Cultures of Violence in Countries at War

War violence did not only take place on battlefields or in abuses against civilians. The First World War was also waged in images and words: it was a cultural war. At the time of mobilisation, each of the belligerent nations already had at its disposal a repertoire of collective representations that could kindle xenophobia and nationalism.

The enemy of the summer of 1914 was often already the enemy of yesteryear. For the French, for example, the German - soon to be called the Boche - was the Prussian, the erstwhile enemy of the war of 1870-1. He was the pillager, the vandal, the occupier from the last war, remembered by the older generation, which had kept his memory alive and passed it on.^{^[471]} As for the Germans, many were animated by an irrational fear of Russians, a fear which was mixed with disdain and which was also rooted in an imaginary inherited from the nineteenth century.^{^[472]}

Throughout Europe, it was believed that only ‘growing nations', in a Social Darwinist perspective, could survive the competition between the major powers. This state of mind fed a real obsession with decadence, which could take various forms depending on the country: fear that global power would shift to the Far East after Japan's naval victory over Russia in Tsushima in May 1905; fear of the French demographic decline; fear of aerial bombardment of cities, for the British; for the Germans, fear of encirclement (Einkreisung) by Czarist Russia on one side and by France and Great Britain on the other. Popular literature titles reveal the muffled violence permeating Europe on the eve of the war: The Coming Terror (Sydney, 1894); How the Germans Took London: Forewarned, Forearmed (London, 1900); The Infernal War (Paris, 1908).

In the first weeks of the war, the belligerent nations threw themselves into the conflict with the conviction that their survival was at stake.

The hunt for internal enemies began as soon as the mobilisation was announced. State violence was rapidly brought to bear against individuals originating from enemy nations. In 1911, Australia had 33,000 residents born in Germany or in Austria-Hungary. As early as 10 August 1914, they were required to register at the nearest police station and to make a written commitment not to engage in hostile actions. Almost 7,000 of them, including women and children, were interned during the war. German clubs were closed and the teaching of the German language in schools was forbidden.^{^[473]} In Paris, in London, in Berlin, rumours labelled recent immigrants, foreign nationals, and ethnic and religious minorities as ‘enemy agents', liable to undermine national defence. In Germany, rumours spread that French and Russian secret agents - Jews - were crisscrossing the countryside in cars filled with gold. In Paris, the Maggi company was accused of distributing poisoned milk ‘to children... so that there would be no French people left after the war'.^{^[474]} Most of its 800 stores were looted in the first hours of the mobilisation. Even more surprisingly, this wave of violence against internal enemies also affected countries that were not yet officially engaged in the war, countries far from the front: in several cities in the American Midwest, numerous German immigrants were arrested on suspicion of spying.

Fear was also one of the fundamental mechanisms in the abuses committed against civilians by combatants in the summer of 1914. There is nothing surprising about this: for any army, invading enemy territory entails a period of vulnerability. Soldiers advanced into unknown and unsecured territory without reliable access to provisions. Even before entering Belgium and northern France in early August 1914, German infantrymen, remembering the war of 1870-1, were convinced that they would encounter strong resistance from ‘francs-tireurs' perched on bell towers, ready to shoot them as they went by.

‘They put out the eyes of the wounded and cut off their limbs one by one', confided a Bavarian soldier to a resident of Nomeny (Meurthe-et -Moselle). ‘If it wasn't true, our leaders wouldn't have told us so.' A pervasive feeling of insecurity; the exhaustion caused by forced marches; insufficient food and water: everything conspired to increase the Germans' nervous tension. They found an outlet for their anxieties in the massacre of civilians and in rampant destruction. The same pattern occurred on the Eastern Front and in the Balkans. According to Germany, its troops' violation of the laws of war decreed in the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 signalled the supremacy of military necessity over any humanitarian principle.^{^[475]}

The German armies' strain was mirrored by the fear of the invaded populations, which was based both on real experiences of violence and imaginary crimes. For example, the stories of ‘German atrocities' spread by the 200,000 Belgian and 150,000 French refugees often included terrifying descriptions of children whose arms or hands the Germans had purportedly deliberately cut off. This new version of the myth of the ogre, devourer of children, provoked a real panic in the north of France. Even the Bryce Report on German atrocities (May 1915) sought an explanation for this paroxysmal form of war violence. Rings being stolen? Saber thrusts by uhlans? The myth of children with severed hands would quickly spread across France and the United Kingdom, through caricatures, postcards, editorial cartoons and mobilising posters.

