The Guns of August (56 page)

To put the German soldier in the proper frame of mind, German newspapers were filled from the first week, as Captain Bloem recorded, with stories of the Belgians’ “revolting cruelties … of armed priests at the head of marauding bands of civilians committing every kind of atrocity … of treacherous ambushes on patrols, of sentries found with eyes pierced
and tongues cut off.” Similar “ghastly rumors” had already reached Berlin by August 11 to be recorded by Princess Blücher. A German officer whom she asked for verification told her that in Aachen at that moment there were thirty German officers lying in the hospital with their eyes put out by Belgian women and children.

Emotions aroused by such stories made it easy by a single cry of “Snipers!” to set the German soldier off on a rampage of pillage, arson, and murder, uninhibited by the officers.
Schrecklichkeit
was intended as a substitute for the occupation troops which the High Command could not afford to divert from the march on Paris.

On August 25 the burning of Louvain began. The medieval city on the road from Liège to Brussels was renowned for its University and incomparable Library, founded in 1426 when Berlin was a clump of wooden huts. Housed in the fourteenth century Clothworkers’ Hall, the Library included among its 230,000 volumes a unique collection of 750 medieval manuscripts and over a thousand incunabula. The façade of the Town Hall, called a “jewel of Gothic art,” was a stone tapestry of carved knights and saints and ladies, lavish even of its kind. In the church of St. Pierre were altar panels by Dierik Bouts and other Flemish masters. The burning and sack of Louvain, accompanied by the invariable shooting of civilians, lasted six days before it was called off as abruptly as it began.

Everything went smoothly when Louvain was first occupied. The shops did a rush of business. German soldiers behaved in exemplary fashion, bought postcards and souvenirs, paid for all their purchases, and stood in line with the regular customers for haircuts at the barbershop. The second day was more strained. A German soldier was shot in the leg, allegedly by snipers. The Burgomaster urgently repeated his call upon civilians to surrender arms. He and two other officials were arrested as hostages. Executions behind the railroad station became frequent. The endless tramp of von Kluck’s columns continued through the city day after day.

On August 25 the Belgian Army at Malines, on the edge of the entrenched camp of Antwerp, made a sudden sharp sortie upon the rearguard of von Kluck’s Army, flinging them back in disorder upon Louvain. In the turmoil of retreat a riderless horse clattering through the gates after dark frightened another horse which tried to bolt, fell in harness, and overturned the wagon. Shots rang out, setting off cries of
“Die Franzosen sind da! Die Engländer sind da!”
Later the Germans claimed they had been fired on by Belgian civilians or that civilians had fired from rooftops as signals to the Belgian Army. Belgians claimed that German soldiers had fired on one another in the dark. For weeks and months, even years, after the event that appalled the world, judicial inquiries and tribunals investigated the outbreak, and German accusations were contradicted by Belgian countercharges. Who shot whom was never established and was in any case irrelevant to what followed, for the Germans burned Louvain not as a punishment for alleged Belgian misdeeds, but as a deterrent and a warning to all their enemies—a gesture of German might before all the world.

General von Luttwitz, the new Governor of Brussels, expressed as much next morning. Visited in the course of duty by the American and Spanish Ministers, he said to them, “A dreadful thing has occurred at Louvain. Our General there has been shot by the son of the Burgomaster. The population has fired on our troops.” He paused, looked at his visitors, and finished, “And now of course we have to destroy the city.” Mr. Whitlock was to hear so often the story of one or another German general being shot by the son or sometimes the daughter of a burgomaster that it seemed to him the Belgians must have bred a special race of burgomasters’ children like the Assassins of Syria.

Already word of the flames at Louvain had spread. Stunned and weeping refugees driven from the city told of street after street set on fire, of savage looting and continuing arrests and executions. On August 27 Richard Harding Davis, star of the American correspondents who were then in Belgium, made his way to Louvain by troop train. He was kept locked in the
railroad car by the Germans, but the fire had by then reached the Boulevard Tirlemont facing the railroad station and he could see “the steady, straight columns of flames” rising from the rows of houses. The German soldiers were drunk and wild. One thrust his head through the window of the car where another correspondent, Arno Dosch, was confined and cried: “Three cities razed! Three! There will be more!”

