Meeting the Enemy (28 page)

By the taking of souvenirs, the body was often robbed of the one piece of information that might afford the remains a decent burial in a named grave. It is understandable that men hardened to the realities of war would not think twice about taking possessions from the dead when life itself was placed at such low value, particularly enemy dead. A valuable ring, an engraved watch would be looted by someone else so, with that knowledge, it was easy to justify getting in there first.

In early 1916, Jenny Felton received a pocket book containing the last will and testament of her dead husband, Corporal Alfred Felton. Felton, the London building contractor serving with the 9th East Surrey Regiment, was reported missing during the attack made at Loos in September 1915, the same attack in which Captain Wilfred Birt had been mortally wounded.

Felton’s body had been found by a German soldier named Heine, who took the pocket book. Quite what Heine intended to do with it is an open question. Had he in fact killed Felton and, in the ‘time-honoured’ tradition of seeking a victor’s trophy, simply appropriated the book? Was it a souvenir taken from a body he happened to stumble across or did he intend to return it to the family? Whatever the answer, Heine took it to the grave for he was killed shortly afterwards and his property, including Felton’s pocket book, was sent to his wife, Frau Berta Heine, living in Schönebeck on the River Elbe.

It was Frau Heine who forwarded the last will and testament to Jenny Felton, via the United States Legation, asking for reimbursement of the two marks eighty pfennigs postal charges. These were met from a relief fund with a conveyance of thanks from the Felton family for Frau Heine’s ‘kindly action’. Did Jenny Felton ever understand that Heine might, in fact, have cost her husband the dignity of a known grave? Felton’s body was never identified and he is remembered on the Loos Memorial to the Missing.

The Reverend Montague Bere, a member of the Army’s Chaplain Department, was working at a Casualty Clearing Station (CCS) ward when he overheard a heated argument between a man from Exeter and another from Scotland on the ‘propriety’ of bayoneting prisoners in cold blood.

The Jock thought that he ought to be allowed to ‘do in’ all the prisoners and that any interference with this meritorious desire was uncalled for. The Devonian was more soft hearted and maintained that a defenceless man had rights to clemency although he might be a Jerry. I left them to settle the matter remarking that each well-treated prisoner encouraged others to surrender, and that the more surrenders there were the sooner they both would be in Blighty.

The soldiers’ diverse social and economic backgrounds and the experience of war each endured, and sometimes enjoyed, affected them in distinctive ways. There were those who lost brothers or close friends and who habitually took revenge, swearing undying hatred for the enemy, never to be reconciled. There were others who were able to be dispassionate: Ginger Byrne, who witnessed the wounded being picked off by German snipers, remained matter-of-fact about his enemy and not embittered. Many soldiers were the same. Private Arthur Wrench, of the 1/4th Seaforth Highlanders, was in the village of Mailly-Maillet, a couple of miles behind the lines at Beaumont Hamel. After the village was taken by his division, the walking wounded began to stream by, including two men who caught Wrench’s attention. He saw:

. . . a wounded kilty of the Argylls walking arm in arm with a wounded German. As they passed the coffee stall there, one man ran out with a cup of coffee which he handed to the Argyll. He in turn handed it to his stricken companion after which they limped on their way together smiling. Enemies an hour ago, but friends in their common troubles. After all, this war is not a personal affair.

The Reverend Bere had arrived in France in March 1916 and had met many wounded soldiers from both sides, including two from the aftermath of a fight in which a British Tommy had ‘stuck a knife into the shoulder of a Fritz’ during hand-to-hand combat. ‘The Tommy was wounded too.’ Both men arrived at the Casualty Clearing Station in the same ambulance, ‘smoking each other’s cigarettes on the way’.

His interest in human nature was well observed and varied. On another occasion he watched ‘a curious scene’ from the door of his CCS billet.

Outside one of the wards stands a group of men, walking wounded, English, Scots and Boches. They are on the best of terms and are probably fighting over again the ‘stunt’ in which some of them took and others were taken prisoner. The ‘feld grau’ [field grey] predominates over the khaki, and one independent Hun is wandering about the graveyard looking at the inscriptions on the crosses. There is a lightly wounded confectioner from Berlin. He appreciates the white bread and is astounded at his treatment, having been told by his officers that ‘if the English took you, you were “so gut wie todt”’ (as good as dead).

Lieutenant Henry Jones, of the Army Service Corps, was intrigued by the absence of malice. In a letter home dated 8 August 1916, he described to his family how, in a village, German prisoners helped shovel refuse into army wagons before taking the refuse to a dump.

It is a daily occurrence to see a Boche mount up on the box beside the English driver, and off they go – often the Boche can speak English – chatting merrily as if there had never been a war. I have even seen Tommy hand over the reins to his captive, who cheerfully takes them and drives the wagon to its destination, while the real driver sits back with folded arms. This will show you how far the British soldier cultivates the worship of Hate.

It was the nature of a bitterly fought war that most men remained enemies in life and friends only in death, an insight despondently appreciated by soldiers on the Western Front. Guardsman Norman Cliff understood. Passing a large shell hole, he saw two decomposing bodies lying side by side both facing the sky. ‘As we passed it became clear that one was a British soldier, the other a German. They lay hand in hand, as though reconciled in mutual agony and in the peace of death. The tragic significance of it plunged me into a whirlwind of conflicting emotions as we marched silently on.’

Scots Guards officer Captain Henry Dundas pondered over the same thoughts in January 1917 as he walked among British graves at Corbie, a cemetery behind the Somme lines. He had seen the grave of Major William La Touche Congreve VC, DSO, MC, one of the most decorated, celebrated and youthful casualties of the war, when his eye was caught by a desolate plot of ground. It ‘was a forgotten, uncared for patch beneath which were buried five or six Germans who had died in hospital. Poor Fritz Kolner of the 2nd Grenadier Regiment: I can pity him almost as much as John Macdonald of the Clyde RGA, who lies a few feet off. It is impossible to blame the individual for the sins of the nation, even though the nation is merely a collection of individuals. That is why all wars are so hateful.’

