Tommy (73 page)

Many prisoners worked at labouring duties behind the lines under the command of their own NCOs. J. B. Priestley thought that ‘they were far more frightened of their own sergeant-major characters – iron men with Iron Crosses, Kaiser moustaches, terrible rasping words of command – than they were of us, the utterly amateur British'.
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German doctors and stretcher-bearers generally carried on with business as usual after capture, often going back onto the battlefield, without orders from their captors, to help clear the wounded of both sides. But perhaps the best example of proper behaviour on the part of prisoners was a very docile group which was sent back across the battlefield with a single escort. He fell into a shell hole and accidentally ran his bayonet through his leg, but his charges loyally carried him the rest of the way.

Burgon Bickersteth could not deny his admiration for a captured officer who would disclose no confidential information. He was ‘an extraordinarily nice fellow I thought. He would tell me nothing except his regiment and division. He was good looking and well-dressed and perfectly calm and collected.'
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Edward Vaughan chatted to a badly-wounded German in a captured pillbox with an officer-to-officer courtesy which somehow made light of circumstance, and the German offered him the only hospitality at his disposal: a piece of sugar, crumbling and so bloodstained that Vaughan could not face it, but ‘slipped it into my pocket while pretending to eat it'.

Dead officers sometimes struck a spark of admiration too. Billy Congreve thought that Lieutenant Meyer Zu Wambergen, adjutant of the 57th Regiment, ‘died an Iron Cross death all right, leading his men inside the enemy's line… I wonder if I shall ever have the chance of finding out more about him?'.
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Charles Carrington spent several hours in a shell hole on the Somme in the company of a dead German officer, a well-dressed and handsome man about his own age: he removed the Iron Cross from the body, somehow not as a trophy, but for reverend safe keeping.

Soldiers speedily discovered just how heterogeneous in composition the German army was. In May 1916 Edward Underhill wrote that:

A year later Bernard Martin's company was commanded by:

George Adams had enlisted underage into the Middlesex Regiment and survived Loos: ‘I am sorry to say that nearly all the fellows I knew have gone and Dad, Jack Badrick, the bricky who used to work for Harry Rooney has gone as well.' He told his parents on 30 October 1915 that they had ‘a kind of arrangement' with the Germans opposite: ‘They are Saxons you see they are club waiters and barbers and they don't like the war and are decent fellows. Now the Prussians, who they relieved, if you show your head an inch above the parapet you get it, they are
no bon
as the French say.'
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Lieutenant Graham Greenwell wrote on 4 June 1915 that the Saxons hated the Prussians far more than the British, ‘and when they are relieved by them they call out: “Give it them hot tomorrow, it's the Prussians".'
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In many sectors opposing trenches were so close that it was easy for shouted conversations to take place. Bernard Adams, then serving in the ranks, affirmed that at Cuinchy in November 1915:

The entente in question was, of course, the celebrated Christmas truce of 1914, when there was widespread fraternisation. Second Lieutenant Bruce Bairnsfather of 1/Royal Warwickshire exchanged two of his buttons with a German officer; a soldier in the London Rifle Brigade swapped a tin of bully beef for a German spiked helmet (he was asked to return it the following day, and sportingly did so); and near Fromelles a joint burial service was conducted by the chaplain of 6/Gordon Highlanders and a German divinity student. There may even have been a proper football match – the Lancashire Fusiliers' history reported a 3–2 victory – but it is more likely that there was the occasional less formal ‘general kickabout'.
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There was nothing on the same scale thereafter, largely because outraged officialdom issued severe warnings that, as Wyn Griffith put it, ‘we must confine our goodwill not to fellow Christians, but to Christians of allied nationality'. However, even then there was a good deal of shouting ‘Merry Christmas Tommy' and ‘Merry Christmas Fritz', and some bartering of souvenirs went on in No Man's Land.
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Yet if large-scale fraternisation was rare, small-scale contact was common. In front of Guy Chapman's battalion,

One British infantry section was surprised to hear a German shout: ‘It is I, Fritz the Bunmaker of London. What is the football news?'

