Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (8 page)

Andrew Jackson supposedly named it in New Orleans during the War of i812. He was commenting, naturally, on the
English
attitude.

Of course, the soldier-rapist may not see his act in these terms. In the thick of his cause, the rape for him may assume heroic proportions, justified by ideology or even by God. Sexual violence against women was fervently committed in the name of God, although not, we may believe, with His blessing, during the Wars of Religion in France. A remarkable description of one such reli gious rape, which occurred on December i8, i 567, near Provins, was recorded by Claude Haton, a local Catholic priest and a metic ulous diarist. The victim was a Huguenot woman.

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so happened that this LeBlanc and his wife fell into the hands of some soldiers. The soldiers who held the woman did not hold her husband, but others did, and during this time they were not per mitted to see or talk to each other. The woman was finally delivered from the hands of these soldiers and put at liberty but only af ter they had used and enjoyed her at their pleasure and led her through the streets with her feet and legs and head all bare. The only clothing she had on was an undergarment and an apron . . . made of red material all covered with blood. This happened on the i8th day of December. When they passed by the church of St.-Ayoul the poor Huguenot was brought inside. This was between eight and nine o'clock in the morning. At the entrance to the church she was forced to take holy water and sprinkle her face with it and then she was brought before the main altar where a priest was saying mass. Here she was forced to both knees and given a lighted candle to hold dur ing the elevation of the mass. . . . She was told to ask mercy of God . . . for the terrible sin she had committed in straying from the true Catholic religion and adhering to the false Huguenot faith.

his rights and pleasures. Prostitution near a battle camp has been linked his torically with the phenomenon of the camp follower, but this is a misrepre sentation of history. Up to and including the American Revolution, camp following was an occupation based on necessity, practically built into the conduct of war. Female camp followers-many of them were wives of the soldiers-cooked, washed laundry and functioned as nurses for their men, in addition to their obvious sexual function. When the army and Florence Nightingale took over the first-named activities, camp following lost its non sexual functions. Interestingly, while marriage to a foreign woman is made difficult for a soldier by complicated military regulations, access to prostitutes has generally been encouraged.

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Then, too, there is mention in history of those chivalrous
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souls, those knights and squires, who took it upon themselves to
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protect women of rank, though not of the lower classes, from
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assault by common soldiers. Froissart's chronicles of the Hundred Years' War between England and France are filled with romantic incidents such as the moment when Edward III occupied the

castle of Pois and found it deserted except for two noblewomen "who would have been raped by the low-born archers had not two noted knights . . . rescued them." Sidney Painter observed in his book on French chivalry, "Froissart took great delight in describing the courteous treatment accorded by French and English knights to any ladies whom the fortunes of war had placed at their mercy. When a nunnery was pillaged and the nuns were raped, he was careful to point out that it had been done by the Germans." Knights, however, did not always respect the class system. The chronicler Monstrelet reported with shock that when the French Army captured Soissons in 1414, noblemen joined the ordinary soldiers in "indiscriminately raping women of all ranks."

When a victorious army rapes, the sheer intoxication of the triumph is· only part of the act. After the fact, the rape may be

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viewed as part of a recognizable pattern of national terror and subjugation. I say "after the fact" because the original impulse to rape does not need a sophisticated political motivation beyond a general disregard for the bodily integrity of women. But rape in warfare has a military effect as well as an impulse. And the effect is indubitably one of intimidation and demoralization for the victims' side.

An aggressor nation rarely admits to rape.* Documentation of rape in warfare is something the other
side
totals up, analyzes and

* An exception to this rule has been the United States. Individual cases of rape by American soldiers have received considerable attention in this country. Sometimes a case comes to light because of a strong court-martial defense of mistaken identity. There were some highly publicized U.S. courts-martial for rape involving a defense of mistaken identity in Japan and Okinawa during World War II and also during the Korean War. The defendants were black. A similar case and defense, involving two American Cl's stationed with the a1my of occupation in Germany, surfaced in
1971.
As a sign of the changing times, cases of rape by American soldiers in Vietnam have come to light as part of the many journalistic exposes documenting the horrors of the South east Asian war.

propagandizes when the smoke has cleared af ter defeat. Men of a conquered nation traditionally view the rape of "their women" as the ultimate humiliation, a sexual coup de grace. Rape is con sidered by the people of a defeated nation to be part of the enemy's conscious effort to destroy them. In fact, by tradition, men appro priate the rape of "their women" as part of their own male anguish of defeat. This egocentric view does have a partial validity. Apart from a genuine, human concern for wives and daughters near and dear to them, rape by a conqueror is compelling evidence of the conquered's status of masculine impotence. Defense of women has long been a hallmark of masculine pride, as possession of women has been a hallmark of masculine success. Rape by a conquering soldier destroys all remaining. illusions of power and property for men of the defeated side. The body of a raped woman becomes a ceremonial battlefield, a parade ground for the victor's trooping of the colors. The act that is played out upon her is a message passed between men-vivid proof of victory for one and loss and defeat for the other.

n April,
1746,
King George's army led by the Duke of Cum berland put down an insurrection in the Scottish Highlands. The Highland clans that rallied to the banner of Bonnie Prince Charlie were thoroughly decimated in the Battle of Culloden. That battle, and the brutal pacification program that followed, marked the end of organized clan life in Scotland. The modern British historian John Prebble collected the story of Culloden and its af termath from records kept by the proud old clans. In the clansmen's view, rape of their women was a deliberate act of tyranny by the English invader, and Prebble wrote the story as he found it.

