Myths and Legends of the Second World War (14 page)

Lord Northcliffe offered £200 for an authentic photograph of a mutilated civilian, but the prize was never claimed, and an interested English bishop drew a similar blank. The few photographs which were printed proved to be fakes. One in the
Daily Mirror
for August 25th 1915 depicted three grinning Uhlans ‘loaded with gold and silver loot'. In fact the photo was a pre-war picture of three riders who had won cups in the army steeplechase at Grunewald. In France,
Le Monde Illustré
transformed a picture of demonstrations in Berlin over the declaration of war into supposed celebration over the sinking of the
Lusitania
. In any event, cartoons filled the gap, the Allies proving masters of an art form which the Germans were never able to perfect.

More than any other factor, however, the myth of the rape of Belgium came to be accepted as fact following the publication of the infamous Bryce Report in May 1915. The previous December, the very same month in which the unfortunate Kate Hume was convicted, the government had appointed an investigative Committee on Alleged German Outrages. Their eventual report took its name from its chairman, Lord Bryce, an establishment figure who should have been well qualified for the task. As well as being a respected professor of jurisprudence and a noted historian, James Bryce (1838–1922) was a member of the House of Lords, having sat for 26 years as an MP, eight of these as Chief Secretary for Ireland, and nine (1907–13) as a highly popular Ambassador to the United States. There he was spoken of as ‘Wilson's old friend', the
St Louis Republican
offering that: ‘If there is a man in the entire British Empire whom the people of this nation are prepared to believe implicitly, it is James Bryce.' Ironically, Bryce had also received doctorates from several German universities, and was a recipient of the Order of Pour le Merité, the highest honour within the gift of the Kaiser. The other six members of the Committee comprised three lawyers, two historians and an editor. Its brief was to consider written witness statements and other documents, including the eight separate reports on alleged German atrocities offered up by the Belgian government since August 1914.

The Bryce Report was published in May 1915, just seven days after the sinking of the
Lusitania
, and was translated into 30 languages. In Britain the 360-page volume cost just 1
d
– the price of a newspaper – and was an immediate bestseller. Yet although it had a deliberate and critical influence on public opinion at home and abroad, the enquiry was hugely flawed. It was based largely on depositions taken from 1,200 Belgian refugees, whose evidence was not given under oath, and who were not identified in the published Report. The Committee members themselves did not trouble to travel to Belgium or France, and by relying on a team of 22 barristers to take the statements were spared the burden of actually interviewing a single witness firsthand and assessing the reliability of their accounts for themselves. Hearsay evidence was accepted at face value, and early warnings about the reliability of much of it ignored. Even before the end of December 1914, Bryce himself had been warned that no children with amputated hands had been seen or heard of at any of six given addresses in London, while another source confirmed much the same of girls said to have been made pregnant by rape.

The final report was presented in the format and with the precision of a legal brief. It concluded that a deliberate campaign of terror had been conducted by the German army in Belgium, including organised massacres and arson as well as isolated rapes, murders and assorted outrages. Although these generalities had a basis in truth, the form in which the report's final conclusion was presented in effect endorsed each and every atrocity report to have emerged from Belgium:

It is proved

i. That there were in many parts of Belgium deliberate and systematically organized massacres of the civil population, accompanied by many isolated murders and other outrages. ii. That in the conduct of the war generally innocent civilians, both men and women, were murdered in large numbers, women violated, and children murdered.

iii. That looting, house burning and the wanton destruction of property were ordered and countenanced by the officers of the German Army, that elaborate provisions had been made for systematic incendiarism at the very outbreak of the war, and that the burnings and destruction were frequent where no military necessity could be alleged, being indeed part of a system of general terrorization.

iv. That the laws and usages of war were frequently broken, particularly by the using of civilians, including women and children, as a shield for advancing forces exposed to fire, to a less degree by killing the wounded and prisoners, and in the frequent abuse of the Red Cross and the White Flag… Murder, lust and pillage prevailed over many parts of Belgium on a scale unparalleled in any war between civilized nations during the last three centuries.