On August 28 Hugh Gibson, First Secretary of the American Legation, accompanied by his Swedish and Mexican colleagues, went to Louvain to see for themselves. Houses with blackened walls and smoldering timbers were still burning; pavements were hot; cinders were everywhere. Dead horses and dead people lay about. One old man, a civilian with a white beard, lay on his back in the sun. Many of the bodies were swollen, evidently dead for several days. Wreckage, furniture, bottles, torn clothing, one wooden shoe were strewn among the ashes. German soldiers of the IXth Reserve Corps, some drunk, some nervous, unhappy, and bloodshot, were routing inhabitants out of the remaining houses so that, as the soldiers told Gibson, the destruction of the city could be completed. They went from house to house, battering down doors, stuffing pockets with cigars, looting valuables, then plying the torch. As the houses were chiefly of brick and stone, the fire did not spread of itself. An officer in charge in one street watched gloomily, smoking a cigar. He was rabid against the Belgians, and kept repeating to Gibson: “We shall wipe it out, not one stone will stand upon another!
Kein stein auf einander!
—not one, I tell you. We will teach them to respect Germany. For generations people will come here to see what we have done!” It was the German way of making themselves memorable.

In Brussels the Rector of the University, Monseigneur de Becker, whose rescue was arranged by the Americans, described the burning of the Library. Nothing was left of it; all was in ashes. When he came to the word “library”—
bibliothèque
—he could not say it. He stopped, tried again, uttered the first syllable,
“La bib—”
and unable to go on, bowed his head on the table, and wept.

The loss, made the subject of a public protest by the Belgian government and officially reported by the American Legation, caused an outcry in the outside world while the fire was still raging. Eyewitness accounts by refugees, reported by all the correspondents, filled the foreign press. Besides the University and Library, “all the noble public buildings,” including the Town Hall and St. Pierre with all its pictures, were said to have been destroyed; only later was it found that, though damaged, the Town Hall and the church were still standing. G
ERMANS
S
ACK
L
OUVAIN
; W
OMEN AND
C
LERGY
S
HOT
blazed the headline in the New York
Tribune
above Davis’s story. Under a subhead, “Berlin Confirms Louvain Horror,” it carried a wireless statement from Berlin issued by the German Embassy in Washington that, following “perfidious” attack by Belgian civilians, “Louvain was punished by the destruction of the city.” Identical with General von Luttwitz’s statement, it showed that Berlin had no wish for the world to misunderstand the nature of the gesture at Louvain. Destruction of cities and deliberate, acknowledged war on noncombatants were concepts shocking to the world of 1914. In England editorials proclaimed “The March of the Hun” and “Treason to Civilization.” The burning of the Library, said the
Daily Chronicle,
meant war not only on noncombatants “but on posterity to the utmost generation.” Even the usually quiet and carefully neutral Dutch papers were stung to comment. Whatever the cause of the outbreak, said the Rotterdam
Courant,
“the fact of destruction remains”—a fact “so terrible that the whole world must have received the news with horror.”

The reports appeared in the foreign press of August 29. On August 30 the process of destroying Louvain was terminated. On the same day an official communiqué of the German Foreign Office affirmed that “the entire responsibility for these events rests with the Belgian Government,” not forgetting the usual claim that “women and girls took part in the fight and blinded our wounded, gouging their eyes out.”

Why did the Germans do it? people asked all over the world. “Are you descendants of Goethe or of Attila the Hun?”
protested Romain Rolland in a public letter to his former friend Gerhart Hauptmann, Germany’s literary lion. King Albert in conversation with the French Minister thought the mainspring was the German sense of inferiority and jealousy: “These people are envious, unbalanced and ill-tempered. They burned the Library of Louvain simply because it was unique and universally admired”—in other words, a barbarian’s gesture of anger against civilized things. Valid in part, this explanation overlooked the deliberate use of terror as prescribed by the
Kriegsbrauch,
“War cannot be conducted merely against the combatants of an enemy state but must seek to destroy the total material and intellectual (
geistig
) resources of the enemy.” To the world it remained the gesture of a barbarian. The gesture that was intended by the Germans to frighten the world—to induce submission—instead convinced large numbers of people that here was an enemy with whom there could be no settlement and no compromise.

