Meeting the Enemy (11 page)

The secrecy surrounding Yate’s death sparked rumours that he had been murdered. On hearing the news, the British government protested, demanding more information. The Germans held firm that Major Yate had been responsible for his own demise, as described by eyewitness testimony. Major Yate had been spotted crossing an estate by the manager of a sugar factory, Herr Brottwitz, who became suspicious. ‘I was cycling towards Cosdorf, between 10 and 11 a.m., when I met a strange looking man walking on a path under some trees. The man wore a shabby cloak much too short for him, workman’s trousers and was hatless. I hailed him but got no answer.’ Brottwitz called to a group of men who were walking to work, giving one of them his bicycle so that he could overtake and stop the suspect. The others hurried in pursuit. It seemed to them that the suspect’s features were ‘those of a gentleman’ and did not correspond with the shabbiness of his clothing.

The workmen pointed to his hands which were small and obviously unused to hard work. I asked the man whence he came and got the answer ‘Schleswig Holstein’. I asked for papers, he said he had none. ‘You know you cannot travel without papers in wartime.’ The workmen removed the man’s cloak and were proceeding to unfasten rather roughly a haversack, which he had fastened to his back by cross straps, when he suddenly took a razor from the inner pocket of his vest and drew it several times across his throat. The action was utterly unexpected; we all drew back in dismay, and nobody interfered when, dropping the razor, the stranger commenced to walk away. He walked on some forty yards when he suddenly collapsed and died at once.

Major Yate’s body was removed but returned to the estate in which he had first been stopped, and buried; an oak cross was erected over his grave. His belongings were eventually returned to his wife. Two months later, in November, Major Yate was awarded the Victoria Cross for his outstanding bravery during the bayonet charge at Le Cateau.

In the febrile atmosphere of the times, Yate had been accused of being a spy, perhaps with some justification. More significantly, his case exposed what might happen to an escapee if caught by civilians. In a post-war investigation into his death, Herr Brottwitz was interviewed and asked specifically what he recalled about the incident.

The peasantry were naturally excited and handled the man roughly, asking him questions, shouting ‘You are a spy’. Asked if he thought Major Yate was liable to be ill-treated if he had not committed suicide, he replied, ‘You know the feeling of the people at the time . . . I cannot say with certainty but I should think he would have been roughly handled and possibly severely beaten when the men discovered from the contents of his knapsack that he was not a German’.

Such threats did not put off officers from escaping, and many made the attempt. Captain William Morritt, who had been surrounded and shot during a bayonet charge against the Germans, was one who remained undeterred. He made several attempts to escape, on one occasion being recaptured on the Dutch frontier. The Germans placed him in solitary confinement, put him on short rations and sent him to increasingly secure camps but his urge to escape remained undiminished. On 27 June 1917, Morritt made yet another attempt but as he emerged from an escape tunnel he was spotted by a sentry and shot. He died of his injuries minutes later and was buried near Hanover. This time fellow officers were permitted to attend the funeral.

The Schlieffen Plan of invasion had envisaged German forces enveloping Paris in one great sweeping move. Diverging from this overall strategy, General von Kluck, in command of the First Army, altered his line of advance to the east of the French capital in order to pursue and destroy elements of the BEF. In bypassing Paris, von Kluck’s right flank was exposed to counter-attack. The Germans, exhausted by their 200-mile fighting march from Mons, were dangerously overstretched. When the French attacked with a new, hastily formed Sixth Army, the Germans had no option but to fall back to the first defensible position on high ground north of the River Aisne. Here the opposing armies rested briefly. In an attempt to outflank each other, the Germans and the Allies engaged in a ‘race to the sea’ that eventually brought them by leaps and bounds to Nieuwpoort on the Belgian coast. A thin and primitive line of trenches had been established by both sides, with a strip of no-man’s-land between them. The British Army, in moving back towards the safety of the Channel ports, ended up at a small but pretty Belgian town called Ypres. The open and fluid nature of warfare, as conducted during August and September 1914, was about to change. Now men took to the ground as a matter of personal protection and of tactical defence.