Sexual mutilation of women on Culloden Moor during the battle proper was only the beginning. Lord George Sackville led a command of infantrymen to Moidart, where Clan Macdonald rebels "showed no enthusiasm for surrendering." A few screaming clansmen raided the rear of his column and captured some horses and provisions. Sackville "allowed his men to take revenge at the next hamlet, where the women were first raped and then held to watch the shooting and bayonetting of their husbands, fathers, brothers and sons."

Major Lockhart's platoons pushed through the glen at In· verwick:

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Where the River Doe meets the Moriston in a black waterfall, Isobel Macdonald was raped by five soldiers, and her husband, skulking high in the heather, watched this in agony. There were other women raped, too, and always before the doors of their burn ing homes. . . . The women who had been ravished made pacts not to lie with their husbands until nine months were passed. "Which resolution," said the Laird of Glenmoriston, thinking of Isobel Macdonald and one other, "the husbands agreed to. But they happened luckily not to fall with child by the ravishing, nor to con tract any bad disease."

Lockhart's next stop was at Strathglass, the land of the Chisholms and Frasers, where his soldiers raped a pregnant woman.

In July of that year, Captain Scott led an expedition to the Outer Hebrides in search of the fugitive Prince Charles. He was ferried from island to island by Captain John Fergusson of the

1. Furnace. "The Laird of Raasay, John MacLeod, said that Scott's men raped a blind girl on Rona. . . . On the island of Raasay . . . they ravished two women whose names were Kristie Montgomery and Marion MacLeod."
   

   

   

   Captain Fergusso had been cruising the Western Isles since March, raiding the islands for fresh beef and mutton, and, said one of the Macdonalds of Canna, "to make ane attack upon all the girls and young women in all the Isle, marryed or otherwise." The women of Canna took shelter in the caves.
   

   In the cottage of Evan Mor Maclsaacs, where there had been two young girls, the sailors found only the mother . . . . Evan Mor was put under guard of drawn swords, and the sailors made ready to rape his wife, but she escaped from them into the darkness. They pursued her drunkenly, shouting and waving their cutlasses, and passing by her where she had hidden in a bog. The Macdonald of Canna who told this story to Robert Forbes said that Mrs. Mac Isaacs was pregnant, and that she died of a miscarriage before morn ing.
   

   The Furnace went next to the isle of Eigg, where the sailors went ashore and slaughtered cattle, pillaged houses and "ravished a girl or two."
   

   At least one Highland woman got her revenge, Prebble re cords: "In Appin a young girl, whose cow had been shot by a soldier,
   

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   AGAINST OUR WILL
   

   killed him with a stone when he attempted to rape her. The body was buried secretly
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   An act of rape in war that a husband or father is forced to watch is quite common. Sometimes it is simply a matter of proxim ity, as when Isobel Macdonald's husband skulked in the heather, but more often it is part of the plan, as in the house of Evan Mor Maclsaacs. Rape of a woman in war may be as much an act against her husband or father, for the rapist, as it is an act against the woman's
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   body. The attitude of husbands af ter a rape is equally interesting. The ravished women of Inverwick did not sleep with their husbands for nine months af ter their assault. Although it appears from the Laird of Glenmoriston that this was a pact that the husbands agreed to, the more common experience is for the husbands to turn from their raped wives in revulsion-as witness the recent mass rejection of the raped women of Bangladesh. In war as in peace, the husbands of raped women place a major burden of blame for the awful event on their wives. The hallowed rights of property have been abused, and the property herself is held culpable.
   

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   A casual reader of history quickly learns that rape remains unmentionable, even in war. Serious historians have rarely bothered to document specific acts of rape in warfare, for reasons of their own scale of values and taste, as well as for lack of hard-and fast surviving proof. Thus the story of Culloden is exceptional for its wealth of detail. Systematic rape of Highland women by En glish forces during the occupation of Scotland fitted perfectly into a bold pattern of national subjugation.
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   also fitted logically into a retrospective analysis of the ultimate destruction of the proud and tightly knit hierarchical clans. Perhaps for these reasons the High land lairds of Scotland understood, as few have, the military impor tance of rape, and kept their painful records.
   

   Not until World War I was documentation of rape in warfare ever again preserved so faithfully.
   

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   When the Germans invaded Belgium in August, i914, rape was suddenly catapulted into prominence as the international metaphor of Belgian humiliation. This unprecedented attention
   

   

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