As historian Rick Atkinson points out, the exaggerated reports of German atrocities in 1914–18, when subsequently discovered to be mostly fabrications, “left an enduring legacy of skepticism,” with a poll finding that barely one-third of the British public in 1944 believed rumors of the concentration camps.
Some Great War writers, even figures of the establishment with much to lose, responded more honestly. Included here, along with the lies and the jauntiness, are more measured responses by Richard Harding Davis and H. G. Wells, the first writing about the difficulties correspondents faced in getting out the truth, the latter agonizing, via his Mr. Britling, over the writer’s role in all the horror.
Still other writers, ones we’ll examine in a later chapter, found the courage to protest the killing, not from the safety and hindsight of the 1920s, but while it was actually taking place. Another of the war’s many ironies: the writers who expected honors and rewards for their wholehearted support of the war are now looked upon as little better than liars, while the ones who had nothing but obloquy heaped on them in 1916 now seem like prescient heroes who command our respect.
The propagandists were not without their critics even at the time. George Bernard Shaw, reading Kipling and his ilk, railed at “the incitements and taunts of elderly non-combatants, and the verses of poets jumping at the cheapest chance in their underpaid profession.”
Perhaps the fairest thing that can be said of them, looking back, is that their writing, in its forced jauntiness and optimism, represents the last struggle of a doomed way of looking at the world as it confronts the horrors of a century that would demand a much darker response.
Arnold J. Toynbee would by the 1940s become perhaps the best-known historian in the Western world, thanks to his twelve-volume A Study of History, which got his face on the cover of Time magazine in 1947. In the years since, his reputation has declined, with historians finding his emphasis on religious and spiritual factors in the workings of history to be exaggerated.
He was twenty-five when the war broke out, and he went to work for the Intelligence Department of the British Foreign Service, later serving as a delegate to the Paris Peace Conference. His 1917 book, The German Terror in Belgium; A Historical Record, is prefaced with his assurance that “with the documents now published on both sides it is at last possible to present a clear narrative of what actually happened to the civil population in the countries overrun by the German Armies during the first three months of the European war.”
But was it clear? Toynbee repeats every rumor and unsubstantiated report as fact, though he admits to exercising his “own judgement as to which of the inferences is truth.” It’s written in a hard-hitting documentary style, with specific names, dates, and places giving the feel of unbiased reportage.
After the war, many of these atrocities were discovered to be either fabricated for propaganda purposes, or the tragic, unavoidable result of the chaos that enveloped the battle zone. Still, war crimes against non-combatants, including women and children, were committed, particularly in Belgium, by German soldiers (whose fears were whipped up by their own writers at home) fearful of franc-tireurs like those the army had faced in France in 1870. A recent history puts the number of Belgian civilians killed at well over five thousand, and shows that the terrorizing of the populace was condoned and actively promoted by the German general staff, just as British writers originally claimed.
Many prominent German intellectuals, including the scientists Max Planck and Wilhelm Röntgen, defended their army, blaming Belgian civilians for the atrocities and insisting upon the army’s right of reprisal.
Ernest Lissauer, a thirty-two-year-old German-Jewish poet and dramatist, is only remembered now for two moments of inspired vitriol. He coined the phrase Gott strafe England, May God punish England, which became the vow of the Germany army—and, in the Second World War, the origin of the word “strafing” as slang for machine-gunning from the air.
His poem set to music, Hassgesang, the notorious “Hymn of Hate,” did even more to stir up German morale, and, when recited in England, stirred up morale there just as thoroughly. Arthur Conan Doyle, for one, found it absolutely beyond the pale.
“This sort of thing is very painful and odious, and fills us with a mixture of pity and disgust, and we feel as if—instead of a man—we are really fighting with a furious screaming woman.”
Lissauer’s hymn made him famous in Germany. The Kaiser decorated him, and Hassgesang was printed and distributed to German soldiers on the western front.
If Lissauer’s poem had any permanent value, it was its role in inspiring one of the great minor poems of World War I, written by the British satirist J. C. Squire.
“God heard the embattled nations sing and shout
‘Gott strafe England!’ and ‘God Save the King!’
Gott save this, God that, and God the other thing
‘Good God!’ said God. ‘I’ve got my work cut out.’”
The Kaiser, with his pompous military garb and knack for inflammatory comments, was an easy target for Allied writers, included the eighty-one-year-old novelist and critic W. D. Howells, who represented all that was good and bad in the American literary establishment at the turn of the twentieth century. Another old-timer asked to contribute to the war effort, a few months before his death, was Edmond Rostand, the author of Cyrano de Bergerac, who managed to turn the German destruction of Rheims cathedral to good propaganda purpose. Howells was famous for being a literary realist, Rostand for being a literary romantic, but the aging writers obviously saw eye-to-eye on the war, and the German’s alleged policy of Schrecklickeit—Frightfulness.
