirchliches Handbuch für das katholische Deutschland, vol. 7, 1930–1
(Cologne, 1931), 263.
7 Michael Snape, “The Great War,” in World Christianities, c.1914–c.2000, ed. Hugh
McLeod (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 131–50. For brief prelim-
inary studies that indicate a historiographic shift is imminent, see Martin Greschat, Der
Erste Weltkrieg und die Christenheit. Ein globaler Überblick (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2014).
4 Catholicism and the Great War

Germany “the modernist nation par excellence” of the twentieth


century.8 Tempering this view, Jay Winter’s path-breaking work of com-
parative and transnational cultural history demonstrates the persistence
of traditional motifs and means of understanding, particularly the modes
of classical, romantic, and religious culture. On a pan-European level,
Winter argues that traditional ways of representation provided comfort,
helping bereaved survivors mourn the dead and thus cope with human
loss on an unprecedented scale.9 Despite the more recent pull of studies
of popular culture, given the impact of modernism, there is still a strong
tendency to view culture in terms of high culture.10
Nevertheless, the religious history of the war has now become an estab-
lished component of its cultural history. Annette Becker’s pioneering
book on Catholic France, War and Faith: The Religious Imagination in
France, 1914–1930, represented a new approach to the cultural history of
religion during the war, deliberately focusing on the religious experiences
of lay believers and thus counterbalancing the previous dominance of the
papacy and priests.11 After the historiographical cultural turn in First
World War studies, powerful recent histories of religion have stressed the
power of religion as an enduring source of identity for everyday believ-
ers; however, these studies are largely limited to the framework of a single
nation-state.12 Recent histories of religion in the capital cities of Paris,
London, and Berlin have shown that even paramount centers of mod-
ernism should not inherently be categorized as engines of secularization
during the war.13 Further complicating cultural stereotypes about the
experience of the First World War grounded in the archetypal hellish

8 Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (Boston,
MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1989), xiv–xvi. For a seminal work about the Great War as a
foundational moment in the emergence of literary modernism, see Paul Fussell, The
Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975).
9 Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
10 See, for example, the essays in Aviel Roshwald and Richard Stites, eds., European Culture
in the Great War: The Arts, Entertainment, and Propaganda, 1914–1918 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1999).
11 Annette Becker, War and Faith: The Religious Imagination in France, 1914–1930, trans.
Helen McPhail (Oxford: Berg, 1998).
12 In addition to Annette Becker’s War and Faith, see Jonathan H. Ebel, Faith in the
Fight: Religion and the American Soldier in the Great War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2010), and Michael Snape, God and the British Soldier: Religion and
the British Army in the First and Second World Wars (London: Routledge, 2005). For a
work that blends analysis of the USA and the UK, see Richard Schweitzer, The Cross
and the Trenches: Religious Faith and Doubt among British and American Great War Soldiers
(Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003).
13 Adrian Gregory and Annette Becker, “Religious Sites and Practices,” in Capital Cities
at War: Paris, London, Berlin, vol. 2: A Cultural History, ed. Jay Winter and Jean-Louis
Robert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 383–427.
Introduction 5

landscape of the Western Front trenches, Alexander Watson’s effective


recent study of combat motivation and morale in the British and German
armies firmly argues that endurance, not psychological collapse, was the
normative condition of most soldiers fighting at the front. Watson high-
lights religion as a key factor in explaining this endurance. He argues that,
“For most [soldiers], religion or superstition lent sense and meaning to
the chaotic environment and offered an opportunity of imposing order on
it. The human capacity for hope, optimism and, not least, self-deception
made the war subjectively less threatening and lent men peculiar powers
of resilience.”14 The archetypal hopeless, hellish anomie in the trenches
of the Western Front simply does not adequately represent the variety of
ways people experienced the war.
In Europe and around the world, societies drew upon religion to make
sense of the Great War. Focusing on the global reordering of the twen-
tieth century, Philip Jenkins has recently written, “Religion is essen-
tial to understanding the war, to understanding why people went to
war, what they hoped to achieve through war, and why they stayed at
war.”15 The study of religion during wartime must study both simi-
larities and differences within a global framework. Overall, as Adrian
Gregory has recently written, wartime religion should be “highly sensi-
tive to the nuances and complexities of actual religions in their practices
and beliefs.” While the concept of religion should be analytically limited
(and not all-encompassing and circular), nevertheless, “religious prac-
tices, languages, and imagery were intimately engaged in making sense
of ‘war experience.’”16
Yet, for religion in Central Europe, the historiographical teleology of
modernization and Nazism remains strong: Weberian disenchantment
followed by the substitute messianism of Adolf Hitler. For religious his-
tory in Central Europe, the story moves quickly from 1914 to 1933.
George S. Williamson has argued that, despite qualifications, the reli-
gious history of Central Europe is dominated by a Protestant Sonderweg.17
As Mark Lilla’s recent appraisal of religiosity The Stillborn God admits,

14 Alexander Watson, Enduring the Great War: Combat, Morale and Collapse in the German
and British Armies, 1914–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 234;
see esp. pp. 92–100.
15 Philip Jenkins, The Great and Holy War: How World War I Became a Religious Crusade
(New York: HarperOne, 2014).
16 Adrian Gregory, “Beliefs and Religion,” in The Cambridge History of the First World War,
ed. Jay Winter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 3:418–44; quote from
443.
17 George S. Williamson, “A Religious Sonderweg? Reflections on the Sacred and the
Secular in the Historiography of Modern Germany,” Church History 75, no. 1 (2006):
139–56.
6 Catholicism and the Great War

the story of secularization is often a tale of legacies of Protestantism and


Judaism, with Catholicism left out.18 Applied to First World War stud-
ies, the “war cultures” approach relies on a notion of ideological crusade
between combatants, which accentuates religious cultural difference and
uses Protestant Prussia as the reductive symbol for Germany. While the
crusading element was certainly one important part of religious belief,
the focus on combatant animosity tends to highlight escalating brutality,
especially of occupied regions, as a formative period for genocide.19
In the historiography of Central European Catholicism on the eve of
the Great War, the milieu remains an analytical starting point. Despite
many advances, the work on the milieu often highlights the ghettoiza-
tion of Catholic historiography within Central Europe. Contrasted with
the permeation of Roman Catholicism, both officially and unofficially,
in Austria-Hungary, as a minority religion in Protestant-dominated Ger-
many the Catholic milieu was a defensive subculture that provided a
life-world for believers, eventually, at the national level, translating into
the political power of the Center Party.20 The top-down reassertion of
papal primacy known as “ultramontanism,” in its extreme form, gave
rise to the model in which the priest was “manager” of the milieu.21
The Franco-Prussian War did not last long enough to create a true sense
of shared suffering capable of integrating Protestants and Catholics.22
By contrast, the enormous bloodletting of the Great War would help to

18 Mark Lilla, The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West (New York: Knopf,
2007).
19 For a recent statement of the “war cultures” approach to religion, see Annette Becker,
“Faith, Ideologies, and the ‘Cultures of War,’” in A Companion to World War I, ed.
John Horne (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 234–47. For the “war cultures”
approach more generally, see Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau and Annette Becker, 14–18:
Understanding the Great War, trans. Catherine Temerson (New York: Hill and Wang,
2002).
20 For a recent review article that expertly outlines debates about the twentieth-century
transformation of the Catholic milieu in Central Europe, ultimately arguing for the
milieu’s analytical viability in terms of “lived religion,” see Michael E. O’Sullivan, “From
Catholic Milieu to Lived Religion: The Social and Cultural History of Modern Ger-
man Catholicism,” History Compass 7, no. 3 (2009): 837–61. Earlier foundational state-
ments include Münster Arbeitskreis für kirchliche Zeitgeschichte, “Katholiken zwischen
Tradition und Moderne: Das katholische Milieu als Forschungsaufgabe,” Westfälische
Forschungen 43 (1993): 588–654, and Oded Heilbronner, “From Ghetto to Ghetto:
The Place of German Catholic Society in Recent Historiography,” Journal of Modern
History 72, no. 2 (2000): 453–95.
21 Olaf Blaschke, “Die Kolonialisierung der Laienwelt: Priester als Milieumanager und die
Kanäle klerikaler Kuratel,” in Religion im Kaiserreich: Milieus, Mentalitäten, Krisen, ed.
Olaf Blaschke and Frank-Michael Kuhlemann (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht,
1996), 93–135.
22 Christian Rak, Krieg, Nation und Konfession: die Erfahrung des deutsch-französischen
Krieges von 1870/71 (Paderborn: F. Schöningh, 2004).
Introduction 7

fuse confessional differences along a model of Christian sacrifice for the


nation, which also accentuated the exclusion of Jews from the national
community.
Standard accounts of Catholicism in Central Europe during the Great
War focus on the bishops, and particularly their aggressive “war theol-
ogy” in defense of interests of state. These tend to represent war experi-
ence solely through published war sermons circulated in pastoral letters
and published in religious periodicals.23 Even religious histories of the
churches during the war tended to focus on the actions of the bish-
ops in a very top-down fashion.24 Because of its accessible source base
and readily identifiable actors, military chaplaincy has provided a way
for talking about religion in a largely military context at the battlefront.25
Thus, despite historiographical shifts that argue for essential connections
between homefront and battlefront, religion in Central Europe during
the war is often represented through the perspectives of the military
administrative state and the leading churchmen psychologically invested
in it, thus instrumentalizing religion and privileging the nation-state.
The focus on church men also highlights the extent to which the reli-
gious history of Central Europe has been largely gendered by exclusively

