Myths and Legends of the Second World War (12 page)

Later historical research reveals that the
corps-francs
accounted for no more than 1,000 German casualties. More importantly, their guerilla campaign obliged the Germans to divert 120,000 fighting troops to protect their rear lines, a figure which amounted to one-quarter of the total German military strength in France. For the invader the consequences were little short of disastrous, and in 1914 the German General Staff were determined that history should not be repeated. But repeated it was, if the following paragraph from the
Daily News
of August 12th is to be believed:

Lively incidents are reported from Herstal, 20 miles south-east of Liége. When the enemy made his first appearance all its strong-hearted sons were in the trenches before Liége, but the women, many of whom are employed at the National Firearm Factory for which Herstal is famous, had sworn to save the works from falling into the hands of the Germans. They seized revolvers and swords, and when the Uhlans charged up the street threw themselves against the foe with a fury which was superb.

Their ammunition exhausted and their swords struck from their hands, they barricaded themselves in their homes and flung boiling water from the windows over the heads of the German lancers. It is stated that 250 troopers have been placed
hors de combat
through burns. The children and grandfathers helped, and when the enemy was obliged to join the general attack on the forts of Liége, the Belgian flag still flew above Herstal Factory.

According to
The Times
on the same date, no less than 2,000 German Uhlans had been scalded and burned at Herstal. Three weeks later the same paper ran another report of heroic civilian resistance from Belgium, only marginally less sensational:

Boy scouts all over the world will be proud of Georges Leysen, of Liége, a lad of 18, who has been decorated by the King and given a commendation. Young Leysen, by brilliant work, has already a bag of eleven spies, all of whom have been shot. He has killed an Uhlan and captured another at Malines, though suffering from a broken arm. Near Malines two fellow boy scouts of 16 and 17 were executed. Leysen declares their only arm was a long knife. On Sunday morning Leysen, who is the hero of the hour in Antwerp, left with important official dispatches for Brussels. He has already twice pierced the German lines.

Whatever the truth of either story, it is certainly true that at the beginning of August there was a certain amount of sporadic and uncoordinated partisan activity by Belgian civilians and civil guards. On August 30th, for example, several Belgian men confessed to a court in Aachen that they had fired on German troops, and were sentenced to death. From the outset, Germany made it clear that it would not tolerate covert attacks on its forces by civilians, nor any group not properly organized in accordance with the laws and usages of war, and would punish such ‘perfidities' as the collective responsibility of the population in the general vicinity. The wholesale destruction of property and the execution of civilian hostages were thus condoned by the German High Command as a blunt yet necessary instrument of policy in the subjugation of occupied territory. In this way, so it was reasoned, an entire nation could be terrorized into absolute submission, with the least possible diversion of military strength. Indeed Clausewitz had prescribed terror as a desirable method to shorten war, his entire methodology being based on the necessity of making war short, sharp and decisive. A word was even coined for the strategy:
Schreklichkeit
, or frightfulness.

Germany appears to have been obsessively concerned with perceived violations of international law, while conveniently ignoring the fact that the very presence of its army on neutral Belgian soil was itself an illegal act of aggression. This obsession was manifest in two main accusations: that Belgian resistance activity was illegal, and that it was endorsed and organized by those in authority, be they government officials, mayors or priests. Indeed German commanders from Ludendorff downward appear to have been only too keen to anticipate, magnify or simply fabricate instances of sniping or physical remonstration in order to set necessary examples. When the German army entered a town, notices were immediately posted warning the population that the mayor, the leading magistrate and the senator of the district would be held as hostages against guerilla attacks, on penalty of death. The taking and killing of hostages was practised systematically, as was the requisitioning of food and livestock, and demands for sureties. The further the Germans advanced, the more hostages were arrested.

