Meeting the Enemy (8 page)

In early September, both sides continued to accuse each other of misconduct, when surrendering German infantry resumed an attack on discovering the enemy’s numerical weakness. At least that was the British version of events as witnessed by men of the 2nd Royal Sussex Regiment. The Germans claimed their men had in fact been fired upon without provocation. These accusations and counter-accusations preceded a series of alleged assaults upon British troops captured the following day. One of those assaulted was Private John Cooper of the 1st Coldstream Guards.

We were taken to an officer who was, I think, a general. He was very angry about some incident having to do with the use of a white flag. He spoke very good English. We knew nothing about the incident, but apparently it had something to do with the Sussex Regiment. This general talked about shooting the men and hanging the officers. Finally he gave an order, and two or three battalions of Germans, armed, lined both sides of the road, and we were made to run between them for a distance of about 400 yards, and they set about us with their rifles and big sticks.

Stories of foul play were meat and drink to the press. British newspapers not only reported abuses of the white flag, they accused the Germans of driving prisoners in front of their own advancing troops and, furthermore, that their infantrymen had been wearing Red Cross brassards on their arms. Such accusations would inevitably make life in Britain much more difficult for enemy aliens and in particular German civilians. Similarly, the German press reported outrages by British and French troops that stirred up civilian resentment, which manifested itself in a spate of attacks on prisoners of war. As the propaganda war became ever more heated, each government condensed newspaper ‘lies’ of the other side and circulated them at home and on the Western Front. One German booklet entitled ‘The Lying News of Our Enemies’ was printed on lavatory paper for emphasis.

Germans believed that Britain’s opportunistic union with France and Russia made her guilty of dirty tricks before a shot was even fired. Add to this the popularly held view that Britain’s professional soldiers were little different from mercenaries beholden to a politician’s will, and a toxic anti-British mix was distilled. One British soldier listened intently as Germans shouted across, ‘You fight for money, but we fight for the Fatherland’; another that British soldiers were ‘paid murderers’. In fact, Germans were ignorant of the reason many British soldiers joined up. Had they known, ‘you fight for food and shelter’ might have been more accurate.

It was all right, in German eyes, for a man to be called upon to defend his country. In this regard, French soldiers were deemed relatively blameless; Germany had, after all, declared war on France, and France, since the days of Napoleon, had also relied on conscription. RAMC Corporal Samuel Fielding and his comrades were to suffer the impact of this considerable difference when they were transported to Germany.

As soon as they knew we were English they tried to slash us with their whips. They ignored the French . . . At one station a hefty big German Unter Officer got into our truck, he appeared to be half drunk. He brushed by the French troops shouting ‘Englander’. We were all at one end of the truck. He came up to a chap next to me, shook him and banged his head against the side of the truck and flung him to the floor. He then came up to me, looked me up and down, got hold of my arm and saw the Red Cross which I was still wearing. He then passed on to some more of our fellows, hitting them left and right with his fists.

Time and again during interviews given by exchanged British prisoners of war, officers and men gave a similar story, that prisoners had faced verbal or physical abuse at railway stations between the German frontier and prisoner-of-war camps. Captain Thomas Sotheron-Estcourt of the 2nd Dragoons (Royal Scots Greys), captured on 12 September 1914, contended that ‘the whole way along, until we reached Magdeburg, there seemed to be an organised demonstration against us. People stood on the footboard and shook their fists at me, cries of dum-dum etc almost at every station.’ Another officer, Captain Peskett, captured on 2 September, recorded that ‘Someone had thoughtfully written in German on our cattle truck “English Prisoners”, this at once brought the mob up who cursed us, our King and Country and our parents and consigned us to the nethermost regions in German and English.’

Public indignation was further stoked by the deliberate misinterpretation of enemy weapons. The German
bête noire
, as reported widely in their press, was the pointed marlinspike (used for splicing rope) which formed part of the clasp-knife carried by all British soldiers and marines. Despite its innocuous role, it looked sinister. Rifleman George Winkworth, captured just after the Battle of Mons, recalled how a German sentry had got hold of one of the knives ‘and at every station exhibited it, saying that we used it to cut out the eyes of the wounded. At all the stations the civilians came to the doors [of the train] and spat at us and howled.’

The British press was not beyond such tactics either. The British were ‘horrified’ at the German saw-bayonet, a pioneer’s bayonet with a vicious but practical serrated edge. Journalists did not know or deigned to forget that it was the British who had invented the saw-bayonet during the Crimean War. The enemy were endlessly castigated for its use until, in 1917, the Germans acceded to international pressure and ground down the teeth. The British also made a fuss over what appeared to be a cat-o’-nine-tails carried by German officers. This, it was claimed, was used to whip their own (German) men but was in fact used by officers to flick mud off their own uniforms. On both sides there was nothing to be gained by letting the truth get in the way of a good story.

All prisoners felt relieved to escape the battlefield in one piece but, being unarmed, they also felt vulnerable, being at the behest and mercy of the enemy. In years to come, lurid stories were told by returning British POWs, tales of threats and maltreatment, too many for there not to have been considerable truth in the accusations.

As Fielding finally reached the German city of Münster, he and the other prisoners were ordered to leave the train. ‘Here were two women dressed in deep mourning. One of them, as soon as she saw the wounded, burst into tears. The other who was more hard-hearted called us Englander Swinehunds. When I got near them, still carrying a wounded fellow on my back, she spat a mouthful of phlegm in his face.’ It was hardly edifying but at least prisoners believed that they had certain rights guaranteed under international law. Whether these rights would be respected was another story altogether.