7

Between a Rock and a Hard Place

The Germans truly began to feel the economic squeeze in 1917. British-born Princess Evelyn Blücher, whose private journal captured the public excitement and bravado in the first months of the war, began to note the shortage of necessities in Berlin, from the absence of fuel to the scarcity of food. Bread dough was adulterated with potato and root vegetables such as turnips: later it would be mixed with sawdust. The era of the
Ersatz
(substitute) and
Strecken
(stretch) food had arrived. Coffee, the favourite non-alcoholic drink in Germany, was increasingly made from chicory, grain and acorns, while foliage from trees or bushes was used instead of tea leaves. Milk and beer were watered down.

As early as March 1916, small-scale disturbances had occurred over the bread ration in towns such as Wittenberg, but they had taken place shortly after the opening of the Germans’ great Verdun Offensive and well before the Battle of the Somme. It was the cost of these battles that proved ruinous not only to the German army but also to the economy.

In August 1916, the German army’s High Command launched its all-out campaign for industrial mobilisation. It was called the Hindenburg Programme to help boost its chances of success, and wooden effigies of the Field Marshal were erected all over the country, and plastered with cheques and cash given by civilians still willing to invest in war bonds. In Berlin, at the top of the Siegesallee, a gigantic wooden statue of the great man was raised on a platform. Contributors to the German Red Cross were permitted to climb some stairs to hammer in nails of gold, silver or iron, the colour of the nail reflecting each individual’s generosity: so many were gold that the statue became known as the ‘Yellow God’. But, once again, the authorities were ignoring the needs of the wider economy by focusing on the army. The ambition to double industrial output would be at the expense of the civilian population: resources including horses and fuel were withdrawn from agriculture to aid an expansion in munitions. Greater food shortages and higher prices were the result.

The public mood was changing, as Princess Blücher observed. A virulent fungus infected that year’s potato harvest, destroying nearly 50 per cent of a crop that was an indispensable part of the German diet, particularly for poorer families. And when the bitterly cold European winter of 1916-17 struck, one of the worst in living memory, she witnessed public morale faltering as hunger and cold took their toll.

The heroic attitude has entirely disappeared. Now one sees faces like masks, blue with cold and drawn by hunger, with the harassed expression common to all those who are continually speculating as to the possibility of another meal.

All labour resources are being organised for military purposes, which means that every man will be called upon to serve his country in some way, and even those who were passed as physically unfit a few months ago are now being trained for military service.

Government rationing affected everybody, including the Reverend Henry Williams. His food coupons were valid for Berlin only, throwing him on the mercy of civilians once he left the city to visit prisoners of war. ‘My prisoner-friends, who usually guessed that I could do with a meal, gave me food wrapped up in newspaper before leaving the camp.’ This food he ate in secret as civilians would quickly discern the relative quality of English food and arrest him as a spy.

I can see myself now, as soon as I had left a camp out of sight, looking around me for somewhere to hide, and then sitting in a ditch or behind a bush or a cow-shed greedily wolfing the contents of my parcel. It might be only hard biscuit or harder white bread seamed with green mouldy cracks, and a slice or two of corned beef; but how good it always tasted . . . It was no wonder that I began to suffer acutely from indigestion.

In Berlin, Williams was only too grateful to accept a dinner invitation especially as his host had procured a rabbit, ‘a rare luxury’. Only later did his host ask if he had suspected anything. ‘You seemed rather sniffy about that rabbit of mine’, she said before confessing that the rabbit was in fact an old tom-cat.

‘Another day I was walking along a main street off Charlottenburg and passing a baker’s shop I noticed a disagreeable smell coming up through a grating outside the window,’ wrote Williams. ‘I thought “I wonder what on earth they are making the bread of today!” Glancing in the window, my eye fell upon a placard there displayed; it ran “Highest prices paid for potato-peelings”.’

The public’s expectation of easy victory had long since evaporated, and now, perhaps, people were beginning to question whether victory would come at all, and if it did, at what cost. The population began to blame the government for perceived inadequacies in food distribution. Soup kitchens became a common sight on German city streets and when a nutritionist undertook that winter to live for six months off the official ration, his weight plummeted from 76½kg to 57½kg.

One thing that did surprise Princess Blücher was the attitude of Germans to the British. Since the Battle of the Somme, feelings had ‘veered round’, she discovered. ‘Men who were scoffing and railing at England twelve months ago are beginning to express their admiration, and even dare to display a certain affection and attachment publicly.’ British and German troops had slugged it out for five months on the Somme, and yet German forces had been driven back. Although retreat was dressed up in the newspapers as an ‘elastic bend’ in the line, the Princess noted, there was no suppressing the stories brought home by soldiers wounded or on leave. British and Empire troops were in the ascendancy, not least in their use of artillery fire, the weight of which was fearsome and demoralising.

Princess Blücher’s opinion was just one individual’s view, and from a member of the privileged classes at that. But she was also perceptive. Had she correctly spotted a genuine shift in German attitudes to the war? If so, it was a change that would have profound repercussions for German politicians and the German High Command: it would mean that the ire once directed at the British was turning on them.

In the skies above the Western Front, an air war raged. Portrayed in the press then and since as a chivalrous campaign, such a description, if it were ever true, was by 1917 inaccurate and naive. In reality, chivalry, and its associated traits such as honour and courtesy, was impractical and irrelevant to young men whose survival was tenuous. These officer pilots, fêted as ‘knights of the air’, were, by force of circumstance, ruthless and gritty killers.