Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War

by Max Hastings

  All the while that the soldiers were struggling around the frontiers, in homes across Europe tens of millions of civilians awaited tidings from the battlefield. Helene Schweida wrote to her boyfriend Wilhelm Kaisen from Bremen on 18 August: ‘We civilians know nothing. After the fevered excitement in the first days of mobilisation, now a quiet has descended. Bremen will soon be a city of women.’ In the first weeks of war, every society experienced successive waves of jubilation and dejection amid news from the front which was scanty and often wildly mistaken. In August, most of the rash rejoicing took place in Germany. On the afternoon of the 21st, news of victories in Lorraine unleashed a round of celebrations in German towns and cities. In Freiburg, for instance, many a house decked itself out with German and Badenese flags, church bells rang, the imperial colours were raised over the cathedral, there was wild cheering in the streets for the Kaiser and the army. Excited crowds gathered around the Victory Monument in the city’s central square.

  In France, to an extraordinary degree the population, along with the government and its British allies, were kept in ignorance about what was taking place, the slaughters and retreats. But there were sufficient hints to dismay informed people. An elderly dowager in Nice, disgusted by hearing reports that the local Provençal regiments were performing poorly in Lorraine, asserted contemptuously that the local male population expected to live on its womankind. British ambassador Sir Francis Bertie wrote on the 16th: ‘I think that the French system of announcing only French successes and captures of men and guns is foolish, for they have no doubt lost many men and some guns and when the truth comes out there will be a great outcry here.’ He added a fortnight later: ‘There is much more description and truth in The Times than in any of the French newspapers,’ though this was no high compliment.

  Among the first intrusions of war upon the home front was the arrival of wounded men in provincial towns. Grenoble, for instance, received its first trainload on 22 August, and by September the town was caring for 2,000 casualties. Most had been dispatched straight from the front, to be distributed among towns and villages as local authorities saw fit. The high command issued orders that for morale reasons, the civilian population was to have the minimum possible contact with the wounded. But each arriving train was met by crowds of spectators who asked anxious questions, to which shrugs were the most common response. A chasseur-alpin said: ‘We soldiers were usually as much in the dark about the military situation as the civilians. Our platoon, our company, our unit, that was all we knew or generally cared about.’

  After the first weeks, however, many people were chilled by the swiftness of the ebb of civilian curiosity about the casualties, and sympathy for their plight. In Narbonne, barrel-maker Louis Barthas noted bitterly that when the town’s hospitals overflowed, mayoral appeals for citizens to take wounded men into their homes fell mostly upon deaf ears. The wounded languished for hours on stretchers laid down around the station, no one knowing where to send them. For months the medical facilities of all the belligerents, and especially of the French, were overwhelmed by hundreds of thousands of lacerated and maimed men. Many died whom even the crude treatments of the time might have saved, had these been available. But often they were not.

  French morale did not collapse following the slaughters of those first dreadful weeks; most of the men of Joffre’s armies remained amazingly staunch. But a new sobriety tempered the spirit of millions. A French officer wrote dryly to an English friend: ‘Self-evidently, what is happening is not taking place in a theatre; the situation and timing of the acts are not regulated by whistle-blast; and members of the audience impatient for their suppers may find that the action continues a little longer than they would wish … We will fight the enemy to our last man, and to the expenditure of our last écu, and rest assured that long before these are reached, Germany will be on its back.’ But as the failed French offensives melted away, Moltke’s great assault gathered momentum. The clashes of mid-August served only as an overture for those of the weeks that followed, that would decide the war.

  2 ‘GERMAN BEASTLINESS’

  A significant and conspicuously ugly aspect of the first weeks of Germany’s campaign in the west was the misconduct of its army towards civilians, approved at the highest level. The policy of institutionalised ruthlessness which the invaders initiated at Liège was thereafter extended across every area they occupied. Conditioned by their 1870–71 experiences of meeting civilian guerrillas in France, in 1914 they showed themselves obsessed with the alleged threat posed by francs-tireurs, in breach of the laws of war. One soldier recorded in his diary near Andenne on 19 August: ‘Our cavalry patrols, we hear, are being shot at in the villages again and again. Several poor fellows have already lost their lives. Disgraceful! An honest bullet in honest battle – yes, then one has shed one’s blood for the Fatherland. But to be shot from ambush, from the window of a house, the gun-barrel hidden behind flowerpots, no, that is not a nice soldierly death.’

