There are few enough times indeed when a reviewer's heart lifts with unmitigated joy at a work, not merely because of the scholarship involved, but because of the moral and historical importance it possesses. This is such a work; for this is an account wherein lie the seeds of Europe's catastrophe in the 20th century - of a brutal, unprovoked violation of a blameless, unprepared people, of the transfer of blame for their fate from their tormenters to the victims themselves, followed by a vast programme of denial by the perpetrators that any such atrocities occurred.
The Kaiser's army ravaged France, Belgium, Luxembourg. It murdered thousands of civilians in ways which had not been experienced in such a concentrated, studied fashion in Europe since the Thirty Years War. Women were raped, children bayoneted, churches used as execution warehouses, villages destroyed, their populations had been massacred.
The atrocities began with over one hundred civilians killed - shot and bayonetted - in Soumagne on August 5th. Day after day, German troops moved through Belgium and through Alsace, committing atrocities which stunned the world. In Aarschot, 156 people were butchered, and nearly 400 buildings destroyed. In Andennes, 262 civilians were killed, in Tamines, 383. In Ethe, in defenceless Luxembourg, German troops slaughtered 218 civilians. That same day, August 23rd, 674 civilians were massacred in Dinant, and over a thousand buildings destroyed. Two days later, 248 civilians were killed and 2,000 buildings burnt down in Louvain.
The authors convincingly place these murders in the context of a myth-cycle which animated the German army, and which involved an almost psychotic belief that Belgian and French civilians were engaged in illegal franc-tireur (free-shooter; in other words, terrorist) war against it. This belief essentially emanated from Prussian military doctrine, which had been formulated during the occupation by Napoleon's troops a century before.
The logic ran thus. If Germany were occupied by enemies, civilians would be right to take up arms against the occupier. We must expect the Belgians to do the same. But such civilian resistance is illegal. Therefore within the usages of war, it is lawful to kill civilians and to take reprisals. So the German army was morally equipped for a civilian resistance which did not actually occur; yet aided by a collective expectation - which is commonplace in those great rumour-factories called armies - and by much distorted witness evidence, the Germans behaved as if it had occurred.
The resulting moral dissociation of deed from doer might explain some of the behaviour of the troops; it doesn't explain the lengths to which the German intelligentsia went to defend those deeds. Worse still, though lacking any evidence of the kind which they would have insisted on in their own personal disciplines, German intellectuals loudly justified the behaviour of their armies in the conquered territories.
In doing so, they foreshadowed the later triumph of the collective unconscious of the Third Reich. In this sense, the war-crimes at Louvain and Aarschot were not simply departures from the norms of European civilisation, but were actually templates for the future, not just in the deeds that were done but in the effortless transfer of blame, even by intelligent people, from the doer to the victim. This psychosis was only developing in 1914: twenty years later it came to its full flowering.
The authors might have made more of the fate of Captain Fryatt to illustrate how murderous sanctimoniousness was becoming an almost ungovernable characteristic in German high command.
Fryatt was the skipper of the cross-channel ferry the Brussels which had ignored the order of a German U-boat, the U33, to stop, steering towards her to force her to submerge. Knowing the ferry timetables, some months later the German authorities arranged an ambush by torpedo-boats, and Fryatt was kidnapped. For having made a threatening move with his vessel, he was tried as a franc-tireur and executed, a deed which the Germans announced with the swaggering self-righteousness of the pathologically virtuous.
The real truth about the atrocities of that time came to be obscured by the moral-equivalence school which through the 1920s generated the popular narrative for this period. This held that no one side was to blame for 1914-18, and that war itself was the evil. In Ireland, there was a local dialect of this explanation, influenced largely by the 1916 Rising, the Proclamation for which had, deplorably, termed the Germans "gallant allies".
Only clinical denial of diseased proportions could have permitted such fatuous counter-factualism. Yet when the atrocities had occurred in 1914, nationalist Ireland was aghast. The war which had appeared so irrelevant when it erupted in early August became rapidly very relevant indeed as news of the butchery of Belgium emerged, not just from British sources, but from even the Germans themselves, whose collective delusion actually drove them to boast of their abominable deeds.
This fuelled the sense of dismay in British intellectual circles in particular, where Germany and its kultur had long been held as the guardian of civilisation in Europe. That dismay fed into the conduct of the war, its relentlessness, its determination not to submit to such barbarity. In the hecatomb which followed, the 6,500 civilians of Belgium and France soon became invisible. They have been largely invisible to this day. Their ghosts might rest easy that finally they have been remembered, and their essential place in the tragedy of European history been restored by this quite splendid work.
Kevin Myers is an Irish Times journalist. His novel Banks of Green Willow has just been published by Scribner TownHouse