That autumn the Reverend Williams had watched with interest as captured British artillery was paraded through the Brandenburg Gate and down the Unter den Linden: bands were playing, drums were beating to the accompaniment of stamping horses’ hooves and the clatter of wagon wheels. An excited civilian throng lined the entire route. Russian and French guns had arrived a week earlier to far less pomp; ‘special honour, it seemed, was to be paid to the trophies representing the British army’, which were given centre stage in front of the Royal Palace. Chalked along one gun barrel was the inscription, ‘This Gun belonged to the Regiment of the English Crown Prince – Hurrah!’

British guns were singled out for special attention, in much the same way as captured British troops, although, on this occasion, German press reports that British prisoners would be made to walk alongside the guns had not materialised.

The object of German propaganda, according to the Reverend Williams, was to vilify England in the eyes of the people.

In the window of practically every bookshop I saw in every town, I saw the same sort of books displayed. Most conspicuous among them was one bearing on its cover a lurid picture of Kitchener in a Scotch kilt grasping a bag of gold in his hands and wading through a sea of blood in which floated the corpses of women and children. Wherever I went, I found myself confronted by a huge poster showing a leering, drunken-looking British soldier, also in a kilt, with a pipe between his protruding teeth and a bull-dog between his bandy-legs. Above him were the words ‘Who is guilty?’ And beneath ‘He is guilty’.

It had not taken long for the British press to influence government policy towards enemy aliens. Within weeks, headlines appeared reporting that stronger action [25 August] was to be taken against German and Austrian civilians. Fleet Street set the agenda, with news reporting and editorial opinion worryingly uniform. ‘The public even now seem scarcely to realise the great gravity of this matter,’ wrote one
Times
journalist of the perceived menace from espionage. The journalist quoted official figures of 50,000 enemies at liberty in the United Kingdom, 34,000 within the Metropolitan Police District, including 7,000 German and Austrian men of military age. He continued:

Thousands of resident Germans – waiters, barbers, and the like – have lost their employment since the outbreak of war; the adage concerning work for idle hands naturally occurs to the mind. Many of the East-end Germans are known to the authorities as ex-criminals; some of them are regarded as dangerous men . . . It has been remarked by the observant that German tradesmen’s shops are frequently to be found in close proximity to vulnerable points in the chain of London’s communications, such as railway bridges. Some such alien tradesmen have already been moved on. The German barber seems to have little time for sabotage. He is chiefly engaged in removing the ‘Kaiser’ moustaches of his compatriots. They cannot, however, part with the evidences of their nationality altogether, for the tell-tale hair of the Teuton will show the world that new Smith is but old Schmidt writ small.

Could this be the same East End German community described in such glowing terms by the
East London Observer
not three weeks before? The paper had commended that community as honest and productive.

The government believed German spies or sympathisers would attack key state infrastructure, with docks, power stations, waterworks, railway tracks and bridges principal targets. With this in mind, soldiers patrolled railway lines and station platforms while Special Constables, civilians appointed part-time to the force, guarded anywhere else deemed vulnerable. ‘Probably, this ceaseless vigilance of the Specials, regular policemen, and soldier sentries frustrated the organised plans of the enemy’s agents,’ wrote a former Special in a history of the London Special Constabulary published in 1920. Or perhaps there were no plans for attack, certainly not organised ones. The Metropolitan Police received nearly 9,000 reports of suspected espionage in the first month of the war, but in fewer than a hundred cases was anyone detained let alone charged. Despite public fears, there was not a single substantiated case of enemy sabotage during the war.

In London, Dorothy Peel noted just how far spy mania gripped the public’s imagination.

It was suggested that enamelled iron advertisements for ‘Maggi soup,’ which were attached to hoardings in Belgium, were unscrewed by German officers in order that they might read the information about local resources which was painted in German on the back by spies who had preceded them. True or not, this story was generally accepted, and screwdriver parties were formed in the London suburbs for the examination of the back of enamelled advertisements.

Inevitably, the finger of suspicion came to rest on those who did not appear to fit parochial standards of familiarity. The Reverend Andrew Clark, living near Braintree in Essex, recorded in his daily diary the anxious triviality that was part and parcel of local life. In September, an elderly woman with a German accent was arrested in Little Waltham as she was selling lace. She was jailed for a night while her claims to be a doctor’s wife were investigated before being substantiated. Four weeks later, overzealous civilians detained an official working for the Ordnance Survey as he toured the countryside. When a Special Constable arrested this unfortunate man, he finally threw up his work, seeking out the protection of a local Justice of the Peace. Other outsiders, such as members of the Royal Commission on Ancient Sites and Monuments paying ‘visits of enquiry’ to outlying farms, were met with grave suspicion in Braintree, while a tramp was picked up during a ‘spy hunt’ as he rested by a haystack. Finally, in December, a ‘foreign-looking’ local was the target of an elderly lady’s half-brick, thrown in the belief that he too was a spy. ‘She missed him,’ wrote Clark, ‘but fetched the policeman a fair “crack” on the side of the head.’

Public anxieties were visited upon towns and villages up and down the country. It was at times almost funny – almost, but not really, for the repercussions were serious. Britain’s German community was marginalised at almost every level. When representatives from London’s golf clubs discussed what to do with German and Austrian members, it was hoped that such ‘aliens’ would take the hint that they were not wanted and withdraw without recourse to formal expulsions. In entertainment, a meeting was concluded of senior British musicians, including the musical adviser to the London County Council. While it was agreed that it might be difficult to ignore German music, German musicians were ripe for boycotting. ‘For many years foreign musicians had usurped the positions which really belonged to Englishmen, and taken the bread out of the mouths of the rank and file of British musicians,’ they agreed. And so it was thought only fair (expedient) that the war could be used (as an excuse) to restore an imagined status quo, with theatres and restaurants encouraged to employ only home-grown talent.