Meeting the Enemy

by Richard van Emden

  Germany and Britain remained technically at war, but the Wagners and the Brewsters had long since been at peace.

  11

  An Expedient Divorce

  After leaving Berlin, Brigadier General Rees proceeded to The Hague where he reported to the British Embassy the following day. He fully expected to find the staff ‘thoroughly cheerful with the successful conclusion to the war’ but instead he arrived in an atmosphere of anxiety and rumour. Everyone was convinced that Field Marshal Hindenburg was creating a new army outside Hanover with which to renew the fight. It took Rees the best part of two hours to convince the ambassador that no such army existed. This achieved, Rees was packed off to the War Office in London to see and reassure the Foreign Secretary, Arthur Balfour, that ‘We really had won the war and [that] the Germans knew it’. Rees remained perplexed by the paranoia.

  My only explanation of what seems a curious phenomenon is that, the armies having lost contact with each other, the Allies were solely dependent on the reports of secret agents. The agents who knew perfectly well that the war was over saw no object in making further reports. The result was a state of intense anxiety amongst responsible people who, faced with a complete absence of any real news, were half inclined to give credence to the wildest rumours.

  For two days after the ceasefire there was no communication between the Allies and the Germans. The latter were clear about what the terms of the Armistice obliged them to do. The Allies would hold their line while the German army began its march home, abandoning vast quantities of weaponry as they went. The Germans’ head start was in order to avoid any possible clashes between opposing armies but, as Rees pointed out, this created uncertainty and the ridiculous conjecture that the Germans might opt to fight on.

  The British Army’s senior command had far more pressing problems to deal with than to take notice of idle fears. Before the ceasefire, the Germans had laid booby-traps in towns and villages through which Allied troops would pass. They also planted explosives to blow up important road junctions and these would have to be dealt with by engineers and, where necessary, roads rebuilt. River crossings had been destroyed and pontoons were needed; smashed railway signalling and switching equipment required immediate repair. The first wireless traffic post-11 November was in response to the Allies’ urgent need to know where German delayed-action mines were hidden and which roads were currently impassable or badly damaged.

  On the ground, the Allied infantry remained on the defensive and instructions were issued forbidding fraternisation; spare time would be used by the men to clean up. In what became known as the ‘pomp and polish order’, all arms were to achieve a level of smartness that brought home to the enemy the reality of its defeat and, correspondingly, the high morale and battle-readiness of the Allies.

  Although the ‘talk’ had been of waging war to Berlin’s gates, there was no appetite to cross the greater part of Germany to reach the enemy’s capital, despite the symbolism attached to entering the city. Instead, the Allies would march on the Rhineland but no further: of the British Expeditionary Force’s five armies, only the Second Army was given the privilege of crossing the border.

  The Allied occupation and control of the industrial and commercial jewel of Germany would undoubtedly focus the attention of Germany’s politicians on a lasting peace settlement. The Germans knew that the Armistice was simply a cessation of hostilities, the Allies reserving the right to reignite the campaign should the Germans become non-compliant.

  On 1 December 1918, the first Allied troops crossed into Germany. Stephen Graham, a Scots Guards private, was one of the first over the border.

  We were thoroughly proud of ourselves, as if we ourselves had won the war, and we entered each German village with the air of conscious pride and with that élan which might well characterise the first British troops to enter. We believed always that we dazzled the Germans, and that they were rubbing their eyes and asking in surprise, ‘Are these the English whom we once despised?’

  The Rhineland was partitioned: the Belgians took Düsseldorf to the north of Cologne, the French the region of the Eiffel, including Koblenz to the south, and the Americans occupied Wiesbaden, sixty miles south-east of Koblenz. Haig, in a masterstroke of negotiation, took control of the Rhineland’s most important commercial hub, Cologne. He allowed the French, still boiling at the destruction of northern France, to forgo judgement and seize by far the biggest chunk of the Rhineland, including swathes of unimportant farmland and forests: the French had landmass but at the cost of influence. By contrast, the British held a relatively small portion of ground that included a city that was the industrial, financial and transport centre of the region.