‘A blurry supporter of blurry Chelsea,' muttered Bill – hitherto the most aggressive man in the section. ‘'e must be a damned good sort of sausage eater.'
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Billie Neville wrote from the line near Albert in late 1915 that:

On another occasion the Germans mounted a raid with artillery support; however, ‘They did not come as a fighting patrol… but carried placards which they dropped into the bays, and in big bold letters the placards read: “Deutschland welcomes the 29th Division to France.” They must be a sporty lot over there.
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The Germans often demonstrated a good knowledge of the units opposite them, and V. F. Eberle, an engineer officer near Ploegsteert in May 1915, observed that: ‘The Germans opposite are now more chatty. On our battalion relief nights the incoming troops are greeted with “Hullo, the Blanks”.'
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Sometimes, less well informed, they called across to ask what the relieving unit was. Scenting the chance of a wind-up, soldiers usually replied with something dramatic but untrue, like ‘First Black Watch' or ‘Th'Oirish Guards'.

There were times when it was difficult to feel much real hostility to the men in the trenches opposite. When Brigadier General Count Gleichen was told by a sentry that he often saw a German not far away, he asked why the man had not shot him. ‘Shoot him,' said the man, ‘why, Lor' bless you sir, 'e's never done me no harm.'
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One of Frank Dunham's comrades gave just the same reply when a sergeant asked him why he had not fired at a German who had just looked over the parapet: ‘No, I couldn't kill him, for he ain't done no harm.'
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Even Frank Crozier, not backward when it came to killing, could not see the sense in sniping ordinary Germans when there was no battle on: the practice revolted him and he gave it up.

Soldiers on both sides periodically deserted by creeping across No Man's Land, though it was always a tricky business. Gerald Burgoyne was shocked to report that:

Another, who tried the same with Frank Hawkings's battalion, was luckier.

The hunt for souvenirs was universal – ‘rather like looking for mushrooms' – and prisoners and the fallen were routinely pillaged of cash and collectibles. Those, British and German, who knew the rules ensured that watches and other valuables were easy of access at the moment of capture in order to avoid a dangerous scuffle as captors sought their dues: one British officer was told that his men had been ‘given' watches by their prisoners out of sheer gratitude, but was realistic enough to wonder. The 2/Royal Welch Fusiliers, reprimanded by their brigade headquarters when a German prisoner claimed his watch had been stolen, ‘sent down two dozen for him to choose from'. Prisoners often showed their captors photographs of their wives and children to make the point that they too were family men whose deaths would spread rings of sorrow: one fell on his knees and babbled to Edward Vaughan of his wife and
‘zwei Kindern'.
There was a ‘natural utilitarian morality' which encouraged men to loot bodies, both British and German. ‘A tin of bully in a dead man's pack can't help him,' affirmed George Coppard, ‘nor can a packet of cigarettes.' But the business of going through the wallet of a German brought him up sharply: ‘There were wives and children, parents, old chaps with big whiskers, nearly all dressed in black, as if attending a funeral. Respectable, clean and tidy was the general impression.'
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There were occasional local truces, usually dictated by the need to bury the dead or recover wounded, and these continued despite official disapproval. Often men would not fire on stretcher-bearers or doctors clearly going about their business, and one British soldier, bravely caring for the wounded just in front of the German parapet, was eventually asked by a German officer if he wanted to ‘come over'. When he replied that he did not, the German firmly told him that he would have to go back to his own lines or be shot: he walked back unmolested. In February 1917 the Germans allowed Rowland Feilding's men to recover their wounded, and he walked forward to supervise the operation. ‘I found Germans – almost shoulder to shoulder,' he told his wife, ‘leaning over their parapet, exposed from the waist up: on our side it was the same. All were intensely interested in the stretcher-bearers at work in No man's land.' He then discovered that there had recently been a divisional order forbidding precisely that sort of thing: ‘In short, our methods henceforth are to be strictly Prussian; the very methods to abolish which we claim to be fighting this war.'
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This pattern of respect illuminated by flashes of chivalry was wreathed with darker clouds. First, there was no guarantee a man's surrender would be accepted. If he maintained a brave defence to the last moment and then threw down his arms he was likely to be killed out of hand, sometimes with a gruff: ‘Too late, chum,' as the bayonet went in. Charles Carrington explained that:

Thomas Penrose Marks, a private and then an NCO in the infantry, was disinclined to show mercy to machine gunners who surrendered at the last moment: