Meeting the Enemy

by Richard van Emden

  The British government’s response to Wells was characterised by mounting indifference. Officials concurred that it was probably useless making representations as the German army would be unlikely to let him ‘out of their clutches’ and that Wells should have acquainted himself with the laws of the country in which he resided. ‘Besides,’ wrote one official, ‘he is a queer sort of an Englishman, if he is one at all, except in name and I don’t think he is very deserving of assistance.’ In the end the Foreign Office sent a letter to Thomas Smith: ‘In the circumstances we do not propose to take any further steps in the matter.’

  Wilford Wells was the youngest of four children born into a middle-class London family. He and his brother Norman attended Dulwich College in south-east London, but while Wilford sought a life in academia his elder brother followed the family tradition and set up a practice as a solicitor. It is not known how either his surviving mother or his siblings reacted to news of Wilford’s actions but an indication of Norman’s feelings may be inferred from his immediate decision to enlist.

  Although just six months short of his fortieth birthday, and with three young sons of his own, in November 1915 Norman Wells applied for a commission entirely on the basis that his brother was serving in the German army. This was rejected and so he dissolved his practice and attested, being called up for service in January 1916 and posted to the 1/28th London Regiment (Artist’s Rifles) to serve as a private. Within seven weeks he had been sent overseas, serving with C Company in France, having requested an immediate posting after basic training. In August he was awarded a commission, transferring to the Army Ordnance Corps, rising to the rank of temporary captain. He remained in France until May 1919.

  Wilford Wells survived the war but his wish to serve only on the Eastern Front may not have been honoured. In May 1916 he was sent to join the 3rd Company, 1st Battalion Landsturm Infantry Regiment on the Eastern Front, serving during operations near Pinsk. He soon fell ill with pleurisy and was sent to a field hospital at Cobryn (in present-day Belarus) and after convalescence returned to Munich. Then, in December 1917, he joined the Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment, deployed that winter to fight in Flanders, where it remained for the rest of the war. It appears that Wells may have served in Flanders until February 1918, when he returned to Munich to see out the war. Whether he was aware that his brother was on the other side of the line is unknown, nor if he ever saw or spoke to his sibling again.

  Of all the incidents that inflamed Anglo-German hostility, the torpedoing of the Cunard liner RMS Lusitania was the most serious and had profound repercussions for Germans living in Britain. On 8 May 1915, the liner, returning from the United States, was torpedoed eleven miles off the west coast of Ireland and sank in eighteen minutes. Of 1,959 passengers on board, 1,198 drowned, including almost a hundred children. The attack on this civilian liner was portrayed in the British press as unprecedented, unwarranted and without warning. There was a public outcry, prompting furious and sustained attacks on Germans and German property across Britain.

  Nowhere was anger more heartfelt than in Liverpool, which considered the Lusitania one of its own. The ‘Lusy’, as she was affectionately known, moored at Liverpool’s docks before each Atlantic crossing, guaranteeing that the crew, including the captain, were overwhelmingly Liverpool men. A journalist writing for The Times on 9 May reported the arrival of survivors at Liverpool’s Lime Street Station, some two hundred in all: there was a handful of petty officers, some engineers, stewards, trimmers and firemen. ‘Some had bandages round their heads, some were limping, and a few more seriously injured had to be carried away in motor-cabs. They all came in such clothes as they happened to have on when their ship was taken unawares . . .’

  It was a pathetic scene. A noxious mix of fury and grief was inevitable. As the Union Jack was lowered to half-mast on Liverpool’s City Hall, mobs attacked German shops, with police using batons to break up rioting crowds in Everton and Birkenhead. In places crowds swelled to two or three thousand with police powerless to halt wholesale looting and burning of German premises. Incidents were not confined to Liverpool but spread across the country. In Bradford, where Germans were still employed in mills, strikes were threatened unless all enemy aliens were dismissed - such demands were quickly acceded to.

