In light of Pearl James’s introduction, “Reading World War I Posters” (in Picture This: World War I Posters and Visual Culture [2009]) and of Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth, I chose to read the poster “Remember Belgium. Buy Bonds. Fourth Liberty Loan.” by Ellsworth Young from the World War I Posters Collection of McFarlin Library Special Collections at the University of Tulsa.

Vera Brittain recalls that when she was assigned to a hospital ward for wounded German soldiers, her initial thoughts were of common stories of German atrocities. She had been told often that the Germans “had crucified Canadians, cut off the hands of babies, and subjected pure and stainless females to unmentionable ‘atrocities.’ ... I half expected that one or two of the patients would get out of bed and try to rape me” (374). Although Brittain knew many of the stories had been exaggerated or even fabricated, she surely also knew that real atrocities and individual acts of brutality had occurred on all sides throughout the war.

Michael Howard, in his The First World War: A Very Short Introduction, mentions that the German invasion of neutral Belgium—which was thought a quick and necessary route to Paris—strengthened British and American will for war. Those Belgians who did not, or could not, flee “were treated by the invaders with a harshness intended to pre-empt the kind of ‘people’s war’ of sabotage and assassination that the French had begun to wage against their invaders in 1870” (30). Thousands of civilians were shot, and civilian buildings were burned (31). True and exaggerated reports of German harshness spread, becoming fuel for the kind of propaganda found within, for example, the “Remember Belgium ...” poster.

The poster depicts in silhouette a caricatured German soldier (with large, scruffy moustache) pulling along a young Belgian girl. In the background rise the flames of a burning landscape, and superimposed are the words: “Remember Belgium,” “Buy Bonds,” and “Fourth Liberty Loan.” The image is meant to remind the reader of the stories of German atrocities in Belgium, particularly of rape and of the indiscriminate burning of cities, and to evoke an outrage that would turn into a desire to act by purchasing war bonds.