  At the beginning of December, the citizens of Cologne welcomed home German troops as heroes. Rhenish flags were raised and bunting and banners draped across city streets, reassuring truculent soldiers that civilians honoured their sacrifice. Those flags came down as the final soldiers crossed the Rhine, and the city prepared for British troops.

  During the hiatus, trouble broke out as gangs of radicalised former soldiers roamed the streets. City security was threatened and the mayor, Konrad Adenauer, politely asked the British to hurry up in order to restore calm. The 4th (Royal Irish) Dragoon Guards, the regiment that had taken part in the first action four years before, rode into Cologne on 6 December with one squadron forming up outside the cathedral under the gaze of curious civilians. By the terms of the ceasefire, all serving German soldiers were marched east of the Rhine, leaving the city open. To ensure this had happened, two troops under Second Lieutenant Kenneth Stanley rode over the giant river-spanning Hohenzollern Bridge.

  After posting sentries at the bridge’s western end, Stanley crossed to find a ten-man German guard on the far side where, using a mixture of hand signals and pidgin French, he conveyed his belief that the Germans should not be there. Some minutes later a staff car drew up and out stepped a much-decorated German general who assured Stanley that the British were not meant to cross the river until 12 December. A compromise was reached with the Germans ceding two-thirds of the bridge to enable the British to keep observation. A chalk line was drawn to signify the divide, while a German officer was ordered to report each sunrise to the British until he and his men were withdrawn.

  The Second Army fanned out through Cologne and into neighbouring towns such as Bonn. The men took up residence in abandoned barracks, freezing halls, theatres and schoolrooms: eighty-eight schools were requisitioned for troops. Officers were sent to live in private homes, and the population of Cologne grew by a quarter. Where necessary, NCOs and even privates were ordered to sleep under the same roof as German families, some of whom still expected their own soldier sons home at any time.

  Living cheek by jowl with British soldiers was not the great hardship it first appeared to be, for hungry families quickly discovered their ‘guests’ brought with them much-needed food and toiletries purchased from the army’s well-stocked canteens.

  Military law was introduced, with a 6 p.m. to 9 a.m. curfew. Identity cards were compulsory and freedom of movement restricted. Letters were subject to censorship and telephone calls forbidden. No newspapers or leaflets could be printed without express military permission. The rule of non-fraternisation continued and British soldiers were expected to walk about in twos or more and bearing side arms. No disrespect, intended or otherwise, would be tolerated. As a result, civilians who failed to remove their hats in the presence of British officers had them firmly clipped from their heads; a truculent policeman who attempted to cross the road between companies of a marching battalion was left lying in the gutter. As one journalist wrote, ‘British rule settles on a district as softly as snow, but freezes as hard as ice.’

  Britain’s military leaders and politicians worried unnecessarily about the Bolshevik contagion in Germany spreading among British ranks. To stifle its influence, the British steadfastly refused to work with anyone except existing, properly constituted civil authorities. The
y declined to recognise any revolutionary governments such as those that briefly existed in Bavaria or Mainz, while within the British Bridgehead, Rhenish separatists and communist Sparticists were watched and, if necessary, expelled. To remain broadly dispassionate, the British were equally firm with right-wing units of the German Freikorps and determinedly refused to sanction the chasing of suspected left-wing ‘felons’ who escaped into the safety of the British zone.

  ‘The people welcomed us as rescuers from anarchy,’ wrote Guardsman Norman Cliff. When he came across a gang terrorising a shopkeeper, he and fellow Guardsmen ‘weighed in’ until the thugs dispersed. ‘The gratitude of the weeping family was overwhelming, and nothing would satisfy them until the father fetched the Iron Cross he had won and handed it to me, emphatically rejecting my appeals to take it back.’

