"The swift advance of German armies through Belgium and northern France in the opening weeks of the First World War brought with it rumors of alleged atrocities committed by German troops on the civilian populations in those areas. In 1915 the British government released the Bryce Report, a damning account of alleged German outrages. While the report described a variety of incidents, few if any witnesses to them were named, and questions arose as to the authenticity of many of the events. Despite that, the Bryce Report inflamed passions in Britain and France and provided a further rallying cry to defeat the hated Hun. Though most artists and illustrators shied away from the subject of the German atrocities, feeling them too gruesome to depict, one French artist, Pierre-Georges Jeanniot, created a series of 10 etchings in 1915 that showed ravaged women hanging from trees, rape scenes, massacres, maiming, executions, and other violations. French authorities banned the series as too shocking and panic inducing to be shown.
While the invasion of Belgium and France had been duly noted in the American press in late 1914, most Americans viewed the conflict in general as a European problem. It would be three more years before the United States entered the war, and even then many of its citizens opposed it, including artist George Bellows, a proponent of New York's Ashcan school who had become famous for his gritty paintings of boxers in the ring, New York tenements, and other urban landscapes. Bellows soon changed his views on the war, however, and volunteered for the tank corps in 1917. Though he never saw active duty in Europe, he did devote over eight months in 1918 to his War Series—20 lithographs, more than 30 related drawings, and five oil paintings depicting the alleged 1914 German atrocities in Belgium…"
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