The town of Herve was razed as early as the beginning of August, while on the 10th at Linsmeau eleven male villagers were rounded up and shot. On the 15th the town of Visé, on the Dutch frontier, was largely destroyed after reports of sniper fire, although the town had by then been occupied for two weeks. About 38 civilians were killed, and 631 men and boys removed to Germany for forced labour. The remainder of the population, some 4,000 people, fled across the border to Holland. The tragic litany goes on. On the 19th 150 civilians were executed at Malines and another 27 at Aerschot, while on the 20th and 21st the town of Andenne was set ablaze, and up to 200 civilians shot in retaliation for alleged
franc-tireur
attacks. The official German proclamation put the figure at 110, although Belgian accounts estimated the death toll at 211. At Seilles, near Andenne, it was 50, at Monceau-sur-Sambre 40, and on the 22nd at Tamines, 384, after Germans were angered by the stubborn resistance of a French army unit.

This atmosphere of brutality was much aggravated by the fact that German troops were themselves fed stories of outlandish atrocities committed by Belgian civilians, as were their families at home. As early as August 8th the novelist Walter Bloem, then a captain in the 12th Brandenburg Grenadiers, recorded en route to the front:

We bought the morning papers at a wayside station and read, amazed, of the experiences of those of our troops already across the Belgian frontier – of priests, armed, at the head of marauding bands of Belgian civilians, committing every kind of atrocity, and putting the deeds of 1870 into the shade; of treacherous ambushes of patrols, and sentries found later with eyes pierced and tongues cut off, of poisoned wells and other horrors. Such was the first breath of war, full of venom, that, as it were, blew in our faces as we rolled on towards it.

Bloem admitted to being haunted by the ‘monstrous thought' that he might be hit by a bullet fired by a civilian, and that during an exhausting march of 28 miles in a single day, not one of his men fell out of line because ‘the thought of falling into the hands of the Walloons was worse than sore feet'. As days became weeks, the atrocity reports became increasingly exaggerated on both sides. The American Ambassador to Belgium, Brand Whitlock, recorded with no little irony that continual German justifications left the impression that the burgomeisters of Belgian towns had bred a special race of children, so often was the reason advanced for a particular atrocity that the son or daughter of the local mayor had attacked an innocent or unarmed German soldier. On September 15th the
Kolnische Volkzeitung
offered that:

It is proved beyond doubt that German wounded were robbed and killed by the Belgian population and indeed were subject to horrible mutilations, and that even women and young girls took part in these shameful actions. In this way, the eyes of German soldiers were torn out, their ears, noses, fingers and sexual organs cut off or their body cut open.

Other atrocity myths at large in Germany held that troops had been doused with boiling oil at one location, or served with poisoned food at another, or blinded by exploding cigars. It was also said that wounded soldiers had been robbed and killed, and that in Aachen 30 officers lay blinded in hospital, their eyes gouged out by Belgian women and children. A related story told of the discovery of a bucketful of soldiers' eyeballs, a battlefield myth which had its origins in the Crusades. Indeed a large proportion of these reports were merely the stock-in-trade offered by propagandists from previous conflicts, removed from their shelves, dusted down, re-labelled, and sold as new.

In fact two streams of propaganda found themselves in conflict. For a brief period, reports appeared in the Belgian press which arguably provided Germany with some small measure of justification. According to the
Neuwe Gazet
for August 8th 1914:

At Visé young and old ran to take up arms, and if they were unable to stop the murderous advance of the German cavalry the inhabitants at least resisted until the last moment.

While an Antwerp newspaper,
Metropole
, announced the next day:

Some of the inhabitants of Liége broke open the window of a gunsmith's shop, seized guns, revolvers and cartridges and pursued the Uhlans to the outskirts of the town.

The propaganda of Belgian patriotism was therefore at odds with the propaganda of Belgian innocence. But if these stories can be said to prove anything at all, like the legend of the lethal boy scout Georges Leysen, and the deadly munitionettes at Herstal, it is merely that it is impossible to say whether the Allied or German side first began to promote stories of atrocities in Belgium.