In October and November, the regular soldiers of the BEF, increasingly reinforced by the Territorial Army, held the ground in a tightening salient in front of Ypres. The Germans once more strained every sinew to break the British that autumn. Mass, almost suicidal, shoulder-to-shoulder assaults by German infantry were broken up as the fast and accurate fire of professional soldiers took its toll. Charlie Parke, an NCO serving with the 2nd Gordon Highlanders, was astonished at the tactics.

The Germans wore grey uniforms which, when massed, gave a suggestion of a blue hue, with matching circular hats. Their packed formations were four rows deep, each row barely a foot behind the one in front; it was a stunning sight.

They started advancing at a fast march pace firing their rifles in the air whilst at the port position, an exercise that killed nobody but was just another of the Hun’s frightening tactics. At 800 yards the British started intermittent firing, approximately six rounds per minute; it was like shelling peas from a pod, the Germans were so closely massed. At 400 yards the enemy increased the speed of charge to a slow double but at the same time we switched to rapid fire. It was bloody murder: the grey masses fell like ninepins, the man behind climbing over his dead comrade and continuing the advance. It was as though those brave men had been told by their ruthless, ambitious Kaiser that they could walk through bullets.

Fighting raged for weeks around Ypres, the Germans breaking the weakest points in the Allied line and British troops trying to plug the gaps or retake lost ground before the Germans consolidated their gains. The fighting was often confused, as Lieutenant Colonel John Hawksley revealed in a letter home on 23 October. Hawksley commanded a battery of guns close to a convent where one of his subalterns, Lieutenant Macleod, was on observation. In the morning the men woke to heavy firing and shouting. The convent had been surrounded and Macleod, as Hawksley saw, was shot at. Macleod dodged behind a wall.

Presently he found a German officer coming towards him. The officer saluted; Macleod saluted. The officer bowed; Macleod bowed; and then they all bowed to each other. My subaltern then was searched, his military equipment taken from him, and his revolver bullets examined, presumably to see whether they were expanding bullets or not. His private property was given back to him. Then he and other prisoners were marshalled in the courtyard and put under escort of about twelve men and given some of the English rations which were captured in the convent. Someone (either ourselves or the Germans) began shelling the convent, and they were put in the cellars. After an hour or so of this, someone shouted in English, ‘Hands up’. A party of East Lancashires had made a counter-attack, retaken the convent, and taken about 100 prisoners as well. So my subaltern was released. He had the satisfaction of taking his own glasses back from the neck of the N.C.O. who was escorting him.

As battle raged, the Germans varied their battery fire, and fuses in shrapnel shells were adjusted to explode twenty or thirty feet from the ground. Shrapnel shells were intermixed with high explosive, wrecking trenches and causing mayhem and fear among defenders. All the while, Charlie Parke remembered, ‘the enemy never eased up on their fear tactics; they would make sure the British knew when they were about to charge by sounding off with bugles and whistles and the German officer’s loud commands. The Germans knew they had vast superiority in numbers and demoralisation was a tool they never ceased to use.’

The fighting continued until late November when winter weather caused operations to be suspended. Britain’s regular and territorial soldiers, bolstered by men of the Territorial Army, held on, but only just. ‘I believed then and I still believe,’ wrote Parke, ‘that the Germans lost the war at Ypres in 1914. If the Hun couldn’t pass a thin line of troops, then how were they going to stop hundreds of thousands of British reinforcements later on?’

Both sides hunkered down for winter. In the front line, trench walls crumbled and an oozing, cloying mud caked itself onto the men’s feet and legs. Wood stripped from the finest houses in Ypres was used as makeshift flooring but in sub-zero temperatures there was nothing to do but feel miserable as men clapped their hands and stamped their feet. Charlie Parke was fortunate. He was sent out of the line to train reinforcements in musketry, fine-tuning what these men had learnt. They were taught to fire, he recalled, in the prone, kneeling and standing positions, to simulate, as he assumed, ‘the different stages [depths] of trench preparation’. No one foresaw just how long ‘standing’ remained the predominant posture of the war.

