Authors: Richard van Emden
Meeting the Enemy (17 page)
A recruiting office was opened at Limburg and twelve men at a time taken to see the sort of food they might eat, including roast beef and potatoes. In spite of all the incentives and arm-twisting, the men remained almost impervious to persuasion. This infuriated Casement. An Irish Brigade ‘black book’ was created and the names entered of those declining to help, so testified Private Cullen of the Royal Munster Fusiliers. ‘Those men (of whom I was one) were given reduced rations and made to do all the “dirty work” in the camp.’
Those resistant to persuasion were sent away, as the Reverend Henry Williams discovered. Williams had made an application to visit Limburg but the camp commandant turned it down: ‘My services were not required as all the prisoners were Roman Catholic.’ Williams wrote in his diary that Casement had become convinced that a few loyalist ringleaders swayed potential volunteers and that if these loyalists could be identified, weeded out and removed, then the others would soon join the Brigade.
The consequence was that week after week small parties of these supposed ring-leaders were singled out for punishment and sent to other camps containing several thousands of Russians but no British. It was in these camps that I met them and soon got to know their story. The presence of these small groups of Irishmen at Sagan, Spottau, Guben and other camps puzzled me at first.
Seventeen Irishmen were sent to Guben, where, on arrival, they were subjected to four days without food, mattresses or blankets. At Neuhammer camp, fifteen ‘ring-leaders’ were sent to live among some 20,000 Russian and Polish prisoners.
The testimony given by witnesses to Casement’s campaign varied in peripheral details but not in key facts. Casement returned to Limburg and with the additional help of an Irish-American priest, Father Nicholson, sought more recruits but without success, and only a handful of men enlisted. One recruit, Corporal Harry Quinlisk of the Royal Irish Regiment, would come to acknowledge ruefully the failure of the entire enterprise. ‘The Munster Fusiliers were more loyal than the English soldiers. Several Englishmen volunteered for the Irish Brigade, but we could never enrol them. Most of the men we interviewed asked how much money they would get.’ In all, just fifty-six NCOs and other ranks joined up and, although some effort was made by the Germans to enlist officers, none succumbed.
The few dozen prisoners who joined the Irish Brigade would live in a sort of limbo, their numbers too small to be of any material use in an Irish uprising. As a group, they would wear a distinctive Irish Brigade uniform described as green with red cuffs, with a shamrock on the collar, cap and cuffs. Being so conspicuous hardly mattered: all their names were known to their erstwhile comrades. Eventually, in July 1915, they were taken from Limburg to Zossen camp, south of Berlin, where they remained segregated from other prisoners. James Gerard, the American ambassador, came across them in 1916. ‘The Irishmen did not bear confinement well, and at the time of my visit many of them were suffering from tuberculosis in the camp hospital. They seemed also peculiarly subject to mental breakdowns.’
Little wonder. No one, least of all the men themselves, knew what the future would hold for those who had thrown in their lot with the enemy.
4
Heavily laden soldiers funnelling through narrow, winding trenches understood that there was a claustrophobic side to front-line life. The twisting route up deepening communication trenches linking the reserve, support and front lines felt interminable to those who shuffled, puffed and grunted their way forward. Theirs would be a worm’s eye perspective on the world, crumbly earthen walls, a parapet lined with sandbags, wooden duckboards on which to walk. Here, hemmed in by earth, they would feel relatively safe just as long as the trenches were sensibly located, properly constructed and deep. Men would stay here for three days or more, venturing out at night, using the protection of darkness to undertake trench repairs, strengthening barbed wire defences or patrolling no-man’s-land. Only during the day was there time to rest, pen a letter home or chat to mates.
For those new to the line, the temptation to peer over the top was worryingly common: to take a quick look at no-man’s-land and see the enemy’s trenches. Some men were overeager to see for themselves where Fritz sat, maybe no more than a hundred yards away, perhaps less. Such curiosity was madness if the German trenches were near. To stick one’s head up above the parapet for more than a second invited the attention of snipers, who were adept at taking advantage of such naivety. And what would a man expect to see? Hardly a German looking back at him. At best he might see a grubby, meandering line of enemy sandbags and straggling lines of barbed wire. In the early days, before the great battles of attrition destroyed the ground, uncut crops or long grass swayed in the breeze. Roofless houses stood with disintegrating walls, abandoned farm machinery lay idle, and soldiers’ discarded tin cans and bottles littered the ground.
