by G. J. Meyer
Accounts of unspeakable German atrocities, sent across the Atlantic almost as soon as the war began, had an indelible impact on American public opinion. The question of their veracity remains vexed even today, and conclusive answers, if they exist, lie beyond the scope of this book. The subject is entangled in the ambiguous morality of war, conflicting testimony, and the confusions to be found at the confluence of journalism, propaganda, and the search for historical truth. That some German troops behaved criminally can be taken as settled. That in some cases they did so on the orders of their commanders is probable if not quite certain. That francs-tireurs attacked German troops, and that they displayed extraordinary courage in doing so, is beyond question. But in firing on soldiers—green troops with no experience of war, troops unaccustomed to being shot at and frightened by stories of the carnage caused by French francs-tireurs in their grandfathers’ time—they relinquished the right to be treated as civilians in exactly the same way that merchant ships and liners, in arming themselves and attempting to ram submarines, were no longer entitled to the protection of cruiser rules.
On one hand are such horrors as the story of Leuven, where a never-explained burst of gunfire as German troops entered the town triggered a nightmare of destruction in which 248 Belgians were killed, two thousand buildings were destroyed, and a magnificent medieval library was reduced to ashes. It cannot be considered anything other than an atrocity on a terrible scale, and it was not unique. Other outrages, mercifully smaller ones, were reported in other places.
On the other hand, there is the message received by the New York office of the Associated Press on September 6, 1914, and signed by five American correspondents. All were aware of the impact the atrocity stories were having, and they wanted their countrymen to know what they, at least, had witnessed.
“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 unprovoked reprisal,” the message stated in crippled telegraphese. “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.”
The five were not alone in failing to corroborate the worst of the stories. In 1915 the lawyer Clarence Darrow, skeptical about what he was reading, offered to pay a thousand dollars for one verifiable example of a Belgian boy having a hand cut off. The gesture cost him nothing, as no examples came forward. But that was not what Americans wanted to read, or editors wanted to print, and so it made no difference. The Masterman organization, for its part, had long since seen to it that no more accounts of ambushes by civilians got into print. Belgian civilians could be portrayed as heroic victims but not as heroic fighters.
The message of the Yank reporters may have been one reason the British and French made it their policy to deny access to the Western Front to journalists from neutral nations. There was no need for reporters to generate their own copy when Masterman and Parker were on the job, supplying stories free of charge. When the London Chronicle observed that “the debt that England owes the newspaper world of America cannot be overestimated….We have no better allies in America than the editors of the great papers,” it does not appear to have been referring to the accuracy of what was appearing in print. What mattered, where the United States was concerned, was less the truth of what happened in and to Belgium than what Americans accepted as the truth. Belgium was the first of three stories—the others being the sinking of the Lusitania and a German telegram published in 1917—that cumulatively brought much of the American population to believe that Germany really was a monster among nations and had to be put down.
London’s news monopoly paid handsome dividends even in religious circles. Before the war was a month old, The New York Times published a letter from the Rev. Dr. Charles Henry Parkhurst of Manhattan’s Madison Square Church: “When a mad dog runs amuck, the policeman shoots him on the spot—not by way of revenge, but as a humanitarian contribution to the security of the public. Now has a more rabid creature than Emperor William ever run amuck through the peaceful and prosperous domain of Europe?” Et cetera through two fat paragraphs. In those same first weeks the Rev. Dr. Newell Dwight Hillis of the Plymouth Congregational Church in Brooklyn Heights gave worshippers the good news that “already the hemp is grown to twist into the noose for the royal neck” of the kaiser. For the Huns he had only bad news: “You shall not skewer babes upon your bayonets; you shall not crucify officers upon the trees; you shall not nail young nuns to the doors of the schoolhouse; you shall not violate the sanctities of infancy and old age; you shall not mutilate the bodies of little girls and noble women.” These strictures must have come as a terrible blow to the kaiser’s troops as they advanced on Paris.
The vividness of the imagery employed by these men of the cloth shows what rich material the atrocity stories provided for the visual arts. Masterman and Parker and their teams quickly exploited the opportunity: posters showing the Hun to be not only inhuman but subhuman were soon everywhere. The chilling pictures of a Dutch artist named Louis Raemaekers were especially valued; he became a hero in London and an international celebrity and ultimately would be credited with helping the Allies win the war. One of his posters shows a gaunt, gore-spattered figure drinking a toast to Kultur from a large goblet brimming with red blood. In others, the helmeted figure of Germany cowers in fear and shame under the stern gaze of Jesus, and a satanic figure in a German helmet leers gleefully atop a mountain of skulls. One hundred and forty-eight of Raemaekers’s drawings were published in book form in the United States in 1916, with an afterword by the prime minister of Britain. The editor noted in a preface that what ensured Raemaekers’s artistic immortality was his lack of “racial and national prejudice.” The following year would bring the artist himself to the States, with a traveling exhibition of his greatest hits.
