The Illusion of Victory (9 page)

Such realistic details never got into Lord Northcliffe’s newspapers, of course. When the war erupted in 1914, the press baron and the conservatives were primed to respond with I-told-you-so vituperation that wilted the liberal politicians in the Asquith government who had repeatedly declared their opposition to a war on the European continent. Even more flummoxed by Foreign Secretary Grey’s revelation of his secret “understandings” with France and Russia, they soon joined the cry to defend “poor little Belgium.”
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To an objective observer, Northcliffe and his allies in Wellington House would seem to have had a problem arousing pity for Belgium. In 1904, Sir Roger Casement, a tall, black-bearded Irishman in the British diplomatic service in the Belgian Congo, and Edmund Morel, a young British shipping agent, had revealed to an appalled world a tale of brutality and rapine unmatched in the annals of imperialism. The Congo’s blacks had been routinely starved, beaten and shot for trivial offenses while being forced to labor endless hours as slaves to extract millions of dollars in rubber and ivory for their Belgian masters, chief of whom was King Leopold II. For many years, the royal family literally owned the Congo, making an estimated billion dollars out of its exploitation. Behind a screen of unctuous lies about bringing Christianity to the dark continent, an estimated 10 million natives had died—a holocaust that exceeds anything in previous, or subsequent, recorded history. Whole districts were depopulated. Chopping off a man’s or woman’s hands was a routine punishment for disobedience. At the time, one British writer said Belgium had become “a stench in the nostrils of the world.” But in 1914, Lord Northcliffe’s newspapers and Wellington House’s propaganda machine raised a howl against the violation of “poor little Belgium’s” neutrality that obliterated the crimes of the Congo.
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In fact, Belgium was about as neutral as Scotland. The Belgian government had secret understandings with France and England. The Belgian border with Germany bristled with forts. On the French border, there were none. The country’s official language was French, although half the population, the citizens of Flanders, spoke Flemish and had no great enthusiasm for France or French culture. When hostilities began, the Germans had asked Brussels for safe passage for their army and had guaranteed to pay for any damage to property as well as for food or drink obtained en route. Neighboring Luxembourg had accepted these terms without a word of reproach.

Belgium was about as democratic as Germany—it had a parliament elected in a system that gave the wealthy as many as three votes. A similar system prevailed in Prussia, Germany’s most powerful province. Like Kaiser Wilhelm, Belgium’s king, Albert I, son of the monstrous Leopold II of the Congo barbarism, had not a little legislative power. Nonetheless, by sheer reiteration, Belgium became a keystone of the basic British propaganda line: It was a war to defend small, democratic, neutral countries against autocracy and its supposed by-product, militarism.

These claims were supplemented with quotations from the writings of extremists in Germany, such as the members of the Pan-German League, who talked wildly of world power. Another favorite source of hate quotes was retired General Friederich von Bernhardi, whose 1911 book,
Germany and the Next War,
had chapter headings such as “The Duty to Make War” and “World Power or Downfall.” Many more quotations were obtained from books by German socialists and liberals, attacking “German militarism”—a term these critics of the establishment all but coined. Ignored was France’s love of military glory and lust for conquest. In the era of Napoleon, the rest of Europe had labeled militarism the French disease. On the eve of the Great War, with a population far smaller than Germany, France had a bigger army, and most of its politicians were obsessed with erasing the stain of their crushing 1870–1871 defeat by Germany in a war that another French militarist, Napoleon III, had started. To satisfy the national appetite for
la gloire,
Paris had established a colonial empire in Africa and Indochina. The British, possessors of the world’s biggest fleet and an immense empire ruled by force, were hardly entitled to prate about militarism. But facts seldom if ever deterred the determined men in Wellington House.
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Germany’s parliament, the Reichstag, with its turbulent mix of political parties, was denounced as a fake, with no real power to rein in the kaiser. There was some truth to this latter claim, but the kaiser also lacked the power to silence his critics in the Reichstag, to his often vocal distress, because they could refuse to fund the annual budgets he submitted to them. When President Wilson called for peace without victory on January 25, 1917, the Socialist newspaper
Vorwärts
and the liberal
Berliner Tageblatt
effusively praised his speech. Nevertheless, Germany was convicted of the crime of “autocracy.” Lost in the blasts of war and bleats about poor little democratic Belgium was the secret diplomacy of Foreign Minister Grey and the fact (pointed out by La Follette) that a hefty proportion of the British lower class did not have a vote when the war began.
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In 1912, at King Albert’s behest, the Belgian parliament increased the army to 340,000 men, a large force for a country of 7 million. Many of these soldiers were untrained “civic guards,” who did not wear uniforms, beyond shoulder ribbons or an insignia pinned to their shirts. When these units joined the uniformed regulars in resisting Germany’s invasion with gunfire, they ignited an old grievance in the minds of the advancing Germans. In the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871, after the Germans smashed the French army and the government surrendered, there was an attempt to arouse a
levée en masse
. This idea of citizen resistance originated in the wars of the French Revolution, in which the entire population was summoned to resist invaders. Thousands of civilian
franc-tireurs
(French sharpshooters) took up the fight, inflicting many casualties on the Germans.

