Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War (38 page)

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 faced 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’.

The atrocity issue has been addressed at some length here, because it plays an important part in the evolution of allied public sentiment about the war, together with associated myths and legends. From the first weeks, some sceptics within the allied camp denounced tales of German ‘frightfulness’ as mere propaganda. Six American correspondents in Germany,
headed by Irving S. Cobb of the
Saturday Evening Post
, sent a joint wire to the Associated Press on 7 September dismissing published accounts of horrors: ‘In spirit we unite in rendering the reports of German atrocities groundless, as far as we are able to … After spending two weeks with and accompanying the troops upward of 100 miles we are unable to report a single instance unprovoked.’

This naïve proclamation sat oddly with such German newspaper reports as those of the
Kölnische Zeitung
four days earlier; far from denying stories of savage reprisals, it sought instead to justify them: ‘Our brave fellows were not prepared for the resistance of the inhabitants of the towns and villages which they were obliged to occupy. How could they expect to be shot at from windows and cellars? At first they were petrified with horror at such crimes, and only when their officers ordered it did they adopt punitive measures, burn houses, execute civilians.’ Modern researchers have assembled evidence which seems hard to question. A mood of hysteria overtook the Kaiser’s army in Belgium and France during August 1914, matched by a determination swiftly and ruthlessly to assert its supremacy. There was also, among some soldiers, a desire to wreak revenge on any victims to hand for battlefield setbacks and casualties. Unauthorised misdeeds are committed by every army in every war, but in this case the German hierarchy formally endorsed the legitimacy of its soldiers’ conduct.

Many well-intentioned allied people, both soldiers and civilians, after discovering that some outrageous contemporary charges against the German army were false, thereupon concluded that all ‘atrocity stories’ should be disbelieved. Such a view grew among the British, especially, because of their respect for pre-war German culture. They were naïve. Their enemies indeed committed actions in Belgium and France in 1914 unworthy of a civilised society. In defence of German conduct, it is sometimes asserted that other European nations and their armies also behaved barbarously at times. The Russians were guilty of widespread atrocities against Polish Jews in 1914–15. The Belgians’ conduct in their Congo colony was consistently appalling. The record of British imperial security forces in India and Africa was tarnished by excesses towards civilians, as was that of the French in their overseas possessions. The British also sometimes acted deplorably during the 1920–21 independence struggle in Ireland.

But the German policy – and policy it was – of seizing large numbers of hostages and murdering them wholesale in response to resistance,
largely or wholly imagined, was unmatched in scale in Western Europe during that era. The excesses of the Kaiser’s nation cannot reasonably be compared with those of the Nazi regime that followed a generation later. But they make it more difficult to accept the indulgent view of some historians that a German victory in the conflict of 1914–18 would have represented the triumph of a nation and a cause morally indistinguishable from those of the allies.

3 LANREZAC ENCOUNTERS SCHLIEFFEN

All the while that the French armies had been hurling themselves upon the Germans along almost the entire length of France’s eastern frontier, the hosts of Moltke’s right wing tramped, tramped, tramped towards the centre of the stage, which they would dominate in the days ahead. In Belgium and northern France, rather than in Luxembourg, Alsace or Lorraine, the fate of Europe would be decided. Almost 600,000 German soldiers of two armies passed Brussels, then swept on southward towards the frontier of the two nations. In their path stood the French Fifth Army, soon to be joined by the British Expeditionary Force, together mustering just half the enemy’s strength.

Joffre still cherished hopes that Belgian forces might strike at the German right flank when, as he wrongly expected, Moltke turned south of the Meuse. After the loss of Liège, the Belgians would most sensibly have retired to the frontier fortress of Namur, within reach of the main French army. But King Albert cared less for prudence than for clinging to national soil. He determined instead to fall back on his northern fortress of Antwerp, there to hold out until the allies marched to his relief – he himself reached the city on 20 August. Joffre’s GQG dismissed the Belgians’ insistent and accurate warnings, that the principal might of the German army was now surging through their country, headed for France.

On the afternoon of 21 August, however, the commander of the French Fifth Army, Gen. Charles Lanrezac, suddenly recognised the strength of the enemy bearing down upon him. His formations lay beneath the descending mace of the German right wing, the critical stroke in Moltke’s implementation of the Schlieffen concept. Lanrezac’s force comprised four corps, and was three times as large as the little British Expeditionary Force coming up on his left, but it was nonetheless heavily outnumbered by the Germans. At that stage, GQG was still expecting Fifth Army to join with its neighbours further south in renewing Joffre’s grand offensive.
Instead, its commander defied orders, abandoned his attacking role and began to pull back south of the Sambre, with the Germans crowding on his heels.

Lanrezac, sixty-two years old, has had a poor press from historians, and it is easy to understand why. Though a clever man, one of his nation’s leading military intellectuals, he was also a boorish and ineffectual one, prey to a despondency beyond pessimism. He disdained the British, who returned his contempt with interest. He referred to the BEF as ‘
L’armée
W
[ilson]’, because its sub-chief of staff was the only senior officer capable of speaking French, and thus deserving of notice. But Lanrezac’s grasp of developments in mid-August 1914 was much superior to that of Joffre. He was among the first French generals to realise that the Germans were advancing through Belgium in huge strength, and vainly urged the commander-in-chief to abandon his thrust in the Ardennes, ‘that deathtrap’. The repeated retreats which Lanrezac ordered on his own initiative seemed to Joffre as well as to the British pusillanimous. But they preserved Fifth Army for important service under a better commander. More immediately, Lanrezac’s handling of his forces denied the Germans the decisive clash in the north they were impatient to bring about.