Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (9 page)

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had little to do with an understanding of the rights of women. It had a lot to do with the evolution of a new form of battle-the scientific use of propaganda.

We are indebted for our most complete and factual knowl edge of rape in World War I to the distinguished British historian Arnold Joseph Toynbee, who was a young Thucydides scholar at Oxford when the war broke out. Toynbee published two small volumes in
1917,
one devoted to the early months of the war in Belgium and a second to the war in France. Both books were basically compendiums of German Army atrocities, gathered by Allied commissions of investigation and cross-checked against available German documents. As Toynbee and his contemporaries saw it, the German General Staff deliberately mounted a campaign of terror in the first three months of the war.*

From Liege to Louvain, as Toynbee wrote it, the German Army cut a swath of horror. Houses were burned, villages were plundered, civilians were bayonetted, and women were raped. "A number of women" were raped at Tremeloo. At Rotselaer "a girl who was raped by five Germans went out of her mind." In Capelle au-Bois a woman told how "the German soldiers had held her down by force while other soldiers had violated her daughter succes sively in an adjoining room." At Corbeek-Loo "a girl of sixteen was violated by six soldiers and bayonetted in five places for offering resistance." An eyewitness who survived the siege of Louvain re ported, "The women and children were separated. . . . Some Ger man soldiers came up to me sniggering and said that all the women were going to be raped . . . . They explained themselves by gestures."

That was a sample of August in Belgium. The pattern held for September in France. Jouy-sur-Morin: "Two Germans came into a house carrying looted bottles of champagne, and violated a girl of eighteen-the mother was kept off with the bayonet by each sol-

*
In
The Guns of August
Barbara Tuchman attributes the German campaign of terror to the influence of Clausewitz, the nineteenth-century military theorist. She may have taken Clausewitz too literally, but then again, so may have the Germans. More to the point, Tuchman does not bother to include rape among her many examples of terror. In this omission I believe she was unduly influenced by those who sought to unravel and debunk Allied propa ganda af ter the war.

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,
the night." On the road from Fosse to Vitrival, an eyewitness recounted, "A soldier approached one of the women, intending to violate her, and she pushed him away. He at once struck the woman in the breast with his bayonet. I saw her fall."

Chateau-Thierry . . . Charmel . . . Gerbeviller . . . a tale of rape in each town. The terror continued in northern France through the month of October, broken briefly by the Battle of the

Marne. It was the same story in Flanders and along the Franco Belgian border. A British professor of constitutional law named
J.

H. Morgan examined the sworn statements of thirty women who were raped at Bailleu} during eight days of occupation. Because he was a cautious lawyer he also demanded and received their medical certificates of injury. Professor Morgan later published his findings.

Outrages upon the honour of women by German soldiers have been so frequent that it is impossible to escape the conviction that they have been condoned and indeed encouraged by German offi cers. . . . At least five officers were guilty of such offences, and where the officers set the example the men followed. . . .
In
one case, the facts of which are proved by evidence that would satisfy any court of law, a young girl of nineteen was violated by one officer while the other held her mother by the throat and pointed a revol ver, af ter which the two officers exchanged their respective roles. The officers and soldiers usually hunted in couples, either entering the houses under pretense of seeking billets or forcing the doors by open violence. Frequently the victims were beaten and kicked, and invariably threatened with a loaded revolver.

Nieppe . . . Laventie . . . Lorgies . . . Armentieres . . . Es taires . . .

Toward the end of 1914 the strategy of warfare underwent a revolutionary change. Historians agree that war was "modern ized": stationary trenches, barbed wire, machine guns, gas and gas

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masks replaced the concept of the maneuvering, marching army. From the best information available it appears that the incidence of rape and other weapons of terror employed by the German Army dramaticlly dropped off at approximately the same moment in time.

Interestingly, the young Arnold Toynbee was at great pains in
1917
to deny that the two events were related. He was convinced that the German Army abandoned rape
'
and other terror tactics independent of their adoption of stationary trench warfare, and that the commission of atrocities on a grand scale during the first three months of the war was deliberate in its limits.

This has not been due to the immobility of the fronts [he ar gued], for although it is certainly true that the Germans have been unable to overrun fresh territories on the west, they have carried out greater invasions than ever in Russia and the Balkans, which have not been marked by outrages of the same specific kind. This seems to show that the systematic warfare against the civilian population in the campaigns of
1914
was the result of policy, deliberately tried and deliberately given up. This hypothesis would account for the peculiar features in the German Army's conduct . . .

The imposition of a Machiavellian scheme on German Army rape is tantalizing, but I fear when Toynbee wrote those sentences he was serving the cause of propaganda more than the cause of history. It is logical to believe that rape may have been a deliberate tactic of the German Army during the first few months of the war, or if not deliberate, certainly not discouraged, but it seems more rational to conclude that the opportunity to rape was effectively cut down by the new system of stationary trench warfare, the frequency curtailed by military stalemate, and the horror of it superseded by the staggering loss of life as the war went on.

Af ter the first three months of the war, the Allied countries no longer bothered to tally rape reports or tried to verify the rumors. There was no need. The war had given birth to a new and highly effective tool of battle: the scientific use of international propa ganda. The German Army may have temporarily seized the mili tary initiative, but in the vivid war of propaganda it was the Allied nations that swarmed the field and moved decisively. In the hands of skilled Allied manipulators, rape was successfully launched in

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world opinion, almost overnight, as a characteristic German crime, evidence of the "depraved Boche" penchant for warfare by atrocity. Never before in history had rape in war-the privilege of territorial conquest-boomeranged quite so spectapularly. Neutral America was the chief target of the propaganda technicians from both sides of the fence, but the unimaginative Germans never stood a chance. "The Rape of the Hun" became an instant byword in this country.
It
came to symbolize the criminal violation of innocent Belgium.
It
dramatized the plight of La Belle France.
It
charged up national pa triotism and spurred the drive for Liberty Loans by adding needed authenticity to the manufactured per sona of an unprincipled barbarian with pointed helmet and syphi litic lust who gleefully destroyed cathedrals, set fire to libraries, and hacked and maimed and spitted babies on the tip of his bayonet. As propaganda, rape was remarkably effective, more effective than the original German terror.
It
helped to lay the emotional ground

work that led us into the war.

In his
1927
study, Propaganda Technique
in
the World War, the pioneer work in propaganda analysis, Harold D. Lasswell wrote, "A handy rule for arousing hate is, if at first they do not enrage, use an atrocity." As for the propaganda value of rape, Lasswell specu lated, "These stories yield a crop of indignation against the fiendish perpetrators . . . and satisf y certain powerful, hidden impulses. A young woman, ravished by the enemy, yields a secret satisfaction to a host of vicarious ravishers on the other side of the border."

Lasswell's Freudian analysis is a revealing glimpse of the male mentality.
( It
could hardly apply to the reactions of women.) It
is
even more revealing when we realize that he wrote those lines to leave the reader with doubt as to whether or not women actua1Iy were raped in any great number in Belgium and France. His next and final words on the subject were "Hence, perhaps, the popu larity and ubiquity of such stories." But Lasswell's theory certainly does apply to the lustful, rape-mongering prose that was cheerily ground out by Allied propaganda mills once they moved into full swing.