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Tag Archives: Belgium

“Destroy This Mad Brute”

16 Thursday Jun 2022

Posted by Novelhistorian in Comment

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"barbarian Hun, 1917, American propaganda, Belgium, Germany, Josef Goebbels, masculinity, recruiting, sexism

Building on my post two weeks ago about the Seattle parade and propaganda efforts, here’s more historical background for my forthcoming novel, Lonely Are the Brave.

Many recruiting posters in Britain and the United States appealed to men by addressing the masculine imperative to protect women. But the one shown here pulls out all the stops.

H. R. Hopps, 1917 (courtesy Library of Congress)

“Destroy This Mad Brute” posits a savage gorilla wearing a spiked helmet that says, “Militarism,” wielding a club labeled “Kultur” (frequently translated as “civilization”), and abducting a fair-haired woman. She, for once, isn’t wearing white, and you can’t see her face, a concealment perhaps intended to spare her; or conversely underline her humiliation; or leave the viewer free to imagine her as a loved one. Further, the invader advances menacingly, having already torched American shores to cinders. The single word “Enlist” sends the message.

For starters, I find it sad and utterly misguided how humans can cast other primates as savage, when we’re the ones to machine-gun and bomb each other; but gorillas, essentially peaceable, shy creatures, have long suffered a bad rap (witness King Kong). The German Army had abandoned the admittedly ludicrous (and impractical) spiked helmet by 1916, but for some reason, it became an emblem of brutality, and American propagandists loved it.

As for “militarism,” responsible for the invasion and destruction of neutral Belgium, that’s the lone scrap of truth. But, as I noted in a previous post, legal and moral arguments lack visceral appeal. Ridiculous as it sounds today, the suggestion that the German Army raped its way across Europe and would somehow cross the Atlantic to repeat the crime found its adherents.

The story of this poster didn’t end there. When Germany invaded Poland in 1939, Hitler’s chief propagandist, Josef Goebbels, rolled out this same illustration, with different text, to inoculate the German public against foreign charges of atrocities.

More to come.

A Speck of History: This Date in 1916

14 Friday Nov 2014

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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Belgium, deportation, First World War, forced labor, history, Hoover Archives, military occupation

On 14 November 1916, Robert Jackson, an American relief volunteer in Belgium, checked out disturbing rumors. The German occupiers of Belgium, he had heard, were deporting workers to serve the German war effort, breaking official promises and violating international law. The latest “selection” would take place at Court-St.-Étienne, sixteen miles southeast of Brussels, at an empty textile mill.

Cardinal Mercier protecting the Belgians, by Charles Fouqueray, 1916. Library of Congress, Print and Photograph Division.

Cardinal Mercier protecting the Belgians, by Charles Fouqueray, 1916.
Library of Congress, Print and Photograph Division.

“In the distance,” Jackson later told his journal, “the can[n]on were booming very loud, the 3rd day in succession,” as a “long serpentine of men” filed into the mill. Outside, “entirely apart & away were the masses of women & children waiting & weeping, wondering whether their men would be taken & coming as near as was permitted.”

If a man was told “to the left,” that meant liberty–“so far as liberty exists for the inhabitants of Belgium”–and “to the right” meant Germany. The “selection” screened thousands of men in four hours, of whom almost nine hundred were loaded onto sealed boxcars, bound for Germany. There, they would be offered contracts to work in war plants and tortured if they refused.

That same day, American newspapers reported a protest by Cardinal Désiré Mercier, the chief Catholic prelate in Belgium. Many neutral nations also criticized the German policy, even Switzerland, but not the United States. President Woodrow Wilson, having just narrowly won reelection under the slogan, “He Kept Us Out of War,” refused to speak publicly on the matter; he interpreted neutrality to mean diplomatic silence, except when he felt American interests were involved. (He also hoped to mediate peace, a delusion the Germans encouraged, but that’s another story.)

In 2003, I read Robert Jackson’s journal at the Hoover Archives at Stanford; Herbert Hoover directed the relief effort that employed Jackson, and many of its papers wound up there. When I opened the journal, a small, hard-backed notebook like those used for school compositions, my hands trembled. The ink had browned with age but was generally legible, and the words leaped off the pages, evoking passions and images of people long dead. This was the eyewitness account I was looking for, a description that would retrieve a speck of history from obscurity: the deportation of 120,000 Belgians in 1916-17, a little-known event in a great war. I used it in my book, The Rape of Belgium, and it has stayed with me ever since.

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Recent Posts

  • The Price of Revenge: The Blood Covenant
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  • “Destroy This Mad Brute”
  • Starting Place: The School of Mirrors
  • The Great American (Historical) Novel: The Scarlet Letter

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Maria on Not just a parade
Novelhistorian on My debut novel, Lonely Are the…

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