  An officer’s letter published in the newspaper Deutsche Tageszeitung on 19 August said: ‘We have to shoot practically every town and village to smithereens … because civilians, above all women, shoot at the troops as they march past. Yesterday civilians shot at the infantry from the church tower in X, and wiped out half a company of brave soldiers. The civilians were fetched down and executed and the village was left in flames. A woman chopped off the head of an injured Uhlan. She was caught and had to carry the head to Y, where she was killed. My magnificent men are full of courage. They are ardent for vengeance. They protect their officers, and whenever they catch francs-tireurs, they string them up from the roadside trees.’ This account seems wildly fanciful, but paranoia about guerrillas was ubiquitous. A German assured some French prisoners they were safe – ‘all soldiers are comrades’ – then brandished his bayonet menacingly as he added, ‘But as for francs-tireurs …’

  Reports of the enemy’s conduct in Belgium – ‘German beastliness’ – soon made headlines in every allied newspaper. A wounded Irish soldier in Dover hospital told Asquith, the prime minister, that he had seen with his own eyes Germans driving a screen of women and children in front of their troops. Such incidents occurred, though sometimes witnesses may merely have seen refugees fleeing spontaneously ahead of attackers. Some accounts, however, were grossly exaggerated: there were tales of babies impaled on Hunnish bayonets, of mothers’ hands cut off by Prussian grenadiers. British naval cadet Geoffrey Harper wrote in his diary on 24 August after hearing of atrocities in Belgium: ‘It is utter rot saying that the Germans are “a cultured race” or a civilised race. If the greater part of their army is capable of doing what it is doing, the rest of the race must be the same. From now onwards I shall of course regard every German – man, woman and child, from the Kaiser downwards – not as a poor and uneducated savage, but as a wilful savage.’

  There was a fierce argument in Britain’s newspapers about whether its own civilian population should resist if the country was invaded. H.G. Wells and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle urged that it should, but a correspondent to The Times strongly disagreed, citing the futility of Belgian civilian resistance, which did no harm to the Germans, but prompted severe reprisals: ‘Let no one doubt what would be the consequences. We should be treated to the ghastly and maddening spectacle of blazing villages, brutal executions, and all the nameless horrors that the retaliation of an exasperated soldiery usually involves.’

  Before long, it became known that some reports of German behaviour in Belgium had been exaggerated, or entirely manufactured, for propaganda purposes. A violent reaction followed. An American in Paris one day entered the offices of the Foyer Franco-Belge, a group to which André Gide was giving help, and scornfully offered a large donation if its staff could introduce him to a single child who had been mutilated by the German invaders. This incident followed publication of a newspaper article by Jean Richepin, claiming that the hands of 4,000 children in occupied territories had been cut off by the enemy.

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sp; Many British soldiers – at least in the early stages of the war, before gas and protracted slaughter hardened attitudes – respected the Germans as ‘honourable adversaries’. They were disgusted by newspaper atrocity stories, at odds with their own experience. Maj. Bertie Trevor wrote home in September, applauding a sporting enemy: ‘We fought the Guard Corps … a good lot … The German atrocities (so-called) to the wounded are much exaggerated.’ The New Statesman declared its scepticism about tales of the enemy’s alleged enormities against civilians: ‘It seems to be universally the case that, if one’s enemy does not commit atrocities, one has to invent them for him in order to hate him as he requires to be hated.’ Bernard Shaw contemptuously compared the cry of newspapers for German atrocity stories to ‘the clamour of an agonisingly wounded combatant for morphia’.