In Belgium, the Germans decided the civic guards were
franc-tireurs
, symptoms of a
levée en masse
. Compounding the Germans’ rage was the threat from the east, where only a few divisions were on the defensive against the oncoming Russian hordes. Time was of the essence, and Belgian resistance was fatally delaying the German goal of a quick victory against the French. Also in this explosive mix was the inexperience of the German army’s rank and file. The nation had not fought a war since 1870. Spooked by rumors of
franc-tireurs
everywhere, the Germans frequently opened fire on each other in the darkness, inflicting numerous casualties and deepening their rage against the recalcitrant Belgians and their obviously spurious neutrality. Retaliation was virtually inevitable—and bloody. Civilians were seized and many were executed. Towns and villages, including Louvain’s world-famous medieval library, went up in flames. Wellington House soon had a new propaganda theme: atrocities.
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A flood of stories portrayed the Germans as monsters capable of appalling sadism. Eyewitnesses described infantrymen spearing Belgian babies on their bayonets as they marched along, singing war songs. Accounts of boys with amputated hands (supposedly to prevent them from using guns) abounded, without even a hint of a blush for the way the Belgians had done the real thing in the Congo. Tales of women with amputated breasts multiplied even faster. At the top of the atrocity hit parade were rape stories. One eyewitness claimed that the Germans dragged twenty young women out of their houses in a captured Belgian town and stretched them on tables in the village square, where each was violated by at least twelve “Huns” while the rest of the division watched and cheered. At British expense, a group of Belgians toured the United States telling these stories. Woodrow Wilson solemnly received them in the White House.
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The Germans countered these tales with equally extreme stories of wounded soldiers found with their eyes gouged out and German officers shot dead at the dinner tables of their treacherous Belgian hosts. Berlin permitted eight American news reporters to follow the German army through Belgium. On September 3, 1914, they sent a telegram to the Associated Press: “IN SPIRIT FAIRNESS WE UNITE IN DECLARING GERMAN ATROCITIES GROUNDLESS AS FAR AS WE ARE ABLE TO OBSERVE. AFTER SPENDING TWO WEEKS WITH GERMAN ARMY ACCOMPANYING TROOPS UPWARD HUNDRED MILES WE UNABLE REPORT SINGLE INCIDENT UNPRO VOKED REPRISAL. ALSO UNABLE CONFIRM RUMORS MISTREATMENT PRISONERS OR NON-COMBATANTS . . . NUMEROUS INVESTIGATED RUMORS PROVED GROUNDLESS . . . DISCIPLINE GERMAN SOLDIERS EXCELLENT AS OBSERVED. NO DRUNKENNESS. TO TRUTH THESE STATEMENTS WE PLEDGE PROFESSIONAL WORD.”
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Early in 1915, the British government asked Viscount James Bryce to head a royal commission to investigate the atrocity reports. Bryce was one of the best-known historians of the era; he had written widely praised books on the U.S. government and on Irish history, sympathetically portraying the Gaels’ hard lot under British rule. In 1907, he had collaborated with Roger Casement to expose the horrendous exploitation of indigenous people on the Amazon by a British rubber company. From 1907 to 1913, he had served as British ambassador in Washington, where he became a popular, even beloved, figure. It would have been hard to find a more admired scholar.

