The Illusion of Victory

by Thomas Fleming

  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.28

  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.29

  In spite of its patent lies, the Bryce Report was a huge propaganda victory for the British, convincing millions of Americans and other neutrals—the report was translated into twenty-seven languages—that the Germans were beasts in human form.30

  V

  The British piled the Bryce Report on top of another propaganda bonanza handed to them by the Germans—the torpedoing of the passenger liner Lusitania off the Irish coast on May 7, 1915. Of the roughly 2,000 passengers on board, 1,198 died, including 291 women and 94 children. American dead numbered 128; among them were Broadway producer Charles Frohman and millionaire sportsman Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt. Fueled by the British claim that the submarine had fired two torpedoes, causing the ship to sink in less than twenty minutes, American outrage was intense. Theodore Roosevelt called for an immediate declaration of war. The British distributed graphic accounts of the bodies of women and children floating ashore on Irish beaches. An Irish grand jury indicted the kaiser for murder.

  No one told the Americans (or the Lusitania’s passengers) that the liner was carrying 4.2 million rifle cartridges (the equivalent of ten tons of gunpowder) and 1,250 cases of shrapnel shells (supposedly empty) in its hold. Insiders such as Secretary of State Bryan and Dudley Field Malone, Collector of Customs in New York, suspected these explosives, not a second torpedo, were the source of the blast that sank the ship so swiftly. But the Wilson administration said nothing in public to counteract British claims of a second torpedo.

  Shortly before the Lusitania sailed, the German government had published a warning in New York newspapers, urging passengers not to travel on the liner. But Woodrow Wilson’s administration maintained that American citizens had a right to take belligerents’ ships, even when they were sailing into the war zone. The British, determined to prove Britannia still ruled the waves, had scoffed at the danger.31

  Later in 1915, the Germans gave the British another propaganda victory that in some ways equaled the Lusitania. Dame Edith Cavell was a British-born nurse working in a Belgian hospital. The Germans discovered that she had helped more than two hundred Belgian, English and French wounded soldiers escape to their own lines or to the neutral Netherlands. A five-man military court found her guilty, and she was executed at dawn on October 12, 1915. “I realize patriotism is not enough,” she told the British clergyman who consoled her on the eve of her death. “I must have no hatred or bitterness for anyone.”Wellington House made those words, which it may have fabricated, as famous throughout the United States as Nathan Hale’s farewell utterance. A delighted American colleague wrote Sir Gilbert Parker that Cavell “gave us an occasion for another outburst of real sentiment.”32

  The cumulative impact of Cavell’s execution, the Lusitania’s sinking and the Bryce Report is visible in a New York Times editorial on October 23, 1915. The writer admitted that the Germans had a legal right to shoot Cavell and then conflated her death with “countless other acts of like kind, all the fruit of the stern blind devotion to the ruthless ideas of militarism and state power. ” This was why “the civilized world had turned against Germany . . . and hopes and fervently prays for [her] defeat in arms, lest by triumph her unspeakably horrible ideals should come into dominance and the hands of the clock of civilization be turned back 1000 years.”33

  A separate Wellington House campaign focused a substantial share of this anti-German rage on the kaiser. Wilhelm II was a juicy target, as Lord Northcliffe had demonstrated long before the war began. A grandson of Queen Victoria, Wilhelm had a prickly relationship with his British royal cousins and a tendency to shoot off his mouth about Germany’s martial prowess and its right to a “place in the sun. ” He was also fond of discoursing on the danger of “the yellow peril”—the growing power of Japan—and the superiority of white, northern European Protestants. Prone to nervous breakdowns—he suffered three in the five years preceding the war—he was extravagantly fond of gorgeous military uniforms, perhaps an attempt to achieve masculinity in spite of a withered arm. At his desk, he sat in a saddle because it made him feel like a warrior. His gaunt face, which featured haughtily curled mustaches, made him a hostile cartoonist’s dream.34

  Soon the kaiser, who had little more control over his armies than King George V of England had over the British Expeditionary Force, was being blamed for rapes and murders in Belgium and called a megalomaniac with a hunger to rule the world. From here it was only a short step to calling him “the Mad Dog of Europe” and “the Beast of Berlin.” In one book, The Unspeakable Prussian, the author argued that “madness has always dogged the steps of the Hohenzollerns.” Among his proofs of Wilhelm’s insanity was his open dislike of his mother, Victoria,“England’s Princess Royal.”