  In response, prominent German-born Britons felt compelled to demonstrate their loyalty. In Bradford a deputation of just such leading citizens handed to the mayor a signed statement that underlined their repugnance at the German navy’s actions, and there were similar declarations made in Hull, Manchester and London. Others chose to write to the press. Sir Felix Semon, a naturalised British citizen of German extraction, and former physician to King Edward VII, wrote on 11 May that he had hoped that by doing his duty to his adopted country he would not need to make public an overt expression of loyalty. But, he continued, he was forced to act, hence his letter to The Times in which he wished it to be known that he ‘emphatically abhor[red] the barbarous methods, one and all, employed by Germany’.

  Sir Carl Meyer and Leopold Hirsch, leading London financiers, added their voices to the chorus of disapproval. Meyer wrote:

  I shall be very glad to join in a loyal address to the King to express on behalf of naturalised British subjects of German birth their feelings of detestation at the horrors committed by the German Army and Navy in the prosecution of the war, culminating in the cold-blooded murder of the innocent victims of the Lusitania . . . I take the earliest opportunity of declaring, in the most emphatic manner, that my feelings are no less strong and unequivocal than those of any British-born subject of his Majesty, and that I have lost all regard and affection for the country which is not ashamed of applauding such acts of infamy.

  Leopold Hirsch made known his disgust and his wholehearted loyalty and devotion to King George V in whose country he had spent the previous thirty-six years. He pointed out that his son, John Hirsch, an officer serving in France with the 13th Hussars, was proof, if any were needed, of the patriotic feelings his family cherished.

  Such feelings were justified. Sir Edgar Speyer, naturalised in 1892, headed the London bank Speyer Brothers. Highly respected, he had been part of London’s economic and social life since the 1880s, being made a baronet in 1906 and a Member of the Privy Council in 1909. Speyer’s brother, James, lived in New York, and was reported to have expressed pro-German and anti-British sentiments, but the odium that might have attached to James was, instead, visited on his brother.

  Sir Edgar was attacked periodically in the press after August 1914 but the vitriol intensified after the Lusitania’s sinking. He was forced to resign from charitable boards, and from other business interests with which he was associated. Worse still, his house required police protection from crowds that harangued visitors. Speyer’s children were forced from school because of a threat made by other parents to withdraw their children. When friends offered to take the children into safety, Sir Edgar had had enough. On 17 May he wrote to the Prime Minister requesting that his baronetcy be revoked and that he be allowed to resign from the Privy Council. Asquith rejected the proposals and wrote that he had full confidence in Speyer’s loyalty, adding that he understood Speyer’s ‘sense of injustice and indignation’. The Prime Minister had known his friend ‘long and well enough to estimate at their true value these baseless and malignant imputations’. Despite such support, Speyer packed up, and, judging German U-boats a lesser threat than the British public, left for New York.

  For unnaturalised Germans and Austrians there was little likelihood of assuaging public anger. The sinking was just the latest in a catalogue of reported incidents, including the Germans’ first use of asphyxiating gas on the Ypres battlefield, the alleged ill treatment of British prisoners and reports of escalating Zeppelin raids on Britain. On the same day as The Times carried letters from Semon, Meyer and Hirsch, all enemy subjects in Liverpool were told that they would be interned; even those who were naturalised were advised to leave the city and move ‘inl
and’.

  Great swathes of the national press, including the Daily Sketch, which ran a headline ‘Lock Them All Up!’, the Globe and the Evening News called for the internment of all unnaturalised Germans, as much for their own safety and for the preservation of public order as for their likelihood to cause mischief. The fear of social disorder frightened conservative newspapers. The public’s antagonism towards enemy aliens should not be a reason for ‘hooliganism’, cautioned an editorial in The Times. ‘If men are sufficiently able-bodied to attack Germans and to loot their shops, they should be in the trenches in Flanders with rifles in their hands.’