Louis Raemaekers
The Dutch artist’s depictions of a monstrously bloodthirsty Germany made him famous in Britain and the United States.
American artists soon outdid Raemaekers in luridness. An example from 1916 shows a fanged, deranged-looking ape arriving on the shore of America, a ruined Europe visible on the horizon behind him. “Destroy This Mad Brute,” the poster says, not wasting space by explaining unnecessarily that the brute is Germany. In his right hand the ape holds a bloody club bearing that word Kultur, in his left arm a fair-haired damsel whose face is concealed, her bare breasts fully on view. Anticipating intervention by some months, the poster calls upon America’s youth to join the army, adding in small print, not far below the bare breasts, that “if this war is not fought to a finish in Europe, it will be on the soil of the United States.” Bare breasts feature prominently in American Great War posters, presumably to attract the attention of men of military age, presumably also to indicate that the young ladies to whom they belong have been ravished.
The pattern of the propaganda campaign was set in place in the first sixty days of the war, and it would hold for the next four years and longer. London kept the United States flooded with news that was carefully edited when it was not invented, but was rarely identified as coming from official sources. When Ambassador Bernstorff mounted a ridiculously underfinanced and amateurish countercampaign, cries went up from coast to coast about how the Germans were attempting to poison public opinion. Long before America entered the war, representatives of the Central Powers (but not of the Allies) were put under Secret Service surveillance. There was much wringing of hands over the thought that if Germany triumphed in Europe, her next step would be to invade the United States. In the spring of 1915, when the British government’s Bryce Report offered corroboration of the Belgian atrocity stories, it was featured in newspapers throughout the United States. Only years later would investigators set out to check the sources on which the report
was supposedly based; they would be told that all such materials had unfortunately and unaccountably disappeared. When Bernstorff’s spokesman, Bernhard Dernburg, was foolish enough to publicly defend the Lusitania sinking, the backlash was so alarming that the ambassador ordered him to return to Germany.
Worse came in October 1915 with the execution, in Belgium, of an English nurse named Edith Cavell, after her conviction on charges of helping more than two hundred British, French, and Belgian prisoners of war escape from the Brussels hospital where she was employed. Cavell’s actions were, in addition to being heroic, a capital offense under international law. And she had confessed her guilt. Evidence has recently come to light that her organization, and possibly Cavell herself, were engaged not only in arranging escapes but in spying for British Intelligence. Her execution was an inherently repugnant act and a gift to the Allied propagandists. It is understandable that few among the Allies or in the United States cared that it was lawful. Nor is it likely that Allied or American editors were informed when the French executed three German nurses under similar circumstances. If any did, they demonstrated no interest and would have been roundly condemned if they had.
Manufacturing hate
American poster art showed the Germans as not only inhuman but subhuman, and contributed to making lasting peace impossible.
As a morale-builder and motivator, propaganda that dehumanizes the enemy can seem an excellent idea while a war is in process. Obviously it seemed a very good idea throughout the Great War. But there is always a price to be paid. Irrational hatred is more easily turned on than off, especially after it has gone unanswered through four terrible years. The Germans were monsters, the people of the nations fighting them were told repeatedly and with all possible emphasis. But how did you make peace with monsters? What did you do with monsters once they had been subdued? Such questions would prove to be among the greatest obstacles to the achievement of a lasting peace.
Chapter 7
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Onward, Christian Soldiers
THE TWO MONTHS that followed Berlin’s announcement of unrestricted submarine warfare were electric with suspense. The great question was how the president was going to respond. The world waited for the answer, thinking that it knew but unable to be certain. It watched for clues and thought it found some, but they were never conclusive.
Which is not surprising. The evidence suggests that the president himself was not sure of what he was going to do until at least three weeks had passed, probably more. Members of his cabinet tried every trick to get him to reveal his plans but could learn nothing. It was only after eight weeks that he shared his thoughts even with Colonel House.
The momentum, in any case, was carrying the nation toward war. And Wilson, uncertain though he appears to have been, was contributing to it. On February 3, he went before Congress and announced to loud applause that he was breaking off diplomatic relations with Germany. He reminded his audience of the note with which, after the sinking of the Sussex ten months earlier, he had accused the German authorities of using their submarines in ways that violated “the universally recognized dictates of humanity.” And of the German response: a promise that no merchant ships would be sunk “without warning and without saving lives, unless those ships attempt to escape or offer resistance.”
He acknowledged that, in yielding to his demands, Berlin had warned that it could not be expected to accept restrictions indefinitely if the Allies “continue to apply at will methods of warfare violating the rules of international law”—a reference, obviously, to the starvation blockade and the arming of merchant ships. He did so, however, only to reject the warning as curtly as he had done at the end of the Sussex crisis. He repeated his 1916 assertion that German observance of the “sacred rights” of American citizens could not “in any way or in the slightest degree be made contingent upon the conduct of any other government.”
