Call it divine providence, a glitch in the matrix or a quirk of fate, but Armistice Day is also the feast of Martinmas.
What is Martinmas?
This is a feast day that emerged from France around the cult of St Martin, a Roman soldier, who was baptised as an adult and became a bishop in Tours. Saintly acts included cutting his cloak in half to share with a beggar during a snowstorm, to save him from the cold. Saint Martin died on 8 November 397, and was buried three days later on the 11th.
A few hundred years later, celebrating him became ‘a thing’ thanks to Pope Martin the First, clearly a fan. After a while the feast of Martinmas began the extended season of Advent, which has since been truncated. Lots of traditions, myths and stories arose around Martin. For example, he was said to have been thrown into a mill stream and killed by the wheel. Therefore, the use of mill wheels and cartwheels that day were therefore frowned upon.
In the twenty-first century, we often scoff at how our ancestors were easily persuaded in their yearning for myth, feast and ritual.
I include Christians among those scoffers, especially my own tribe of Evangelical Protestants. We claim to believe in the resurrection of the dead and the miracles of Christ, but do not wish to believe unverified stories of saints that seem far-fetched and bizarre. (As opposed to Jesus talking to Moses and Elijah at the Transfiguration which is perfectly reasonable.)
We are all children of the so-called Enlightenment and consider ourselves to be rational, even though, ironically, the science proves how irrational and emotional we truly are. (See The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt)
The Noble Savage
Another relic of the Enlightenment is the myth of the noble savage. The spirit of Rousseau is still at work among us, romanticising life in the pre-Christian area. Read history books and see how we are told the feast of Martinmas was merely a Christianisation of already common – and more noble – pagan practice.
11th November was around the time you would slaughter animals so that you wouldn’t have to feed them through the winter. You would feed on them. This is entirely sensible and in keeping with the seasons (which God created - Gen 1:14). But the ignoble pre-Christian savages would often engage in cruelty to animals – akin to bullfighting – and bloodletting, rather than a swift kill. There would also be the liberal spreading around of the animal blood to ward off evil spirits.
That kind of behaviour is unthinkable now. Why? Only because of the success of the Church spreading the gospel of Jesus Christ, who spilt his blood and put an end to those old ways. The Lamb of God takes away the sin of the world. No further blood is required. So that’s good.
St Martin’s Day, or Martinmas, is still widely celebrated across Europe, especially on the night of the 10th with bonfires, but all kinds of other traditions have emerged including processions, lanterns and various meals. In England and Wales, St Martin’s influence has waned. There is greater resonance in Scotland, which has historically been more allied with the French. The university of St Andrew’s first semester is known as the Martinmas Term.
The cult of most non-Biblical saints dwindled in England after the Reformation as the liturgical calendar was seriously pruned of popish practices. What remained of St Martin was finally vanquished on 11th November 1918, when the guns on the Western Front fell silent. There was a new festival in town: Armistice Day.
The Making Of Myth
There is an expression that is hard to source but is nonetheless true in its current form: a lie can travel halfway round the world while the truth is putting its boots on. Nowhere is this more true than our mythologising what has come to be known as a global exercise in bloodletting, the First World War.
This war has only recently passed from living memory and yet our myth-making tendencies are still work, recreating events and reshaping and representing them to suit our own emotional needs. The way the war was perceived at the time is very different from how we like to think of it today.
I recently read Forgotten Victory by Gary Sheffield, whom I heard interviewed on the Rest is Historypodcast. In his account of the First World War, he shows how the British Army was mostly unprepared for trench warfare. But slowly the troops on the ground and generals figured it out. The army of 1918, combining infantry, artillery, tanks and aeroplanes, was much cannier and far more effective than the one in 1914, even though the losses were still heavy.
Why do we believe myths so readily?
The reality of the war is lost in the myth. When an idea is neatly expressed in a culturally appropriate way, it gets into the bloodstream very quickly. I still remember learning the words of the war poem ‘Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori’ which means it is a good and noble thing to die for your country. It sounds brilliantly wistful in Latin, doesn’t it?
The poets painted pictures more vivid than the photographs we see of fields of mud and tree stumps. Scenes are described which give the impression that Tommies sat in rat-infested water-filled trenches for four whole years.
This is a myth.
While the front line trenches were often horrible, the troops were rotated between trenches, reserve trenches, training camps and rest areas fairly regularly. And the soldiers themselves were surprisingly upbeat about their conditions and the war itself.
But the war poetry’s narrative and legacy is in the mainstream culture. We look back at the last days of the war, in which war poet Wilfred Owen was killed, and consider the whole thing maddeningly futile. It wasn’t.
This is another myth.
In order for there to be a properly negotiated peace or surrender – to ensure that British, French, Australian, Canadian, American and Indian soldiers had not died in vain – Germany needed to know that they had been well and truly defeated. The last weeks of the war demonstrated that Germany’s surprise Spring Offensive had been the final gamble that had ultimately failed.
The Echoes of Poems & Ritual
I now know this intellectually, thanks to Sheffield’s excellent book. But those poems still perpetuate the powerful myth, like that of the noble savage, or the saintly works of St Martin or his death at a miller’s wheel.
The annual rituals around Armistice Day and Remembrance Sunday still resonate in my head. I’ve never forgotten the intensely sarcastic poem by Sassoon beginning with the line:
“Good-morning, good-morning!” the General said
When we met him last week on our way to the line.
We quickly discover that most of the soldiers he greeted are now dead. We see this ill-placed, breezy and devastating confidence in General Melchett, in Blackadder Goes Forth, probably the funniest of the Blackadder series. Curtis and Elton’s masterpiece embodies the blackest of black humour about the war in which Captain Blackadder finds himself trapped, yearning for an end to the:
mud, death, rats, bombs, shrapnel, whizz-bangs, barbed wire and those bloody awful songs that have the word 'Whoops' in the title. (Private Plane)
The show crystalised and perpetuated the view that the war was futile and unwinnable. And yet, as Gary Sheffield reminds us in his title ‘Forgotten Victory’, we did win, despite the awful cost to human life on both sides. And it is right that we remember those who fell in that conflict.
This is why Richard Hurst and I wrote Bluestone 42 about the war in Afghanistan. But I’ll write about that next time.
For now, it is worth noting that we are hungry for myth, for rhythm and ritual. That has not changed since the time of St Martin. The only questions is what will we base our myths, rituals and traditions upon? A harder truth – the true Christian myth – that makes demands of us ignoble savages? Or the comfortable lie that we’re basically good, rational St Martins-in-the-making? Without Christ, we are not.
Please do come and see me talk about Jesus turning water into wine in my experiments in stand-up theology:
19th Nov 7.30pm St John’s Church, Knutsford, Cheshire BOOK TICKETS HERE
27th Nov 7.30pm St Anne’s Limehouse, London BOOK TICKETS HERE
30th Nov 7.30pm St Mary’s Sileby (nr Loughborough) BOOK TICKETS HERE
3rd Dec 7.30pm St Peters, Bishops Waltham (nr Southampton) BOOK TICKETS HERE
If you’d like me to come to your church in 2022, get in touch here.
And I think you’ll find that signed copies of my books - The Gospel According to a Sitcom Writer and The Sacred Art of Joking - would make excellent Christmas presents. Just sayin’. Get them both here.