23 Wilhelm Achleitner, Gott im Krieg: Die Theologie der österreichischen Bischöfe in den Hirten-
briefen zum Ersten Weltkrieg (Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 1997); Karl Hammer, Deutsche
Kriegstheologie, 1870–1918 (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1974); Heinrich
Missalla, “Gott mit uns”: Die deutsche katholische Kriegspredigt, 1914–1918 (Munich:
Kösel Verlag, 1968); Wilhelm Pressel, Die Kriegspredigt 1914–1918 in der evangelischen
Kirche Deutschlands (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1967).
24 Heinz Hürten, “Die katholische Kirche im Ersten Weltkrieg,” in Der erste Weltkrieg:
Wirkung, Wahrnehmung, Analyse, ed. Wolfgang Michalka (Munich: Piper Verlag, 1994),
725–35; Richard van Dülmen, “Der deutsche Katholizismus und der Erste Weltkrieg,”
Francia 2 (1974): 347–76. More recently, see Martin Lätzel, Die katholische Kirche
im Ersten Weltkrieg. Zwischen Nationalismus und Friedenswillen (Regensburg: Friedrich
Pustet, 2014).
25 For an overview of military chaplaincy in both the Habsburg and the Hohenzollern
monarchies, see Patrick J. Houlihan, “Clergy in the Trenches: Catholic Military Chap-
lains of Germany and Austria-Hungary during the First World War” (Ph.D. disserta-
tion, University of Chicago, 2011). See also Claudia Ham, “Von den Anfängen der
Militärseelsorge bis zur Liquidierung des Apostolischen Feldvikariates im Jahr 1918,”
in Zwischen Himmel und Erde: Militärseelsorge in Österreich, ed. Roman-Hans Gröger
(Graz: Styria Verlag, 2001), 13–98; Arnold Vogt, Religion im Militär: Seelsorge zwis-
chen Kriegsverherrlichung und Humanität: Eine militär-geschichtliche Studie (Frankfurt
a.M.: Peter Lang, 1984); and Benjamin Ziemann, “Katholische Religiosität und die
Bewältigung des Krieges: Soldaten und Militärseelsorger in der deutschen Armee,
1914–1918,” in Volksreligiosität und Kriegserleben, ed. Friedhelm Boll (Münster: Lit,
1997), 116–36.The published diaries of chaplains, with valuable scholarly commen-
tary, are also an excellent source. See Frank Betker and Almut Kriele, eds., Pro fide
et patria! Die Kriegstagebücher von Ludwig Berg 1914/18: Katholischer Feldgeistlicher im
Grossen Hauptquartier Kaiser Wilhelms II (Cologne: Böhlau, 1998), and Hans-Josef
Wollasch, ed., Militärseelsorge im Ersten Weltkrieg: Das Kriegstagebuch des katholischen
Feldgeistlichen Benedict Kreutz (Mainz: Matthias Grünewelt Verlag, 1987).
8 Catholicism and the Great War

male stories. Catholic women and children remain a marginalized group


of historical actors. The present work represents this group in order to
more accurately depict the religious experiences of believers.
The landscape of Central European war history is starting to change.
Benjamin Ziemann’s Front und Heimat, a fundamental work on Bavaria
(a heavily Catholic region of the German Empire), brilliantly dismantles
Nazi myths of combat solidarity at the front, arguing that ties between
homefront and battlefront were much more consequential. Ziemann
finds that for soldiers from Bavaria, a heavily agricultural area, regional
loyalties of farm, family, and faith were extremely important markers of
identity.26 Bavaria, as a key Catholic region of the German Empire and
a vital point of transnational affiliation between Germany and Austria-
Hungary, also figures largely in the present study. This book builds on
this work by incorporating other regions and firmly keeping in mind the
comparative dynamics of the different empires.
On a pan-European level, religion during the First World War remains
vastly understudied, particularly in comparison to the Second World War
and its aftermath.27 Catholics were immersed in processes of globaliza-
tion that took formative shape in the nineteenth century and continue
into the twenty-first.28 Many works of Catholic history rightly point out
that the Church’s story of adaptation to the modern world took huge
strides forward with the Second Vatican Council of 1962–65. Thus, the
present book highlights how the Catholic story of the twentieth century,
as seen through the losing powers, does not fit with standard narratives
of the Great War as an epic moment of disillusioning modernism.
Prescient analyses of wartime Catholicism have called attention to the
need to place the experiences of the laity at their center.29 Especially in
historical long-term analyses, structural factors tend to compress the era
of the world wars into a rubric of clerical nationalism, in which the power
structure of religion-nation-power has remained the definitive experi-
ence of religiosity since the French Revolution.30 The focus on clerical

26 Benjamin Ziemann, Front und Heimat: Ländliche Kriegserfahrungen im südlichen Bayern,


1914–1923 (Essen: Klartext, 1997). Recently translated as Benjamin Ziemann, War
Experiences in Rural Germany, 1914–1923, trans. Alex Skinner (Oxford: Berg, 2007).
27 Nicholas Atkin and Frank Tallett, Priests, Prelates, and People: A History of European
Catholicism since 1750 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).
28 Vincent Viaene, “International History, Religious History, Catholic History: Perspec-
tives for Cross-Fertilization (1830–1914),” European History Quarterly 38, no. 4 (2008):
578–607.
29 Andreas Holzem and Christoph Holzapfel, “Kriegserfahrung als Forschungsproblem:
Der Erste Weltkrieg in der religiösen Erfahrung von Katholiken,” Theologische Quar-
talsschrift 182, no. 4 (2002): 279–97.
30 Andreas Holzem, ed., Krieg und Christentum: Religiöse Gewalttheorien in der Kriegser-
fahrung des Westens (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2009).
Introduction 9

nationalism, however, tends to instrumentalize religion in service of state


aims: that is, to emphasize that religious enthusiasm was “successful” to
the extent that it sustained social cohesion, advancing mobilization for a
victorious political outcome in the war.
Instead, this study focuses on the losing powers in a transnational con-
text, showing that even though political entities in Central Europe lost
a disastrous war, religious believers there had a wide variety of religious
experiences. These religious experiences certainly included the nation,
but they were not exclusively, or even primarily, defined by it. Religious
believers made sense of the war at many levels: individual, familial, local,
national, imperial, and transnational. The nation was only one of many
valences of loyalty. Studies of popular religion have rightly insisted that
the boundary between institutional religion and superstition is blurred.31
In the realm of popular religion, forms of Catholic spirituality drew on
pagan and folk cultures, adapted by individuals to fit the new circum-
stances of war.
The Great War was an epic moment in the religious history of mod-
ern Europe, and yet the voices of ordinary believers remain marginal-
ized by the sound and fury of the war’s immense cultural legacy. This
book analyzes themes on a broad scale across national boundaries, relat-
ing huge swaths of Central and Eastern Europe to more pan-European
developments. It exemplifies the classical theoretical tension between the
“horizon of expectation” (Erwartungshorizont) and “realm of experience”
(Erfahrungsraum) articulated by Reinhart Koselleck.32 Avoiding simplis-
tic starting and stopping points such as 1914 or 1918, the book’s narrative
instead shows how the Great War as experienced by religious believers
does not fit standard twentieth-century chronological signposts.
Thus, this book is a study of how a very traditional religion, stereo-
typed as archaic, confronted and adjusted to the new horrors of industrial
warfare. At the level of the nation, collective symbolic loss was an impor-
tant part of the conflict, but this was only one level at which religious
believers conceived of the war. The book examines the bishops’ infamous
war theology and its transmission to the masses of believers, but it also
represents the lesser-known positions of the papacy and of lay believers.
It examines fundamental contrasts between national/imperial visions of
collective sacrifice and what these meant for individual believers in terms

31 Christine Beil, Thomas Fliege, Monique Scheer et al., “Populare Religiosität und
Kriegserfahrungen,” Theologische Quartalsschrift 182, no. 4 (2002): 298–320; Gottfried
Korff, ed., Alliierte im Himmel: Populare Religiosität und Kriegserfahrung (Tübingen:
Tübinger Vereinigung für Volkskunde, 2006).
32 Reinhart Koselleck, Vergangene Zukunft. Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten (Frankfurt
a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1979).
10 Catholicism and the Great War

of personal piety, especially after it became apparent that the war was
lost. Institutional prescriptions of the Catholic faith formed important
orientation points for believers. Whenever possible, however, this work
stresses the lived reality of individual experiences of transcendence. It
places emphasis on pastoral forms of theology and religious practice,
showing the popular reception of ideas, the transmission to action of
the faithful, and the autonomous modes of spirituality that developed
against Church guidelines. Thus, this work highlights both Church and
state authorities’ instrumentalization of faith and individual lay believers’
assertion of their faith as a form of personal identity and experience.

Methodology
Impossible to articulate fully for one person, and even more so for mil-
lions of believers in two empires, a focus on religion and everyday life
will inevitably fall short of an adequate representation of personal reli-
giosity. Nevertheless, one should clarify some of the guiding methods. In
studying religious phenomena, where does one draw the line for classi-
fying something as a religious experience? Scholars of religious studies
will continue to debate whether the existence of a concept of “religion”
makes sense.33 In order not to get bogged down in endless wrangling
over this issue, this book has been generous in classifying according to
an ideal-type characteristic of Catholicism defined by both scholars and
believers. Nevertheless, in order to better represent cultural flow and
personal agency, it also incorporates a model of concentric, overlapping
circles of commitment.34 At the center of the circle lie the doctrine and
dogma of the Catholic Church seated in Rome under the authority of
the Pope, but the direction of commitment to that center has two-way
movement: both centripetal and centrifugal.
This study focuses on Catholicism specifically, although other religions
and confessions will be discussed throughout. Occasionally, in order to
compare and contrast forms of Christianity, the book discusses Protes-
tant spirituality in particular. There are obvious areas of overlap: for
instance, in loyalty to Kaiser Wilhelm II as the highest state authority in
Imperial Germany. In some cases, the book has used Protestant archival
material, and one may wonder at the scholarly legitimacy of including

