Myths and Legends of the Second World War (13 page)

The distribution of arms and ammunition among the civil population of Belgium has been carried out on systematic lines, and the authorities enraged the public against Germany by assiduously circulating false reports. The only means of preventing surprise attacks from the civil population has been to interfere with unrelenting severity and to create examples which, by their frightfulness, would be a warning to the whole country.

During August and September 1914 pamphlet and newspaper reports of essentially factual atrocities such as at Dinant and Louvain were rapidly churned and exaggerated. True, criminal acts of arson, theft and hostage murder had been widespread, and certain localities had been put to fire and sword. However graver myths and fictions grew and multiplied, so that in the popular mind the German invasion of Belgium came to be seen as a bestial chronicle of wanton destruction, drunken pillage, religious desecration, hostage and child murder, living burials, perverse mutilation and rape. It mattered little that all too many of these same atrocity stories had been widely circulated in previous wars. At one stroke the German army – jack-booted, spike-helmeted – was re-cast as the ancient Hun, leaving behind a trail of blood, depravity and ruin. German civilians were said to be no more civilized, and women were said to wear necklaces made out of eyes plucked from French wounded. And so forth, ad nauseam, as hysteria darkened into hatred.

Scepticism, where displayed, was likely to be branded as unpatriotic, while for those who were determined to believe, the lack of verifiable evidence was conveniently explicable: the victims had died, or were trapped inside enemy-occupied territory. Lurid stories of German atrocities in Belgium and France were actively promoted by the Allies for a number of reasons. For the Allied governments, they possessed a potent propaganda value, particularly in America, and also boosted collective moral indignation as well as recruitment to the colours. Prior to the introduction of conscription in 1917, the million men who joined Kitchener's New Armies volunteered to fight for a country and a cause, even if ultimately they ended up fighting for their lives. Of equal importance was the fact that Britain had based its entry into the war on the fulfilment of its treaty obligations to Belgium, so any issue which continued to provide justification – both political and moral – for the conflict with Germany was vigorously promoted. For certain lower regions of the fourth estate, atrocity reports also provided an opportunity to run countless items of lurid and exploitative copy which would have been unprintable in peacetime. Strict War Office censorship also meant that there was an almost total lack of official war reporting from the Front, with the result that anecdote and rumour were seldom countered, and allowed to run wild. In an age far less media-literate than our own, in which the public were far less ready to accept that statesmen and editors might knowingly perpetrate falsehoods, propaganda offered ready-made opinions for the unthinking herd.

In Britain, the
Daily News
emerged as one of the tabloid papers least averse to publishing purple atrocity stories. On August 21st, for example:

A woman was forced to undress amid the insults of the soldiers and was then shot. The mayor's wife was shot in her house and the body burned with her home. An old man of 74, deaf and blind, received two volleys in his body. Another was dragged on to the market place and tortured till he died.

And five days later, on the 26th:

An old man … had his arm sliced in three longitudinal cuts; he was then hung head downwards and burned alive. Young girls have been raped and little children outraged, and at Orsmeal several inhabitants suffered mutilations too horrible to describe.

On October 14th the same paper carried the story of yet another boy scout shot by Uhlans for refusing to give information about the French army. The content of atrocity reports swiftly became generic. The characteristic story was supplied by an anonymous correspondent some distance from the scene of the crime, and invariably took the form of a supposedly verbatim account by an unidentified ‘Belgian soldier' or ‘married woman', albeit delivered second- or third-hand. Descriptions of cruelties to women, children and the elderly predominated, and chimed with the standard depiction of Belgium itself as the violated maiden, taken by force, then mutilated horribly and left to die. In France, the Bureau de la Presse released atrocity stories in such quantities that the French press ceased to report them under individual headlines, and instead ran them week after week beneath the same heading:
Les Atrocitiés Allemandes
.

Other factual incidents were also reported in Allied and neutral papers as comparable examples of Hunnish barbarity. On August 25th several bombs or shells landed on Antwerp, causing perhaps a dozen civilian casualties. It was said to be the first Zeppelin bombing raid of the war, and as such was widely reported, not least because bombardment by airships had long been anticipated with much the same level of dread as atomic attack a half century later. An American journalist present in the port, E. Alexander Powell, filed a gory report on the aftermath, describing in detail how one policeman had had both his legs blown off, and how the head of a woman watching from a window was severed. Powell entered one house to inspect the room where a woman had been sleeping:

She had literally been blown to fragments. The floor, the walls, the ceilings were splotched with – well, it's enough to say that the woman's remains could only have been collected with a shovel.

Over the next twelve months this litany of infamies would be extended to include the shelling of Rheims Cathedral in September, the callous bombardment of Scarborough and Hartlepool by German warships in December (leaving 137 dead and 592 wounded), the declaration of unrestricted submarine warfare in February 1915, the first use of poison gas near Ypres in April, the sinking of the Cunard liner
Lusitania
in May with the loss of over 1,000 lives, and the execution of Edith Cavell in October. One by one these successive outrages served only to endorse Lloyd George's pronouncement of September 14th 1914 that ‘the new philosophy of Germany is to destroy Christianity'.

Against this background it was hardly surprising that atrocity propaganda was also spread from the pulpit. In October 1914 one clergyman informed the Manchester Geographical Society that:

You will hear only a hundredth part of the actual atrocities this war has produced. The civilized world could not stand the truth. It will never hear it. There are, up and down England today, scores – I am understating this number – of Belgian girls who have had their hands cut off. That is nothing to what we could tell you.