  As with most soldiers, the primary concern was for their own welfare and a chance to enjoy the trappings of a beautiful, largely untouched city. The ban on fraternisation was subverted as soldiers mixed with civilians, especially those fortunate enough to be in private billets, although, as Private Stephen Graham saw, the losses of war touched many families.

  When we entered into the German houses we saw on many walls and shelves the photographs of soldiers, and as we asked of each we learned the melancholy story – wounded, dead, dead, wounded. Death had paused at every German home. The women brought out their family albums and showed us portraits of themselves as they were before the war, and asked us to compare that with what they looked like now.

  In bars and cafés, British soldiers met former German servicemen, many of whom wore their greatcoats. Initial frostiness thawed as all understood that while they had been enemies on the battlefields they were, and remained, comrades in arms. It was only weeks since they had been at each other’s throats in France and Belgium but German and British soldiers soon shared tables and talked, using, as Graham recalled, the international language of hand gestures and schoolboy French.

  We were all agog to find out where Fritz had fought against us, where we had faced one another.

  ‘You at Ypres.’

  ‘Moi aussi at Ypres.’

  ‘Compris Bourlon Wood? Moi at Bourlon Wood.’

  ‘Bapaume? Yes I know that fine, M’sewer. He’s been at Bapaume. Wounded, M’sewer? Twice? Moi three times.’

  Our fellows would unloose their tunics and show the scars on their bodies. The German boys would do the same. Then, being unable to express themselves, both would grin in a sort of mutual satisfaction . . . We met a young man who had actually been opposed to our very unit in the Cambrai fighting of a year before.

  Racial affinity certainly greatly contributed to bring about this reconciliation between the rank and file and the German people they met. The cleanliness of German towns and villages and of the people, the fair complexions of the women, the first-class state of German civilisation from an artisan’s point of view . . . ‘Well, Stephen,’ said a dour Scottish corporal to me at Zulpich, ‘I have been four and a half years out here, and have lived in France and in Belgium and now in Germany, and I can tell you the people I feel nearest to me are these. They are honester and cleaner, and somehow I feel I understand them better.’

  He was ordinarily a very reserved fellow, but I know he had hated the Germans.

  One man with reason to hate the Germans was Private Ginger Byrne. It was nearly two and a half years since he had seen the slaughter on the first day of the Battle of the Somme. That day he had been pinned down in no-man’s-land by a German machine-gunner who made it his personal aspiration to kill the young British private, but Byrne was not one to hold grudges.

  I had been given a two-ounce packet of tobacco with a gold label on the front. You could chew it if you wanted. But I smoked fags and I’d had this packet in my pocket for six months. So I thought I’ll give old Jerry a present. Well, it was Christmas Eve and we’d been heaving quite different sorts of presents at each other for the previous four Christmases, hadn’t we?

  So off I trudged through the snow. I went by myself, because if it turned out to be a little old lady by herself she might’ve been frightened if there’d been more than one soldier. I opened the gate and walked down the footpath and knocked on the door. An old German with one of those big pipes opened the door and he just looked at me. I didn’t know any German except ‘Gut morgen’ so I said that. Then I took this packet of baccy out of my pocket and offered it to him, and I held out my hand. So we shook hands. Then he stood back and motioned me to go inside.

  His wife was there and his two sons. They all welcomed me and we all shook hands. They didn’t have much food, but they had a good fire and we all sat round the fire. The language barrier was terrible, but we tried speaking to each other in what bit of French we had. The old lady obviously couldn’t understand anything. The two sons gave me to understand they’d been machine-gunners in the German army. I said I’d been a machine-gunner too and we all nodded our heads. It was a pity I’d no German; we could have had a nice professional chat. I wondered afterwards if either of them could have been that gunner on the Somme in 1916. I’d willingly have shaken him by the hand; he knew his job all right . . .