Still more damaging was the appendix, which reproduced 500 of the unsworn, untested depositions. As well as re-heating endless hackneyed tales churned time and again during the preceding nine months, the appendix was the origin of many of the most gruesome atrocity myths destined to remain in circulation long after the end of the war. Its offered details of how German officers and men had publicly raped 20 Belgian girls in the market place at Liége, how eight German soldiers had bayoneted a two-year-old child, and how another had sliced off the breasts of a peasant girl at Malines. Babies had been dipped in boiling water, or spitted on bayonets, or swung against brick walls. When not busy cutting hands off children, or giving them grenades to play with, Germans had vandalized houses and excreted on personal possessions. Crimes against military personnel were also alleged, including the use of dum-dum bullets, the killing of wounded and prisoners, and abuses of Red Cross and white flags. There were even suggestions of cannibalism. The following extract is typical:

As I looked into the kitchen I saw the Germans seize the baby out of the arms of the farmer's wife. There were three German soldiers, one officer and two privates. The two privates held the baby and the officer took out his sword and cut the baby's head off… We saw the officer say something to the farmer's wife, and saw her push him away. After five or six minutes the two soldiers seized the woman and put her on the ground. She resisted them and they then pulled all her clothes off until she was quite naked. The officer then violated her while one soldier held her by the shoulders and the other by the arms. After the officer each soldier in turn violated her, the other soldier holding her down… After the woman had been violated by the three the officer cut off the woman's breasts.

A Belgian soldier told how women were publicly raped in the market place at Liége:

Immediately after the men had been killed, I saw the Germans going into the houses in the Place and bringing out the women and girls. About 20 were brought out. They were marched close to the corpses. Each of them was held by the arms. They tried to get away. They were made to lie on tables which had been brought into the square. About 15 of them were then violated. Each of them was violated by about 12 soldiers. While this was going on about 70 Germans were standing round the women including five young officers. The officers started it… The ravishing went on for about one and a half hours. I watched the whole time. Many of the women fainted and showed no sign of life.

One of the most repugnant stories, frequently quoted in the press as ‘the foulest crime of three centuries', told of the bayonetting of a small child at Malines:

As the German soldiers came along the street I saw a small child, whether a boy or a girl I could not see, come out of a house. The child was about two years of age. The child came into the middle of the street so as to be in the way of the soldiers. The soldiers were walking in twos. The first line of two passed the child; one of the second line, the man on the left, stepped aside and drove his bayonet with both hands into the child's stomach. Lifting the child into the air on his bayonet and carrying it away on his bayonet, he and his comrades still singing… The child screamed when the soldier struck it with his bayonet, but not afterwards.

And so forth. Under the totality principle adopted by Bryce, no lie was too great, and no distortion too bizarre. As an exercise in anti-German propaganda the Report was an unparalled success, and was rushed into print early to capitalize on the sinking of the
Lusitania
on May 7th 1915. Publication and distribution had been arranged by the propaganda department at Wellington House, whose internal press report observed with triumph that:

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 scepticism out of the question, and many leading articles begin on this note.

C.F.G. Masterman, the head of the British propaganda bureau, wrote in a letter to Bryce on June 7th:

Your report has swept America. As you probably know even the most sceptical declare themselves converted, just because it is signed by you!

Coming hard on the heels of the
Lusitania
tragedy, and the debut of poison gas on the battlefield at Ypres, the report and its lurid appendix triggered the appearance of a fresh wave of atrocity stories in the papers. A set of more or less identical allegations were collated by the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and published in Britain at about the same time. All of which raises the question of why an honourable man such as Lord Bryce chose to sign off such a morally questionable document. Bryce no doubt saw the report as his contribution at a time when, in the name of its dead and wounded, every combatant nation realised its future would be signed and sealed by victory or defeat. Had his report concluded that Germany had perpetrated fewer acts of violence than alleged, Bryce perhaps feared undermining Britain's moral justification for fighting Germany. Bryce and his colleagues stopped short of producing a fraudulent report, in that the conclusions drawn were sound based on the selective evidence they chose to examine. But the Committee did take particular care to avoid verifying that evidence. Bearing this in mind, some might share the view of the American observer H.C. Peterson, who concluded in his 1939 study
Propaganda for War
that in perpetuating a fictive litany of ultraviolent and pornographic fantasies, the Bryce Report stood as a
bona fide
atrocity in itself.