33 For excellent discussion of these issues, see Robert A. Orsi, ed., The Cambridge Com-
panion to Religious Studies (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
34 John Taylor, “The Future of Christianity,” in The Oxford History of Christianity, ed. John
McManners (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 644–83. See also David B. Bar-
rett, George Thomas Kurian, and Todd M. Johnson, eds., World Christian Encyclopedia:
A Comparative Survey of Churches and Religions in the Modern World, 2nd edn., 2 vols.
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).
Introduction 11

this. For example, in Chapter 5, it discusses Red Cross sisters and the
historigraphically neglected experiences of women and children. In these
cases, Christian material was selected as the most clear empirical exam-
ple of a larger point that exclusively Catholic sources do not adequately
address. For instance, Red Cross nurse Hilda Galles, a Christian of
uncertain denomination, provided a vivid and immediate contrast of dif-
fering representations of war experience: a laconic, dutiful letter to her
parents and her personal diary entries written at the same time, the latter
of which record a hospital world of hellish chaos and depression. These
two documents highlight important points of difference between per-
sonal subjectivity and semi-public images of war: factors crucial to the
varieties of religious experience and gendered representations of duty.
Perhaps most offensive to scholars and some religious believers will be
this book’s claims that Catholicism provided an extra measure of comfort
beyond Protestantism during the Great War. On one level, these criti-
cisms are correct: there are no quantifiable benchmarks to demonstrate
something like this with a social scientific degree of numerical accuracy.
On another level appropriate to religious studies, however, argumentation
must be qualitatively suggestive rather than quantitatively conclusive, and
this book does not pronounce infallible judgments ex cathedra; rather, it
posts theses for disputation.
There is a qualitative difference that this book insists upon: firmly
rooted in historical theology between Christian denominations, wartime
Catholicism’s emphasis on belief and practice, or faith and works, sim-
ply provided more ways in which Catholic believers could understand
and potentially shape their own beliefs. This was especially relevant for
increasingly atomized national or imperial communities as the collec-
tive sacrifice that began in 1914 became increasingly hopeless by 1918.
Particularly for the losing powers of Central Europe, the Protestant jus-
tification by individual faith alone, especially when the war seemed lost,
did not allow religious believers additional ways in which to understand
the chaos of war that made communal sense outside of national defeat
and frustration. As religion became tangled with nationhood in German
history, the consequences of defeat in 1918 were especially traumatiz-
ing for the Protestant collective imaginary that had, the year before,
celebrated the 400th anniversary of the Reformation begun by Martin
Luther in 1517. By contrast, Catholic spirituality emphasized such mat-
ters as intercessory saint culture, the tangibility of devotional objects,
and a universal Church community beyond the nation – and these were
modes of faith that proved comforting during collective imperial defeat
for the Central Powers.
Instead of stressing religion’s ecumenical similarity, which prejudices
analysis toward the nation-state, this book stresses religious differences.
12 Catholicism and the Great War

Rooted in war experience, Protestant theology in Central Europe,


represented by towering figures such as Karl Barth and Paul Tillich, took
a decisive turn during the Great War. By contrast, Central European
Catholic theology and its exponents, such as Max Scheler, Romano
Guardini, and Karl Adam, viewed the years of 1914–18 much more
traditionally and continuously, not as a decisive rupture. The Catholic
Church, represented ultimately by the papacy and institutional networks
such as a caritas network for social welfare, dealt with the Great
War in terms of adapted tradition, not fundamental disruption and
reorientation.
Catholic specificities remain at the heart of this transnational and
comparative work. In his classic work on Catholicism, Father Richard
McBrien argued for a more inclusive reading of Catholicism that rep-
resented the Church’s self-conceptualized universalistic mission. Never-
theless, McBrien identified three themes that have helped to differentiate
Catholic belief and practice from alternative variants of Christianity:
sacramentality, mediation, and communion.35 Sacramentality empha-
sizes tangible practices and concerted actions; mediation stresses the
intercessory culture in the hierarchical Church, where clergy members
and saints intervene on behalf of all believers, communicating with the
group of spirits ultimately led by God; and communion underscores the
united community of believers, transcending all boundaries of distinc-
tion. These themes will recur often in the present work.
Given the interreligious ecumenism in modern studies of religion, the
focus on one religion might seem strange, especially considering the
intertwined relations and deep history of Protestants, Catholics, and
Jews in Central Europe.36 Focusing on Catholicism was also a strategic
choice, however, made for two primary reasons. First, because of the
multi-ethnic nature of the Habsburg monarchy, a study of Germany and
Austria-Hungary that dealt with the major official state religions would
have to talk about not only Protestantism, Catholicism, and Judaism, but
also Eastern Orthodoxy and Islam. In the course of a single monograph,
comparing so many religions would result in a superficial level of empir-
ical representation, detracting from the desire to represent the everyday
thoughts and beliefs of ordinary believers. Second, the empirical archival
data available at the state and local level simply exist in much richer
detail for Catholicism than for other religions, especially Protestantism
in a military context in Germany. Significantly, the destruction of the

35 Richard P. McBrien, Catholicism, rev. edn. (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1994),


8–17.
36 For one of the best approaches, see Helmut Walser Smith, ed., Protestants, Catholics,
and Jews in Germany, 1800–1914 (New York: Berg, 2001).
Introduction 13

German military archives in Potsdam during an air raid in 1945 caused


much archival material on the German Army during the First World War
to be lost forever, complicating the study of Protestantism in particular.
However, at German federal and ecclesiastical archives, particularly the
ecclesiastical archives in Munich and Cologne and the military archives
in Freiburg im Breisgau, enough material on Catholic religiosity during
the war has survived to permit a substantial comparison to Catholicism in
Austria-Hungary. Although much of the empirical material of this book is
focused on ethnically German speakers, the book’s Catholic transnation-
alism integrates other nationalities into discussions of the war’s impact
for Central and Eastern European Catholicism. Thus, this book opens up
avenues for further research, integrating previously marginal individual
Catholics from these regions into discussions of the war’s cultural history,
which were previously focused on bishops and artists. Areas of overlap
between Christian denominations can be extended to allow analysis of
other religions during the war.
Thus, Catholicism in Germany and Austria-Hungary represents
a transnational and comparative history of everyday religion during
wartime. It is transnational in that it examines Catholicism, an ancient
religious community of believers affiliating with the Pope in Rome as
the successor of Saint Peter, the supposed leader of the initial Church
organized by Jesus Christ – and thus oriented across the political bound-
aries of two empires. But the comparative aspect is also important, for
Catholics in Germany and Austria-Hungary were also political mem-
bers of two different empires. In Germany, Catholics were a suspect
minority, around thirty-six percent of the population in a Protestant-
and Prussian-dominated empire, while Catholics in Austria-Hungary
were around eighty percent of the population (over ninety percent in
the “Austrian” half of the monarchy), a favored majority in a monar-
chy affiliated with a throne-and-altar alliance of privilege. Recent works
of Habsburg history have done much to complicate the standard story
of an unstable monarchy doomed to dissolution by the unruly forces of
nationalism; indeed, the category of “national indifference” has helped
to reintroduce contingency and identity on a local level: key parts of
a complicated picture of state-building.37 The nation and emerging

37 Gary B. Cohen, “Nationalist Politics and the Dynamics of State and Civil Society in
the Habsburg Monarchy, 1867–1914,” Central European History 40 (2007): 241–78;
Jonathan Kwan, “Nationalism and All That: Reassessing the Habsburg Monarchy and
Its Legacy,” European History Quarterly 41, no. 1 (2011): 88–108. For a pioneering work
of “national indifference,” see Tara Zahra, Kidnapped Souls: National Indifference and the
Battle for Children in the Bohemian Lands, 1900–1948 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 2008).
14 Catholicism and the Great War

national consciousness mattered, but this was not the only source of
loyalty.38
This book keeps the power relations of national sacrifice firmly in
mind, while also representing multiple layers of religious affiliation above
and below the nation: a universalistic Church, regional affiliations, fam-
ily relations, and personal identities – all of which were unified by
a centripetal–centrifugal relation to the Church of Rome. Politically
speaking, the most represented contingent in this study remains a pan-
Germanic version of Catholicism, in which German-speaking ethnic-
ity played a large part. However, the book contextualizes pan-German
Catholicism within other layers of Central European identities.
The comparison of Germany and Austria-Hungary also focuses on
the losing powers for reasons of historiographic strategy. One could, for
instance, make intriguing comparative studies between Catholic “win-
ners” and “losers” during the war: France and Austria-Hungary or Italy
and Austria-Hungary. However, the focus on Germany and Austria-
Hungary allows a transnational focus on Catholicism that is both sim-
ilar and different. It problematizes a pan-Germanic Central European
Catholicism, while also relating to the emerging nationality question for
Central and Eastern Europe. Most importantly, it allows a pointed his-
toriographic engagement with narratives of disenchantment and loss,
which is especially paramount in studies of the First World War’s cultural
legacy. The dominant narratives of the war’s cultural history represent
well the story of secularization and literary modernism. This, however,
has created a negative teleology. Focusing on the experiences of the losing
powers allows engagement with the metanarratives of secularization and
modernism, pointing the way toward a Church history of Central Europe
that goes beyond the words of bishops toward the beliefs and actions of
individual Catholics. It shows that religious believers, even from the los-
ing powers, had formative life experiences that have not been sufficiently
represented in the Great War’s cultural history.
How does one represent a religious experience, either one’s own or,
especially, someone else’s? There is, at the outset, a fundamental problem
of subjectivity: the inability to “peer into hearts,” as the Protestant the-
ologian Friedrich Wilhelm Graf has put it.39 There is also the problem of
evidence. As Annette Becker, one of the foremost historians of religion in

38 Gerd Krumeich and Hartmut Lehmann, eds., “Gott mit uns”: Nation, Religion, und
Gewalt im 19. und frühen 20. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2000).
39 Friedrich Wilhelm Graf, “‘Dechristianisierung.’ Zur Problemgeschichte eines kul-
turpolitischen Topos,” in Säkularisierung, Dechristianisierung, Rechristianisierung im
neuzeitlichen Europa, ed. Hartmut Lehmann (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht,
1997), 66.
Introduction 15

