The war on the Western Front ground to a halt with the Armistice of November 11, 1918. That day was also the Feast Day of Saint Martin of Tours, a notable patron saint of soldiers, who was especially worshipped not for his military prowess but rather for his peacemaking and social devotion to the needy. Sixteen centuries after his death, the stories of Saint Martin had powerful resonance in the aftermath of the First World War as Europe tried to heal itself. Due to his associations with both France and Hungary, and his travels through Central Europe, he became a pan-European figure of veneration during the Middle Ages. In the after- math of the First World War, his stature gained new currency due to this coincidence with the Armistice on the Western Front.

Traditional religious imagery played a key role in helping European society make sense of the war. Religion, along with classical and romantic tropes, allowed communities of bereaved to mourn the loss of loved ones. This occurred on a mass scale, as more people simply had to deal with violent death and destruction, approaching what Jay Winter has termed a “universality of bereavement” as European society attempted to assuage its grief. Traditional imagery and languages of mourning thus played a fundamentally healing role, strengthening social bonds and emotional ties. Hence, as Winter noted in his classic study, war memorials after 1918 involved dual motifs: “war as both noble and uplifting and tragic and unendurably sad.” War memorialization involved this duality in an ever-shifting process of balance between the two interests. It was only after the Second World War, not the First, that European society changed its attitudes toward war memorialization, invoking more abstract imagery and universal values.

The religious aspects of commemoration have often been subsumed under the heading of “nationalism,” especially in Germany a vengeful nationalism, dedicated to redeeming the political loss of the First World War.