  On 12 May 1915, a Conservative MP, William Joynson-Hicks, presented a petition to the Commons, signed, he claimed, by a quarter of a million women, demanding the internment of enemy aliens of military age and the withdrawal from coastal areas of all enemy aliens, male and female, to a distance exceeding thirty miles. Under mounting pressure, the Asquith government buckled. All unnaturalised male persons of hostile origin would be interned, the Prime Minister told MPs on 13 May. If over military age, they would be repatriated. Where suitable, women and children would also be sent home. Over the following six months, the number of internees grew rapidly once more, and included those men released the previous winter when accommodation was in short supply. Under reciprocal arrangements with Berlin, 9,300 Germans, women, children and the elderly, had left Britain since the start of hostilities: they would be followed by 10,000 more in the wake of the Lusitania disaster. Women of less than five years’ British residency were automatically repatriated.

  The pressure of living behind barbed wire grew ever more challenging for internees. To Doctor Adolf Vischer, a member of the Swiss Embassy and visitor to Britain’s internment camps, it was becoming increasingly clear how endless confinement was already having serious ramifications for prisoners’ mental health. His observations made for sober reading.

  Foremost is an increased irritability, so that the patients cannot stand the slightest opposition and readily fly into a passion . . . They find intense difficulty in concentrating on one particular object, their mode of life becomes unstable, and there is restlessness in all their actions.

  Failure of memory is a general complaint, especially as regards names of people and of places with incidents occurring shortly before the outbreak of the war . . .

  Very often people who are much affected brood for three or four days without uttering a single word. All in common have a dismal outlook and a pessimistic view of events around them . . . many are inordinately suspicious. I have met with complaints of sleeplessness in some camps in considerable number . . .

  Prolonged confinement led to bizarre situations. Private Thomas Hughes, sent to guard prisoners held at Olympia in London, saw with detached amusement an internal court martial prosecuted by prisoners after one internee accused another of stealing a chocolate. Evidently no case was too small for men with time on their hands. Statements were taken, witnesses called and the prosecution and defence made their cases; even guards on duty at the time of the alleged offence were asked to give evidence. What the sanctions were Thomas never discovered as he was moved from Olympia before the verdict was in.

  An internee’s experience of captivity varied according to the prevailing ethos of the camp commandant. German-born Richard Noschke had avoided internment, working in a varnish factory. But then came the sinking of the Lusitania and on 23 July he was removed to an old jute factory in Stratford, a temporary holding camp, where, he claimed, conditions were poor and internees assaulted and harangued. The commandant, the Marquis de Burr, was, Noschke wrote, ‘a very proud man, and a great German hater’. Burr was followed by a Colonel Lambert, who was ‘even worse’. After three months, Lambert handed over to Colonel Haines, a ‘perfect gentleman’, Noschke acknowledged. ‘A new life seemed to start in the camp, up until then everyone was depressed and downhearted.’ Haines let the men build a skittle alley, allowed football matches and encouraged the formation of a choir and a band. He addressed the grievances of the internees and removed the rifles carried by the camp police. The improvement proved temporary, for Colonel Lushcombe, described by Noschke as being ‘as bad as the first two’, replaced Haines.

  Anything that provided distraction or amusement for internees was welcomed but nothing compared to a visit from wives and children. Married men were normally transferred from camps like Stratford to more accessible places such as Alexandra Palace, north London, containing 3,000 internees. Richard Noschke was sent there, as was another internee, Pal Stoffa, who watched with melancholy and sadness the fortnightly family visits.

  It was pathetic to watch the painful excitement of the men whose visitors were due in the afternoon: suddenly oblivious of the existence of their comrades, they were a prey to subdued suspense all the morning and as soon as the mid-day was over, they started their preparations, each man deliberately anxious to look his best. Long before 3 o’clock, which was the appointed hour for visitors, they assembled with their little bunches of flowers and toys for the children, and were then marched off to the visiting rooms.

