A Patriot's History of the Modern World (16 page)

But the Belgian fortresses bought precious time, adding days to von Moltke's delicate schedule, made flesh by the workaholic general Erich Ludendorff,
deputy chief of staff for the German 2nd Army. Described as “friendless and forbidding,” Ludendorff had gained a place on the General Staff at age thirty, and directing the bombardment of Liège now reassured everyone that Count von Schlieffen had it right, and that flee or fight, Belgium would be only an annoyance.
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Part of that confidence emanated from the massive artillery, ponderous though it was. Part of it came from his personal experience. Ludendorff may have been a caricature of the monocled German militarist, but he was also absolutely fearless. Sensing that the bombardment of Liège was taking too long, he found a brigade whose commander had been killed and led it forward into the city. He ordered his adjutant to drive him to the Citadel. Somehow they made it through swarms of Belgian soldiers in the city to the Citadel's gates, which he pounded on with the pommel of his sword. They opened, and Ludendorff found himself facing a mob of Belgian soldiers. He demanded they surrender, and the Citadel fell to the two German officers.
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Most of Ludendorff's faith in the Schlieffen Plan, however, derived from the meticulous logistical planning of the German General Staff, all dependent on railroads and essentially stopping at the Belgian border. Germany moved 550 trains a day across the Rhine, including one every ten minutes crossing the Hohenzollern Bridge at Cologne. France's rail network responded, shifting around three million troops in seven thousand trains. Germany's rail mobilization plan dwarfed that of the Russians, who had one fourth as many railroads, and who had deliberately built rail gauges wider than the Germans' so as to impede invasions. But once the battle reached Germany, it meant the Russians would have to stop and switch trains at the border. But the implications of this, while unforeseen, scarcely figured into von Schlieffen's calculations, as he intended to have already forced a French surrender by the time Mother Russia slothfully mobilized, which, according to his timeline, would take forty days.

Von Schlieffen never planned on the near-suicidal Belgian resistance. Nor did any of the German High Command expect efforts by Belgian civilians, few as they were, to slow down, tie up, and harass German columns. Already inflated by the morality and justness of their cause, the German soldiers were shocked and outraged that the Belgians did not welcome them as friends but as invaders. Shortly following the first incidents of sniping, property destruction, and simple insubordination, German commanders began posting stark warnings about brutal punishment for anyone remotely interfering with their “visit.” The extreme overreaction by Germans at all
levels was rooted in their experience during the Franco-Prussian War, when French
franc-tireur
s (free shooters) or civilian snipers took a heavy toll of German soldiers after the French were defeated. The actions by these guerrillas did not affect the outcome of the war, but substantially raised German casualties and caused the Germans to consider all such citizen actions dishonorable and unlawful.

At first, only suspected guerrillas were arrested or shot; then hostages were taken—the city council, mayor, or other important local persons; then randomly one of every ten men were held and then both men and women were shot in reprisal; then finally substantial groups of civilians were shot and their villages put to the torch. At Namur, 2nd Army commander Colonel General Karl von Bülow took ten hostages per street, all to be shot if any German was fired upon by a local. At nearby Andenne during the Battle of Charleroi, following an incident in which Germans claimed townspeople had shot at them, between one hundred and two hundred civilians were executed.

Dozens of small towns were looted, others burned, including Louvain in late August 1914, with its magnificent library of more than 250,000 volumes and 750 medieval manuscripts. Hugh Gibson, then with the American legation, went with officials from other nations to investigate the reports on August 28, only to find the Germans boasting of their destruction. Troops moved from house to house, stealing valuables and setting fires, as the officer in charge ranted to the international observers, “We shall wipe it out, not one stone will stand on top of another…. We will teach them to respect Germany.”
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Some of the most brutal pillaging occurred at Dinant, two days before Louvain was burned, when troops under General Max von Hausen accused Belgians of “perfidious” activity, including interference with bridge rebuilding, and arrested hundreds of civilians. Forcing them into the town square, the grenadiers ordered the men to one side, women to the other, then firing squads—shooting in opposite directions—mowed down the townspeople. As at Louvain, troops then looted what remained of the town. The resistance by the small Belgian army and the unreasonable German fear of civilian guerrillas helped doom the German right wing attack as the Germans had to siphon off excessive numbers of troops to maintain their lines of communication. Without question, the Germans reacted harshly and, in some instances, hysterically to the reports of franc-tireurs.

German troops and officers claimed to see violent resistance at every
turn, ignoring evidence that the resistance either broke out spontaneously or was nonexistent (in some cases nervous German troops fired on other Germans), and in no way was directed by the government. Invoking “international law,” the Germans unsuccessfully attempted to claim the moral high ground for their barbarism. Most of the world rejected their rationalizations. “Brave Little Belgium” became an international symbol of courage and hope in British propaganda while Germans were increasingly portrayed in posters, cartoons, and newspapers as “Huns,” replete with bearskin capes and blood-drenched fangs.