Bryce was parroted in a widely read book compiled by J.H. Morgan,
German Atrocities – An Official Investigation
, published in 1916. The title was misleading, in that the ‘official' element was a reference to Lord Bryce, not Morgan, although Bryce gave the book his blessing in the
Westminster Gazette
, pronouncing that ‘ample justification exists for publishing the horrible record which this book contains'. Based largely on material taken from the infamous appendix, but abandoning all pretence of moderation, Morgan devoted considerable space to the perceived ‘bestiality' of German officers and men:

The public has been shocked by the evidence, accepted by the Committee as genuine, which tells of such mutilations of women and children as only the Kurds of Asia Minor had been thought capable of perpetrating… The Committee hint darkly at perverted sexual instinct. Cases of sodomy and of the rape of little children did undoubtedly occur on a very large scale. Some of the worst things have never been published… There is very strong reason to suspect that young girls were carried off to the trenches by licentious German soldiery, and there abused by hordes of savages and licentious men… A girl was found lying naked on the ground ‘pegged out' in the form of a crucifix. I need not go on with this chapter of horrors.

As regards private property, respect for it among the German troops simply does not exist. By the universal testimony of every British officer and soldier whom I have interrogated the progress of German troops is like a plague of locusts over the land… Cases of petty larceny by German soldiers appear to be innumerable; they take whatever seizes their fancy, and leave the towns they evacuate laden like peddlers… Chêteaux or private houses used as headquarters of German officers were frequently found to have been left in a state of bestial pollution, which can only be explained by gross drunkenness or filthy malice. Whichever be the explanation, the fact remains that, while to use the beds and the upholstery of private houses as a latrine is not an atrocity, it indicates a state of mind sufficiently depraved to commit one.

Another popular atrocity text, published in 1917, was
The Marne and After
by Major Corbett-Smith, which devoted an entire chapter to frightfulness and ‘Kultur', although his earlier fiction concerning the child on the meat-hook was not included.

The defence offered by Germany to these largely mythical charges was wholly inadequate, and continued to seek to justify frightfulness on the dry basis of violations of international law. In March 1915, two months before the publication of the Bryce Report, Berlin issued its own ‘White Book' of sworn testaments to alleged murders and mutilations of German troops by Belgian soldiers and civilians. In addition to the alleged
franc-tireur
attacks described at the beginning of this chapter, priests were said to have gunned down German soldiers from behind altars, and served poisoned food and drink, while women and children were accused of having maimed German wounded, assassinated officers in their quarters at night, and even carried out crucifixions. German civilians were also said to have endured unwarranted cruelties on the outbreak of war.

In terms of content, these stories equalled those of the Allies – or All-Lies, as Berlin suggested – yet had nothing like the same impact on international opinion. German propaganda to neutral territories was, in general, less effective than that produced by Britain and France, failing as it did to simplify the issues of the war into right against wrong. Germany also failed to establish any coordinated machine for propaganda, and was much disadvantaged at an early stage when the British cable ship
Telconia
cut her deep sea cables off Emden on August 5th 1914, thus severing Germany's main line of communication to America. To many, the Rape of Belgium became the supreme issue of the war, and the ‘precipitant' of opinion across the Atlantic. Matthias Erzberger, later the Kaiser's Chief of Propaganda, concluded that events such as the sacking of Louvain ‘aroused almost the entire world' against Germany. The stock counter-argument, that the conduct of German commanders and troops was justified by law and military necessity, was woefully inadequate.