Abstract
This chapter examines the concept of “war culture” as a set of beliefs that allowed the Belgians to countenance war as a necessary reality. A major contribution of this chapter is its account of King Albert’s Book, published by the Daily Telegraph for Christmas 1914, in which the “sacrifice” of Belgium was eulogized and Belgium’s status as a martyred nation established. De Schaepdrijver dismisses as a myth the widespread view of Belgian sufferings as a “sacrifice for the greater good”, and sees the reality of Belgium’s position as lying in its need to comply with international law in order to ensure its long-term survival as an independent, neutral nation.
This text is a revised and updated version of my chapter “‘A Signal Service’: Neutrality and the Limits of Sacrifice in World War One Belgium”. In: De Keizer 2008, pp. 64–82.
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- 1.
Keith Wilson has called the reaction of the British public “predictable but untutored” (Wilson 1983: 410).
- 2.
The concept of “war culture” is fruitful if not unproblematic; I use it heuristically here. Cf. Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau and Annette Becker (2003).
- 3.
Great Britain (1914), The Parliamentary Debates (Official report), Fifth Series, Vol. LXVI, House of Commons, Ninth Volume of Session 1914, p. 191. The Irish MP John Redmond added: “The spectacle of this small nation making these heroic sacrifices in defence of their independence and honour against overwhelming odds appeals in a very special way to the sentiments and the feelings of Ireland.” The House unanimously voted to send an expression of “sympathy and admiration” to King Albert.
- 4.
BBC Radio 4 broadcast a three-part series on King Albert’s Book in December 2014: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/history/world-war-one/11295047/Britains-homage-to-plucky-Belgium.html
- 5.
The composer Ethel Smyth, who contributed a piano arrangement of her 1910 March of the Women (the famous anthem that had sustained suffragists in Holloway prison), expressly linked the Belgians’ struggle “in defence of their honour and freedom” to that of “women in England” (King Albert’s Book, p. 67). See also Wood (1995).
- 6.
Of the remaining six contributors, two were Belgian (the symbolist writers Emile Verhaeren and Maurice Maeterlinck), two Polish (the pianist Ignace Paderewsky and the novelist Henryk Sienkiewicz), one Portuguese, and one Japanese (viz., the ambassador to London). The third Dutch contributor was Willem Leendert Bruckman (1866–1928), an artist working in Britain. He sent a rendering of “Louvain Cathedral” (opp. p. 72) and in 1915 he illustrated The Glory of Belgium, a tour of medieval cities.
- 7.
These are the words of the Portuguese Minister of Foreign Affairs, Antonio Macieira.
- 8.
Lloyd George’s emphasis on Belgium’s role in ”exposing” German designs was not accidental. Unlike some of his colleagues, he had fully expected Germany to invade Belgium, and secured agreement within the British cabinet in advance, over what seemed to some a merely hypothetical issue. His deft anticipation tactic isolated the anti-war cabinet members once the invasion occurred. See also Gilbert (1985).
- 9.
The manipulative dimension would become more prevalent as the war progressed, especially during the mobilization drive in the USA, where propaganda was far more of a professionalized effort than elsewhere (though even here, there was genuine indignation over, for instance, the forced labour deportations of 1916–1917). I use the term “political myth” not to mean a falsehood, but “the continual process of work on a common narrative by which the members of a social group can provide significance to their political conditions and experience”, in the words of Bottici and Challand (2006). On the “mental mobilizations” of World War One see Eksteins (1990) and Audoin-Rouzeau and Becker (2003).
- 10.
Rolland referred to the successful defensive stand against a superior Asian invasion force taken by the Greek troops under General Leonidas in 480 B.C., a battle that had saved Greek civilization from a barbarian onslaught—or so generations of high-school students had been taught. Belgium, then, took its place alongside Thermopylae in the millennia-spanning grand narrative of the battle between plucky Civilization and its brutal enemies. The Thermopylae simile was standard fare in “Belgium 1914” discourse; the trope appears dozens of times in King Albert’s Book. American audiences were familiar with it as well (see de Schaepdrijver 2008b).
- 11.
G.K. Chesterton’s article with the same title, written in the spring of 1915, was intended to appeal to the British public on behalf of Belgian relief.
- 12.
Portrait of the King on p. 2; Resurgam by Frank Dicksee opposite p. 32; St. George and the Dragon by Briton Rivière, opp. p. 57; On the Field of Honour by H. Chandler Christy opp. p. 69; Aid for the Fallen by Thomas Brock, opp. p. 77; Dies Irae by Maxfield Parrish opp. p. 113; St. Michael of Belgium by J.J. Shannon opp. p. 161. To some extent, the small boy in The Belgian of To-Morrow by William Nicholson opp. p. 183, is also a heroic representation. There are two other pictures of children, but those are helpless victims.
- 13.
Especially the highly eroticized image by Edmund Dulac opp. p. 81. See also Justice by Solomon J. Solomon, opp. p. 53 (though this image is ambivalent); Unconquerable by Arthur Rackham, opp. p. 65; Sympathy by J. Montgomery Flagg on p. 129; La Belgique by Bernard Partridge opp. p. 165. The symbolism of the naked girl in The Gloomy Thick Wood by Kay Nielsen opp. p. 105 is less immediately definable.
- 14.
Raemaekers’ war cartoons appeared first in de Dutch Telegraaf; by late 1915, he had become “the single most influential figure in projecting the Allied vision of the German enemy to home audiences and to the rest of the world” (Horne and Kramer 2001: 297).
- 15.