  A Dutch cartoonist, Louis Raemakers, was employed by Wellington House to portray the kaiser as a cross between a Cro-Magnon primitive and a slavering crocodile. The British hailed Raemakers as a great artist and distributed books of his caricatures in the United States, one of them with an introduction by Prime Minister Asquith. When the artist visited the United States, Woodrow Wilson invited him to the White House.35

  In the wake of this tidal wave of hate, it was hardly surprising to discover that by March 1917, the Reverend Newell Dwight Hillis, pastor of the Plymouth Congregational Church in Brooklyn, was telling his well-heeled flock that he was prepared to forgive the Germans “just as soon as they are all shot.” Then, to fill his cup of happiness to the brim, he wanted to see “the sight of the Kaiser . . . hanging by a rope.”36

  Totally forgotten was the supplement devoted to the kaiser in the New York Times on June 8, 1913, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of his coronation. On its front page, along with a handsome portrait of the monarch in a navy uniform, was an effusive salute to him from the paper’s editors. The headline read “Kaiser, Twenty-Five Years a Ruler, Hailed as Chief Peacemaker.” The accompanying story called Wilhelm “the greatest factor for peace that our time can show”—and credited him with frequently rescuing Europe from the brink of war. Along with the newspaper’s praise came tributes from prominent Americans, including Theodore Roosevelt; his White House successor, William Howard Taft; Columbia University president Nicholas Murray Butler; and steel tycoon Andrew Carnegie, whose full-page commentary concluded that all the citizens of the civilized world were the kaiser’s “admiring loving debtors” for his service to the cause of peace.37

  What a difference a war makes.

  VI

  What the British and the Germans really thought about neutral countries was exemplified by Greece. A democracy with roots in the ancient past, it was aggressively, even obnoxiously neutral. The Greek king, Constantine, was of German descent but wanted nothing to do with the war. His rival for power, Premier Eleutherios Venizelos, had other ideas. He saw that the Serbians were almos
t certain to be thrashed by the Austrians and the Germans, and hoped to replace them as the Balkan ally of the Triple Entente.

  The entente became more than eager to listen to this siren song after the disastrous failure of the British attempt to land an army at the Dardanelles and knock Germany’s halfhearted ally, Turkey, out of the war. Still hoping to launch some sort of foray at the southern flank of the Central Powers, the British soon wangled an invitation from the devious Venizelos to land an army in Greece. When the first British and French troops came ashore at Salonika in October 1915, the premier, realizing that no one, especially the king, bought his diplomacy, protested the violation of Greece’s neutrality—and resigned.

  It did not matter what anyone in Greece said or did. The British and the French were in Salonika to stay. They were soon joined by 150,000 Serbs, the remnants of the army that had been smashed by a German-led Austrian offensive, in alliance with Bulgaria. The Serbs, French and British sat in Salonika for the next three years, doing little but skirmishing with the Bulgarians and treating the Greeks as second-class citizens in their own country.38

  VII

  The Germans were unprepared for the British propaganda onslaught of 1914. As a newcomer to international power politics—Germany was barely forty years old in 1914—the country had paid little attention to this time-honored British custom of slandering their enemies. In the sixteenth century, the predecessors of Wellington House had pinned the label “barbarians” on the Irish, thereby putting them outside the usages of international law and the mercies of Christianity. When the British fought the Spanish for imperial hegemony in the New World and in Europe, London’s Grub Street flacks created the Leyendra Negra, the “Black Legend,” which used the Spanish Inquisition to paint a portrait of Spaniards as uniquely cruel, bigoted, fanatical, treacherous and greedy.

  When the American revolutionists under George Washington became the foe, no less a literary heavyweight than Samuel Johnson was hired by Parliament to label them “Negro drivers” and a “mongrel” mix of Irish, Scottish, German, Dutch and English, unworthy of being considered true Englishmen. Other scribblers spread the story that George Washington revolted because he had spent all his rich wife’s money on gambling and loose women. The Bew Letters, supposedly written by Washington, portrayed him enjoying the sexual favors of his washerwoman and any other female within reach. When the French under Napoleon challenged England’s growing world power, hordes of London pamphleteers and journalists pictured their Continental rivals as bloodthirsty madmen with a guillotine in every village square. Napoleon was the subject of caricatures at least as vicious as those visited on the kaiser.39

  A major flaw in the German character in World War I was a naive righteousness. No one in Berlin gave any thought to creating a Wellington House to respond to the British defamation campaign with similar whoppers about the British Expeditionary Force, Lord Northcliffe, and other ripe targets such as Arthur Balfour, the quintessential aristocrat who headed the Conservative Party before the war and eventually joined the war cabinet. In the early 1900s, Balfour asked a friend,“What exactly is a labor union?” Instead, the Germans earnestly tried to refute British and French slanders. They defended shooting Belgian franc-tireurs who had fired on their army and the civilians who supported them. When the Cavell execution detonated in their faces, they pointed out that the French had shot two German nurses as spies in 1915. The story did not stir an iota of sympathy in America.

