To find meaning in the senseless destruction and death of the Great War, both the British and the Germans turned in their war commemorations, Stefan Goebel argues, to the Middle Ages. While medievalism had been employed in the nineteenth century to construct national identities, it provided after 1914 the forms for mourning, not necessarily in their orthodox Christian context, and the means for bridging the gap between private grief and political mobilization. The placement of the tomb of the Unknown Warrior in Westminster Abbey is the most obvious example. Such medievalism was not, as is often supposed, the antithesis of modernity, provoked by the war's dislocations, because such medieval motifs as the recumbent sepulchral figure were reconfigured, especially in Germany, in modern idioms—in this instance as a soldier with a steel helmet (Stahlhelm), the quintessential German symbol of the frontline combatant. There were distinct religious, regional, class, and educational differences in such national discourses of historical continuity; and subgroups in both nations, such as the Calvinist, iconophobic Scots and East Frisians, both of whom rejected the cross as a symbol, had more in common with each other in this regard than with their Anglo-Catholic and Bavarian countrymen.

The British choice of the word warrior rather than soldier for the unknown, the term the French and Americans utilized, was a deliberate transformation of the nameless Tommy into a chivalric gentleman, ennobled by his conduct and so made worthy of resting in the company of kings. This transfiguration reinforced rather than undermined the social hierarchy. The British civilians, in this case the dean of the abbey, who commissioned such memorials, minimized in this way the violent deeds the dead had perpetrated on behalf of a nation that lacked a strong militaristic tradition. After Edmund Allenby captured Jerusalem, the war was imagined to be a crusade for freedom and justice; but I wonder how much Wilsonian idealism rather than events in the Middle East contributed to this reconceptualization. Warrior saints such as St. George thus became appropriate commemorative figures, though nonconformists were bothered by such Catholic imagery. Similarly, memorials often included statues or stained glass windows showing Arthurian knights. (Interestingly, the Germans never used stained glass.) British memorials emphasized the deceased's Christ-like suffering and personal salvation rather than national regeneration.

Significantly, although Konrad Adenauer proposed that a similar tomb be placed in Cologne cathedral, a Catholic church that had been finished under the aegis of the Protestant Hohenzollern, no monument to the unknown soldier was ever erected in Germany. Unlike Britain, veterans' organizations planned such commemorations in the Weimar Republic. They focused on the soldiers' experiences rather than their conduct during the war, which they conceived as a defense of the encircled Reich. The iron knight rather than the chivalric crusader was the symbol of German endurance. The emphasis was on national rebirth in the earthly future rather than individual resurrection in the hereafter, as can be seen in a proposal in the 1920s to build a Hall of Honor for the dead on the Kyffhäuser, the Wilhelmine monument that had linked the pseudo-medieval legend of the sleeping Barbarossa to the foundation of the Second Reich.

The subordination of the individual to the nation and the leader is most apparent at Tannenberg, which the Nazis made into Germany's national monument. The original plan in the 1920s called for a modernistic, eight-sided, castle-like structure, reminiscent of the fortifications of the Teutonic Knights who had been defeated there in 1410, with a central grave for twenty representatives of the völkisch community who had died on the Russian front. German memorials were often placed in or near ruined castles or urban fortifications, and mass graves in military cemeteries were designed as Totenburgen, fortresses of the dead, echoing the war's alleged defensive character. Hitler ordered the removal of the common grave at Tannenberg, and the conversion of the monument into Hindenburg's tomb, thus shifting the focus from the soldiers to the victorious commander. While the conflict on the western front was embedded in the nationalistic narrative of Germany's thousand-year resistance to French expansion on the Rhine, Tannenberg was seen as part of the fight of German Kultur against Slavic barbarism and the search since the Middle Ages for Lebensraum. This timeless struggle was invoked by the placement of Germanic megaliths at the entry to the field marshal's vault, a not-so-subtle shift from the Christian to the pagan past. Any such Germanic references were taboo in Britain, but Celtic symbols such as the Celtic cross were acceptable, especially in Scotland. It was Siegfried versus Sir Galahad.

The Unknown Warrior was a High Church response to the erection of the classical Cenotaph, an empty Greek tomb, in Whitehall. The educated elites in both countries sought comfort in the classical rather than the medieval world in their school and university monuments. While the Germans used nude figures, the British were satisfied with Latin inscriptions. The question arises whether such classical representations had, for the British, unacceptable republican connotations, so apparent in Washington. It is worth noting that some British memorials included depictions of St. Louis as a symbol of the French alliance, but not, apparently, of Joan of Arc, the saint most associated with the Third Republic. (If my memory does not fail me, the Princeton chapel built in the 1920s has Joan in its program.) Goebel calls in his conclusion for similar investigations of medievalism in French and Italian war memorials, but I wonder if the findings would not be rather different because of the linkage of the French republican tradition with the Gallo-Romans rather than the Germanic Franks and the Fascist glorification of Rome. Both medievalists and modern historians will profit from reading this comparative study.