The Lightning and the Rock: Why Pioniere and Artillery Share a Patron Saint

Links ein Stollen im Fels mit Grubenlampe, rechts ein Gewitterhimmel mit Blitz über flachem Land

Design History · Pioniere

The Lightning and the Rock
Why Pioniere and Artillery Share a Patron Saint

Two branches that have little to do with each other in combat mark the same day. The occasion is a woman nobody can say ever existed.

The Legend

Tradition calls her Barbara, daughter of the merchant Dioscuros in Nicomedia. Her father locks her in a tower to keep her away from Christianity. While he is gone, she has a third window cut into the wall, one for each person of the Trinity. As she flees, a rock opens and hides her. A shepherd betrays her. Dioscuros carries out the death sentence himself, with the sword. Then lightning strikes him.

Panel from the Barbara altarpiece in Schwaigern: a man with a raised curved sword grips the kneeling Saint Barbara by the hair — Dioscuros carries out the death sentence himself, with the sword.Barbara altarpiece by Jerg Ratgeb, Stadtkirche Schwaigern (detail). Photo: Peter Schmelzle, CC BY-SA 3.0

None of this is proven. No veneration is recorded for late antiquity, she is missing from the Martyrologium Syriacum (after 520), and the story was probably first written down in the seventh century in the Byzantine world. The oldest versions of the Legenda Aurea do not mention her; she was added in the late Middle Ages. In 1969 the Catholic Church removed her from the General Roman Calendar on the grounds that her existence is not historically proven.

She stayed anyway, in the places where she was needed.

The Rock

Two images from this story took on a life of their own. The first is the rock that opens.

The miners took it first. Their veneration of Barbara is documented in Saxony, Bohemia and Silesia from the fourteenth century on. Underground, death comes out of the rock, without warning and faster than a man can react. Anyone who reckons with that every day looks for a patron saint for exactly that case.

The way from the shaft to the barracks was short. Siege warfare needed men who could dig and blast, and mining had them. They came as Mineure, in the Bundeswehr's definition the “soldier who handles explosives and mines”, and they brought their patron saint with them. Beside them worked the Sappeur, who dug the approach trench above ground and whose name the Bundeswehr has long since replaced with Pionier, and the Pontonier, who built bridges. In 1810, on Scharnhorst's proposal, the Mineur and Pontonier companies were merged into the Pionierkorps.

Floating bridge of amphibious vehicles across a river, a heavy transporter driving over it — “Anker – Wirf!”

What is left of the Pontonier is the troop's battle cry. “Anker – Wirf!” was the command to drop anchor.

The branch colour is older than the branch. The Ingenieurkorps, the engineer corps, has worn black since the regulations of 1788, the Pontonierkorps since 1798, the Pioniere since 1808. In the song of the Pioniere, the black collar is called the collar of honour of the army.

The Lightning

The second image is the lightning that strikes Dioscuros.

Drawing in the style of a copper engraving: lightning strikes a figure on a rocky summit

The artillery took it, and took it literally. The recorded hope is that the artillery may hit its targets the way the lightning hit Dioscuros. Force out of a clear sky that lands exactly where it was calculated to land.

The gunners have a motto too, and it is the better known one. Ultima Ratio Regis, the last argument of the king, stood on the cannon of Frederick II from 1742, for reasons of durability only on the bronze ones. The older wording is the plural, Ultima ratio regum, which Richelieu had cast onto French barrels in the Thirty Years' War.

What holds miner, gunner and Pionier together is the material all three handle, and the way they die when something goes wrong with it. Barbara is invoked against the danger of sudden death, first by lightning, then in mining and in the military. It is fast, it comes without warning, and nobody has time to prepare.

What Separates the Two

The patron saint alone assigns nobody to a branch. They are told apart by branch colour and by motto. Black against bright red.

The motto of the Pioniere reads AUT VIAM INVENIAM, AUT FACIAM. I shall find a way or make one. The line is in Seneca, in the tragedy “Hercules Furens”, act two, scene one, verse 276, said of Hercules in the third person. It is attributed to Hannibal, as his answer to the supposedly impossible crossing of the Alps. There is no ancient source for that.

Pionier Flag laid flat on wooden boards, split diagonally into Flecktarn and black-red-gold, with the motto Aut Viam Inveniam, Aut Faciam, a camouflaged combat helmet beside it — I shall find a way or make one.

4 December

Saint Barbara's Day. A feast day in the Roman Catholic and the Greek Orthodox Church since the twelfth century, and shared by both branches. It is observed by artillerymen, Pioniere, ordnance technicians, army air defence, the Luftwaffe's surface-to-air missile troops and the explosive ordnance disposal branches.

In the Bundeswehr, the first Barbara celebration took place on 4 December 1956 at the artillery school in Idar-Oberstein. To this day the format combines a service with an evening on which the incidents of the year are worked through. It outlasted the Reichswehr and the Wehrmacht and is held on deployments abroad as well, where it is multinational.

In civilian life, the Barbara branch has survived. On 4 December people cut twigs from fruit trees and put them in water. If they bloom on Christmas Eve, that counts as a good sign.

The Drop

The Pioniere are the first branch in the Warfighter Collection and the first outside the infantry. Their mission is to open the way: blast, bridge, clear. The artillery gets its own drop, with its own branch colour and its own motto.

Printed on the Next Level NX3600 in Sand, regular fit, by hand in water-based screen print.