By late 1915 a complex, interlinking system of trenches, three lines deep, stretched over two hundred miles from the Swiss Alps to the Belgian coast. Long gone were the mere scoops in the ground dug by the men of 1914. Where the water table was low, trenches were dug eight feet into the earth, with ‘dog-leg’ turns every few yards. Sumps drained water away, and raised wooden duckboards kept the men’s feet out of the worst of the mire. Where the water table was high, digging was restricted to a couple of feet and a trench wall constructed above ground with literally millions of sandbags.
Trench life was routine to experienced soldiers, but to the uninitiated stepping into the front line could be a thrill. Corporal George Foley of the 6th Somerset Light Infantry felt that frisson of excitement. ‘There was no one between us and the enemy. It was a great moment for every one of us, and my diary announces with pride that on this night I “fired my first shot at them”. It was merely a blind shot in the direction of the Hun trenches, some 300 yards away.’
Casualties put paid to such attitudes. Private Martyn Evans’s first day in the trenches was marked by the unnecessary loss of good mates. ‘Cook and Dyer were killed outright during the morning and several men were wounded because they would not stop from looking over the top,’ he wrote. ‘Strict orders were given that during the day, except in case of attack, no one was to use anything but the periscope for observing the enemy.’
Interest in the German trenches, and by extension the Germans themselves, remained pervasive, especially when sightings were infrequent and generally fleeting. On a quiet night the noise of German transport rumbling along the back roads might be audible, but the enemy himself remained hidden, tantalisingly so. ‘It was queer seeing all those miles of trenches in front of us showing not a sign of life, and yet swarming with the enemy,’ noted Evans, serving with the 1/6th Gloucestershire Regiment.
As a reminder to everyone that this was a deadly war, the artillery exchanged shells morning and evening to dissuade anyone from using the half-light to attack. Bouts of machine-gun and small-arms fire peppered the parapet or whined overhead, with the occasional crash of a trench mortar and crack of the sniper’s bullet to ginger everyone up. At night, flares rose and fell for miles around, eerily lighting up no-man’s-land, and distant, continuous gunfire rumbled; it was not hard for a man to appreciate that he was involved in a gargantuan struggle.
Of course it was possible, with the curvature of opposing trenches, and the ground’s natural undulations, that a man might glimpse the enemy. Signaller Victor Cole, of the 7th Royal West Kent Regiment, was making his way along a battered, largely disused section of trench, looking for a break in a telephone wire, and as he went he took a quick look over the top. In two months on the Western Front he had yet to see the enemy. ‘To my surprise I saw a German about three hundred yards away digging at the back of a trench. I watched him for a moment and thought, “Well, I’m entitled to have a shot at him.” I aimed, pulled the trigger and saw a piece of cloth or leather fly off the side of his coat – he disappeared.’
In popular imagination, the Great War has come to symbolise a conflict in which suffering was unremitting, and conducted in a putrid landscape. Memoirs evoke scenes of carnage: the reek of cordite after a shell explosion and the shouts for stretcher-bearers. Diaries tell of the pitiless shooting of combatants in trench raids and fighting patrols and of men breaking down with shell-shock. These stories are just one side of a bigger, now forgotten picture. Eclipsed are the stories of humour, albeit much of it black, of passive, easy-going relations with the enemy and of the German-baiting fun that saved morale, particularly at critical moments. When the 1st Royal Scots were locked in desperate fighting at Ypres in April and May 1915, their response to ferocious German attacks was not to buckle but to raise a large piece of cardboard on which was the life-sized picture of a man’s head in profile with an outlandishly large hand. The fingers were outstretched, the thumb placed on the tip of the nose: the meaning transparent enough. It lifted spirits in the British trenches and it was raised every time the Germans opened fire.