France during the Great War, has written, “Traditional religious services
and spiritualism, prayers and amulets, the suffering of Christ and the
intercession of the saints, ordinary piety and extraordinary revelations
all contributed to the religion of wartime. Yet it is hard to reconstitute
prayers, fears, and suffering when they leave few archival traces.”40 Per-
haps more than other historical questions, religiosity is a problem that
tends toward an unreachable limit. Yet the attempt must be made, given
the sources at hand.
This is a religious history that gives an impressionistic portrait. For
those who seek a quantitatively grounded social scientific history of reli-
gion, this book will be especially unsatisfactory: for the most part, it does
not chase after representation of religion by measuring statistics such
as official communion reception and burial records (even when such
records exist), with a few pointed exceptions. Existing statistical data
on religious personnel, even for an institution with such deep bureau-
cratic ties as Catholic military chaplaincy in Germany, are often non-
comprehensive and plagued with uncertainty.41 As a statistical portrait,
the “evidence” will be problematic, in some cases relying on one per-
son’s retrospective account of what he or she thought, sometimes written
down years afterward. Nevertheless, supporting evidence for the book’s
argument draws on multiple archival sources across Europe, represent-
ing other voices marginalized in the historiography of the Great War.
This book has surveyed existing archives in an unprecedented breadth
and depth for its subject matter, including ecclesiastical, federal, state,
and local archives across Central Europe, including Vatican City. Build-
ing on previous histories of military religion in Central Europe, this
work particularly incorporates sources from Catholic areas of Germany,
including Bavaria and the Rhineland, as well as the records of the Austro-
Hungarian monarchy centralized in Vienna. This archival detail helps to
demonstrate that previously marginalized “epiphenomena” of religious
belief were, in fact, pan-European phenomena of utmost importance to
how masses of people understood and experienced the war.
Whenever possible, this study seeks the perspectives of the history
of everyday life of ordinary believers. Although the pope, bishops, and
prominent clerics are an important part of the story, this book strives
to give voice to the lay believers, especially women and children. It

40 Becker, “Faith, Ideologies,” 241.


41 The pioneering work of a research team in the Catholic Military Bishop’s office has
brought a much more comprehensive approach. Nevertheless, this team freely admits
being hampered by lack of knowledge of their office’s holdings before 1918. See
Hans Jürgen Brandt and Peter Häger, eds., Biographisches Lexikon der Katholischen
Militärseelsorge Deutschlands 1848 bis 1945 (Paderborn: Bonifatius, 2002), xii–xiii.
16 Catholicism and the Great War

incorporates a topically unparalled source base of personalized ego-


documents, such as letters, diaries, and memoirs. Other, more conven-
tional sources also provide context: periodicals and bureaucratic sources
such as chaplains’ reports to their religious and military superiors. How-
ever, in contrast to previous religious histories of the conflict, this work
contextualizes the “war theology” rhetoric of the bishops and prominent
members of the clergy, especially as represented in official publications.
The book lets believers speak in their own voices as much as possible,
with relevant context, because the extant personal written sources are the
best way of accessing their “life-worlds.” As Brad Gregory has recently
argued, a history of religion must not seek some instrumentalized social
scientific explanation of religion that reduces it to something else; rather,
a genuine inquiry about religious belief should seek to clarify “what did
it mean to them?”42 Consequently, whenever possible, one needs to hear
believers in their own voice. This does not imply that readers should
necessarily believe them, but it does require that we take seriously his-
torical actors’ viewpoints as one possibility of what their experience
meant. When believers’ viewpoints are shared by others, the beliefs in
question achieve more social significance. Consequently, we should keep
in mind the words of Richard McBrien, who has written that the Catholic
Church is, in the minds of believers, “not simply a religious community,
institution, or movement (although it is all of these and more)” but also
a “mystery, or sacrament . . . the corporate communal presence of the
triune God in the world.”43 In any event, the plurality of Catholic expe-
riences complicates standard notions of the cultural history of the Great
War and its religious legacy for twentieth-century Europe.
In line with studies of “total war,” this book blurs the boundaries
between homefront and battlefront. The book seeks to introduce a “fam-
ily” history of Catholicism into larger debates about the changing nature
of war. It argues that women, children, and family relations connected
homefront and battlefront as both a problematic nostalgic ideal and an
unsettling new political reality. By incorporating homefront religiosity,
this book recasts a religious history of the war that, for Central Europe,
has been almost exclusively male and very much focused on the clergy,
especially the bishops and the papacy.
Recent works on the history of everyday life in Central Europe have
done much to introduce women and children as socio-political actors into

42 Brad S. Gregory, “The Other Confessional History: On Secular Bias in the Study of
Religion,” History and Theory 45, no. 4 (2006): 132–49.
43 Richard P. McBrien, The Church: The Evolution of Catholicism (New York: HarperOne,
2008), 354.
Introduction 17

the history of the war, but their religious worldviews have not received
adequate attention. The notion of religion as a “lived condition” firmly
anchors religious inquiry in a history of everyday life, and this historio-
graphical field has seen marked advances applied to the study of Central
Europe during the Great War. Recent works have focused on the break-
down of social relations in capital cities, emphasizing the importance
of material conditions, especially food supplies. Maureen Healy’s path-
breaking work on the collapse of Imperial Vienna, Vienna and the Fall
of the Habsburg Empire, shows that women and children became political
actors with grievances against the state, and that the imperial patriarchy
lost its authority when people realized that the government could not pro-
vide food for its citizens.44 Similarly, with a staggering amount of empir-
ical detail, Roger Chickering’s urban history of Freiburg, The Great War
and Urban Life in Germany, is a pioneering attempt to give a “total history”
of “total war” using massive documentation to portray the experiences of
a single city. As Chickering freely admits, such histories of everyday life
are very good at capturing the “structural and material changes that the
war occasioned” but struggle “to accommodate the many different ways
in which urban residents made their own war – how they understood,
interpreted, or otherwise ‘constructed’ the war’s meaning as they dealt
with its mounting burdens.”45 Urban histories showing the socio-political
breakdown of the state are a vital component of the war, although one
cannot assume that wartime cities were inherent engines of seculariza-
tion. In contrast, this work is an attempt to recover the religious actions
and spiritual worldviews of masses of ordinary Catholic believers across
Central Europe. Thus, this book historically problematizes the religious
emotions of everyday life,46 articulating transnational Catholic beliefs in
imperial frameworks of the losing powers.
Regarding the structure of the book, Chapter 1 gives a sketch of
Catholicism in Germany and Austria-Hungary. While providing a por-
trayal of religious life in the pre-1914 world, it outlines the structural
factors of Catholicism as a minority religion in Germany and a majority
religion in Austria-Hungary. Chapter 2 takes up the question of theologi-
cal worldviews, beginning with the infamous war theology of bishops and

44 Maureen Healy, Vienna and the Fall of the Habsburg Empire: Total War and Everyday Life
in World War I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
45 Roger Chickering, The Great War and Urban Life in Germany: Freiburg, 1914–1918
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 7.
46 For approaches to the burgeoning subfield of the history of religious emotions in Central
Europe, see Pascal Eitler, Bettina Hitzer, and Monique Scheer, “Feeling and Faith:
Religious Emotions in German History,” German History 32, no. 3 (2014): 343–52.
More generally, see Nicole Eustace et al., “AHR Conversation: The Historical Study of
Emotions,”The American Historical Review 117, no. 5 (2012): 1487–531.
18 Catholicism and the Great War

clerics but quickly moving on to discover alternative strands of theology


that were to be much more influential for the course of twentieth-century
Catholicism. The chapter includes both famous theologians (and their
implications for Vatican II) and “little theologies” of everyday experi-
ence, including strains of virulent anti-Semitism that would help to lay
the groundwork for genocidal complicity during the Second World War.
Overall, the chapter stresses how Catholic theology ran on a different time
scale of deep continuities, thus minimizing the horror and destruction of
the Great War. Moving into the experience of battle directly, Chapter 3
represents the most pointed association of religion with state adminis-
tration: Catholic military chaplains as state-sponsored clergy members
ministering to troops in battle. This chapter shows that even chaplains,
the stereotypical fire-breathers of “Praise God and pass the ammuni-
tion,” were often sensitive and nuanced observers of the upheaval and
catastrophe of war. This chapter also highlights the insufficiency of offi-
cial representations and clerical agency, arguing that religious experi-
ences during the war went well beyond possibilities of clerical control.
Nevertheless, chaplains represented an essential source of commentary,
simply because of their liminal position and the records they left behind.
Chapter 4 goes into the realm of personal spirituality, arguing for recog-
nition of the blurred spectrum of officially sanctioned forms of piety
and of “superstitious” elements, showing a mix of folk belief, magic,
and official devotion. Catholicism’s culture of tangible devotions and
intercessory saint culture provided its believers with a wide spectrum of
comfort measures and ways of interpreting the chaos of war.
While the first four chapters stress homefront connections as integral
to an understanding of total war, Chapter 5 puts more of a focus on
the homefront itself. It especially highlights the role of women and chil-
dren, stressing that the dream of peaceful order was often a form of
delusive nostalgia, but was nonetheless a powerful motivating factor in
healing societies shattered by war. More concretely, the chapter stresses
the essential roles of religious women as members of a caritas network
that helped to ameliorate suffering and rebuild the war-torn world; this
was especially important as religious resources had to supplement areas
that the state was unable to cover. Catholicism’s emphasis on the role of
the Virgin Mary played a key role in creating a picture of female devo-
tion to Christian sacrifice. Chapter 6 looks at the role of the papacy,
arguing that more attention should be paid to the transformative role
that Benedict XV had in shaping the Church as a humanitarian polit-
ical actor both during and after the war. Institutionally speaking, the
Church and its new Code of Canon Law from 1917 emerged from the
war strengthened, more believable as a non-partisan actor, and poised
Introduction 19

