The Illusion of Victory

by Thomas Fleming

  Also very much in the propaganda field were voluntary British organizations, such as the Union of Democratic Control (a revealing juxtaposition of terms) and the Central Committee for National Patriotic Organizations (CNPO). The Central Committee was almost as formidable as Wellington House. Created on November 21, 1914, soon after the British Expeditionary Force had been bloodied in its first encounter with the German army in Belgium, the CNPO had affiliates in all the neutral countries and a separate committee that concentrated on the United States. This group too sent pamphlets, books and speakers to America.7

  In the former colonies (aka, the United States) voluntary organizations sprang up that also became valuable channels for British propaganda. One of the most important was the Navy League. Its members included dozens of major bankers and corporate executives, from J. P. Morgan, Jr., to Cornelius Vanderbilt.“What a band of patriots,” Senator Robert La Follette exclaimed when he saw their membership list.“Owning newspapers, periodicals and magazines and controlling through business relations the editorial good will of many others.”

  Virtually confirming the senator’s comment, in the fall of 1914 one of Morgan’s partners remarked: “In America [at present] there are 50,000 people who understand the necessity of the United States entering the war on [England’s] side. But there are 100,000,000 Americans who have not even thought of it. Our task is to see that those figures are reversed.”8

  Equally potent was the National Security League, which was created to preach preparedness but soon spent much of its time and energy echoing British propaganda handouts and warning of the danger of German “reservists” operating under cover in the United States. These homegrown Anglophiles were almost all situated in the Northeast, with the heaviest concentration in New York City, whose newspapers dominated editorial opinion in the rest of the country.9

  Also not to be discounted were the numerous immigrants from the British Isles and Canada, many of them fairly well-to-do, who eagerly volunteered to help the mother country in its hour of peril. Woodrow Wilson’s four grandparents and his mother were among these nineteenth-century arrivals. Unlike American immigrants with foreign-sounding names and scant knowledge of English, these British (in Wilson’s case, Scottish and Scotch-Irish) newcomers had won ready acceptance in American middle-and upper-class society. They had access to men and women of power and influence.10

  III

  The Wellington House propaganda machine had a ready-made supply of themes on which to elaborate. Since 1896, the Conservative Party, with the avid cooperation of press tycoon Alfred Harmsworth, a low-rent version of Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst, had been ranting about Germany’s “militarism” and its intention to attack England. The Tories sneered at Germany’s boasts about its Kultur and the prosperity of its working class, who enjoyed pensions and health care while most of England’s workers had neither and lived in some of the worst slums in Europe. The Germans, according to Harmsworth, were thick-necked helots who obeyed the orders of the generals and Prussian aristocrats who ran the country. Harmsworth also portrayed Wilhelm II, Germany’s kaiser, as a bully and a menace.

  Elevated to the peerage as Lord Northcliffe, Harmsworth owned a megachain of newspapers and magazines, including the venerable Times of London, which struggled to retain some vestiges of respectability in his sordid grip. The seat of Northcliffe’s power was his flagship, the Daily Mail. With a circulation of more than a million, it was a veritable epitome of yellow journalism.11

  In 1906, Northcliffe sponsored and serialized a novel by William Le Queux, dramatizing a brutal German conquest of Britain with the help of a secret civilian army of reservists disguised as waiters, clerks, hairdressers and bakers. The book, unimaginatively titled The Invasion of 1910, sold over a million copies worldwide and was popular in the United States. To advertise the serial, Northcliffe had sandwich men dressed as German soldiers, complete with spiked helmets, parading London’s streets.12

  Wrapping this hate propaganda around the cry of preparedness, Northcliffe almost single-handedly revived the British Conservative Party in the elections of 1912. He was backed by the National Service League, which called for a conscription law, and Britain’s Navy League, which constantly warned that Germany’s decision to build a big navy meant that it was out to dominate the world. Anglophiles in the United States soon transferred this paranoia to the Western Hemisphere, finding evidence of pan-Germanism in German immigrants to Brazil and other South American countries. In fact, Germany’s imperialism was timid and indecisive most of the time. German immigrants in southern Brazil, for instance, pleaded in vain for money from Berlin to build a railroad to connect them to the sea. When Germany sent warships to demand payment from Venezuela for long-overdue debts, it scrupulously asked American permission, lest it violate the Monroe Doctrine. The Germans were fearful of offending major powers, especially England and the United States, and worsening their sense of isolation.13

  The real reason for Northcliffe’s hate campaign was economic, not military. For more than a decade, Germany had been challenging England as a competitor in the world marketplace. British economic power was in decline everywhere. Between January and June 1914, Germany’s exports and gross national product had exceeded England’s for the first time. Senator La Follette cited this competition as the real reason for the slaughter in Europe. George Bernard Shaw said the same thing in an obstreperous pamphlet that outraged the writers who had obediently parroted Wellington House’s line. Ultimately, Woodrow Wilson himself would admit this dolorous truth.14

  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.”15

  IV

  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.16

  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.17

  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.18

  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.19

  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.20

  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.”21

  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.”22

  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:

  GERMAN ATROCITIES ARE

  PROVED, FINDS BRYCE

  COMMITTEE

  Not Only Individual Crimes, but

  Premeditated Slaughter in

  Belgium

  YOUNG AND OLD MUTILATED

  Women Attacked, Children

  Brutally Slain, Arson and

  Pillage Systematic

  COUNTENANCED BY OFFICERS

  Wanton Firing on Red Cross and

  White Fl
ag: Prisoners and

  Wounded Shot

  CIVILIANS USED AS SHIELDS23

  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.”24

  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.25

  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.26

  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.”27