  As late as 1928, Labour MP Arthur Ponsonby published a book entitled Falsehood in Wartime, claiming that 1914 ‘atrocities’ were wilful inventions by allied governments, designed to stimulate hatred for the enemy. His work was acclaimed by liberal opinion and became unsurprisingly popular in Germany, where it was later republished by the Nazis. Around Europe to this day, many people believe that allegations of German war crimes had scant basis in reality. The issue became entwined with the post-war British liberal conviction that all the belligerents shared moral and political responsibility for the catastrophe that had taken place, and that all were equally guilty of crimes against humanity.

  Such a view is at odds with the contemporary evidence. Modern research shows that, while some press reports of atrocities were fabrications, the German army in Belgium and France indeed behaved with systemic inhumanity. British and French soldiers occasionally executed innocent French and Belgian civilians as spies, but nothing is recorded or even alleged against the Western allies remotely on the scale of German massacres. Obsessed with an alleged threat from francs-tireurs, the Kaiser’s army murdered civilians and hostages in large numbers. The most authoritative recent chroniclers of German war crimes, John Horne and Alan Kramer, write: ‘We can state categorically that there was neither collective civilian resistance nor military action by franc-tireur units [as there had been during the 1870–71 Franco-Prussian War]. There were a few isolated cases of individual civilians firing on Germans, but none of these incidents provoked mass executions such as those of Dinant, Louvain, or Liège in Belgium and others in France.’

  From early August onwards, rumours of francs-tireurs’ activity, and details of their alleged atrocities, spread feverishly among German formations. These fed soldiers’ willingness both to believe the worst whenever they heard gunfire behind the front, and to exact summary retribution. A policy of extreme severity was sanctioned at the highest level. The Kaiser wrote on 9 August: ‘The population of Belgium … behaved in a diabolical, not to say, bestial manner, not one iota better than the Cossacks. They tormented the wounded, beat them to death, killed doctors and medical orderlies, fired secretly … on men harmlessly standing in the street … The King of the Belgians has to be notified at once that since his people have placed themselves outside all observance of European customs … they will be treated accordingly.’

  A sample of incidents which provoked appalling German responses included one in Belgian Luxembourg on the night of 12 August: a woman in Arlon accidentally severed a field telephone wire by opening her shutters on it. She was denounced as a saboteur; the local commander ordered the razing of the village and payment of an indemnity. A police officer taken hostage was executed the following night, after German cavalry claimed to have been fired on. At Jarny in Luxembourg on 10 August, an Italian who shot his own dog in compliance with a German edict about controlling pet animals prompted allegations of franc-tireur activity, which caused fifteen Italians to be shot. Tactical battlefield setbacks often prompted murderous displays of spite towards civilians. On 11 August, after German dragoons were forced to withdraw under fire, they claimed to have been attacked by villagers in Bazailles. Twenty-five of its inhabitants were thereupon shot, forty-five houses burned. In Vise on the 16th, drunken Königsberg Pioneers claimed to have been attacked. Twenty-five inhabitants were shot, 631 deported to Germany; the town was pillaged and six hundred houses burned.

  Some German units punished enemy troops for resisting them: two Belgian regiments held up an advance on Aarschot on 19 August, which provoked the affronted invaders to kill twenty prisoners and throw their bodies into the river Demer. Later that day, a brigade commander named Col. Stenger was shot and killed, probably by ‘friendly fire’. A certain Capt. Karge ordered seventy-six male hostages to be shot immediately, in batches of three, as a reprisal. The burning and looting of Aarschot continued through that night. On 28 August a further thousand of the town’s inhabitants were herded into Louvain, where some were shot on arrival. Four hundred were later deported to Germany, including monks of the Sacred Heart order from the local monastery. In all, 156 inhabitants of Aarschot perished.

  Even some German officers seem to have had misgivings about the ruthlessness of such actions. After 262 civilians of both sexes and all ages were murdered in Andenne-Seilles, a newly appointed town commander, Capt. Becker, ordered that ‘a festival of reconciliation’ should be held on 28 August, which local people regarded as evidence of German discomfort. But incidents involving the exploitation of civilians as human shields remained relatively commonplace, including one during the taking of Namur, where two priests were among those killed fulfilling this role. In Namur also, which was occupied on the evening of 23 August, four hundred hostages were assembled in a riding school, to be addressed by a German officer in halting French: ‘Our soldiers have been fired on. We are going to act as we did at Andenne. Andenne [is] finished … The inhabitants tried to poison our soldiers, fired on our soldiers … You too are going to be shot because you’ve fired on our soldiers right near here, in the Grand Place. You Belgians have also cut off our soldiers’ noses, ears, eyes and fingers.’ Instead, and most unusually, that evening the hostages were abruptly freed.