On Christmas Day 1914, the Dean of Durham Cathedral, Hensley Henson, addressed the congregation. The subject of his sermon was ‘The Paradox of Christianity’ and he spoke of how empty and pointless it felt to sing Christmas carols to the ‘accompaniment of the cannon’ and the ‘clamours of battle’. Yet, rather than be depressed, his congregation should be impressed by the ‘vigour and volume of protest’ that Germany’s crimes had aroused, for despite ‘a fearful repudiation of the principles of Christendom in Germany’ – the ‘ruin of Belgium’ and of towns ‘shamefully attacked’ – other countries had stood up against this naked aggression and that was a cause for celebration.

That morning at the Temple Church in London, the Master, the Reverend Henry Woods, spoke, too, of the unavoidably saddened Christmas festival and of the suffering of fighting men. ‘Unfortunately,’ he told his congregation, ‘it had been found impracticable to arrange a Christmas Truce, but they [the soldiers] could at least hope that there was a lull in the trenches, so that the men might have an opportunity for a quiet moment with their God.’

In Rome, Pope Benedict XV sought to silence the cannon by proposing a Truce in the hope that politicians of warring nations might take the ceasefire as an opportunity to negotiate a fair and honourable peace. His influential words failed to yield results, at least not as he envisaged them, for that Christmas morning a truce of a very different kind was already under way on the Western Front, albeit informal, haphazard and completely unauthorised. The truce was a spontaneous decision taken by the soldiers in the line to have a day off: an opportunity to celebrate a festival that was important to both nations. Frank Sumpter, a young private serving with the 1st Rifle Brigade, was there.

We heard the Germans singing ‘Silent Night, Holy Night’, and then they put up a notice, ‘Merry Christmas’. Then they started singing, and our boys said, ‘We’ll join in’. So we joined in with a song and when we started singing, they stopped. So we sang on and then we stopped and they sang. The Germans waved their hands, ‘Happy Noel, Tommy’.

One German took a chance and jumped up on top of the trench and shouted out ‘Happy Christmas, Tommy!’ No one fired a shot, which was marvellous, as before then you couldn’t put your finger up without it being blown off. Of course our boys said, ‘If he can do it, we can do it’. The sergeant major came along and said, ‘Get down there, get down there.’ We stuck our two fingers up at him. ‘It’s Christmas!’ and with that we all jumped up and the Germans beckoned us forward to the barbed wire and we shook hands. I spoke to one German and he said, ‘Do you know Islington?’ He could speak very good English. ‘Do you know the Jolly Farmer’s pub in Southgate Road?’ and I said, ‘Yes, my uncle has a shoe repairing shop next door,’ and he said, ‘That’s funny, there’s a barber’s shop on the other side where I used to work before the war.’ He must have shaved my uncle at times and yet my bullet might have found him and his me.

Meeting the enemy in no-man’s-land spread to other units and, given it was Christmas, soldiers exchanged presents across a hundred, perhaps two hundred yards of grubby, stubbly and lightly shell-pocked fields: there were German cigars for British tins of bully beef, buttons for newspapers, cigarettes for plum pudding. It was extraordinary how many Germans spoke English well but then many of the lads with whom the British Tommies shook hands or with whom they posed for pictures were the London waiters, Manchester barbers and Hull pork butchers who had used the period of grace offered by the British government to go home and enlist. Captain Sir Edward Hulse of the Scots Guards met four Germans in no-man’s-land who crossed over to the British front-line wire.

They were three private soldiers and a stretcher-bearer, and their spokesman started off by saying that he thought it only right to come over and wish us a happy Christmas, and trusted us implicitly to keep the truce. He came from Suffolk, where he had left his best girl and a 3½ h.p. motor-bike! He told me that he could not get a letter to the girl, and wanted to send one through me. I made him write out a postcard in front of me, in English, and I sent it off that night. I told him that she probably would not be a bit keen to see him again.