  I’d spotted a little accordion on one of the kitchen shelves. So I pointed to it and the old farmer got it down and gave it to me. I played ‘Silent Night’ and they sang it in German and I sang it in English. They really loved that. We enjoyed it so much we sang it twice. Their national anthem is one of our hymn tunes, you know. I learned all the words of the German national anthem when I was in school – in English, of course. In those days they were sort of relations of ours; still are . . . Funny really.

  As barracks were occupied by men of the cavalry and infantry, so numerous aerodromes on the outskirts of Cologne were taken over by squadrons of the recently renamed Royal Air Force. The respect which opposing pilots accorded one another in combat was uninterrupted during the Occupation. Ernst Udet, the German ace whose sixty-two victories placed him second only to the great Baron von Richthofen, was a welcome visitor to RAF messes. At Bickendorf in early 1919, Udet spoke at length to British pilots including Captain Edward Crundall, recipient of the Distinguished Flying Cross and with seven victories to his name. Crundall recalled how Udet was ‘treated to drinks and talked about the war days when he was stationed at Douai and flying Albatross Scouts’.

  Not everyone shared such tolerant views. There was low-level and persistent trouble in the city’s back streets, shops and bars, and brawls were common. There was petty and vindictive damage, too. One unidentified private whose portrait was taken by a German photographer wrote on the reverse. ‘This [picture] cost me two marks and it cost the man that took it 300 marks for a new camera.’ There was theft, soldiers helping themselves to cigarettes in shops with the self-serving excuse that, just as Germans had stripped Belgium bare, so British soldiers were entitled to dish out reciprocal medicine. Complaints poured into the civilian-run Occupation Office about the thoughtlessness of soldiers taking shortcuts across private gardens, trampling on plants. In private billets, homeowners submitted innumerable claims for broken china, damaged furniture, carpets ruined by spurs and cigarette burns. Low-level antagonism was to be expected. What surprised everybody was how well, in general, Britain’s Tommies rubbed along with the Germans.

  Within months of the Versailles Peace Treaty being signed in June 1919, the number of British troops in Germany shrank to fewer than 10,000. The occupation gradually became another peacetime posting, albeit an attractive one as British soldiers saw their buying power rise concomitant to the declining value of the German currency, which faltered, then freefell. Families were allowed to join the occupying forces and a new source of friction developed between army wives and proud German Hausfrauen.

  In the end, around 700 soldiers married German girls, and lifelong friendships were forged between soldiers and the families with whom they came into contact. Alfred Henn, a driver in the artillery, struck up a friendship with a German soldi
er that continued until the late 1990s. The pragmatic people of Cologne appreciated the security the British brought, not just for resisting interference from the political extremes tearing the rest of Germany apart, but from the French, whose bitterness at the damage wrought in northern France and the profligate loss of life poisoned post-war contact.

  Violet Markham, who visited the Cologne Bridgehead in late 1919, was astonished at the calmness and relative tranquillity on the city’s bustling streets.

  The outstanding fact in the occupied territory, and one which fills an English visitor with ever-growing amazement, is the complete acquiescence of the Germans in the situation. Life is astonishingly normal. These amazing people, outwardly at least, do not appear to mind that their country is occupied by hostile armies . . . A picture rose before my eyes of an English station occupied by German troops: would equal apathy and indifference have been shown under such conditions? In this as in many other aspects the German psychology is a riddle to which no answer seems forthcoming, and it is a riddle the perplexity of which will be found to deepen with every hour spent in the occupied territory.

  Of course these were not ‘Germans’ inasmuch as they were not Bavarians, Hannoverians or Schwaben. These civilians were Rhinelanders, and Rhinelanders prided themselves on an easy nature and gentle pragmatism. Security and relative stability brought by the British after such a devastating war was worth more at that moment than unfettered freedom and probable chaos. No population enjoys being occupied but the Germans had come to call the British-controlled Cologne Bridgehead ‘the Island of the Blessed’, and for good reason.