Meeting the Enemy

by Richard van Emden

  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 wrappe
d 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.

  The ultimate aim of fighter pilots was air superiority, preventing the enemy’s observation planes from overlooking the battlefield and passing back intelligence on, among other things, troop movements and artillery dispositions. If accurately collected, this information could prove key to inflicting heinous losses on the enemy, even hastening a tactical defeat. This fact was reason enough for an absence of latitude or humanity in combat, and was as strategic a consideration to a pilot as his natural inclination for self-preservation. Fighter ace Captain James McCudden understood this implicitly: his success was not down to flying skill alone. ‘One cannot afford to be sentimental when one has to do one’s job of killing and going on killing,’ he wrote in 1918.

  Such single-minded focus had the power to startle even him.

  It seems all very strange to me, but whilst fighting Germans I have always looked upon a German aeroplane as a machine that has got to be destroyed, and at times when I have passed quite close to a Hun machine and have had a good look at the occupant, the thought has often struck me: ‘By Jove! There is a man in it.’ This may sound queer, but it is quite true.

  So close did planes come to each other as they spiralled and twisted in the air that pilots’ recollections of combat included remarkably detailed descriptions of the enemy. McCudden recalled one German pilot who, by half-rolling his aircraft, passed a few feet below his own.

  I saw the pilot look upwards; and it struck me that he did not seem the least perturbed, as I should have expected him to be . . . That Hun was a good one, for every time I got behind him he turned upside down and passed out underneath me. I well remember looking at him too. He seemed only a boy.

  Aerial killing could never be entirely dispassionate. Down below, in and around the trenches, the war was different inasmuch as artillery and machine-gun fire were responsible for a vastly disproportionate number of deaths in comparison to individually targeted rifle fire and the bayonet. By contrast, aerial combat was as personal as it could be: a one-on-one duel to the death and a likely plummet to earth for the loser.

  Pilots flew without parachutes. Not, as is popularly assumed, because it was feared they would jump at the first sign of difficulty, but because parachutes were bulky, heavy and entirely unsuited for tight cockpits. Pilots did everything they could to make their aircraft lighter and faster. Even if parachutes could be worn, deploying one would be tricky at any time and highly problematic from a spinning, burning aircraft. To have any chance, a pilot had to remain with his plane even when it had lost power and was badly damaged. The alternative was to bail out to certain death.

  Lieutenant Patrick O’Brien, a pilot with 66 Squadron, Royal Flying Corps (RFC), believed that the worst scenario came once an aircraft was fully alight. Then it took less than a minute for the fabric to burn off the wings, at which point the plane dropped ‘like an arrow’. In close combat O’Brien watched, albeit fleetingly, as one German aircraft hurtled past him in flames, and witnessed the look of dread on the pilot’s face. ‘The Hun was diving at such a sharp angle that both his wings came off.’

  Destroying the enemy was all-engrossing and victory elating. And yet on those occasions when a stricken pilot was forced to leap from his falling aircraft, there was a rush of sympathy among pilots for the doomed opponent, and a feeling of sickness as he hit the ground.

  ‘The machine went beyond the vertical and onto its back,’ recalled McCudden of the finale of one engagement. ‘The enemy gunner either jumped or fell out, and I saw him following the machine down, twirling round and round, all arms and legs, truly a ghastly sight.’

  There was something about the lone, tumbling man that evinced sympathy from all sides. Choosing to jump rather than burn to death took guts. Julius Buckler, a German pilot serving with Jasta 17, was aghast when, strafing an aircraft of the RFC, it began to emit smoke, then burst into flames. ‘Now came the most horrifying thing I have ever witnessed . . . I saw the pilot stand up – the brave man did not want to burn – preferring to leap to his death from 3,000 metres . . . I cannot describe my emotions as I watched this person plunging into the depths before my eyes.’

  The grim spectacle haunted Buckler. ‘I could endure everything again if I had to, but I would not want to experience my thirteenth victory a second time.’

  Death was a daily occupational hazard but respect for the vanquished was rarely found wanting. Where a plane was shot down, victorious pilots went to see the defeated pilot whenever possible, regardless of whether that man was alive or dead. One of Captain McCudden’s ‘kills’ in October 1917 included an enemy aircraft brought down over British positions near Mazingarbe. McCudden landed immediately.

  I found the observer shot dead, but the pilot was still breathing, and so I got some Tommies to find a stretcher in order t
o take him to hospital, but the poor fellow died in a few minutes, for he was badly shot too. I felt very sorry indeed, for shooting a man down where you can see the results of your work . . . It makes one think when one views such an object as I was doing then.

  After returning to the Squadron Mess for lunch, McCudden drove back to the crash site with Major Blomfield, the Officer Commanding the squadron. It was the wish of pilots, McCudden acknowledged, to down a German plane over British lines, in order to collect a war trophy and McCudden and his OC were keen to see what they could find. The downed plane was under guard, and as the two men approached, one of the guards handed McCudden a silk cap belonging to the pilot. There was paperwork that showed the German had only recently returned from leave in Berlin. ‘We stayed by the Hun for some time, and the O.C. said that it was a pity we could not bring down Huns without this happening – alluding to the dead occupants – and I agreed . . . The Major collected what parts of the machine he wanted and we then came away, as it was getting late.’

  After watching a German pilot plummet to his death, Second Lieutenant Patrick O’Brien was in combat again above the Ypres Salient. In this dogfight his squadron was outnumbered two to one. He fully expected a fate similar to that of the pilot he had seen downed in flames but, as he made a desperate sharp turn, he came upon another German plane at point-blank range.

  I had the drop on him, and he knew it. His white face and startled eyes I can still see. He knew beyond question that his last moment had come, because his position prevented his taking aim at me, while my gun pointed straight at him. My first tracer-bullet passed within a yard of his head, the second looked as if it hit his shoulder, the third struck him in the neck, and then I let him have the whole works and he went down in a spinning nose dive.