Belgium clarified issues, became to many the “supreme issue” of the war. In America, said a historian of his times looking back, Belgium was the “precipitant” of opinion and Louvain was the climax of Belgium. Matthias Erzberger, soon to be appointed chief of propaganda when that unhappy necessity forced itself upon Germany, found that Belgium “aroused almost the entire world against Germany.” The argument of his counterpropaganda, that Germany’s conduct was justified by military necessity and self-defense, was, as he admitted with a certain wry regret, “insufficient.”

It did the Kaiser little good to take the offensive ten days after Louvain in a telegram to President Wilson saying “my heart bleeds” for the sufferings of Belgium caused “as a result of the criminal and barbarous action of the Belgians.” Their resistance, he explained, had been “openly incited” and “carefully organized” by the Belgian government, compelling his generals to take the strongest measures against the “bloodthirsty population.”

It did little good for ninety-three German professors and other intellectuals to issue a Manifesto addressed “To the Civilized World” proclaiming the civilizing effects of German
culture and stating, “It is not true that we have criminally violated the neutrality of Belgium .… It is not true that our troops have brutally destroyed Louvain.” However imposing the signatories—Harnack, Sudermann, Humperdinck, Roentgen, Hauptmann—the mute ashes of the Library spoke louder. By the end of August people of the Allied nations were persuaded that they faced an enemy that had to be beaten, a regime that had to be destroyed, a war that must be fought to a finish. On September 4 the British, French, and Russian governments signed the Pact of London engaging themselves “not to conclude peace separately during the present war.”

Thereafter issues hardened. The more the Allies declared their purpose to be the defeat of German militarism and the Hohenzollerns, the more Germany declared her undying oath not to lay down arms short of total victory. In reply to President Wilson’s offer to mediate, Bethmann-Hollweg said the Pact of London forced Germany to fight to the limit of her endurance, and therefore Germany would make no proposals as basis for a negotiated peace. The Allies took the same stand. In this position both sides were to remain clamped throughout the war. The deeper both belligerents sank into war and the more lives and treasure they spent, the more determined they became to emerge with some compensating gain.

The gains Germany expected to win with victory were laid down within the first thirty days of battle in a memorandum presented to the government on September 2 by Matthias Erzberger. Leader of the Catholic Centrum Party and
rapporteur
of the Military Affairs Committee, he was the Chancellor’s right-hand man and closest associate in the Reichstag. A shrewd and able opportunist who represented whatever opinion was dominant, he combined energy and intelligence with a political flexibility unseen in Europe since Talleyrand’s. It was said of him that he had “no convictions but only appetites.” As he was one day to make himself the bearer of Germany’s plea for an armistice and to serve in the first Cabinet of the Weimar Republic, so now he drew up a list of war aims that would have made the most extreme Pan-German proud. Bethmann, who relied on him, never failed to wonder
where Erzberger obtained all his bright ideas when he himself never seemed to have any.

Germany, according to Erzberger, was to utilize victory to gain control of the European continent for “all time.” All demands at the peace table were to be based on this premise for which three conditions were necessary: abolition of neutral states at Germany’s borders, the end of England’s “intolerable hegemony” in world affairs, and the breaking up of the Russian colossus. Erzberger envisioned a Confederation of European States analogous to the later Mandates system under the League of Nations. Some states would be under German “guidance”; others, such as Poland and the Baltic group annexed from Russia, would be under German sovereignty for “all time,” with possible representation but no voting power in the Reichstag. Erzberger was not sure which category Belgium would fit into, but in either case Germany was to retain military control over the entire country and over the French coast from Dunkirk down to and including Boulogne and Calais. Germany would also acquire the Briey-Longwy iron basin and Belfort in Upper Alsace which she had failed to take in 1870. She would also take the French and Belgian colonies in Africa. Morocco, curiously enough, was excepted as likely to be too much of a drain on Germany’s strength. No mention was made of England’s colonies, which suggests that Erzberger may have been considering a negotiated settlement with England. In reparations the vanquished nations were to pay at least 10 billion marks for direct war costs, plus enough more to provide veterans’ funds, public housing, gifts to generals and statesmen, and pay off Germany’s entire national debt, thus obviating taxes on the German people for years to come.