Bryce and his six fellow commissioners, an amalgam of distinguished lawyers, historians and jurists,“analyzed” 1,200 depositions of eyewitnesses who claimed to have seen atrocious German behavior. Almost all the testimony came from Belgians who had fled to England as refugees; some were statements from Belgian and British soldiers, collected in France. The commissioners never interrogated any of these eyewitnesses; that task was left to “gentlemen of legal knowledge and experience,” namely, lawyers. Since the asserted crimes took place in what continued to be a war zone, there was no on-site investigation of any report. Not a single witness was identified by name; the commissioners said this was justified in the case of Belgians by the fear that there might be German reprisals against family members. British soldier witnesses remained equally anonymous, for no apparent reason. Yet Bryce stated in his introduction:“In dealing with the evidence we have recognized the importance of testing it severely.”
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The Bryce Report was released on May 13, 1915. Wellington House made sure that it went to virtually every newspaper in the United States. The impact was stupendous, as the headline and subheads in the
New York Times
make clear:

CIVILIANS USED AS SHIELDS
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On May 27, 1915, the
American Press Résumé’
s editors gleefully reported to Wellington House:“Even in papers hostile to the Allies, there is not the slightest attempt to impugn the correctness of the facts alleged. Lord Bryce’s prestige in America put skepticism out of the question.” Charles Masterman told Bryce:“Your report has
swept
America.”
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Among the few critics of the Bryce Report was Sir Roger Casement. “It is only necessary to turn to James Bryce, the historian, to convict Lord Bryce, the partisan,” Casement wrote in a furious essay, “The Far Extended Baleful Power of the Lie.” By this time Casement had become an advocate of Irish independence and did not hesitate to compare British crimes in Ireland to Belgium’s in the Congo. Few people paid any attention to his dissent, which was dismissed as biased.
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Clarence Darrow, the famously iconoclastic American lawyer who specialized in winning acquittals for seemingly guilty clients, was another skeptic. He went to France later in 1915 and searched in vain for a single eyewitness who could confirm even one of the Bryce stories. Increasingly dubious, Darrow announced that he would pay $1,000, a very large sum in 1915—more than $17,000 in twenty-first-century money—to anyone who could produce a Belgian or French boy whose hands had been amputated by a German soldier. There were no takers.
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After the war, historians who sought to examine the documentation for Bryce’s stories were told that the files had mysteriously disappeared. This blatant evasion has prompted most historians to dismiss 99 percent of Bryce’s atrocities as fabrications. One called the report “in itself one of the worst atrocities of the war.”
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More recent scholarship has scaled down the percentage of the Bryce Report’s fabrications; several thousand Belgian civilians, including some women and children, were apparently shot by the
franc-tireur-
enraged Germans in the summer of 1914. Bryce more or less accurately summarized some of the worst excesses, such as the executions in the town of Dinant. But even these latter-day scholars admit that Bryce’s report was seriously “contaminated” by hysteria and war rage.
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Correspondence between the members of the Bryce committee survived the destruction of the documents; it revealed severe doubts about the tales of mutilation and rape. One of the committee’s secretaries admitted that he been given numerous English addresses of Belgian women supposedly made pregnant by German rapes but could not locate a single case. Even the story of a member of Parliament sheltering two pregnant women turned out to be fraudulent. This dearth of corroboration is hardly surprising. Tales of spearing babies and cutting off the breasts of murdered women were standard hate-this-enemy fables hundreds of years old. So were mass rapes in fields and public squares. Lord Bryce the scholar should have rejected such fabrications out of hand. Instead, he lumped them all into a general condemnation of the German army.
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