By the time winter set in [the war] had become a horrid fact of daily life to which individuals and societies had to adjust. London society hostess Lady Ottoline Morell noted that “the war goes on like an evil dance of the furies."
By Michael S. Neiberg
From: The Dance of the Furies: Europe and the Outbreak of World War I
Prior to August 1914 there were no nationalist hatreds or suspicions sufficient to cause Europe to go to war. Chauvinism and hyper-nationalism were abstract concepts that lacked both the power to bring about war and the allure to drive the behaviors of the vast majority of Europeans. Neither concept features prominently in the letters and diaries of Europeans before the start of the war. Once the war had begun, however, atrocities and tales of violence fueled the development of genuine hatred and a desire for vengeance that proved sufficient to maintain the consent for a war that had relied on ideas of self-defense.
The war's horror, Sigmund Freud presciently noted, "cuts all the common bonds between the contending peoples and threatens to leave a legacy of embitterment that will make any renewal of those bonds impossible for a long time to come." Atrocity tales from the war's early weeks played an important role in the severing of those bonds.
The story of atrocities in World War I has a long and controversial history. It is not the point of this article to evaluate the truth of such stories or to try to parse out the atrocities that undoubtedly did occur from those that propagandists embellished. The significance of atrocity stories in 1914 lies in their ubiquity in all the great powers and their emergence as "one of the defining issues of the war, for both sides." Whether true or not, atrocities struck fear into the hearts of all who heard them and provided motivation to fight the war to the finish in order to keep such depravity from being visited upon one's own homeland. The nature of censorship, of course, meant that people only heard of the atrocities committed by their enemies. Germany's now well-documented atrocities in Belgium, for example, do not appear in German letters and diaries because the Germans either received no news of them or believed that German soldiers were only defending themselves against Belgian and French atrocities.
Atrocity stories were commonplace everywhere in August 1914. Germany's real atrocities in Belgium, as well as those invented by Allied publicists, have become the most famous, both because they could be verified by the reports of neutral correspondents and allowing for the accumulation of evidence and because they were used after the war as proof of German perfidy. Atrocities tales abounded in the media and in general conversation. Reverend Andrew Clark spoke to a long-time British Army veteran who told him of the "fanatic savagery" of German soldiers. Another soldier told him that he had seen women who had had their breasts hacked off by German soldiers; he also told of two young Belgian girls beaten by German soldiers so badly that they had bled to death. Belgian refugees also told Clark's dentist that they had seen the decapitated bodies of children and wounded soldiers mutilated by German soldiers.
But Belgium was not the only scene of atrocity tales. French newspapers highlighted the German naval bombardment of undefended cities in Algeria by the German warships Goeben and Breslau during their famous voyage to Turkey, as well as the targeting of the cathedral of Reims. The latter especially seemed to demonstrate to Frenchmen that the goal of Germany's war was the elimination of French culture and civilization. French soldiers also know about the German shooting of the mayor of Senlis, the razing of entire French towns, and the brutal German treatment of French civilians. French soldier Olivier Gaulleux saw for him self French towns where the Germans had killed every animal, destroyed every building, cut down fruit trees, poisoned water wells, and shot civilians. One soldier spoke to a female refugee who told him that German soldiers had raped every woman in her town regardless of age. "Sexual menace," report the authors of the most important study of the German atrocities, "was ubiquitous in the violence of the German invasion."
Learning about atrocities could motivate soldiers to fight harder. French soldier Charles Delvert believed a rumor he had heard that German soldiers had snatched a baby from its mother's arms and smashed it to the ground for the crime of wearing a beret. Delvert had also found a postcard on a dead German soldier promising his family that they would soon burn Paris to the ground after they took it. Seeing the postcard led Delvert to bemoan the "joy in destruction that was so characteristic of the German people," and he noted that it rallied the men of his unit (i.e., fight harder to prevent the Germans from advancing on the capital).
Germans, too, heard stories real and imagined that gave them motivation to fight. Berliners heard that British soldiers carried special knives designed to carve out the eyeballs of German prisoners of war. Fritz Nagel was terrified to hear that Belgians strung wires between buildings to decapitate German soldiers riding in cars. German newspapers reported that a Russian soldier had been found with the fingers of seventeen German soldiers in his pockets, and some German soldiers believed stories that the French cut off the penises of prisoners of war. Other tales included French soldiers putting cholera in water supplies before retreating; Russians nailing women and children to the doors of churches (this one allegedly confirmed by a refugee from East Prussia); the French gouging out the eyes and cutting off the ears of the German wounded; and a Belgian boy having been found with a basket of German eyeballs.
Tales of French doctors killing the German wounded were also commonplace. Many of these stories appeared in highly respected newspapers, giving them an air of truth. One German noted simply in his diary that the tales of French treatment of the wounded, children, and women he had heard were too horrifying to put to paper. Germans tended to assume that such atrocities were the result of a carefully planned "popular uprising" directed by government officials, local dignitaries, and, in many cases, Catholic priests. They therefore assumed that they were facing an "underhanded people" that committed unspeakable horrors, not just isolated acts from a few individuals.
Refugees often brought with them terrifying tales of the behavior of the enemy, although in many cases they were merely repeating rumors they had heard from others. In Berlin, refugees from East Prussia told of "Russian barbarism .... hands being cut off, children being burned, women raped." The tales of Belgian and French refugees were similar, often supported and embellished by government propaganda and media reports.
