Do you think we live in liberated times? Or maybe you think that the sexual revolution broke out in the 1960s? In fact, the biggest moral breakthrough came a good fifty years earlier.
With each war, the number of illegitimate children broke records, and whole caravans of prostitutes followed the armies. This phenomenon, however, has always been of a rather limited scale. Everything changed with the First World War. This time the clashing powers mobilized millions of armies, and thousands of soldiers died on the fronts every day. In the face of almost certain death, the privates and officers forgot their morals completely. Seeing the world collapse, civilians did exactly the same. The rule was simple:Ride your soul while you live!
As Peter Englund, author of the book "The Beauty and the Sorrow of War" writes, among the Allied soldiers visiting Paris during World War I, as many as 20% contracted venereal diseases . Canadians must have been special daredevils, because almost every fourth of them caught a "muck" while serving in France. Such statistics are easy to interpret:it seems that almost all the soldiers went to prostitutes whenever the opportunity arose. And this most often regardless of their health or hygiene. In many armies condoms were distributed to soldiers leaving on leave and in the Austro-Hungarian army, even penalties were imposed for not using them.
Moreover, the armed forces considered one of their priorities (apart from killing enemies) ... controlling prostitutes. For example, when the Germans occupied Warsaw in August 1915, they immediately registered and examined all women engaged in paid prostitution. Overall, access to sexual services was almost unlimited.
Hundreds of prostitutes followed the armies, and the armies created official brothels or even ... mobile brothels on wheels . In big cities, no one even tried to pretend that harlotry was forbidden. It was enough to enter any pub and ... order a girl at a bar . While in France, for example, prostitution was generally permitted, the number of arrests for illegal prostitution has increased by 40% anyway.
First-war brothel on wheels. Literally!
Official pleasure homes for Austrian and German soldiers.
The business must have been going really well, because the ladies of light morals also decided to support the war effort by undertaking ... a kind of volunteering. As we read in the book by Peter Englund, in France:
All the dearest whores (...) have a so-called godson. Each of them, for patriotic reasons, "adopted" one soldier, which means that when he comes home on leave, he can use her sexual services for free.
Finally, it is worth explaining why the number of infections with syphilis and other venereal diseases was so horrendously high, despite all the remedial measures taken by the military. First of all, many soldiers ... wanted to become infected. As Englund writes:
There were times when infected whores made more than healthy ones because they were very successful with soldiers who wanted to catch some venereal ailment and be discharged from service at the front. The most grotesque expression of this situation was the oil trade from gonorrhea patients ; soldiers bought her and then rubbed her genitals, hoping to end up in the hospital.
German soldiers in a brothel… in Poland.
Extremely desperate, instead of on the groin, they rubbed the pus into their eyes. In most cases, this resulted in lifetime blindness. Nota bene, for the same reasons, they were traded in ... soldiers suffering from tuberculosis with coughing up phlegm.
Source:
Peter Englund, The Beauty and the Sorrow of War. Twenty extraordinary fates from the time of the global conflagration , Mark 2011.