  When the kaiser’s men captured Brussels, they searched the Belgian Foreign Office files and found ample evidence that Belgium had a virtual alliance with France and England. Again, the refutation of “poor little neutral Belgium” was barely noticed. Berlin tried to answer the uproar over the Lusitania by denying that there was a second torpedo and arguing that the ship was a floating explosion waiting to happen, thanks to its cargo. Again, yawns and rampant skepticism. As any student of modern-day spin can tell you, the story that gets there first gets the most attention.40

  The Austro-Hungarian empire, headquartered in Vienna, with less-than-total power over provinces that included restless Czechs, Hungarians, Poles, Croatians, Bosnians and Serbs as well as Germans, was even less prepared to cope with the publicity war in the United States. Vienna took the better part of six months to send someone to the United States to explain why it was the one party in the whole mess with a legitimate reason for going to war. The Serbian terrorist who shot Archduke Ferdinand and his wife had patent links with government plotters in Belgrade.

  Thanks to the astute German ambassador, Count Johann von Bernstorff, the kaiser’s men in the United States mounted a propaganda counterattack fairly quickly. Bernstorff persuaded the New York Times to give him a full-page interview in their Sunday magazine on August 30, 1914, in which he denounced England for cutting the undersea cables and blamed Russia for starting the war by mobilizing its huge army to defend Serbia. By September 1914, the German Information Service (GIS) was up and running in New York. It had established radio contact with Berlin and other European capitals through the Trans-Ocean News Service, which operated from Sayville, on the south shore of Long Island. But the GIS’s numbers never came close to the manpower that Wellington House and the British voluntary organizations, supplemented by Lord Northcliffe’s numerous reporters and American Anglophile volunteers, brought to the fray.41

  VIII

  Ambassador Bernstorff ’s team asked for help from the 8.3 million U.S. citizens who proudly called themselves German-Americans. By far the most affluent immigrant group in the United States, they had enclaves in numerous Midwest cities and towns, and politicians were sensitive to their opinions. In 1908, a survey of how other Americans viewed immigrant groups had ranked the Germans as the most admirable. They were hardworking, law-abiding, patriotic—tens of thousands had fought for the Union in the Civil War.

  The German-American response to the war in Europe was staunchly pro-fatherland. In their numerous newspapers, they fulminated against the prejudices of U.S. papers, which quickly became saturated with Wellington House propaganda. Mass meetings in major cities—Chicago, New York, Cincinnati—hailed the “idealism of Germany” and damned the English for cutting the cables and gaining a monopoly on the flow of information about the war. They set up a Literary Defense Center, which sponsored hard-hitting books by American writers, defending Germany and Austria-Hungary with titles such as Who Is to Blame for the War?42

  A star German-American writer soon emerged: George Sylvester Viereck. He had come to the United States as a boy, graduated from New York’s City College, and won a reputation as an experimental poet and a progressive political journalist. With backing from the German Information Service, he began editing an English-language weekly, Fatherland, which swiftly achieved a circulation of 100,000. But Viereck blundered badly when he defended the sinking of the Lusitania as proof that “Germany was not bluffing in this war” and maintained that burning Louvain’s famous library taught a valuable lesson to other countries that were thinking of ordering their civilians to participate in the war. Naive Germanic self-righteousness skewed even Viereck’s seemingly sophisticated judgment.43

  Also active was a national group, the German-American Alliance. Until the war began, they had confined themselves to fighting prohibition, the growing political movement to ban alcoholic drinks from the United States. They now organized mass meetings in Washington to demand an embargo on the sale of munitions to England and France. They also indulged in outbursts of authoritarianism when their local numbers gave them power. They called for firing schoolteachers who espoused the Anglo-French cause in their classrooms and the banning of pro-Entente books in public libraries. These activities raised the hackles of the National Security League and other Americans, whom Wellington House had turned into Germanophobes. They began claiming that the alliance was a “vast engine of the German government.”44

  Germany also had some spokesmen in the academic world. Shortly after the war started, the New York Times gav
e Hugo Munsterberg, professor of history and psychology at Harvard University, a respectful hearing when he blamed Russia for igniting the explosion. Another Harvard professor, Edmund von Mach, launched a weekly column,“The German Viewpoint,” for the Boston Evening Transcript. After the Lusitania went down, the editors decided their readers were no longer interested in the German viewpoint and fired him. Munsterberg was similarly isolated. He stopped coming to Harvard faculty meetings because former friends refused to sit near him.45

  The Germans tried to counter Belgian atrocity stories with tales of monstrous deeds by Russians on the Eastern Front. Berlin’s lack of imagination was almost pathetic. The best they could muster was a familiar recital of women with amputated breasts, impaled children, and virgins ravished by gloating Cossacks. These obvious retreads impressed no one.46

  The German Information Service sponsored or originated more than 1,500 books, pamphlets and articles. But they seldom disguised the source of this propaganda; with that same naive self-righteousness, they usually did not even try. They never came close to matching the covert way Wellington House distributed British propaganda through American friends and pliable reporters. Nor did the Germans ever find an advocate with Viscount Bryce’s instant credibility. The GIS’s first spokesman, Bernhard Dernburg, was a clever man and a skillful writer. But he was soon labeled the Kaiser’s mouthpiece by the pro-British New York press. When he tried to defend the sinking of the Lusitania, the American response was so ferocious, Ambassador von Bernstorff sent him back to Germany.47