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Prologue
- Leuven University Press
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Prologue “The truth transcends the limits of the probable.” Cardinal Désiré-Joseph Mercier “What a vast difference there is between the barbarism that precedes culture and the barbarism that follows it.” Friedrich Hebbel This book describes what happened when three German armies invaded Belgium in August 1914. In district after district, troops looted and burned homes and murdered the inhabitants. By the end of the month, nearly 6,000 Belgian civilians were dead, the equivalent of about 230,000 Americans today. The worst of the carnage took place during an eightday period between August 19th and 26th .¹ To anyone familiar with activities in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe , there will be a striking sense of déjà-vu. In a series of organized manhunts, people were chased out of their homes, herded at gunpoint to isolated fields or, more often, to town and village squares, and then gunned down, without the pretense of a trial. Others – men, women and children – were forced into cattle-cars and, under deplorable conditions , transported east to concentration camps, where they were held for months. Still other captives were forced to march for days in the sweltering August heat, with little or no food or water, before being herded to Belgian lines or dispersed. Whenever residents were removed from their villages and towns, the homes were systematically looted and then set on fire. The stolen goods selected by officers were shipped back to Germany. Some 25,000 homes and other buildings in 837 communities were burned to the ground. About one and a half million Belgians fled the country, 20% of the population. The suffering was without precedent in modern Europe. For over two hundred fifty years civilians had not fled en masse before invading armies. They had not been targeted by the invaders. As in the 1940s, the German advance was preceded by end- 14 Prologue less columns of refugees, caked with dust, shuffling along under heavy bundles, feet bleeding, staring blankly ahead, numbed beyond despair. Yet even today, particularly in the U.K. and the U.S., reports of German crimes in Belgium are frequently dismissed as Allied propaganda. Historians and popular writers treating the subject concede that the Germans retaliated harshly for attacks by “franc-tireurs” (guerilla snipers ), but the stories told by survivors of murder, arson, rape, and pillage have generally been regarded as gross exaggerations, if not wholesale inventions. Typical is the treatment in the 1996 PBS series “The Great War and the Shaping of the Twentieth Century.” In terms of audience size, this is perhaps the most influential recent account of World War I. Sections of it are replayed in high school and college history classrooms throughout the U.S. each semester.² The film approaches the subject from the point of view of German soldiers. “To their surprise, Belgian snipers known as franc-tireurs began shooting,” the narrator declares. A German solider is then quoted: “The war became a hideous experience, because the population took part in the fight. Whenever they had a chance, they shot down German soldiers.” After briefly mentioning that “hundreds” of Belgian civilians were executed, the narrator informs viewers that “with each retelling, [the tales] became more vicious. Exaggerated stories were taken as fact.” Host Jay Winter then discusses “the first substantial propaganda campaign in history,” by which he means the attempt to tell the world about the massacres of Belgian civilians. The campaign freely indulged in racism , Winter claims. The image of “‘poor little Belgium’” – the irony is unmistakable – “would haunt the Germans for years to come,” the narrator concludes.³ In the most recent history book to make the New York Times bestseller list, apart from biographies of America’s founders, readers are assured that “in fact, Belgium was not neutral at all; it had agreements with France and Britain, and forts dotted its border with Germany (unlike its border with France, which had none).” All of these statements are false. “After the war,” the author continues, “it was well established that the Belgian atrocities were largely fabricated, but the lies did their damage.”⁴ [35.171.22.220] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 16:44 GMT) Prologue 15 So why the unwillingness to acknowledge that war crimes took place in Belgium in 1914? There is, in the first place, a problem with the term adopted in Britain and America to describe the mistreatment of civilians . During the first two months of the war, stories were told of sadistic maimings both of Belgian civilians and...