Thomas Fleming begins his article: "With historians heavily involved in either defending or damning the war in Iraq, it might be good time to ponder the case of Viscount James Bryce, the historian who sold out."

We're further informed that stories of German atrocities filled British and American newspapers from the start of World War I. It was the   German march through Belgium that attracted the most attention.
"Eyewitnesses described infantrymen spearing Belgian babies on their bayonets as they marched along, singing war songs. Accounts of Belgian boys with amputated hands (supposedly to prevent them from using guns) abounded. Tales of women with amputated breasts multiplied even faster."

Amputated breasts is a standard claim in Armenian horror stories, of course.  "Turkish gendarmes raped and sometimes disemboweled or cut the breasts off women before finally killing them" is how TIME Magazine eagerly played the role of Armenian propaganda accomplice in an Aug. 23, 1982 article entitled "A Cry for Bloody Vengeance." The article relates how Armenian terrorists killed nine and wounded 72 during an attack at the airport in Ankara; instead of allowing the reader to grieve for these innocent victims, TIME shifted direction by taking the work of Bryce and Toynbee (as well as — incredibly! — the forged telegrams of Aram Andonian), and irresponsibly perpetuated this awful propaganda referring to the "extermination" of "more than a million Armenians."  Once again, this comes from TIME Magazine, the usually worthy newsmagazine, over three-quarters of a century after "1915," which should have afforded plenty of opportunity to separate fact from fiction.

Fleming continues:

"At the top of the atrocity hit parade were rape stories. One eyewitness claimed the Germans dragged twenty young women out of their houses in a captured Belgian town and stretched them on tables in the village square, where each was violated by at least twelve 'Huns' while the rest of the division watched and cheered. At British expense, a group of Belgians toured the United States telling these stories. President Woodrow Wilson solemnly received them in the White House."

At British expense, Wellington House illegally (although with the awareness of the U.S. government) operated a branch on American soil, run by the Canadian, Sir Gilbert Parker. Reports were made to look as though sent by private citizens, not the British government. Parker had a list of 170,000 to send propaganda reports to, a "Who's Who" list of America's influential who sent out the material in turn. This is one of the reasons why Peter Balakian loves to point out that The New York Times printed 145 stories about the Armenians in 1915 alone. (An output not hurt by the fact that the newspaper's publisher, Adolph Ochs, was a good personal friend of Ambassador Henry Morgenthau.)

"The Germans angrily denied these stories. So did American reporters with the German army."

The Ottoman Turks also denied these stories, but more defensively than angrily; they were well accustomed to the raw deal they were receiving in the Western press, for the longest time. The only American reporter who travelled into the Ottoman interior, according to ""America and the Armenian Genocide of 1915," George Schreiner, saw the truth and also opposed the propaganda stories. His was a lone voice, and the censors saw to it that his truth wouldn't get out. Even when he tried to get the truth out through the Ottomans' ally, the Germans, he was refused... such was the strength of Armenian propaganda.

 

"The Bryce Report was released on May 13, 1915. British propaganda headquarters in Wellington House, near Buckingham Palace, made sure it went to virtually every newspaper in America. The impact was stupendous, as the headline and subheads in the New York Times make clear."

"GERMAN ATROCITIES ARE PROVED, FINDS BRYCE COMMITTEE"

"Not Only Individual Crimes, but Premeditated Slaughter in Belgium"

"YOUNG AND OLD MUTILATED"

"Women Attacked, Children Brutally Slain, Arson and Pillage Systematic"

"COUNTENANCED BY OFFICERS"

"Wanton Firing on Red Cross and White Flag: Prisoners and Wounded Shot"

"CIVILIANS USED AS SHIELDS"

The above certainly has a familiar ring to those involved with the study of the "Armenian Genocide."

Gilbert Parker; novelist, politician & propagandist

Fleming writes that Wellington House operatives in America (which would likely be Sir Parker's turf) provided a report to London on May 27, 1915:

"Even in papers hostile to the Allies, there is not the slightest attempt to impugn the correctness of the facts alleged. Lord Bryce's prestige in America put skepticism out of the question." Fleming adds that Masterman, the head of Wellington House, told Bryce: "Your report has swept America."

Few bothered or dared to criticize the invincible Lord Bryce. One was Sir Roger Casement. In a "furious" essay entitled, "The Far Extended Baleful Power of the Lie," Casement wrote that "It is only necessary to turn to James Bryce, the historian, to convict Lord Bryce, the partisan." Fleming tells us Casement's words were ignored, since the author was regarded as a biased  advocate of Irish independence.

Another skeptic was Clarence Darrow, the "famously iconoclastic American lawyer, who specialized in winning acquittals for seemingly guilty clients." (Darrow was the social reforming attorney behind the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial; he was portrayed, in a fictionalized version, by Spencer Tracy in INHERIT THE WIND.) In 1915 Darrow travelled to France and  "searched in vain for a single eyewitness who could confirm even one of the Bryce stories. Increasingly dubious, Darrow announced he would pay $1,000, a very large sum in 1915 —  more than $17,000 in 21st Century money —  to anyone who could produce a Belgian or French boy whose hands had been amputated by a German soldier. There were no takers."

Sounds very much like when Capt. Norman wrote in 1895 that the English have "heard stories ad nauseam of massacres, of pillages, of the ravishing of women, but none of these stories have been corroborated by a single European eye-witness."

Same with the 1915 events; Melton Prior, as C. F. Dixon-Johnson wrote, "showed a pleasing exception to the general attitude adopted by the foreign journalists":

The renowned war correspondent confided In me that he was in an awkward predicament. The public at home had heard of nameless atrocities, and was anxious to receive pictorial representations of these. The difficulty was how to supply them with what they wanted, as the dead Armenians had been buried and no women or children suffered hurt, and no Armenian church had been desecrated. As an old admirer of the Turks, and as an honest man, he declined to invent what he had not witnessed. But others were not equally scrupulous. I subsequently saw an Italian illustrated paper containing harrowing pictures of women and children being massacred in a church.

A passage from Fleming's essay I wish the British Foreign Office from 2005 would have paid heed to:

"After the war, historians who sought to examine the documentation for Bryce's stories were told that the files had mysteriously disappeared. This blatant evasion prompted most historians to dismiss 99 percent of Bryce's atrocities as fabrications. One called the report 'in itself one of the worst atrocities of the war.'"

Remember, the British Foreign Office tsk-tsked Turkish parliamentarians' claims that the Bryce reports had been refuted. The Brits actually insisted, with a straight face, that "the moral and intellectual probity of the authors, Lord Bryce and the prominent historian Arnold J. Toynbee, may not be questioned."

Fleming elaborates, somewhat in defense of Bryce:

"More recent scholarship has scaled down the percentage of the Bryce Report's fabrications; several thousand Belgian civilians, including some women and children, were apparently shot by the Germans in the summer of 1914 and Bryce more or less accurately summarized some of the worst excesses, such as the executions in the town of Dinant. But even these latter day scholars admit Bryce's report was seriously 'contaminated' by the rapes, amputations and speared babies. They blamed this lapse on hysteria and war rage. This amounts to giving Bryce a free pass."

Importantly:

"Correspondence between the members of the Bryce committee survived the destruction of the documents; it reveals severe doubts about the tales of mutilation and rape. One of the committee's secretaries admitted that he had been given numerous English addresses of Belgian women supposedly made pregnant by German rapes but could not locate a single case. Even the story of a member of Parliament sheltering two pregnant women turned out to be fraudulent. Bryce apparently brushed aside this negative evidence."