Trench life, in quieter and less contested parts of the front, was punctuated by only short periods of intense excitement and fear; otherwise it was dull. If one side looked for trouble, trouble was returned, and with interest, as Denis Barnett, a second lieutenant serving with the 2nd Leinster Regiment, was well aware. If German artillery opened up, British guns responded, but rather than searching out the enemy’s batteries, the guns pummelled a village where it was known the enemy had billets. It was tit for tat but on an impressive scale.
All these things work out on very human lines. If we turn a Maxim on to a German fatigue party, that night they’ll keep firing to spoil our night’s rest. If they try to pump water into our trenches, we fire rifle grenades where we see their smoke rising. It’s all very amusing. If one side does not annoy the other, they live side by side in perfect concord without interfering with one another.
To break the daytime monotony, shouted conversations with the enemy were heard and might begin with a simple ‘Morning, Fritz’ and other pleasantries, or with bullish insults, depending on the mood.
‘I had a conversation with a German the other morning,’ wrote Barnett in a letter. ‘It began just at dawn: “Guten Morgen, Allyman,” and we soon got going. I told him about the Kaiser, and he said we were all sorts of things I didn’t know the English for, and also one thing which is a favourite appellative among the lower orders of English society, which he was awfully pleased with.’ Acknowledging that Germans had been the mainstay of London’s pre-war restaurant and café staff, Barnett parted with a badinage with which he was particularly pleased. ‘I shouted “Waiter!” and one sportsman said “Coming, sir, coming, sir!”’
It was usually boredom that made the fur fly, and not always between opposing trenches. When tedium got the better of two men in Barnett’s platoon, the disagreement was settled on top of the parapet in full view of the enemy. The scrap was a welcome distraction for all, including the Germans who encouraged the two protagonists by cheering and firing their rifles in the air. There was no question of sniping at the men.
During daylight, both sides regularly inspected no-man’s-land to see that there was nothing untoward. A visual inspection was undertaken with a variety of trench periscopes raised above the parapet or telescopes slid through a concealed hole in the sandbag defences, known as a loophole. Routine observation was that nothing had altered, although that did not prevent surprises. Brigadier Philip Mortimer, serving with the 3rd Meerut Divisional Train, borrowed a telescope belonging to a Machine Gun officer, and, as he peered at the German trenches:
I actually saw as clear as daylight, the reflection in the top mirror of his periscope, a German officer’s head as he searched our trenches through his periscope, a most uncanny sight – the grey peaked cap and face as he looked down into the bottom mirror could be clearly seen. It was decided to ‘strafe’ the periscope with a Maxim which after being trained on it carefully was let off to the tune of about 15 rounds. The periscope immediately disappeared.
Looking through binoculars, Private Percy Ogley, serving with the 1st York and Lancaster Regiment, was in a position to see beyond the enemy’s trenches and was intrigued by a small cloud of rolling dust. It was a dispatch rider on a motorbike taking a message to the trenches and Ogley was able to observe the man dismount, run into a dugout then reappear a few minutes later when he was seen to strap a bag onto his back and ride off. On the Somme, in the summer of 1915, Lieutenant James Pennycuik, serving with the Royal Engineers, studied a German in the village of Curlu. Pennycuik was sitting in a French observation post and through a telescope watched with almost voyeuristic interest the sentry in front of a house. He recalled watching a ‘rather sloppy individual’ lounging about and talking to a lady. He also saw the Colonel’s cook dressed in white overalls and an apron, as well as two other Germans, some children and a number of cows. It was, he claimed, an amusing half-hour.
Perversely, it was when the trenches were far apart that the enemy were more evident, lazily confident that distance made them safe even from excellent snipers. Private Sydney Fuller watched one German repairing a trench with sandbags. Judging the distance to be about 1,400 yards, he and another sniper set their sights. Their shots had no effect on the German other than to make him stop and glance up. Only later did machine-gunners use a range finder to accurately measure the distance; it turned out to be half Fuller’s estimate. A Lewis gun was then brought to bear on the same spot where three Germans could now be seen; the first burst scattered all three.