Wilson read at length from the German announcement of January 31, saying that it left Washington with only one choice “consistent with the dignity and honor of the United States”: to withdraw the American embassy in Berlin and give Ambassador Bernstorff and his staff their passports with instructions to depart. He made no reference to Berlin’s complaint about the Allies’ “brutal methods of war,” perhaps regarding it as a case of the pot calling the kettle black (which it was) and undeserving of comment. He was perhaps less justified in not mentioning Berlin’s claim that its “freedom of action”—its right to unleash the U-boats—had been restored by the “openly disclosed intentions” of the Allies to “destroy the Central Powers.” When the fight is for survival, the Germans meant, extreme measures come into play. This was, at a minimum, worthy of a response.
Tough though Wilson’s words were, and tough though his action was in breaking off relations, at the end of his speech he appealed to Berlin to reverse itself and professed faith that it would do so. “I refuse to believe,” he said, “that it is the intention of the German authorities to do in fact what they have warned us they will feel at liberty to do.” Nothing would make him believe it, he said, except “actual overt acts on their part,” meaning attacks without warning on American ships or on Allied ships with Americans on board. This can hardly be dismissed as trickery—concealing a determination to go to war behind conciliatory verbiage—because trickery was so clearly not needed. If the president had asked for a declaration of war on the day he made this speech, majorities in both houses of Congress would have cheered him for doing so.
On February 7 he received a message in which a newly appointed Austro-Hungarian foreign minister, Count Ottokar Czernin, declared Vienna’s support for the peace without victory that the president had called for on January 22. Czernin expressed a willingness to negotiate, adding however that it would be impossible to enter into talks with enemies avowedly committed to the destruction of the empire he served. He asked for assistance in moderating the Allies’ intentions.
To say that this was an unimpressive communication is an understatement. It had been overtaken by events more than a week before it was received, and it came from an empire that had entered the war in a parlous state and after two and a half years of fighting was not only destitute but in the early stages of disintegration. The young emperor who had succeeded Franz Josef at the end of 1916, Karl I, knew that a near-miracle would be required for Austria-Hungary to emerge from the war even partly intact. Peace without victory meant peace without defeat, and in 1917 that would be, for Austria-Hungary, a monumental achievement. Wilson had never broken off relations with Vienna, in part because it could no longer pretend to be a major power and seemed scarcely worthy of attention, in part because he thought its empire might be worth saving, albeit in truncated form, as a source of stability in postwar eastern Europe. He therefore responded to Czernin’s message by sending off one of his own, not back to Vienna but to London. He instructed Ambassador Page to ask Prime Minister Lloyd George if it might be possible to use the Czernin message as a starting point from which to attempt a general peace conference.
One thing would be necessary, the president said: the Allies would have to agree that Vienna could keep at least the core of her empire. Though it is unlikely that anyone on earth was less interested in peace without victory than Walter Hines Page—from the start of the war, he had displayed far more loyalty to his friends in the British government than to the administration in Washington—on this occasion he appears to have followed orders, keeping his opinions to himself. He could have been neither surprised nor displeased when Lloyd George airily dismissed Wilson’s suggestion.
Nothing could have come of any of it in any case. France’s and Britain’s long-standing reluctance even to discuss the possibility of a peace conference had hardened into an open flat refusal now that Germany and the United States were almost at sword’s point. Both allies had long since pledged—whether Wilson in early 1917 had any knowledge of this is unclear—to let Italy and Romania annex substantial portions of Vienna’s domain
s. The president’s willingness to make use even of Czernin’s transparently pathetic appeal does indicate rather clearly, however, that he was prepared to try almost any door that might lead away from intervention. One wonders if he regretted not having tried harder in 1916, when Kaiser Wilhelm and Chancellor Bethmann were still the decision-makers in Berlin and still hoped that the United States might serve as an honest broker.
The severing of U.S.-German diplomatic relations had caused jubilation among those, in Congress and elsewhere, who were determined to have a war. Those same people were again delighted when, on February 13, the House of Representatives passed the biggest naval appropriations bill in the country’s history. This bill, which originated in the War Department, was ambitious in scope. It aimed at launching new warships at a rate that would in due course make the U.S. Navy equal or superior to the Royal Navy. The British were not pleased, but for once few in Washington cared what they thought. The bill passed by a margin of fifteen pro votes for every one opposed.
Meanwhile the War Department was at work on bills to expand the regular army, introduce universal military service, and conscript young men in numbers that would have been unimaginable just months earlier.
The Treasury Department, for its part, was preparing bills for which there could be little need unless the United States went to war. One would generate the tax revenues with which to pay for a major war. Another would become the basis for future war bond drives, and a third proposed to levy an excess-profits tax both to increase revenues and to clamp down on the profiteering that was already generating much resentment across the country.