“I THOUGHT IT HAD SAVED MY LIFE,” said Sergey Shastak, referring to a sunflower field that offered a camouflaged lifeline back to the Ukrainian lines. Climbing through the drooping stalks, he soon discovered he was in a minefield. To his left, a unit of Ukrainian troops were assaulting the village of Makiivka. Mortars began to fall. No time to look out for mines. Running, amid strafing bullets and exploding metal he felt light of foot as he made his break for safety. A strange sense, that this time, having come so far, he was not going to die.
Why? “I don’t know, man. I felt, in that moment, that someone else was in control of my body.” Who? “This I cannot explain. You have to start thinking about things like God.”
Since the dawn of modern war, there have been clumsy attempts to define this almost mystical relationship between religion, faith and war. “There are no atheists in foxholes,” is a maxim that may have emerged from the outpouring of spiritualism and superstition in the First World War’s trenches, going on to work itself into US army sermons during the war in the Pacific.
FACED WITH war, men do strange things. Some see fairies and angels. Others find themselves praying. They make promises to God. Some lose faith in everything forever. Faith, as one chaplain told me dryly, “offers one way of making sense of it all”.
