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.

Apocalyptic expectations ran riot in 1917, and had a major influence on Allied policies towards Palestine and the Jewish people. The propaganda of all nations was amazingly religious and apocalyptic - ghosts and visions, crucifixions and sacrifice, crusaders and holy warriors.

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.

. If you believe that your nation is divinely ordained to rule Europe, and you must struggle to establish its supremacy, is that a religious doctrine or a nationalist one? In Germany especially, the whole super-nationalist ideology of the post-1871 empire is heavily imbued with religious teaching, chiefly Lutheran, and frankly viewing the new empire as the germ of the kingdom of God on Earth.

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.

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.

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.