for a period of interwar renewal and growth through such movements


as the youth movement, the liturgical movement, and Catholic Action.
Finally, Chapter 7 examines processes of memory and mourning, high-
lighting how traditional Catholic representations of grief and destruction
such as the Mass in Time of War and the motif of the Pietà helped
believers understand the chaos of war and mourn the loss of their loved
ones. Catholic modes of grief were centered on feminine and familial
means of representation, which helped especially to comfort the losing
powers. Catholic universalism was a transnational ideal that helped to
generate reconciliation but also allowed new nation-states to flourish as
new or reborn identities that championed both political particularity and
common religious identity.
This book portrays the wide and deep varieties of religious experience.
Seen through the everyday lives of Catholic believers from the Great
War’s losing powers, the Catholic story of the twentieth century does not
fit with standard narratives of the First World War as an epic moment
of disillusionment. Ultimately, this book shows how the futility of trench
warfare on the Western Front is an inadequate master narrative for talking
about religion and the European cultural history of the twentieth century.
Another Random Document on
Scribd Without Any Related Topics
just described are only to be discovered by very patient scrutiny. But
in the Pin-tailed Snipe (Gallinago stenura) the number of the
feathers has been greatly increased, while at the same time their
webs have been so reduced that the outspread tail seems to consist
of little more than spines. With such a transformation one expects to
find a quite exceptional performance, far surpassing that of the
Common Snipe. Yet so far as observation and experiment go they
effect absolutely nothing! Here again we have a case where
modification of structure has passed the bounds of need and passed
so far as to make the whole tail useless as a sound-producing organ!
A contrast and a parallel are afforded by some of the gallinaceous
birds of South America. The Black Penelope (Penelopina nigra) of
Guatemala, while on the wing, will, during its “love-flights,” pitch
suddenly earthwards with outstretched wings, and at such times a
crashing, rushing sound is produced, which has been likened to the
sound of a falling tree. Yet there is nothing in the shape of the wing
which will account for this. On the other hand, a near relation of this
bird, the Black-wattled Guan, Aburria (Penelope) aburri has the four
outermost primaries deeply incised along their inner vanes, reducing
the outermost portion of the feathers to mere spines. Yet, so far as
is known, this wing makes no especial noise. However, the males of
certain little South American Perching-birds known as Manakins have
the shafts of the secondary quills thickened to an extraordinary
degree so as to form solid, horny lumps, and these, when the wings
are brought together smartly over the back, produce a noise not
unlike the crack of a whip, so that here again structure and function
are found together. In the contradictory cases just cited where
specialized parts are found which are apparently functionless, we
must suppose that the habit of using them has been supplanted by
some new stimulant.
The part played by musical instruments of percussion would seem to
be a variable one. In some cases, and possibly in all, it may serve as
an excitant, or stimulant, to the rousing of a “sex-storm”; in many, at
any rate, such sounds serve as calls to the sexes when separated.
This much seems to be demonstrated in the case of certain of the
Woodpeckers, which in this matter differ conspicuously from any
other species yet referred to, in that they have developed no special
sound-producing mechanism, but make use of hollow trees which
serve them as drums, the beak being used as the drumstick. This is
a very noteworthy fact, for one would have supposed that here at
any rate, where the production of loud and far-reaching sounds is of
vital importance, the means would have been provided by some
such modification of the wing-feathers as we have already seen to
obtain in the case, for example, of the Manakins. More closely
examined, however, this apparent failure of the organism to produce
its own mechanism becomes less remarkable, for Woodpeckers are
forest-dwellers and but indifferent fliers; loud sounds produced by
the rapid vibration of the wings or tail, as in the case of the Snipe, in
mid-air, are thus impracticable, if not impossible, and sounds
produced after the fashion of the Manakins would not have sufficient
carrying power.
One of the most skilled performers among the Woodpeckers is the
Great Spotted Woodpecker (Dendrocofus major), whose weird
drumming once heard will never be forgotten. These sounds are
produced by blows of the beak on a branch, delivered so rapidly that
the bird’s head presents but a blurred appearance. The sounds thus
made vary with the resonance of the wood and can be heard at a
distance of half a mile. These strange vibrating notes are most
frequently heard during the courting season, and they will commonly
beget a speedy response from some more or less distant part of the
wood, so that their purpose is clear. They attain the same end as the
bellowing of the stag or the “lek” of the Capercaillie. They are,
however, to be heard at other times, as when the birds are greatly
alarmed or when the nest is being robbed.
CHAPTER VII

THE SEXUAL SELECTION THEORY AS APPLIED TO


BIRDS

Where the Rôle of the Sexes is reversed—Polygamy and how it is brought about
—Coloration and Courtship—Instinctive Actions—The Importance of Landed
Possessions—The Meaning of “Display”—The Springs of “Behaviour”—A New
Light on the Wild-duck—The “Display” of the Great-crested Grebe—Some
Neglected Factors.
The significance of the varied behaviour of birds—more especially of
the males—during the period of reproductive activity must now be
more minutely analysed. But before this analysis can be profitably
begun, it will be necessary to recall the fact that there are several
cases known wherein the rôle of the sexes is largely reversed.
Herein the females do the “courting,” and fight one another as rivals
for the males; while the males perform the duties of incubation and
brooding, and feeding the young. This is really very remarkable, and
demands more attention than it has yet received.
What factors have brought about this curious reversal? In any search
for an explanation it must be borne in mind that in all such cases
polyandry is the rule, and in all such cases the female is larger and
more vividly coloured than the male. Here, then, we have exactly the
opposite to what obtains in cases of polygamy. What is the reason
for this preponderance of males? Why is it that when the males are
in excess of the females the latter should be the more brilliantly
coloured and the more amorous? These questions at present are
unanswerable. When polygamy obtains it seems always to be
assumed that it is explained by the excessive pugnacity of the males,
which, after fierce contests for the mastery, take forcible possession
of as many females as may be captured and held in durance; the
same argument seems never to have been applied when polyandry
obtains. There can be no doubt but that it applies in neither case.
When polygamy obtains, as we have already pointed out, the
females are not seized and captured by the males, they are not
victims of a lecherous lord. On the contrary, they seek the males,
and the intensity of the desire to satisfy their natural cravings
extinguishes any feeling of jealousy.
The same interpretation must obtain where the numerical values of
the sexes is reversed. Failure to appreciate this accounts for one of
the many futile suggestions made for the suppression of the rabbit
plague in Australia, which was that large hauls of these pests should
be made by netting, and that the females should be slain and the
males released. This, it was held, would lead to the speedy reduction
of the latter, which would kill one another in their fights for the
remaining females. The plan was impracticable, but the suggestion
demonstrated the prevalent belief as to the attitude of the male in
this respect. Had it been well founded, surely polyandrous species,
whether of birds or beasts, would never have existed; for, by the
reduction of the males, monogamy would speedily have been
restored. How, then, are we to explain polyandry? How are we to
explain the fact, as it seems to be the fact, that the excess of males
has brought about such a complete reversal in behaviour—the
males, instead of the females, requiring the aphrodisiac? The
solution of this problem probably lies with the physiologist. We now
know that the problem of sex does not rest merely in the complete
development of the primary sexual organs; we know that fertile
unions do not depend merely on the act of pairing, but on the
functional activity of those ancillary glands already referred to. And it
may well be that some change in the character of the secretions has
not only altered the numerical values of the sexes, but reversed the
normal rôle of coloration and behaviour. That is to say, neither
polygamy nor polyandry among the lower animals, at any rate, has
been brought about or is maintained by the excessive death-rate
due to combats for possession of mates, but must be explained as
demonstrating inherent changes in the germ-plasm, disturbing the
relative proportions of the sexes and correlated with a profound
transformation, not only in the behaviour of the sexes during the
period of reproductive activity, but also in their physical
characteristics.
The action of the primary sexual glands and of the ancillary glands
has, then, to be allowed for in all attempts to interpret behaviour in
sexual matters. No less so must this be the case in regard to the
development of coloration and other forms of ornament, and the
genesis of weapons of offence. But at present we are, in this
direction, dealing with an unknown quantity. The recognition of this,
however, should not deter us from attempting to solve the riddle of
sex from the phenomena which have so far been surveyed.
To-day the interpretation which holds the field is Darwin’s theory of
“Sexual Selection.” But this was framed rather to account for the
existence of conspicuous secondary sexual characters—the antlers of
Deer, the train of the Peacock, and so on; it did not take cognizance
of the unarmed, and the soberly-clad individuals. But whatever
shortcomings we may discover, real or imaginary, in this theory, we
must never forget that he had not only to analyse and present his
facts, but he had first to collect them. This, in his case, was a more
laborious task than most people seem to suppose. Our criticisms to-
day are based, not so much on the revelations of new facts, as on
the harvests of his gleaning. Yet when all is said and done, the
theory of “Sexual Selection” remains, though perhaps in a new
setting.
To attempt to epitomize this theory is to essay a very difficult task.
But, in a condensed form, it may be said to be a theory which
accounts for the development of secondary sexual characters, on the
one hand through the agency of conquest by battle, whereby rival
males strive for the possession of one or more females, who have no
choice in the matter, or who may deliberately elect to follow the
victor: and on the other by display of conspicuous ornamentation, or
of more or less grotesque antics, or of some form of music, using
this term in a very wide sense. Wherever display is the agent,
however, its purpose seems to be to win the affections of the female
to whom such attentions are addressed. She is supposed to elect to
mate with the finest performers of a number of suitors. In this way,
it is assumed, the intensity of the display, whatever its nature, has
been gradually increased.
Wallace strongly opposed this, contending that it assumed too much,
that it assumed a common and uniform standard of perfection
shared by all the females concerned in the selection, which is indeed
assuming too much. But his own theory was no more satisfactory.
Indeed it was very much less so, for he contended that these various
exaggerations of colour and form are to be regarded simply as
evidences of a superabundant vitality, though there is no evidence
that “superabundant vitality,” if it exists, is a transmissible character.
The revised version of the Sexual Selection theory advanced in these
pages is largely inspired by the work of Mr. H. Eliot Howard who, in
his Monograph on the British Warblers, has not only added very
materially to our knowledge of the life-histories of these birds,
during the reproductive period, but has also done much—both in the
direction of destructive, and constructive criticism, of generally
accepted conceptions on this head—to set us on the right track for
further research.
A study of his work leaves one with the conviction that, while these
birds exhibit what we may call a nascent intelligence, their actions,
on the whole, may be described as instinctive, or congenitally
definite. That is to say, they follow one another in definite sequence.
Hence we must regard each new phase in the chain of events
appertaining to the reproductive cycle, as following one another in a
definite sequence, so that any break therein throws the orderly
performance of the necessary acts out of gear. There is no
realization of what reproduction means, no deliberate striving to
achieve that end. Each new phase brings its own set of associations
and sets a new train of actions in motion, which are performed
mechanically. For instance, these Warblers, like hosts of other
species under similar circumstances, are scrupulously careful to
remove the fæces of their young from the nest; thereby preserving it
in a sanitary condition. It is certain that any neglect to do this would
speedily end in the death of the young. This act is “instinctive”; it is
not performed because the parents have evolved any views on
sanitation, and any strain in whom this instinct was defective would
speedily become eliminated. Mr. Howard has demonstrated the
mechanical character of this sanitary measure by placing leaves in
nests of young. The parents, having fed their offspring, at once
seized upon the leaf and commenced to dispose of it after their
usual fashion, first by trying to swallow it and then by carrying it
away. They did not, evidently, realize the difference between the
texture of the leaf and the milk-white, jelly-like envelope which
always encloses the fæcal matter of the nestling. We shall probably
never know how this most vitally important instinct came into being;
nor can we hope to discover what chain of happenings begot the
instinct, which each parent displays, to gently stimulate the cloacal
lips of their offspring in order to induce the discharge of the fæces
when this does not immediately follow the stimulus of swallowing
food.
We cannot credit these birds with notions on the importance of the
regular discharge of the evacuations. Equally mysterious is the
development of the envelope enclosing the fæcal matter. This is
jelly-like in substance, and of considerable thickness, and is enclosed
within a very delicate skin or pellicle, enabling one to lift the whole
in the fingers without soiling them. How and where it is formed
should not long evade discovery. But how it has come to be is
another matter. We can, at any rate, vaguely account for responses
of the organism to internal stimuli reacting directly on the individual,
but here is an elaborate mechanism evolved in response to extra-
personal needs: and which cannot be regarded as of exactly the
same configuration as the instinct to feed the young.
A return must be made to the nature of the early phases in the
procession of the reproductive instincts. Mr. Howard’s study of the
Warblers seems to show conclusively that these first manifest
themselves in an overmastering desire to seize upon territory large
enough to ensure an abundance of food for the offspring that are
yet to be. To this end the males arrive from their far-distant winter
quarters at least a week in advance of the females. Since each
returns approximately to the scene of last year’s nursery, the arrivals
are fairly distributed at the first; but nevertheless this distribution
inevitably brings a conflict of interests between one or more males,
perchance young birds about to start in life, and having therefore no
definite objective. But whatever the reason, the competition is there.
The strongest male remains in possession, and immediately
commences to express the ecstasy of feeling which possesses him in
continuous outbursts of song. Such, doubtless, answer to the
bellowing of the male stag. They advertise the presence of a male to
the female, who, as she arrives, would seem to be already stirred by
the rising storm of sexual desire, for having once discovered a male
in possession of the all-necessary site for the nest, and the equally
necessary domain, each settles down to conjugal bliss: within
twenty-four hours the task of building has begun. There is evidently
here no sexual selection in Darwin’s sense: no choice from among a
number of males of the individual which most excites desire within
her; but the mating of the most mettlesome, most virile males has
been determined before her arrival and by a double sieve. In the
first place, the duller-witted birds fail to secure suitable territory, and
in the second, the territory, having been taken, must be held by
force, so that only the strongest males remain to mate when the
females eventually arrive. So far as one can see, selection is less
exacting in the case of the females, which apparently need do little
more than respond to the advances of the males.
Plate 22.

