Just because many modern academics are very secular does not mean that we should ignore those factors in earlier generations - and by that, I don't just mean five or six centuries ago.

Much to my surprise, the Islamic scriptures in the Quran were actually far less bloody and less violent than those in the Bible.

In most cases, obviously, soldiers fought because a government drafted them and gave them a rifle. At every point too, we see the role of nationalistic sentiment, commercial rivalries, and simple greed. But can we ever separate out such motives from the religious? Was that not also true of the medieval crusades?

Famine, plague, death and war... that's a pretty good description of 1917-18. The war was meant to end quickly, but by 1917 it seemed to be set until the end of time. No wonder everyone dreamed of an apocalyptic intervention.

Just because many modern academics are very secular does not mean that we should ignore those factors in earlier generations - and by that, I don't just mean five or six centuries ago.

The typical WW1 soldier was not an intellectual like Ernst Jünger or Wilfred Owen, but was a peasant draftee from Galicia or Bavaria or Sicily, with all the traditional religious ideas. The hothouse atmosphere of war brought everyone into a supernatural-oriented universe of ghosts and apparitions.

When the war started, religion and superstition (whatever the difference is) permeated the lives of ordinary soldiers, who lived in a thought world not too far removed from the seventeenth century.