Although atrocities had been regularly visited on civilian populations throughout history before 1914—and indeed were simply viewed as ordinary side effects of war—Germany had signed the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 that attempted to establish rules of law to govern warfare between civilized nations. It was recognized that rebellions, civil wars, and conflicts with backward countries such as those encountered in colonial conquests were often extremely brutal by necessity and therefore exempt from such rules. America's Civil War demonstrated that guerrilla atrocities were normal for such conflicts; Britain had responded to Boer resistance with civilian “concentration camps” during the Boer War; and
all
the European nations had horrific records of incivility in their colonial conflicts. But 1914 was different—this was a civilized nation, perhaps the most civilized in Europe—systematically inflicting atrocities on a small, helpless country of other Europeans. Historian Jeff Lipkes has effectively proven that the execution of Belgian civilians was part of an intentional policy of brutally subduing the Belgians by the German army and German occupation authorities.
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Ultimately, however, Progressive governments had not expected this and later refused to learn from the example, creating further treaties to curb excesses in war that were notable mainly for their failure to have any positive effect. While burnings of homes and buildings in the Great War would later be considered almost inconsequential in comparison with those of World War II, the number of civilian deaths raised an immediate outcry because it was so visible to the press and because it was one “civilized” state abusing another. Approximately 5,521 Belgian civilians (and 906 French) were executed by the Germans.
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But in a larger sense, the “Rape of Belgium” continued throughout the entire war. Belgians were forced to work on German entrenchments, and large numbers were deported to Germany for work in German industries. Food supplies were cut, and all Belgians in German-occupied territory suffered greatly. The Belgian economy was wrecked, all
productivity was subordinate to German direction, and Belgium even paid large indemnities to Germany during the war, setting the table for the Allies to demand reparations from Germany in 1919.

Significantly, attempts to criminalize wartime actions and bring Germans accused of atrocities to account through trials after the war largely came to naught. Previous treaties ending wars amnestied those committing possible criminal behavior, and Germany successfully arranged for war crimes trials to be held in Leipzig under German law. Those few individuals who stood trial were either found not guilty or given light sentences. The British lost interest in prosecuting war crimes by 1921 and the French by 1925.
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Nonetheless, the principles leading to Nuremberg and the four new Geneva Conventions starting in 1949 had been established (more or less) for warfare between “civilized” nations, and the historical significance of Belgium's misery reached far beyond the four years of German occupation in World War I. Neither France nor Britain launched any serious operation to rescue “Brave Little Belgium,” since Belgium was of little value to the Allies militarily. After all, the Belgian army consisted of only six divisions—a pair of bloated Prussian corps, or about 117,000 men—ill trained and dispersed through the fortress system. Aside from the forts, there was no Belgian artillery, and the Germans had twice as many machine guns per soldier. According to prewar plans, Britain took up positions near Mons and Dinant to block the German right wheel, assuming defensive positions. Earlier bluster about sending five French infantry divisions was quickly dismissed. Instead, three divisions of French cavalry scouts rode 110 miles in three days, passing gallantly through Belgian villages, their cuirasses shining and their black horse-hair plumes streaming. Sobbing townspeople and bands playing the “Marseillaise” greeted them, assuming the Allies had come to the rescue. But the French brushed within miles of Liège without even dismounting, then turned to explore the Ardennes, their reconnaissance complete.

These realities raised three important points about the new nature of the war. First, heavy automatic firepower brought to an end the era of cavalry—and the end of infantry attacks in line or column as well. The age of massed formations, brightly colored uniforms, and decisive battles had vanished with the saber. Bloch's black vision had become flesh. While hand-to-hand combat still constituted a necessary reality of warfare, the range at which death was dealt had expanded by an order of magnitude or more from just a century earlier.

The second reality of the new war was that the mobility of armies stretched beyond the area where traditional communications technologies were effective—tanks, for example, still relied on flags for orders, and there was insufficient wire communication to allow officers to stay in contact with forward troops. World War I was the only conflict in human history wherein commanders lacked real links to the battlefield. It has been suggested that this accounted for more loss of life than even the presence of automatic weapons. Previous eras had seen units directed by voice, bugle, drum, or flag. While imprecise and unreliable, those forms of communication nevertheless fit the speed of combat. Massed formations of troops firing muskets could discern whether they were advancing or retreating based on the movement of the flag and the call of the bugle. While generals of armies, such as Marshal Ney at Waterloo, Ulysses S. Grant at Shiloh, or Lord Raglan at Balaclava, attempting to see the big picture from an elevated position, could find themselves dangerously misinformed or might dispatch ill-written orders via runner or rider, the battlefield of 1914 had expanded beyond the capabilities of any person to visually comprehend it. That opened the way for radio—except in 1914, radio communication (especially on the field of combat) was ludicrously unreliable, uneven, and cumbersome. A few grasped the importance of electronic communication: when U.S. general John “Black Jack” Pershing arrived in France in 1917, he immediately ordered the Army Signal Corps to string twenty-two thousand miles of telephone lines to his Chaumont headquarters, leasing an additional twelve thousand miles of line from the French. Pershing also requested four hundred American telephone operators fluent in French to facilitate communication and cooperation between the armies.
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Boasting that the female telephone operators “will do as much to win the war as the men in khaki,” Pershing also understood that the preexisting familiarity with telephone technology made training and the facility with phone communication vastly easier. In America, there were 14 telephones per one hundred people as opposed to only 1.5 telephones per hundred persons in France, meaning that frequently American men or women arrived on the scene with telephone skills.
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However, for most of the war, the men in the trenches were rarely in direct contact with headquarters, and even less so when they left the trenches to attack.

Finally, European powers had been engaged for almost a century fighting natives in the colonies. Having largely ignored the U.S. Civil War with its stunningly high casualties (the Union lost 30 percent of the troops committed
at Fredericksburg; Lee lost a similar percentage at Gettysburg) and then downplayed experiences in the Franco-Prussian War or the Boer War, Europeans had disregarded the lessons of almost a thousand years of Western military history. The recurring message was that Western armies and navies, when arrayed against non-Westerners, employed technology and precise drill, backed by a culture of individual rights and private property, to elevate their ability to kill on a massive scale. Those trends, as Victor Davis Hanson has shown, dated well back to the Greeks, resulting in combat success unparalleled in the rest of the world, and with the invention of firearms, especially automatic weapons and long-range cannon, the margin of victory grew even larger. Lost in this narrative, however, was the obvious corollary that when Western armies fought other Western armies, the carnage could be unprecedented, particularly in light of the staggering rise in firepower.