From a drawing by H. Grönvold.


FIGHTING FOR TERRITORY.
Two Black-caps are here seen fighting for their annual breeding
territory. A Chiff-chaff has been unable to resist the excitement of
conflict.
Face page 140.

With the advent of the females the amorous instincts of the male
speedily gather force; but for their satisfaction it is imperative that
the female should be possessed by a like desire. To provoke this, for
it is essential to the well-being of the race that offspring should be
produced as early as possible, some form of aphrodisiac seems to be
necessary. This fact has never been properly realized, though it is
implied in Darwin’s theory of “Sexual Selection.” Here, however, it
was used to account for the evolution of resplendent coloration,
eccentric postures, and dances which, it was assumed, enabled or
induced the female to choose the most mettlesome males. What
obtained among sombre-clad species, appears to have excited no
curiosity among the students of the evolution theory. Hence it comes
somewhat as a surprise to find that the soberly-clad Warblers
behave exactly as though they too wore coats of many colours. After
what has been said in the last chapter on this head it will be
unnecessary to describe these displays among the Warblers in detail,
more especially as my friend Mr. Howard has kindly allowed me to
use some of the illustrations from his book. These show convincingly
enough that the wings and tail are made to play the same part as
though they bore all the hues of the rainbow. To bring this fact home
compare the figures of some of these small birds clad in sober russet
and black with that of the Sun Bittern (Eurypyga helias) in like
mood, whose wings and tail when spread, and only then, display
bands of vivid chestnut-red, contrasting with bands of black, on a
background of grey and buff, variegated with delicate mottlings and
vermiculations of black and brown, and streaks of white. In the case
of the Warblers, it is to be remarked, the male, in these ecstatic
moods, will commonly hold a leaf, or a piece of stick, in his beak, as
if suggesting the work of nest-building and its delightful sequence.
This, or its equivalent, is a common phase, for the Great Crested
Grebe, for example, in these paroxysms will dive and bring up weed,
the nest material of the species, as an offering to his mate, or as a
stimulant to her yet slumbering passion.
It seems clear, then, that the evolution of colour is not the stimulant
to display, for this is present where conspicuous colours are wanting.
Yet it can readily be understood how the association of ideas in
regard to colour and display arose, for there are cases where this
interpretation seems inevitable. Such are afforded by certain sea-
birds like the Kittiwake, Guillemot, Fulmar and Cormorant, wherein
the inside of the mouth is of a lurid orange-red in the case of the
first-mentioned, and of flaming gamboge yellow in that of the
others. During moments of sexual ecstasy the mouth is widely
opened, as if to charm the beholder with its gaudy hue. Both sexes
have the same colouring, and both behave alike. But it is doubtful
whether either is conscious that its own mouth is like that exposed
to its gaze: the action is sympathetic. No doubt it may play its part
in stimulating desire, but we cannot contend from this that it has
been evolved by sexual selection, that is to say, that the hues have
undergone a process of gradual intensification owing to the
deliberate rejection of the less gaily-coloured suitors. The tendency
to develop colour in the mouth would appear to be latent in all birds.

Plate 23.

From a drawing by H. Grönvold.


THE DISPLAY OF THE GRASSHOPPER WARBLER.
The behaviour of this bird under the stimulus of sexual excitement
is precisely similar to that of the Sun-bittern and the Kagu, yet it
has no brilliant colours to exhibit by such actions.
Face page 142.

Plate 24.

THE DISPLAY OF THE SUN-BITTERN.


Quite inconspicuous in repose, this bird, in its moments of
exaltation, becomes banded and blotched with vivid colours,
revealed by spreading the wings and tail.
Photos copyright, D. Seth-Smith.
THE KAGU IN DISPLAY.
What is true of the Sun-Bittern is true also of the Kagu.