The theme of ‘German atrocities' and its counterpart, the imaginary abuses committed against German troops by ‘francs-tireurs', fed the demonisation of the enemy for most of the war. When the United States officially entered the war against the Central Powers in the spring of 1917, for example, mobilisation posters still referred to the ‘violation' of Belgium -in the sense both of the violation of its neutrality and of sexual violence during the invasion.

‘Remember Belgium', warned an American poster in September 1918; it depicted a German soldier with his spiked helmet dragging a little girl by the hand. In other posters, the enemy was portrayed as a gorilla assaulting a woman.^{^[476]}

Obviously, this hatred varied in intensity across different countries and social classes, and among different individuals. Similarly, the cultural war against the enemy did not always have the same intensity. The initial mobilisation of the belligerent societies weakened, especially with the crisis of 1917; a period of remobilisation followed in France and Great Britain in the spring of 1918. Despite these nuances, the enemy was often considered a ‘race' apart, characterised by his barbarism, his lack of moral conscience and his taste for wanton destruction. Soon the enemy was said to have a foul smell, a bloodthirsty temperament, and animalistic behaviour - to be an animal.^{^[477]} In a classic process studied notably by the philosopher Rene Girard, the animal- isation of the enemy allows him to be stigmatised as totally Other - and therefore to be fought without restraint.^{^[478]} ‘They [the Germans] don't deserve to be treated like human beings', declared a French soldier from the Fourth Army in a letter to his parents on the eve of the Armistice. Another soldier complained about President Woodrow Wilson, who ‘spoke to the Boches as if they were people. What do you want? He hasn't seen anything, that American', he concluded.^{^[479]}

What is striking, in these letters from French soldiers in autumn 1918, is the persistence of representations first generated in the summer of 1914 - despite the grind of four years of war and the 1917 crisis of morale. If this discursive violence lasted more than four years, it is precisely because it was not only the product of a discourse artificially constructed by the state - what has often been called propaganda. The violence against the enemy came from the bottom: it was the outcome of a kind of self-mobilisation by civilians and combatants, as well as of the continuous flow of news between the Front and the interior.

We should not imagine that combatants were unaware of the suffering endured by their families, of blockades and hunger in the case of the Central Powers, of the urban bombardment undergone by civilians living in Paris or London, and, for all, of mass bereavement and of material deprivations in daily life.

In much the same way, civilians were perfectly aware of the violence of everyday life at the Front. As early as the summer of 1914, rumours spread by refugees and by the first wounded soldiers disseminated, and often amplified, the news of abuses committed against civilians and of the considerable losses of the first weeks of war. By the end of 1914, Kodak's portable camera allowed thousands of soldiers to take photos of the battlefields. These were then sent to family members and friends far from the Front, evading official censure. At the same time, illustrated magazines sought to purchase war photos from readers: on 14 March 1915, the French weekly Le Miroir launched a contest to find the ‘most striking war photograph', with a prize of 30,000 francs. After the forests of mutilated trees and the bodies of horses photographed in the early weeks of the war, it was now human bodies - friends or enemy - whose images were published in newspapers.

The question is therefore not whether or not civilians knew about this new war violence, but what they wanted to know. From this point of view, the turning point in all likelihood was in 1916. That year, the Prix Goncourt - a prestigious prize in French literature - went to Henri Barbusse's Le Feu [Under Fire]. In Great Britain, the documentary The Battle of the Somme had tremendous public success, attracting almost 20 million spectators. After the slaughter of Verdun and the Somme, the representation of war violence changed forever. ‘Combat hammered and forged us to make us what we are', Ernst Junger would state six years later in ‘Battle as Inner Experience' (1922). ‘This war will always be the axis around which the carousel of our existence turns, as long as we are alive.'

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Source: Edwards Louise, Penn Nigel, Winter Jay (eds.). The Cambridge World History of Violence. Volume 4: 1800 to the Present. Cambridge University Press,2020. — 676 p.. 2020

Cultures of Violence in Countries at War

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