  I was once allowed to assist and shall never forget the scene: the men sitting at one side of a long table and the visitors filing in to sit down opposite; here a father with a child on his lap timidly peering into the face of the strange man, there an elderly couple hardly speaking, just looking and looking at one another with an intensity of longing that words cannot express. Elegant young women with a bevy of half-starved children, a grim looking solicitor with a pile of papers in front of him – visitors from another world bringing solace to some and tearing open the wound of others. It made me feel almost glad that I could have no visitors: it seemed cruel to allow the poor wretches to have their world so near to them only to be snatched away after a few minutes.

  One child taken to see her father, Richard, was six-year-old Elfie Druhm. Her English-born mother, Ethel, was struggling to survive after their salon was wrecked in anti-German riots.

  We used to visit him on Saturday afternoon for a few hours and I can still actually remember going through big gates with policemen on either side. In front of the building there was a flight of steps, at the top of which were long lines of German men, standing there looking out for their wives. We went in and sat down and talked for two hours. We weren’t to take any foodstuffs with us, a policeman there was supposed to search us, but I don’t think he ever did. My mother had a muff, in those days that was the fashion, and she could have hidden things in there but she thought that would be the first place they would look, so she stuffed food into the elastic of my bloomers, packets of chocolate, oranges even. All the men were receiving the same sort of smuggled food. We weren’t being watched, or guarded. When we were in there, we were free to move around in what looked like a doctor’s waiting room so it was quite easy to hand the food over.

  In internment they were not badly treated. There was a little room where Father used to make little boxes, marquetry, decorated with tiny pieces of wood, to pass the time. The building was a grey, cold stone kind of place, it wasn’t comfortable. The windows weren’t barred as I recall, but the place was secure. I remember a big fence round the building and in the summer we used to sit outside in the garden along with the other men and their wives and I remember looking at that fence, but not really understanding what it meant.

  As life experienced by an internee in Britain varied according to the commandant, so much the same applied to British prisoners of war in Germany. The genial commandant at Magdeburg POW camp, who helped parole Captain Robert Campbell to see his dying mother, presided over a camp that was in every way different from that run by Karl Niemeyer, the vicious commandant of Holzminden camp. Both Karl and his equally unpleasant brother Charles, also a camp commandant, were notorious enough to be placed on a British prosecution blacklist for alleged mistreatment of British prisoners.

  What provoked individuals to behave well or badly towards British soldiers? The attitude of the District Co
mmander was an influencing factor, but faith in or distrust of war propaganda was also key to their attitude and that of the men under their command. The commandant’s authority and his approach set the overall tone of the camp and therefore of its guards. Nevertheless, as the war progressed and casualties increased, so impressionable younger guards were replaced by middle-aged men who were, in turn, replaced by men who had been wounded in the trenches and were no longer fit for active service. It was widely accepted by British prisoners that former front-line soldiers were, on the whole, more amenable and sympathetic to their charges than those who had seen no action at all.

  Circumstances at the front affected attitudes, too. The one-time commandant at Wahn camp, General von Nestler, enhanced conditions for prisoners after his son was captured by the British, as did the commandant at Göttingen who, according to Private James Harrold, made distinct improvements in the autumn of 1916 when he heard that his captive son was being well treated in Britain. Likewise, General von Stienneich, who had fought in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, and whose two sons were prisoners in England, ‘tried to do his best for us’, according to Lance Corporal Herbert Lewin of the 1st Royal Berkshire Regiment. ‘The General was very human, and was very satisfied with the way they [his sons] were treated.’

  And then there were those Germans picked out by prisoners simply for exemplary behaviour. General Steinkie, in charge at Münster III (Rennbahn camp), was excellent, according to Private James McDaid, captured at Loos in September 1915. ‘He was a very good man and did all he could for the prisoners. He had a “kind of affection” for the English and used to point to us as an example of soldiers to other nationalities. Any complaint that went to him was reasonably dealt with.’