It is significant that whenever bright colours appear, they do so first


in the males, the females and young retaining the dress common, up
to this time, to the species at all ages. In the majority of instances,
at any rate, it would seem that this accession of colour appears with
the seasonal re-awakening of the reproductive activities: it forms a
“nuptial” dress, and is discarded after the breeding season is over
for a livery indistinguishable from that of the female, this forming the
so-called “winter plumage.” But if all the available facts are taken
into consideration there seems good reason to believe that the
nuptial plumage tends to be assumed earlier and to be retained
later, as this disposition to develop ornament gathers force, till finally
only the head and neck go into “eclipse,” as in the case of the Black-
cock, Jungle-fowl and Partridge.
In the Pheasant we have an instance—one of hundreds—where the
resplendent dress is worn throughout the year. The next phase in
the direction of the growth of colour occurs when the female,
towards old age, develops a more or less well marked tendency to
assume the hues of her lord, and this accession of colour makes its
appearance earlier and earlier in succeeding generations, till finally
the adults of both sexes are coloured alike, save that, as a rule, the
female lacks the intensity of coloration which her mate displays. The
original sombre dress is now only worn by the young. In due course
the resplendent dress is assumed also by the young, as witness the
numerous instances among the Kingfishers and among the Parrots,
where adults and young are all habited in the same vivid hues.
There are infinite variations of these changes which cannot be
discussed here, for obvious reasons. All that matters now is the fact
of such sequences, which inevitably raise the questions: Why, in so
many cases, do the females show no disposition to assume
resplendent colours? And to what factors can such coloration, when
it occurs, be attributed? The second only of these questions is
germane to the present discussion, and to this no very satisfactory
answer can be returned.
To say that the development of brilliance in species hitherto
sombrely clad is due to “changes in the metabolism” is only an
affectation of wisdom. What we want to know is what induces the
changes? Time was when no more than a guess could be hazarded
as to this: a suggestion that ornament, of whatever kind, was one of
the many modes of the expression of that instability of the organism
which is characteristic of living things: that it was one of the outward
and visible signs of that inward, intangible tendency to vary which is
so familiar. Later research seemed to show, fairly conclusively, that
ornament was one of those “secondary sexual characters” which was
dependent on the stimulating juices, or “hormones,” emanating from
the primary sexual glands. To-day it is manifest that this is only
partly true, for it is certain that these glands are not alone
concerned and they may only participate indirectly. It seems to have
been clearly demonstrated that the thyroid and pituitary glands, or
the “hormones” therefrom, play a large part in this matter of the
“secondary sexual characters.”
Castration, it is true, profoundly affects these characters. In the case
of Deer it inhibits the growth of antlers, in Cattle the horns are
increased in length but reduced in thickness—they are longer than
those of the female, but resemble them in appearance, and further,
the whole stature is greatly increased, but it is at the same time
conspicuously less massive, particularly at the neck and fore-
quarters. In eunuchs it results in immense stature and the loss of
the more characteristic male features, such as the beard and the
bass voice. The removal of the testes in birds is always a difficult
operation and is rarely successfully performed. Hence the accounts
of changes in plumage consequent on this operation are
inconclusive. It has generally been supposed that whenever, either
by removal or by disease, the testes are rendered inoperative the
plumage, when normally of a resplendent type, assumes the
coloration of the female. This is probably an erroneous supposition,
but what happens is a failure to secrete the more intense pigments
and the more specialized forms of feathers, so that the resultant
dress answers to the juvenile male dress. It is not a case of
“reversion” to this livery, but a failure to assume the latest
acquirements of the species. These, as has already been shown, are
only very gradually developed. The intensity of pigmentation, or
concentration of pigmentation, which results in sharply defined areas
of colour, is a cumulative process. As it loses in intensity at any given
moult, so the individual tends to reproduce the phases of the earlier
and vanishing livery. Sooner or later, however, this earlier livery
disappears more or less completely: is eliminated from the system,
so to speak: and what is commonly called lack of “vigour” results,
not in a return to the earlier, sombre dress, but in the later-acquired,
resplendent plumage lacking intensity. The seasonal, temporary
secondary sexual character has become, as some say, a “somatic”
character. Highly probable as this view appears, it ought, it may be
argued, to receive support from nestling plumages. Young gulls, for
example, should occasionally revert from the mottled to the earlier
striped livery. But we have no evidence of this; and it does not follow
that this sequence of events should occur. The conditions of control
are different.
What exactly are the factors which govern the evolution of
resplendent plumage is not known. But they would seem to be more
complex than was supposed. That the primary sexual glands play an
important part, through the juices or “hormones” which they
liberate, there can be no doubt but these are only partial factors.
The “hormones” of the pituitary and thyroid glands are also
necessary contributors, controlling as they do both fertility and the
more superficial characters, such as colour and ornament. Evidence,
indeed, is slowly accumulating to show that the problem of the
behaviour of animals during the period of sexual activity, as well as
the peculiarities of structure and coloration which they develop at
this time, are all largely governed by the action of these secretions.
These, in their turn, are undoubtedly inhibited, or increased, by the
control of the nervous system, though this control is of course
involuntary. This much seems clear from the fact that birds will
display when under the excitement of fear, though the character of
that display is never the same as that in moments of sexual
exaltation. If the nervous system, through the eye, by “suggestion,”
played no part, there could be no use for display, but it is equally
certain that for the realization of the sexual activities a number of
other factors have to contribute.
The existence of this nexus of conditions is commonly overlooked,
but it is extremely important. Normally, not only among birds, but
other animals higher and lower in the scale of life, “suggestion” does
not suggest until the “hormones” concerned with the sexual
activities have, as it were, saturated the system and rendered it, so
to speak, highly inflammable. Even then it commonly happens that,
with the male at any rate, this inflammable state bursts into flame of
its own accord. But for this, indeed, how could the consummation—
of the period of sexual activity ever be realized? In many cases the
sexes are sundered far apart. What, but the merest accident, could
bring them together if it were not for this consuming fire of desire
which impels each sex to seek out the other? This stage is
manifested in the case of the Deer, where, we have seen, the stag
wanders far and wide bellowing to advertise his errand and listening
for a response to his call. He is possessed by a “male-hunger” which
eventually attains to a state of frenzy. Here no “suggestion” is
needed, but the necessity for this stimulus, for some form of
aphrodisiac, occurs with him after the first relief of his pent-up state
has been attained. This stimulus is applied, both through the eye
and the sense of smell, by the females of his herd. The same
conditions apply in the case of the birds. But it is to be noted that
with the females, as in the case of mammals, sexual desire is
commonly less intense than in the males, and hence, in their case
the need for “suggestion” by display of some sort. But apart from
this, a “display” of some kind is necessary. How else can desire be
indicated? And here is “sexual selection.” For males, mate-hungry as
they might be, which resorted to no means of expressing their
condition would go mateless: and the same is true, though perhaps
in less extent, with the females; hence, then, it is clear display is a
product of sexual selection.
That sexual desire is less intense in the case of the females is to be
regarded as another result of this form of selection. If they displayed
the same intensity of passion the males would speedily become
exhausted, for it is well known that the gratification of the sexual
emotions is far more enervating in the case of the male. It may well
be that polyandry has arisen from this transference to the females,
or development by the females, of increased sexual hunger.
The fact that birds will repeat, albeit imperfectly, the phases of the
sexual display under the stimulus of fear, or anger, and when no
females are present, must be regarded as an indication, for we can
scarcely call it a proof, that exaggerated movements have become
the normal concomitants of great excitement, at any rate during the
season of reproductive activity. They are purely nervous responses
to external conditions. It must not be forgotten that, at this time,
fear begets other movements, equally striking, such as feigning
lameness, and death, which have no part in the sexual display.
Interpreted in this light one can understand that to the female not
as yet sexually “ripe” or sexually “hungry,” these movements, when
not interpreted as signs of fear or anger, fail to produce any
response. So soon, however, as this period of “ripeness” arrives, the
stimulus through the nervous system produces the desired response,
begetting a complementary stimulus through the secretions of the
sexual glands, by what we may call the flow of the hormones; just
as the sight of food stimulates the flow of saliva, or “makes the
mouth water” before we are conscious of feeling hungry. In due time
hunger will assert itself without the stimulus of the nervous system
through the senses. But there must in any case be some form of
display, some form of communicating and stimulating desire
between the sexes, to secure the consummation of the reproductive
acts. How else could intimation of sex hunger be indicated and
satisfied?
That the desire for sexual congress is inherently more avid, more
intense, in the male than in the female is often called in question;
and more especially so by those who imagine that they have a
mission to carry on “social reforms” and to regulate the relations
between the sexes of the human race. Such aims and ambitions are
commonly those of the arrogantly ignorant. There are few people
who possess a sufficiently wide knowledge of this theme, or of the
factors which underlie it, to qualify them to become the mentors of
their fellow-men in these matters. However much we may choose to
seek refuge in sophistry, the fact remains that man is still an animal,
and if the human race is to continue he must always remain so.
A lurid light has just been shed on the fierceness of the sexual
passion in the male by Mr. Julian Huxley, who relates some facts
pregnant with meaning to all who have understanding, in regard to
what obtains among birds. These facts are primarily concerned with
the Mallard (Anas boscas). This bird is ostensibly monogamous, and,
on the whole, seems to be a fairly considerate mate. The normal
period of pairing having passed, and the duties of incubation having
begun, the female ceases to harbour any further desire for sexual
intimacy. Her whole energies are devoted to nursing her embryonic
young into life. Not so the male. He is yet far from satiated; in him
the sexual fever still burns fiercely, but somehow he seems never to
make any attempt to provoke in his mate a like condition, as in the
days before brooding began. On the other hand, he does not scruple
to savagely pursue every other female who ventures abroad in his
neighbourhood. So soon as a duck takes wing for a brief relaxation
from the arduous work of brooding she is pursued by ten or a dozen
already mated males, till at last she is obliged to descend on the
water, and with her descend her pursuers, now to mob her without
mercy. Commonly at least half of these infuriated males will
eventually succeed in treading her; leaving their victim only after she
has become completely exhausted or killed outright. This is no
unusual occurrence. On the reservoirs at Tring, where every spring
from one thousand to one thousand two hundred pairs congregate
to breed, from seven per cent, to ten per cent, of females are
annually killed in this way.
It is just possible, however, that an error may have crept into these
observations. One cannot help asking, may it not be possible that
these pursuing males were actually unmated birds? The chief
argument against this is the fact that there is no sort of attempt to
“display” apparent with these birds, simply an overmastering,
ravenous desire to satisfy the craving which possesses them.
Evidence is not wanting that the evolution of pigment intensification
and the consequent development of vividly coloured liveries, or the
equivalent development of ornament, has been accompanied by an
intensification of the reproductive instincts. For there can be no
doubt but that the display of species which are conspicuous for their
ornamentation is more animated than those of duller hues. As an
argument in favour of this view the case of the display of the Great
Crested Grebe may be cited, wherein each sex has developed both
colour and ornament to a high degree, and are distinguishable only
to the expert.
The latest and the best exponent of the behaviour of this species
under the spell of sexual exaltation is Mr. Julian Huxley, whose
observations, in a condensed form, are now to be surveyed. The
most conspicuous features in this bird are the great Elizabethan ruff
of bright chestnut and dark Vandyke brown, and the long dark-
brown tufts of feathers, or “ears,” which surmount the head. But the
satin-like sheen of the white breast and the fore part of the neck and
face add not a little to the general effect. These ornaments are worn
only during the breeding season. So soon as the fires within begin to
burn, the parade of this finery commences, and it would seem that a
somewhat protracted dalliance takes place before any actual pairing.
During the early phases of these performances much play is made
with ruffs and “ears.” The courting pair will frequently face one
another on the water, and go through a strange ceremony of head-
shaking. To this is soon added a sort of ghost dance, wherein the
male suddenly dives, leaving his mate swinging excitedly from side
to side. In a moment or two, however, he appears, not suddenly, as
usual, but arising gradually out of the water. He seems to “grow” out
of the water. First his head appears, with ears and ruff extended,
and beak pointed downwards; then his neck, and finally the body
arises into view, till only the extreme tail end remains submerged, so
that he looks more like a penguin than a grebe! All the while he is
turning on his long axis, as it were, till he gradually displays before
his mate the dazzling white sheen of his breast and neck, set off by
the rich red chestnut and brown of his face and frills. A moment
more and both subside into their normal attitude, shake their heads
at one another, and then proceed to feed as if nothing had
happened.
But these quaint antics are only the preliminaries to still stranger. A
pair of birds, engaged, apparently, solely in fishing and feeding, will
suddenly approach one another and begin head-shaking, each
striving to outdo the other. Then the ears, till now erect, are thrust
out laterally, and the ruff is still further erected till it forms, with the
ears, a common disc. Then the hen dives: immediately after down
goes the cock. After some fifteen seconds or so she appears at the
surface again, speedily followed by the cock, who breaks out about
five-and-twenty yards off. Each crouches low over the water, and
each will be seen bearing a tuft of weed in the beak. As each sights
the other a tremendous rush is made, as if they intend to charge.
But when about a yard apart each springs up and assumes the
penguin position, save that the beak, instead of pointing downwards,
is now held horizontally and bears its burden of weed. Still
approaching, they eventually touch one another, treading the water
and swaying in a sort of ecstasy, all the while shaking their heads
from side to side. Then they gradually settle down into the normal
swimming pose, though still keeping up the head-shaking; then this,
too, subsides, the weed is dropped, and the performers drift apart
and begin feeding. But no actual pairing accompanies these strange
performances. This final rite is associated with a quite different
ceremonial, and was witnessed more than once by Mr. Huxley. On
the particular occasion which he describes he was watching a male
swimming along near the reeds, apparently on the look-out for
something, and turning his eyes in the direction of the course, he
saw, at some distance off, what he supposed was a dead grebe lying
hunched up in the water, with outstretched neck, and ruff and ears
depressed. Presently the male swam alongside the body and bent
down his head as if to examine it. Then he swam to the tail end, and
suddenly scrambled out of the water on to the body; and there, with
bowed head and depressed ears and crest, he seemed to stand a
moment. Then he waddled forward over its head and into the water.
Instantly the supposed corpse raised its head and neck, gave a sort
of jump, and was swimming by the side of its mate. They had been
pairing on a half-made nest, whose surface lay level with the water.