Despite a lack of coherent resistance, as August wore on the level of German frightfulness increased. By far the worst of the massacres took place at Dinant. On August 22nd the right wing of the French 5th Army fell back from the line of the River Meuse below Namur, demolishing several key bridges as they retreated. One such crossing was at Dinant, a picturesque town dominated by a large citadel on top of the steep cliffs on the right bank. The following day the advancing German 3rd Army set about repairing the bridge as quickly as possible, but claimed that Belgian civilians tried to hamper their progress. Their commander, General von Hausen, ordered an immediate reprisal: hundreds of hostages were rounded up, held in the main square until evening, and then shot by firing squad. In all, 612 bodies were identified and buried, the youngest victim being just three weeks old. An official German statement later sought to excuse the killing of women and children (who accounted for one-sixth of the victims) on the basis that they had been caught in crossfire with Belgian army stragglers, or else had refused to be separated from male hostages. Neither explanation is particularly credible, let alone a justification.

More infamous still was the sacking of Louvain over a five-day period between August 26th and 30th. The historic university city had been occupied by the German 1st Army on August 19th, and although a number of prominent citizens were taken hostage, and a cash indemnity demanded, the population were treated in a generally acceptable fashion. The 1st Army then moved on towards Brussels and Mons, to be replaced by IX Reserve Corps. On the 25th an attack by Belgian forces from Antwerp against German positions near Louvain triggered a mild panic amongst the troops in the city, and allegations of
franc-tireur
activity by Belgian civilians. The following day the German military governor of Brussels, General von Luttwitz, pronounced that the German commandant in Louvain had been shot by the son of the town mayor, which was a nonsense, and ordered that Louvain be razed in reprisal. During the extended orgy of violence which followed, about a fifth of the city's houses were gutted, the church of St Pierre badly damaged by fire, and the ancient medieval university library containing 230,000 priceless volumes destroyed. It is not known precisely how many civilians perished, although on the 28th an American diplomat saw blackened buildings, the bodies of civilians and horses in the streets, and German troops – some of them apparently drunk – driving people from their houses in order to complete the destruction.

In the wake of the sacking of Louvain
The Times
described the Germans as ‘Huns' for the first time, thereby striking a deathless epithet. Another ostensibly reliable eyewitness description of the pillage of the city was provided by an American journalist, Gerald Morgan:

A hour before sunset we entered Louvain and found the city a smoking furnace. The railway station was crowded with troops, drunk with loot and liquor, and rapine as well. From house to house, acting under orders, groups of soldiers were carrying lighted straw, placing it in the basement, and then passing on to the next. It was not one's idea of a general conflagration, for each house burnt separately hundreds of individual bonfires – while the sparks shot up like thousands of shooting stars into the still night air … Meanwhile, through the station arch we saw German justice being administered. In a square outside, where the cabs stand, an officer stood, and the soldiers drove the citizens of Louvain into his presence, like so many unwilling cattle on a market day. Some of the men, after a few words between the officers and the escorts, were marched off under fixed bayonets behind the railway station. Then we heard volleys, and the soldiers returned. Then the train moved out, and the last we saw of the doomed city was an immense red glare in the gathering dusk.

In its sweep through Belgium, it is thought that the Imperial German Army deliberately or recklessly caused the deaths of as many as 5,000 civilians. As well as mass executions, it is also established fact that on occasion advancing German troops used civilian hostages as a human shield, as at Nimy, north-east of Mons, on August 23rd, when several hundred villagers were forced to screen an attack on a bridge held by men of the Worcestershire Regiment. In addition to acts of this kind, which were officially condoned, it may be taken as read that any army which contained a representative cross-section of society must inevitably include in its ranks certain brutal and perverted individuals. Given the circumstances of the German invasion of Belgium and France, it was inevitable that ample opportunity would arise for such individuals to give rein to their passions.

Remarkably, at no time did Germany seek to conceal the nature or extent of any so-called reprisals, and foreign journalists were left free to report them as warnings. This policy of openness was wholly misguided, and would quickly backfire with catastrophic results on the international stage. Nevertheless, in seeking to justify the sacking of Louvain, official sources in Berlin repeated the core rationale behind their policy of
Schreklichkeit
: