War is Hell: The German Rape of Belgium in WW I

War is a constant in human history; our generation is no different.  In my lifetime there have been World War II, Korea, Vietnam, The Gulf War, Iraq and Afghanistan, just to name a few.  I participated in one of them as soldier in the United States Army in Vietnam in 1968-69.  My father was a soldier in the Italian Army in Africa in WW II.  We tend to glamorize wars, especially those where we’ve succeeded. The movies have done their part to help. But war is hell on earth; it is the most grotesque example of man’s inhumanity to man.  The heart of evil shines in war.  Men in war tend to turn into monsters; they are forced to; kill or be killed.  On arrival to my post in Nha Trang, South Vietnam, just after the Tet Offensive of February 1968, the first sign I saw shocked me a bit, though it was not a surprise. The sign read “Although I walk in the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil, for I am the evilest son of a bitch in the valley.”  A purposeful distortion of Psalm 23.  Welcome to a surreal world, I thought.

They called WW I the Great War.  Don’t know exactly what was meant by this, but if it was in the sheer number of death and destruction of human life, it was on a grand scale.  Barbara Tuchman’s book on WW I, “The Guns of August” is a classic.  Most of what I report here comes from this book. Her book deals with the start of the war in August of 1914.  Right off the bat there was death and destruction on such a scale that you would have to go back to Roman times for a comparison.  the Battle of Cannae, August 2, 216 BC, between the Romans and the Carthaginians, led by the brilliant Carthaginian military leader, Hannibal, and the Roman General Gaius Varo, where 50,000 plus men were killed in one day could be comparable.

Germany was the main bad actor.  Since their war with France in 1870 when they crushed France and took two of their territorial provinces, Alsace and Lorraine, Germany was puffing their chest constantly and pressing for another war, again, with France.  Kaiser Wilhelm II was the main instigator.  The Germans thought of themselves as the “anointed ones” of Europe.  They thought they should rule Europe; they saw themselves as superior to other Europeans.  They had a philosophy of expansion and conquest.  From the early part of the 1900s the Germans were planning and preparing for war.  They were chomping at the bit, sort of speaking, to crush France again so they could be the one uncontested leader of Europe.  They took it as an insult that the French did not lie down completely and become subservient to them after their defeat in 1870.  Their military leaders spent years in detailed plans for conquering France, to the minute detail.  Their main planner was German Field Marshal Alfred von Schlieffen, (the “Schliffen Plan”). Plans included how many trains needed to be used, down to the time each train had to pass a certain point.

 

The German plan of attack was designed to go through Belgium to hit France.  This despite the fact that they had signed a treaty to respect Belgium’s territorial integrity.  Not a problem, they invaded Belgium in August of 1914.  It is estimated that they had a force of 700,000 to two million troops. They believed the Belgians would just lie down and let them pass.  When the Belgians resisted, the brutality started.  Upon entering a town in Belgium, German troops would round up civilians and point blank shoot them.  If they found any Belgian with any kind of weapon they would shoot and kill them on the spot.  Any town offering any resistance was burned to the ground.  When some of the Belgians cut telephone lines or blew up rail lines, the Germans were ruthless in slaughtering civilians and torching towns. On August 9 after German troops arrived in the small town of Aerschot, a town between Gette and Brussels and found that the Belgian Army had withdrawn, they took out their fury on the town civilians. 150 civilians were shot dead.  At the town of Dinant, 664 civilians were shot dead.  All innocent people going about their own business like tending their farm.  On August 20, the Germans took Brussels. They took down the Belgian flag and raised their own. An indemnity of 50 million francs was demanded (about $10 million dollars).  In the town of Nomeny on August 20, fifty civilians were bayoneted, and their houses burned to the ground.  In some of the most climactic battles in Belgium, including the battles of Charleroi, Mons, Haelen and Turcos more than 1,250,000 soldiers took part in combat between French, English and German forces.  French casualties, in just four days mounted to 140,000.

 

German brutality had no limits.  German General von Bulow posted signs in the city of Liege announcing that the people of Andenne, a small town near Namur, having attacked his troops, commands the burning of the town and had 110 civilians shot dead.  At the town of Tamines, 400 civilians were herded together in front of a church and a firing squad began systematically shooting them. Those still alive after the shooting were bayonetted.

 

On August 25 the burning of the town of Louvain began.  The beautiful medieval Belgian city was renowned for its University and magnificent Library, founded in 1426, with incomparable historic books.  All lost and destroyed.  The burning and sack of Louvain lasted six days.

 

At the same time as the attack on Belgium, the Russians engaged them on the Russian-German front. In what became known as the Battle of Tannenberg, the Germans wiped out two Russian Army Corps, they took 92,000 prisoners and the dead were estimated to by around 30,000.  All of this in the month of August 1914.  The Russians, in the meantime inflicted a massive defeat on the Austria-Hungary Army.  Between August 26 and September 6, they inflicted 250,000 casualties on the Austrians and took over 100,000 prisoners.  

 

World War I lasted until 1918.  The death and destruction was of biblical proportions.  Over 68 million troops took part, ten million soldiers were killed, twenty million were wounded. Over seven million civilians were killed.  In 1915 the Germans, for the first time in military history, used poison gas at the Belgian town of Ypres, devastating French troops.  Click here for details.  This is just a short list of casualties.  The evil started again twenty years later in World War II.  The Belgians were devasted for the second time by the Germans, on their way to Paris. The murder exploded exponentially with the killing of more than six million Jews by the Nazis.  Evil has no limits.  The definition of war crimes can be found with the German killing machine of WW I and II. One common denominator was that the leader of Germany in both cases was a despot, Kaiser Wilhelm II in WW I and the insane lunatic tyrant, Adolf Hitler in WW II.  Again, we must study and learn from history, otherwise we will repeat it. Yes, war is literally hell on earth.

 

Sow the Wind, Reap the Whirlwind: How World War I Started

Ask anyone with an elementary knowledge of world history how World War I (WWI) started and nine out of ten will probably say the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir apparent to the Austria-Hungary Empire.  This answer is very simplistic.  Most people have no idea what was behind the assassination and how Europe fell into a war they had no idea of the whirlwind that it would bring: 65 million men mobilized; 20 million dead, including civilians; 21 million wounded; three empires destroyed, Ottoman, German and Austria-Hungary.  The assassination was just the match that lit the fire, but the wood for the fire was there.  Since history is one of my passions, I've recently read two great books on WWI, The Lost History of 1914 by Jack Beatty, and The Sleepwalkers, How Europe Went to War in 1914 by Christopher Clark. The information I discuss here is from these two fine books. On this, the 100th anniversary of this most tragic war, we must learn its lessons or be condemned to repeat them. Indeed, we failed to learn these lessons and repeated the slaughter in World War II.

For over 60 years prior to 1914 Europe was in a state of constant turmoil, rising militarism and territorial expansionism.  Beginning with the Crimean War, 1853-66, there were multiple wars: The Austro-Prussian War of 1866, the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, two Boer wars, 1880-81 and again in 1899-1902; two Balkan wars in 1912-13, the Russo-Japanese war of 1904 and the Italo-Turkish war over Libya in 1911-12.

The causes of WWI are very complex.  There are many villains and it is extremely hard to pin the blame on one party or country.  There are some who are more to blame than others.  I will name them later.  The Franco-Prussian War of 1870 represents a major earthquake in European politics. With the victory over France, the Prussians established the new German Empire. The Germans humiliated the French, not only with their victory over them but by annexing two of their provinces, Alsace and Lorraine.  The new German Empire inaugurated a period of high tension and alarm for the remaining European powers.   Britain feared any threat to her dominance in the world, France, smarting from her defeat in 1870, remained bitter and bellicose.  Russia, smarting from its loss in the Crimean war and then from her loss to Japan in the Russo-Japanese War began a period of active militarism.  The German Empire, headed by Chancellor Otto von Bismarck and Kaiser Wilhelm II, wanted to capitalize on their new power.

With the decline of the Ottoman Empire, former Ottoman territories in the Balkans were taken over by Austria-Hungary, Serbia, Bulgaria and Romania.  In 1878 Austria-Hungary took over Bosnia-Herzegovina.  In 1908 Austria annexed this area, thus alienating neighboring Serbia which became extremely belligerent to Austria-Hungary.  Ethnic Serbs were scattered throughout the Balkans, in Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Albania and surrounding areas.  It was a Serbian dream to re-unite all Serbs into one Serbia.  The annexation  of Bosnia-Herzegovina by Austria was an event that set off the Serbians and basically put them on a belligerent status with Austria-Hungary.

To make a bad situation even worse, Serbia began to disintegrate politically.  On the morning of 11 June 1903, 28 Serbian Army officers approached the main entrance of Serbian King Alexander I's palace, disarmed the guard detail, went in and brutally murdered the king and his wife. Queen Draga.   After the murders a group headed by them began to rule Serbia in a form of a dictatorship.  From this time to the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand Serbia was nothing short of a fighter looking for a fight.  When the Archduke was assassinated on 28 June 1914, the Serbians were more or less apathetic, some even cheered the event.

World War I was triggered by the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand.  The Austrians, knowing that the Serbians had been tormenting them for over 40 years and supporting anti-Austrian terrorists, blamed Serbia for the assassination.  The Austrians knew that they had been challenged by this assassination; not reacting would have been a humiliation to them that they could not accept, so they made humiliating demands on Serbia.  If Serbia failed to meet their demands, they would declare war on Serbia.  Indeed, this is what happened.  Once Austria-Hungary declared war, it unleashed all the war horses in all of Europe. The Russians were strong supporters of Serbia, claiming the Serbians as their Slavic brothers.  This was not entirely their motive, for they wanted to have the Balkans in their sphere of influence.  Indeed, Serbia would not have acted without the backing of the Russians. The Serbians had considered meeting Austria's demands. Had the Russians not spurred the Serbians, there probably would not have been a WWI.  Knowing that they had the Russians for their support, the Serbians felt empowered. The Russians,  additionally, wanted for many years, to control the Turkish Straits, the passageway between the Black Sea and the Sea of Marmara, the Aegean Sea and the Mediterranean Sea.  Having influence in the Balkans was a way to get close to the Turkish Straits. Russia was reassured of success due to their earlier treaty with France whereby they pledged mutual assistance.  France provided Russia with assurances that, in the event of war France would back Russia militarily.

One of the things that the two earlier mentioned books on WWI make clear is the pathetic leadership weakness in all the European powers.  The Ottoman Empire was the sick man of Europe, the Tsar of Russia was very weak, the Austrian emperor was a mere figure-head.  Politicians in most countries were self-serving and under-handed, worrying about their own power and not the good of their country. In France, for example, the president and the prime minister often would keep information from each other and at other times sabotage each other for political reasons.  In Germany, it was never clear who held the real power; in some cases military leaders had more power and influence than politicians or the emperor.  The period also highlighted a certain militarism that was uncanny for the glorification of war to gain influence or power.  Many European leaders would show up at international meetings wearing their military uniforms.

Weak leadership, made worse by infighting among each nation's hierarchy was a contributing factor leading to war. If I had to name one country to blame for the war, I'd pick Russia, followed closely by their French cohorts.