Plate 25.
From a drawing by H. Grönvold.
A MALE-SAVI’S WARBLER
—in one of his “courtship” attitudes. Note the leaf held in the beak.
Face page 152.

Mr. Edmund Selous seems to have witnessed some almost incredible


behaviour on the part of the owners of a nest he had under
observation, inasmuch as, on more than one occasion, he declares
the male lay prone upon the nest and the female assumed the
position of the male. After this pantomime both would leave the
nest, but commonly the female would speedily return and pairing
would be duly performed.
This brief summary of Mr. Huxley’s observations, which he was
generous enough to give me the privilege of seeing in manuscript,
taken in conjunction with many other facts of a like kind given in
these pages, seems to lend support to the view that an excessive
amorousness is commonly associated with conspicuous
ornamentation, as if these stood in the relation of cause and effect.
Finally, it is contended, the facts garnered during recent years show
that the theory of Sexual Selection, as Darwin propounded it,
especially in so far as birds are concerned, is no longer tenable: but
it is not an exploded theory, it has only undergone modification. So
far as the evidence goes, it would seem that the first of the series of
events in the sexual cycle is performed by the already avid male,
when he proceeds to secure a “territory” large enough for his needs.
In insectivorous and carnivorous species this area is fairly extensive.
No other male will be allowed within its confines. The perfection of
this instinct is vitally important, if sufficient food for the offspring
that are to be is to be assured. Where the food is inexhaustible, as
with the Auk-tribe, only a ledge large enough to hold the egg is
required. Only avid males will develop and respond to this stimulus.
The second stage occurs with the arrival of a female in the area. She
does not at once proceed to “select” her mate, passing on if he fails
to provoke her admiration. Her sexual condition is apparently as yet
but half awakened: to rouse this, the male supplies an aphrodisiac in
some form of display to which, in the normal course of things, she
responds, often also with some form of display, or indication of the
desire which has been aroused. The intensity of the performance
seems to vary with the intensity of the sexual passion, which
appears to be greater in some species than others, and especially so
with such as have conspicuously ornamental plumage. There is,
indeed, a variation in the sexual appetite as there is in the
ornamentation. The two are reciprocal, and are determined in
degree by the stimulatory qualities of the hormones of the sexual
glands. Where these have been developed in like intensity by the
females, they also display. Diminution in the quality and quantity of
the stimulating secretions of the ancillary sexual glands, the
hormones of the pituitary and thyroid, or the primary glands—testis
and ovary—decreases fertility, or induces sterility. Where these
stimulants are lacking there will be no desire, no display, and no
pairing, and consequently an end to this defective strain. Here then
is Sexual Selection.

Plate 26.
Photo copyright by D. Seth-Smith.
ANOTHER ASPECT OF THE KAGU’S “DISPLAY.”
Herein two birds are seen facing one another with the great head-
crest fully erected. While in this mood these birds will strut up and
down with mincing gait and drooping wings. This is a posture
commonly assumed during momentary excitement, whereas the
posture shown in plate 24 is apparently only assumed during
moments of sexual excitement.
[Face page 154.
Instances of such impotency on the part of either sex are wanting,
and we can only speculate as to how such cases would be met.
Would a female who had chanced to settle in the territory of a male
whose sexual impulses carried him no further than seizing territory
remain with him throughout the mating season, held by an
imperfectly roused, ill-defined, sexual instinct? Or, eventually
becoming mate-hungry, and failing to stimulate him to perform his
part, would she desert him and seek another mate? On the other
hand, would a male, failing to arouse response in the female he had
secured, drive her away and supplant her?
In other words, are we then justified in postulating differential
effects in regard to display: a minimum of intensity to ensure
mating? A display of some sort is essential. It may be feeble as
compared with that of another species—that of the Sparrow, for
instance, compared with that of the Peacock—but it must be
sufficiently good of its kind to effect its purpose, which is to “hustle”
up the production of offspring. A phlegmatic but virile male, or a too
feeble performer, is almost as certainly doomed to extinction as an
impotent male; for his offspring will probably be eliminated by the
adverse conditions of existence to which their late appearance
exposed them. Where a female settles down with a male which does
not attain to the standard of display characteristic of his race, it is
conceivable she may sooner or later seek a mate elsewhere,
deserting the phlegmatic bird as if under the impression that she
had made the mistake of settling down with one of her own sex.
There is no need that the female should have to “select” the best
performer of a number of males displaying at the same time and
place as a number of rivals.
Finally, the ornamental crests and frills, and the vivid hues which so
many birds display have not arisen, as is generally supposed, as a
direct result of the selection, by the females, of the most vividly
coloured, or ornamented, from among a number of suitors
presenting varying degrees of intensity in ornamentation. Such “frills
and furbelows” are to be regarded as “expression points” of internal
variations in the germ-plasm, which have been free to develop along
their own lines because they have not proved in disharmony with the
conditions of the birds’ environment. Their development is to be
traced to the stimulating action of the “hormones” which control
both pigmentation and structure, as is shown by the fact that both
are modified by any interference with the glands in question. Such
ornamental features then are the concomitants not the results of
Sexual selection.
The development of ornament, whether of colour or structure, may
be taken then as an index of specialization, and as one of the many
manifestations of that variation which is going on in every part of
every living organism.
So long as the continued increments in the development of these
characters do not hamper their possessors in the struggle for
existence, they are free to go on developing. Sexual selection, other
things being equal, operates by according the greatest number of
descendants to the most amorous, and not necessarily to those of
the brightest hues.

Plate 27.
Photos copyright, G. Herring.
SOME STRANGE ACCOMPANIMENTS OF
COURTSHIP.
THE WHITE-HEADED BELL-BIRD.
This species is remarkable for the enormous,
erectile wattles which arise from the base of
the beak of the male at the courting season.
THE UMBRELLA-BIRD.
The crest which adorns the crown of the head
has many counterparts, but the long-feather
clad wattle which depends from the fore-part
of the breast is unique.

[Face page 156.

Plate 28.
SKULL OF THE AMERICAN WHITE BEAKED PELICAN.
The beak of this bird develops at each breeding season an irregular
horny plate which falls off at the end of this period, It is difficult to
regard this as a sexual “ornament,” yet it comes under this
category.

Photos copyright, G. Herring.


HEAD OF A PUFFIN, SHOWING THE MOULTING OF THE BEAK
SHEATH.
At the breeding season, in both sexes, a triangular horny plate is
developed over the eye, an oblong plate below it, while the sides of
the beak become deepened by means of larger triangular horny
plates. All these embellishments are highly coloured, and they are
shed at the end of the breeding season. A further ornament is
developed at the gape, in the shape of a fleshy rosette of a bright
orange colour.
Face page 156.]

But Sexual selection does not begin, and end, with the evolution of
frills and furbelows. “Behaviour” counts for more than is generally
supposed. This is as specific as “structure,” that is to say, it is as
constant for each species as is its coloration, and it is also as
variable. That Evolution may be determined by variation in
behaviour, no less than through structural variations, is a possibility
which has received but little consideration at the hands of students
of Evolution.
The singular history of the Australian Bower-birds lends additional
support to this view, and at the same time provides an additional
argument against the generally accepted opinion that bright colours
have been evolved by reason of the preference shown by the
females for the most vividly coloured of their suitors. For while the
males affect all the tricks and turns which are the common
accompaniment of courtship, they, in addition, introduce very
extraordinary features in the shape of “bowers” cunningly
constructed and often gaily decorated, as will be seen presently.
Eight of the total number of species of this group exhibit this
behaviour, and while they differ very conspicuously in coloration
among themselves, they agree very closely in the type of the bower
they build. If the coloration is determined by the female, then in this
they display very different standards, and if they do select, each
according to the standard of the species, then we must suppose that
they also must exercise a choice in regard to the character of the
bower, the favoured male being the best builder. But why, in this

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