The young “war poets” like Sassoon, Graves, and Owen, would become famous for their antiwar stance and their graphic descriptions of suffering in battle, but the most famous poet during the war continued to be the forty-nine-year-old Rudyard Kipling, the first English writer to win the Nobel Prize (1907); he was known for his wholehearted jingoism, if not his outright bloodthirstiness. Beloved before the war for his depiction of common English soldiers embroiled in one Imperialistic scrap after another, he didn’t see any reason to soften his pro-military stance once Germans across the Channel became the enemy and not just some Zulu tribesmen on the fringes of Empire.
His enthusiasm for war would have tragic consequences. His seventeen-year-old son John wanted to enlist in the army, but was rejected because of his weak eyesight. Kipling pulled strings with his friends in the army to get him past the physical to a commission in the Irish Guards. John died in the Battle of Loos in 1915, and Kipling and his wife never got over it. Kipling’s lament, “My Boy Jack,” continues to be one of his most often read poems today.
I have Kipling’s account of a battlefield tour (taken before his son’s death), France at War; on the Frontiers of Civilization, on the desk beside me. The cover depicts, in a softly colored patina, the three furled flags of England, France, and Russia; on the flyleaf is a small sticker showing it was purchased from The Corner Book Store in Boston. Even more interesting, at least to me, is the page with the publishing information. “Doubleday and Page” it says, “1915,” and “Garden City, New York.”
This was the famous Country Life Press, only a block or two from the house I grew up in, and only a few blocks farther from the old site of Camp Mills where my friends and I played touch football near the monument to the Rainbow Division.
After the war, Kipling worked on behalf of the Imperial War Graves Commission in establishing the dignified and moving western front cemeteries. He selected the phrase “Their Name Liveth for Evermore” from Ecclesiastes, found on the Stone of Remembrance in many of these cemeteries, and suggested “Known Unto God” for the headstones of the unidentified. Further, he chose the phrase “The Glorious Dead” for the Cenotaph in Whitehall—a phrase that, when used now, has become mostly ironic.
No writer in World War I worked more industriously than John Buchan—or was more tightly embedded in his nation’s military a
nd political establishment. Already famous for his adventure novels (including The Thirty-Nine Steps, made into one of Hitchcock’s early films), Buchan would be the writer the soldiers read in the trenches, with his novel Greenmantle, with its plot of wartime espionage and suspense, being their special favorite.
Buchan, who was thirty-nine and suffering ill health, still managed to make major contributions to the war effort. He served on Haig’s staff in France, writing communiques and weekly battle summaries; worked for the Intelligence Corps escorting journalists on tours of the front; wrote, for the War Propaganda Bureau, the multi-volume History of the War, which became a huge bestseller; was put in charge of foreign propaganda for the Department of Information; and, to cap it all, became the man responsible for briefing King George V on the progress of the war.
“I have had many queer jobs in my life,” he said of the last, “but this is the queerest.”
The Battle of the Somme—with vivid photos and detailed maps—was published only a few months after the battle, though it has the remote tone of a history written many years later. Buchan’s summary of the first day’s fighting—along with Mrs. Humphrey Ward’s description that follows—should be compared with what the historians had to say about it in the chapter introduction.
Critic Peter Buitenhuis sums up Buchan’s Somme thusly:
“The account contains all the ringing clichés and exaggerations of the genre, and by representing that almost unmitigated hell in such glowing colors, Buchan falsifies the whole military situation on the Western Front. By his omission and exaggerated claims he makes not only the common soldier but also the commanding generals look superb.”
Buchan’s brother and many of his friends were killed in the war. He felt slighted at its conclusion at not receiving more honors for his contributions, though this was rectified in 1935, when the King appointed him the first Baron Tweedsmuir and Governor General of Canada.
Thanks to his “thrillers” and their star, superspy Richard Hannay, Buchan is still read today, and is regarded as one of the founders of the modern suspense story and a formative influence on writers like Ian Fleming and John Le Carré. The John Buchan Society publishes a journal to keep his work alive; this includes operating a John Buchan Museum in Peebles, Scotland.
Babies on Bayonets
—Arnold J. Toynbee
The devastation done by the Germans in their advance was light compared with the outrages they committed when the Belgian sortie of August 25th drove them back from Malines towards the Aerschot-Louvain line.
In Malines itself, they destroyed 1,500 houses from first to last, and revenged themselves atrociously on the civil population. A Belgian soldier saw them bayonet an old woman in the back, and cut off a young woman’s breasts. Another saw them bayonet a woman and her son. They shot a police inspector in the stomach as he came out of his door, and blew off the head of an old woman at a window. A child of two came out into the street as eight drunken soldiers were marching by. A man in the second file stepped aside and drove his bayonet with both hands into the child’s stomach. He lifted the child into the air on his bayonet and carried it away, he and his comrades still singing. The child screamed when the soldier stuck it with his bayonet, but not afterwards. This incident was reported by two witnesses. Another woman was found dead with twelve bayonet wounds between her shoulders and her waist. Another—between 16 and 20 years old—who had been killed by a bayonet, “was kneeling, and her hands were clasped, and the bayonet had pierced both hands. I also saw a boy of about 16,” continues the witness, “who had been killed by a bayonet thrust through his mouth. In the same house there was an old woman lying dead.”