Others were only too keen to tell more, although all too often these ‘truths' were little more than hysterical and even pornographic fantasies. Witness the following letter published in
The Times
on September 12th, submitted by a London vicar and supposedly quoting verbatim from a letter from a BEF officer at the Front:

We have got three girls in the trenches with us who came to us for protection. One had no clothes on, having been outraged by the Germans … Another poor girl has just come in having had both her breasts cut off. I caught the Uhlan officer in the act, and with a rifle at three hundred yards, killed him.

Another BEF officer, Major Arthur Corbett-Smith of the Royal Field Artillery, offered an even more grotesque account. On August 26th 1914, following a successful British counter-attack on an unnamed town, the major related that:

Up the main street everywhere was horrible evidence that
they
had been at work. Mingled with dead and wounded combatants were bodies of women and children, many terribly mutilated … But there was one thing which, for the men who saw it, dwarfed all else. Hanging up in the open window of a shop, strung from a hook in the cross-beam, like a joint in a butcher's shop, was the body of a little girl, five years old, perhaps. Its poor little hands had been hacked off, and through the slender body were vicious bayonet stabs.

Both these military accounts are almost certainly untrue. Corbett-Smith fails to identify the location, and in describing British units re-taking any town by dint of a combined infantry and cavalry attack his account does not correspond with any known BEF action on the 26th. The Major was a prolific author, and his later war memoirs only add weight to the suspicion that he was simply doing the bidding of the propaganda bureau. Indeed Corbett-Smith was mentally unbalanced, later reinventing himself as an actor, songwriter and social hygienist before committing suicide in 1945, advocating euthenasia for those over sixty unable to work. However, at a time when war correspondents were treated as outlaws, much war reporting inevitably originated in letters from combatants at the front, and a significant percentage of the population accepted unverified reports without demur.

One of the more notorious amputation stories concerned a Scottish nurse from Dumfries. On September 16th the
Dumfries Standard
reported the story of 23-year-old Grace Hume, who was said to have left home upon the outbreak of the war to serve in a Belgian military hospital at Vilvoorde. When the Germans arrived on September 6th they burnt the hospital, beheaded and killed wounded men, and cut off Nurse Hume's right breast, leaving her to die in agony. A hastily scribbled note reached her younger sister in Dumfries, apparently written as Grace lay dying. The story was widely repeated in several national newspapers, and grew in the telling: a letter from a second nurse from the same hospital, named Millard, was quickly produced, which told how Grace Hume had shot a German who attacked one of her patients, and how her left breast had also been amputated. Delving deeper into the affair, on September 18th
The Times
revealed not only that Nurse Millard did not exist, but that Grace Hume was in fact alive and well and working in Huddersfield, never having left the country. It transpired that the whole story was a fiction concocted by her younger sister Kate, aged 17, who was subsequently reported to have been greatly affected by the loss of their musician brother John on board the
Titanic
in 1912.

On September 30th the unhappy young woman was charged with uttering a forged letter and remanded in custody, and two months later convicted at Dumfries High Court. At trial her doctor ventured the opinion that Hume had read so many stories of German atrocities she had actually come to believe her elder sister had been killed. The jury recommended leniency, and the judge released her immediately on the basis that she had already served three months in prison. The verdict met with widespread approval, although
The Times
still found time to wonder whether the hoax had been part of a German plot to discredit all reports of atrocities. German papers, quite naturally, reported the unravelling of the sorry story with undisguised glee.

In addition to the 100 or so spy dramas produced in British theatres between 1914 and 1918, a number of atrocity plays were also submitted to the Lord Chamberlain's office.
In the Hands of the Hun
(1915) offered as its villain a sadistic German officer, Count Otto, who planned to burn down a convent and offer the nuns to his men, a fate also threatened by a German naval captain in
For Those in Peril
the following year. Although these plays were produced, certain cuts were demanded, including a scene from
In the Hands of the Hun
in which the Mother Superior was stripped to the waist and then whipped. Also censored was
War, Red War
(1915), in which a German colonel called for a baby to have its brains dashed out on a doorpost, then thrown on a fire.
Armageddon
(1915) is judged to have been one of the better examples of the genre, although
The Times
reviewer noted that the propaganda content might as well have been marked off a checklist: ‘Pictures of German barbarity and “frightfulness” – prisoners shot, women insulted, interceding priests mocked, and so forth … German sentiments about world power declaimed.'

Prior to May 1915, it is probably true to say that in Britain a degree of scepticism surrounded Belgian atrocity stories. A Belgian writer complained in a book published in 1915 that when he first arrived in London the previous autumn, every atrocity story was considered suspect. Another telling sidelight is thrown by the Reverend Andrew Clark, whose diary entry for October 12th 1914 records:

The Germans in their attack on Belgian villages had really much provocation. At the first arrival of the Germans the regular Belgian forces made themselves scarce, but when the German troops began to enter the village, Belgian girls of 15 or 16, revolver in hand, rushed out into the street and shot down Germans. When the Germans defended themselves, their action was exaggerated and misrepresented.

Even with the benefit of hindsight, it is difficult to comprehend why atrocity stories were so widely believed on the basis of such slender evidence. As early as September 1914, five American journalists who had spent two weeks with the German armies in Belgium had issued a signed declaration that they were unable to substantiate ‘a single wanton brutality' – as distinct from hostage executions. None of the men ever revoked the statement, as one might have expected had it been made simply to maintain accreditation. In 1917, a United Press correspondent named William Shepherd made much the same point:

I was in Belgium when the first atrocity stories went out. I hunted and hunted for atrocities during the first days of the atrocity scare. I couldn't find atrocities. I couldn't find people who had seen them. I travelled on trains with Belgians who had fled from the German lines and I spent much time amongst Belgian refugees. I offered sums of money for photographs of children whose hands had been cut off or who had been wounded or injured in other ways. I never found a first-hand Belgian atrocity story; and when I ran down second-hand stories they all petered out.