Myths and Legends of the First World War

by James Hayward

  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 Liège, 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 Liège:

  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 Germa
n soldiers appear to be innumerable; they take whatever seizes their fancy, and leave the towns they evacuate laden like peddlers. . . Châteaux 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.

  In addition, Germany was greatly handicapped by the paucity of factual incidents which could be suitably spun. The shooting of a dozen survivors of the crew of U27 by marines from the British Q-ship Baralong on August 19th 1915 was probably as close as it came. The episode became public after crew members from an American vessel voiced their misgivings to the State Department. After being re-named Wiarda, the Baralong repeated this performance five days later upon the U41, running down two crewmen who had crawled into a lifeboat. Germany’s predictable response was to demand that Britain ‘take proceedings for murder’ against Baralong’s commander and crew. Britain noted with irony the sudden concern by her enemy for the principles of civilized warfare, while at the same time observing that the charges were negligible compared with other crimes ‘deliberately committed by German officers . . . against combatants and non-combatants’. In fact this ignominious episode had been carried out in accordance with standing Admiralty instructions, drafted by Winston Churchill, by which German submarine crews were to be treated as ‘felons’ without any of the rights accorded to prisoners of war. ‘Survivors,’ wrote the ebullient First Lord, ‘should be taken prisoner or shot – whichever is most convenient.’

  After the crew of Zeppelin L19 were left to drown in the North Sea by the crew of the Grimsby trawler King Stephen in February 1916, similar German efforts to build a propaganda sensation were stillborn. Germany also tried to counter Allied propaganda by providing neutral papers with stories and photographs of favourable German activity in occupied territory, or of the warm welcome offered to the Kaiser’s army by Belgian civilians. By these accounts, German soldiers were forever rescuing Belgian children from flooded streams and deep canals. However, positive reports were far less newsworthy than the sensationalist fare served up by the Allies, which reached a peak in the wake of Bryce. There was no better illustration of German mishandling and naiveté than the case of Edith Cavell in October 1915. The ‘martyrdom’ of Cavell caught the imagination of artists and newspapers alike, although a great deal of factual information was withheld from the public. As a matron running a training hospital in Brussels, she had, since early in the war, been involved in running an underground network which helped Allied prisoners escape across the Dutch frontier. She knew well enough that her penalty if caught would be death, espionage being a capital offence within the laws and usages of war. Indeed by the time Cavell was shot by firing squad the French had already executed one German woman, Marguerite Schmidt, for precisely the same offence, and by the end of the war had executed several more, Mata Hari included. Nevertheless, the execution of Cavell caused an outcry, typified by the words of the Bishop of London to a crowd in Trafalgar Square:

  The cold-blooded murder of Miss Cavell, a poor English girl, deliberately shot by the Germans for housing refugees, will run the sinking of the Lusitania close in the civilized world as the greatest crime in history.

  A similar double standard applied to the shocked publicity surrounding a photograph of an Austrian trench club, exhibited as representing ‘culture at the stage of cannibalism’, while making no mention of the fact that similar weapons were used by Allied troops, and even manufactured on a commercial basis by British firms. Later on in the war some alleged atrocity victims also turned their (remaining) hands to commerce of a macabre kind. An American artillery lieutenant with the AEF’s 32nd Division recalled an unpleasant scene as his men disembarked at Brest in March 1918:

  One Belgian youngster, about twelve, made a good thing by exciting the pity of the Americans by showing his wounds, which he said were from German atrocities. He had an inch-long scar in his tongue, caused, he said, by a German soldier piercing it with a bayonet. On his back was a mass of scar tissue and blackened skin, about six inches across, which must have been caused by a severe burn. There had been so much publicity in the States about German atrocities, real or alleged, that most of us accepted the Belgian stories as truth at the time.

  The point being that a bayonet wound through the tongue alone seems highly unlikely. Although Germany bore the brunt of these charges, she was not alone. All the Central Powers were the target of Allied hate propaganda, which posited a ‘league of scientific savagery’ between the Teuton and the Turk. The same kind of allegations were made about the war on the Eastern Front as at Sabac in Serbia, where civilians were massacred by invading Austrian forces. In contrast with the unreliable stories from Belgium and France, there appears to have been no shortage of photographic evidence, if the report published in 1916 is anything to go by. Falsehoods remained a commonplace, however, for example a story from May 1915 that Austrians had killed thousands of Serbian civilians with clouds of poison gas. Nevertheless, the genocidal Turkish massacre of more than a million Armenians between 1915 and 1917 received nothing like the same level of coverage as events in the west, and triggered little by way of moral indignation.

  Belief in the falsehood of the more extreme atrocity myths became widespread only in the years after 1918. In his study The Great War and Modern Memory, Paul Fussell claimed that an incalculable number of Jews died in the Holocaust ‘because of the ridicule during the twenties and thirties . . . about Belgian nuns violated and children sadistically used’. Due to the scepticism engendered by Allied propaganda, Fussell concludes, most people refused to fully credit reports about the death camps until hard evidence emerged in 1945, by which time it was too late. While it is impossible to gauge the truth of this suggestion, it is certainly the case that the extent to which both the tr
oops and the public were duped during the First World War caused a considerable degree of anger, best summed up by Arthur Ponsonby in 1928:

  Finding now that elaborately and carefully staged deceptions were practised on them, they feel a resentment which has not only served to open their eyes but may induce them to make their children keep their eyes open when the next bugle sounds.

  In 2001 the Rape of Belgium sounded a curious echo, after a senior German minister offered the first public apology for the massacre at Dinant. During a visit to the town on May 7th the German Secretary of State for Defence, Walter Kolbow, abandoned all allegations of franc-tireur provocation, and instead announced with no little humility:

  Eighty-seven years have passed since German soldiers indulged in murder, desecrated churches and torched your residential areas. I would like to ask you all for your forgiveness.

  A wreath was then laid by Herr Kolbow at the memorial to the 674 civilian victims, but many locals boycotted the sombre ceremony, including the mayor of Sambreville, whose ward includes the massacre sites at Tamines and Auvelais. The nearby town of Andenne afterwards responded with a demand for payment of £40,000 in respect of each of its victims, 256 in all, to be paid to their surviving descendants. Under Belgian law, it was argued, an apology is akin to an admission of guilt. However, the request was politely turned down by Berlin.

  5

  Trench Myths

  The principal trench and battlefield myths examined in this chapter are those of the Crucified Canadian in 1915, and the German corpse conversion plant, which first gained widespread currency two years later. However, a number of less celebrated legends are worthy of mention in passing.