Cf. Trevor Wilson’s observation that Germany’s real subversion of civilized standards in its treatment of Belgium “paled into insignificance once tales became current of raped women and mutilated children” (Wilson 1986: 190). This coarsening of discourse appalled some observers. In October 1917, Brand Whitlock, the former U.S. envoy to Brussels, wrote to his literary agent that “the worst that happened there was not the rape of women in Belgium, it was the rape of Belgium” (Nevins 1936: 237).
- 16.
Gregory’s study of the Daily Mail indicates that “sadistic-sexual” accents were far more rare than accents of outrage over the destruction of material property; compare to Gullace’s suggestion regarding the British press (Gullace 1997: 725). One of the reasons, of course, was popular press barons’ desire to appear respectable. Needless to say, stories of sexual violence may have resonated disproportionately regardless of their actual occurrence. (With thanks to Adrian Gregory for this information.)
- 17.
The fictional soldier’s accusations of sexual mutilation are taken from actual 1914–1915 atrocity lore, such as the more lurid type of church sermons. But there is no indication that the war poster as described actually existed. With thanks to Stephen Badsey, Adrian Gregory, Edward Madigan, Richard Smith, and Dan Todman.
- 18.
- 19.
- 20.
Albert to Hymans (Minister of Foreign Affairs), June 14, 1917, in Thielemans (1991: 412).
- 21.
In this case, CRB ships were held up at Halifax to protest the German submarine campaign, see Nash (1996: 444–447) and Hoover (1959: 326 f).
- 22.
So thought, by and large, the cabinet; Albert by contrast was not sanguine about the Entente’s chances (largely because he considered parliamentary democracies incapable of enduring a war of attrition) and on several occasions from 1915 to 1918 allowed members of his entourage to engage in secret peace discussions with German envoys. These explorations led nowhere because of German reluctance to give up claims on Belgium. See Thielemans (1991).
- 23.
Speech by Louis Franck, president of the Greater Antwerp Council, on the eve of the war’s third national holiday, July 20, 1917. The speech did subsequently strike a note of confidence in the resilience of the occupied population. A transcript of the speech was smuggled out of the country and relayed to King Albert. Franck was later deported to Germany because of his resistance to Flamenpolitik.
- 24.
- 25.
This was the King’s strategy, shared by several Catholic ministers, though not by his chairman of the Belgian cabinet in exile Charles De Broqueville (Thielemans 1991: 77–79).
- 26.
Preamble to the July 21, 1916, arrêté-loi on the draft; quoted in Amara (2014), chapter VIII: “Aux armes, réfugiés!” The labour schemes of the Belgian government in exile, and refugees’ reactions to them, are documented in great detail in other chapters of this study.
- 27.
The measure referred to here is the French government’s drafting the vast majority of fit men. Service Historique de l’Armée de Terre, Château de Vincennes (France), Commission Militaire du Contrôle Postal de Dieppe, report of May 14, 1917, quoting a letter written on November 17, 1916.
- 28.
In 1916, for instance, Belgian attempts to make the most of military successes in central Africa could be countered, on the British side, by indignant references to sacrifices in Flanders Fields (Marks 1981: 49).
- 29.
This was much more prevalent in Britain (especially from 1916) than in France (Amara 2014, chapters IV, VI, VIII, and IX).
- 30.
Except, of course, in the United States, where they were revived for the purposes of mobilization.
- 31.
The New York Times editorial of July 21, 1918 (Belgian Independence Day, widely celebrated in the USA that year) referred to Germany’s “destruction of the scrap of paper which made Belgium a ward of the world”, thus reminding its readers of the importance of the 1914 violation of neutrality. “Belgium’s Independence Day”, July 21, 1918, p. 22.
- 32.
For a famous image of sexual victimization, see the 1918 Ellsworth Young war-bonds poster Remember Belgium, depicting a dark-silhouetted German soldier leading away a young girl against the backdrop of a burning city. The 1918, illustrated “novel” The Unpardonable Sin, written by the prolific playwright and later Hollywood screenwriter Rupert Hughes, mobilized the trope of sexual outrage and revenge: an American mother and daughter, stranded in Belgium in 1914, are raped by the invading troops (“Mamma and I are to be mothers,” the daughter writes in a letter smuggled out of the country. “But we don’t know who—so many—I can’t write—I can’t die”).
- 33.
During the last year of the war, the New York Times published some 300 articles referring to Belgium. Most of them gave news about the occupied country, its deprivation and resistance; reports on the Belgian army became more frequent from September 1918. Several of the longer articles were written by the famous British correspondent Philip Gibbs, who had published an account of the invasion in 1915, The Soul of the War, but would, in 1920, write an indictment of atrocity-mongering, Realities of War.
- 34.
The patriotic press in the occupied country echoed this priority in its continued insistence upon Belgium’s international status; see de Schaepdrijver (2011).
- 35.
La Fontaine referred to a proposed system of international sanctions against aggressor nations.
- 36.
This does not mean that losses at the actual front were that much lower—they were not—but the mobilization rate was, mainly because of military occupation. Only 20% of Belgian men of military age had served, as against 54% in Britain and 89% in France.
- 37.
One Dutch cartoon, expressing horror at Belgian attempts to obtain borderland territorial gain, depicted “annexationism” as a withered witch, stretching out a greedy hand to the children of Mother Holland and Mother France; see Braakensiek (1918). It is worth investigating whether this cartoon indicates a more general shift in representation. For an excellent study of Belgian diplomacy at Versailles and the devaluation of the 1914 aura, see Marks (1981).
- 38.
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De Schaepdrijver, S. (2018). “A Less-Than-Total Total War”: Neutrality, Invasion, and the Stakes of War, 1914–1918. In: Rash, F., Declercq, C. (eds) The Great War in Belgium and the Netherlands. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73108-7_2
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