Such tales served to reinforce the government's justification for the war and to increase hatreds that were rapidly developing. Atrocity stories (whether real, embellished, or invented) gave people on all sides tangible reasons to fight. Fear of the enemy and of the possible consequences of defeat drove consent for the war and led to a demonization of the enemy. Hateful images of the enemy, theretofore virtually absent in contemporary writings, became commonplace within a few short weeks of the war's outbreak. The Germans, in French eyes, had "the soul of the barbarian who wants to kill." They became "infernal vandals" and "hordes of savages" who had "placed themselves outside humanity" and become nothing more than "machines for burning houses." For the Germans, too, their enemies were "Cossacks" (a term that became shorthand for all the evil in human nature) and their "recruited mercenaries" in France and Britain.
Consequently, attitudes on both sides hardened as early as the end of the war's first few weeks. As one Briton who had admired Germany before the war noted in an editorial in the London, "The admiration which I feel for Germany as a civilizing power in its own fashion (different from ours) is changed to dislike when she misuses her deserved influence in the world of thought to trample on law and right and to force the horrors of war on a neutral state." Other Britons spoke of Germany as "essentially barbaric," "devilish," and "an enemy of civilization." Such attitudes led to "a of frenzy hate" against the Germans and a determination to see that the Germans be "utterly overthrown" before any discussion of peace could begin.
Such views led to an intensification of resolve to see the war not just to victory but to complete victory. J. Herbert Lewis, a British MP, caught the mood of the British people with his statement, "May Heaven save our land from its clutches." In the words of one British officer, Germany had to be completely defeated so that the Huns (a term that only began to appear in late August) "will never see Britain as a conqueror." Harold Peat, a volunteer in the British Army who had come from Edmonton to fight for the "tiny but magnificent island" where he had been born, met a Belgian girl who had lost an arm. She told Peat that a German soldier had cut it off. "Believe me," he wrote in his diary, "I realized then, if never before, what we were fighting for. I was ready to give every drop of blood in my veins to avenge the great crimes that this little girl, in her frail person, typified."
Such views were common in all belligerent countries. The tales of atrocity that one Saxon officer heard convinced him as early as 23 August that the war now had to be "a war to the end." Michael Nolan's observation that for the French "there could be no talk of negotiation with an enemy who was the very negation of all human values" was an equally valid sentiment in the other great powers as well. One British officer's wife wrote to her husband, "I have murder in my heart often and often. I wish I could tear a German Hun limb to limb for what they have done to children. If you get a chance darling don't spare one of the devils. Thank goodness you are a good shot ....
I hope God will curse their nation." Against such an enemy a compromise peace was unthinkable, thus driving all sides to commit to fighting a war to the end, come what may. Revenge, hatred, and fear soon became reasons in their own right to fight "the most holy of all wars that men have ever suffered." Charles Delvert noted that as early as 22 August the rallying cry for men in his unit had become "Let us seek vengeance!" Another French soldier noted that he and his comrades were fighting through their "immeasurable sadness" with the knowledge that they now fought "for duty and for vengeance." Revenge also appeared in Franck Roux's memoirs as he envisioned paying the Germans back for the "numerous scattered bodies" of comrades that he had seen, a "depressing scene, but one which gives us the idea of vengeance." The French government began a systematic accounting of atrocities on 20 August so that "the population of a country" guilty of such crimes could be "struck from the ranks of civilized peoples."
Revenge was no longer an abstract and distant concept as it had been before 1914 over the loss of Alsace-Lorraine; it was now a concrete concept inspired by the need to avenge the deaths of close friends and tell horrors men had seen with their own eyes or heard about from witnesses and newspapers. "Is there no punishment too harsh for these monsters?" asked Cardinal Alfred Baudrillart to the diary in which he recorded numerous tales of atrocities committed by Germans. Hatreds had developed on both sides of the line. From Germany came the observation that the war had led to "passionate hatred of civilian populations." Bavarian Crown Prince Rupprecht told his soldiers to "annihilate the English” and to "take revenge against [England's] hostile intrigue for the many sacrifices we have to make." His statements, of course, made their way the British newspapers, fueling British anger in response. German soldiers often drew their motivation from the desire to keep the war and its attendant horrors away from their homelands. They often thought of their own homes as they saw the damage that the war had wrought on Belgian and French villages and determined they would not allow such tragedies to befall German towns. One German soldier perceptive enough to fear what would happen if the French "in their rage, having discovered their pillaged and destroyed towns," entered Germany. The fear of what he assumed the French already believed about German behavior was enough to make him afraid to become a prisoner of war in French hands.
The enemy became increasingly dehumanized as people across Europe looked for outlets for their anger. From Paris, Jane Michaux thought German atrocities made clear to the world "the danger it runs" should Germany win. France, she thought, had become like the Romans fighting the barbarians and had to choose between fighting to the end or suffering Rome's fate at the hands of people with the "soul of a demon." In Britain, too, "a general indictment of the German character" explained atrocity stories and motivated people to fight a war to the finish. Hatred had not caused the war, but the war quickly created hatreds sufficient to ensure its prosecution to the bitter end.
Source: Originally published in The Journal of the World War One Historical Association, Winter 2012, by permission of the author and Harvard University Press
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