The next place from which the Germans were driven was Hofstade, and here, too, they revenged themselves before they went. They left the corpses of women lying in the streets. There was an old woman mutilated with the bayonet. There was a young pregnant woman who had been ripped open. In the lodge of a chateau the porter’s body was found lying on a heap of straw. He had been bayonetted in the stomach—evidently, while in bed, for the empty bed was soaked with blood. The blacksmith of Hofstade—also bayonetted—was lying on the doorstep. Adjoining the blacksmith’s house there was cafe, and here a middle-aged woman lay dead, and a boy of about 16. The boy was found kneeling in an attitude of supplication. Both his hands had been cut off. “One was on the ground, the other hanging by a bit of skin.” His face was smeared with blood. He was seen in this condition by twenty-five separate witnesses.
“I went with an artilleryman,” states another Belgian soldier, “to find his parents who lived in Hofstade. All the houses were burning except the one where this man’s parents lived. On forcing the door we saw lying on the floor of the room on which it opened the dead bodies of a man, a woman, a girl, and a boy, who, the artilleryman told us, were his father and mother and brother and sister. Each of them had both feet cut off just above the ankle, and both hands just above the wrist. The poor boy rushed straight off, took one of the horses from his gun, and rode in the direction of the German lines. We never saw him again.”
At Sempst, as the Germans evacuated the village, they dragged the inhabitants out by firing into the cellars. The hostages were taken to the bridge. “One young man was carrying in his arms his little brother, 10 or 11 years old, who had been run over before the war and could not walk. The soldiers told the man to hold up his arms. He said he could not, as he must hold his brother, who could not walk. Then a German soldier hit him on the head with a revolver, and he let the child fall.”
At Weerde, 34 houses were burnt. As the Germans retreated they bayonetted two little girls standing in the road and tossed them into the flames of a burning house—their mother was standing by. At Capelle-au-Bois, the Belgian troops found two girls hanging naked from a tree with their breasts cut off, and two women bayonetted in house, caught as they were making preparations to flee. A woman told them how German soldiers had violated her daughter successively in an adjoining room.
The Belgian troops found the body of a woman on the road, stripped to the waist with her breasts cut off. There was another woman with her head cut off and her body mutilated. There was a child with its stomach slashed open with a bayonet, and another—two or three years old—nailed to a door by its hands and feet.
From The German Terror in France, by Arnold J. Toynbee; George H. Doran Co.; New York, 1917.
Hymn of Hate
—Ernest Lissauer
French and Russian, they matter not
A blow for a blow, and a shot for a shot
We love them not, we hate them not,
We hold the Weichsel and Vosges gate.
We have but one and only hate,
We love as one, we hate as one,
We have one foe and one alone.
He is known to you all, he is known to you all,
He crouches behind the dark gray flood
Full of envy, of rage, of craft, of gall,
Cut off by waves that are thicker than blood.
Come, let us stand at the Judgement Place,
An oath to swear to, face to face.
An oath of bronze no wind can shake,
An oath for our sons and their sons to take.
Come, hear the word, repeat the word,
Throughout the Fatherland make it heard.
We will never forego our hate,
We have but a single hate,
We love as one, we hate as one,
We have one foe and one alone—
ENGLAND!
Take you the folk of earth in pay,
With bars of gold your ramparts lay
Bedeck the ocean with bow on bow,
Ye reckon well, but not well enough now,
French and Russian, they matter not,
A blow for a blow, a shot for a shot,
We fight the battle with bronze and steel,
And the time that is coming Peace will seal.
You we will hate with a lasting hate,
&
nbsp; We will never forego our hate,
Hate by water and hate by land,
Hate of the head and hate of the hand,
Hate of the hammer and hate of the crown,
Hate of seventy million choking down.
We love as one, we hate as one,
We have one foe and one alone—
ENGLAND!
From Current History; the European War; The New York Times Co., New York, 1915; translation Barbara Henderson.
Mother is the Name of the Gun
—Arthur Conan Doyle
It was to an artillery observation post that we were bound, and once again my description must be bounded by discretion. Suffice it, that in an hour I found myself, together with a razor-keen young artillery observer and an excellent old sportsman of a Russian prince, jammed into a very small space, and staring through a slit at the German lines. In front of us lay a vast plain, scarred and slashed, with bare places at intervals, such as you see where gravel pits break a green common. Not a sign of life or movement, save some wheeling crows. And yet down there, within a mile or so, is the population of a city. Far away a single train is puffing at the back of the German lines. We are here on a definite errand. Away to the right, nearly three miles off, is a small red house, dim to the eye but clear in the glasses, which is suspected as a German post. It is to go up this afternoon.
The gun is some distance away, but I hear the telephone directions. “Mother will soon do her in,” remarks the gunner boy cheerfully. “Mother” is the name of the gun. “Give her five six three four,” he cries through the ’phone. “Mother” utters a horrible bellow from somewhere on our right. An enormous spout of smoke rises ten seconds later from near the house. “Raise her seven five,” says our boy encouragingly. “Mother” roars more angrily than ever. “How will that do?” she seems to say.
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