  The incendiary catastrophe visited on the old city of Louvain was provoked by an unexplained outbreak of firing at 8 o’clock on the evening of 25 August. Soldiers ran into houses, dragged men out for beating, and in some cases shot them. That night at 11.30 soldiers broke into the university library and set it on fire, then prevented Belgian firemen from fighting the blaze, which consumed 300,000 volumes. Shooting and arson continued through the 26th, until 2,000 buildings had been destroyed. Some 10,000 inhabitants of Louvain were driven from the town, of whom 1,500 were deported to Germany.

  The occupiers convinced themselves that Belgian clergy were foremost in inciting resistance. A young Jesuit, Father Dupierreux, was among four hundred Louvain priests and academics herded into a field outside Brussels, then searched for weapons. A diary was found on Dupierreux in which he had written a passage which his captors read aloud: ‘Decidedly, I do not like the Germans. I learned that centuries ago it was the barbarians who burned unfortified towns, pillaged houses and assassinated innocent townsfolk. The Germans have done exactly the same thing … This people can be proud of its Kultur.’ The priest was executed on the spot.

  ‘The inhabitants of Seilles attacked our pioneers building a bridge across the Meuse, killing twenty of them,’ Harry Graf Kessler wrote in his diary on 22 August. ‘As a punishment approx. 200 citizens were court-martialled and shot. No house still has a roof or windows; bare burned walls stand street by street, and more terrible – household effects, family pictures, broken mirrors, overturned tables and chairs … A family sits on the pavement before one house that is still burning: they watch until the last rafters collapse crying and crying … Every [German] convoy we met between Seilles and Bierwart carried pillage … our soldiers get used to drinking and looting. In Liège whole platoons get drunk daily on wine and schnapps from burnt-out houses. It will be hard to stop this sort of thing.’

  At Leffe, outside Dinant, on 23 August German troops convinced themselves that they fa
ced widespread civilian resistance. Cpl. Franz Stiebing described what followed: ‘We pushed on past house by house, under fire from almost every building, and we arrested the male inhabitants, who almost all carried weapons. They were summarily executed in the street. Only children under 15, old people and women were spared … I did not see if anyone from my battalion was killed or injured in this street fighting. But I saw the corpses of at least 180 francs-tireurs.’ Forty-three men were taken from the church and executed, among a total of 312 Leffe inhabitants killed.

  It is unnecessary to persist in detailing such episodes. Kramer and Horne record 129 ‘major’ documented atrocities during the first weeks of the war – 101 in Belgium and twenty-eight in France – in which a total of 5,146 civilians were killed in cold blood. There were also 383 ‘minor’ incidents, involving fewer than ten deaths, which accounted for a further 1,100 people. A grand total of around 6,427 civilians are known to have been deliberately killed by the Germans during their 1914 operations. Some 65 per cent of the ‘major’ incidents were prompted by allegations that civilian francs-tireurs had fired on soldiers. The killings were carried out by men of every German army. Atrocities declined steeply only when the front stabilised in October.

  It is interesting to contrast these statistics with the Eastern Front. A German official report declared that 101 civilians perished during the Russian invasion of East Prussia. It recorded only two ‘major incidents’: one at Santoopen on 28 August, where nineteen Germans were executed, another at Christiankehmen on 11 September, where fourteen civilians died. The German report concluded: ‘Russian atrocities have … turned out to be grossly exaggerated … It is reported that Russian troops have behaved correctly everywhere towards the inhabitants. If individual towns and villages were burned down, this occurred almost without exception during artillery duels.’ Erich Ludendorff sought to contrast the supposedly ‘shocking’ behaviour of Belgian people towards the Kaiser’s army with the fact that ‘many of the Russian troops behaved in exemplary fashion in East Prussia’.