No Man's Land: Writings From a World at War

by Pete Ayrton

  The ship rolls over the ocean swell.

  Half a thousand men are by the chain locker in the forward battery. The punishment for mutiny is death! One group has settled down by one of the medium guns, they try to overcome their agitation by singing: ‘I want to see home again…’

  A speaker, a second, a third.

  Now the Chief Mate is here.

  ‘But only one man at a time can talk to me, or two at most. – I’m from south Germany, eighteen years with the Navy. – I don’t want to die – Something has been thrown at me. That’s not right – Comrades! Comrades!’

  ‘Liar.’

  ‘He wants to get killed!’

  ‘Get him! Hit him!’

  Light bulbs are smashed.

  The forward battery is plunged into darkness.

  Stamping of feet! The pushing and shoving of many bodies.

  ‘Bloody cowards, stop that singing!’ – ‘The stokers, where are the stokers?’ – ‘Down to the boiler rooms. Damp the fires!’ – ‘Put out the searchlights!’

  ‘Lights out!’

  ‘Fires out!’

  For a moment searchlights illuminate the men pouring out of the armoured decks and the crowds moving over the decks. Then the cones of light waver away into the sky and are extinguished.

  Radio signal from the fleet commander:

  ‘Operation is to be carried out unconditionally.’

  Reply: ‘Operation cannot be carried out!’

  A siren wails.

  Between decks. Entries to the stokeholds, groups of sailors! Fleeing engineering officers! Lumps of coal are flung. Non-commissioned officers defend the posts.

  Wheels! Hand grips! Counterweights!

  Extinguishers are pulled.

  Furnace hatches torn open!

  The alarm bell, telephone!

  A last effort by the commanders:

  ‘Clear for action! General quarters!’

  The ploy doesn’t work any more. In the boiler rooms the columns of steam rise like wild giant jungle trees. In the light of the fading flames struggling knots of bodies. Engineers, leading seamen are pushed aside by the mass.

  The last boiler falls out.

  The ship is immobile.

  One after the other! One ship after another leaves the line and comes to a clumsy stop on the waves. The rudderless drifting vessels are like dead, very bloated carcasses.

  The fleet attack is broken off.

  The fleet staff moves from the battleship ‘Baden’ to the mastless and engineless office ship ‘Kaiser Wilhelm II’ in the inner harbour.

  Fog on the Jade Estuary, on the Kiel Canal and on Kiel Bay. The surfaces of the sea look like dilute milk. Gulls flutter in the wake of the slowly moving ships, shriek and scrap over the slops thrown overboard, disappear swiftly in the airflow. The squadrons have separated, are returning to their home ports, to Wilhelmshaven, Cuxhaven, Brunsbüttel, Kiel.

  Office ship ‘Kaiser Wilhelm II’.

  The staff officers are hanging on the telephone lines. Typewriters are rattling away. Orderlies are chasing back and forward. Letter telegrams! Wireless telegram messages: ‘The naval prisons Fort Schaar, Gökerstrasse, Heppens are to be cleared as far as possible! – To accommodate a larger number of men the steamer “Frankfurt” of Norddeutsche Lloyd has been located. Solitary confinement is out of the question! – The members of the courts-martial… the clerks of court with typewriters to board the “Schwaben”! Embarkation under special orders! – A company of marines at war strength to embark on two harbour steamers to arrest the mutineers! – Should the men not willingly obey the command to come to the forecastle, a torpedo boat is to fire shells into the forward battery. In case of emergency a U-boat should take up position close to the “Thüringen”!’

  A lieutenant-commander, the submarine commander Spiess, has finally found Fleet Staff, he reports to the Chief of Staff, Admiral von Trotha, putting ‘U-135’ at his disposal.

  The chief of staff has already packed his cases.

  Not to set sail: for four weeks now he has had an order to report to Imperial Army Headquarters and considers this moment, at which the Fleet is completely falling apart, as suitable for departing as quickly as possible. He never got to Imperial Army Headquarters!

  ‘Are you sure of your crew?’

  ‘Aye, aye, Admiral!’

  Admiral von Trotha informs the submarine commander of the task. ‘Putting to sea and ensuring that the mutineers of “Thüringen” and “Helgoland” can be arrested!’ – ‘Putting to sea’, ‘ensuring’, the First Lieutenant doesn’t like the terminology. What seems to be meant is torpedoing and blowing up their own ships of the line. He asks for a written order.

  The Admiral replies.

  ‘There is none at present.’

  The submarine commander understands the situation: He is to act at his own risk, as so often before! The higher authorities don’t want to take any responsibility! He doesn’t get a clear order from the Fleet Commander either, a brief greeting, a bow, and he’s standing outside again. Half an hour later the ‘U-135’ moves out into the fog in the wake of the steamer loaded with marines.

  Three hundred men of the ‘Thüringen’ are detained. The same number from the ‘Helgoland’!

  The fleet returns. Battle cruisers, battleships, destroyers, in no order, in packs like fleeing animals.

  A battleship, turrets, superstructure!

  From the flagpole waves the war flag.

  The crew, windbreakers, work trousers, sea boots, unwashed, stubble, thin and with leaden limbs, four and a half years of war and blockade in their faces, a grey flood pouring over the decks.

  A reserve officer who doesn’t read the signs: ‘Lads, does it have to come to this – in 1914 I worked my passage over – from New York as a trimmer in the engine room…’

  Poles! Hand tools! Bayonets!

  The cells are wrecked.

  The prisoners stream up to the light.

  The reserve officer is overwhelmed. The crew rolls towards the stern like an avalanche. No resistance, the officers have barricaded themselves into the armoured deck. Fourteen hundred sailors and stokers, above their heads flutters the war flag, black on a white field, the Iron Cross in the left corner.

  The knots of the flag halyard are not loosened. A thicket of arms and outstretched hands.

  The halyard breaks.

  The war flag sinks down.

  A pair of arms raises a mop, a swab, used to wipe the decks, old and frayed by the sweat of countless coolies condemned to the work as punishment.

  ‘The mop – tie it on!’

  ‘Done – all men! Raise the flag!’

  The tow swab rises into the air, remains hanging above. On the gaff on which in four and half years of war and since the founding of the Navy the symbol of the Empire has waved!

  And on the other ships:The flags come down. Swabs, coal sacks, red flags go up.

  Five thousand naval officers who have sworn an oath to the flag! At lavish celebrations with full champagne glasses in their hands they have repeated countless times that they are prepared to lay down their lives for flag and Emperor.

  Five thousand admirals, captains, officers!

  Only three defend their flag.

  On SMS ‘König’ the commander, the First Officer and the adjutant, a twenty-year-old lieutenant. Pistol in hand the three stand on the afterdeck, abandoned by all the rest. A sailor falls under their shots. Then they’re engulfed, a grey tidal wave breaks over them, clubs, shots! Bodies! Arms! Legs!

  Commander and First Officer fall to the deck wounded.

  The adjutant lies there dead.

  The Emperor’s flag sinks!

  The red flag is raised!

  All other ships give up without a fight.

  The naval bases ashore give up without a fight.

  The Imperial Navy Department in Berlin – Permanent Secretary, admirals, captains, lieutenant-commanders, several hundred officers armed with daggers, pistols, hand gren
ades, machine guns, supported by a company of riflemen at war strength, loyal to the Emperor: this fortress capitulates to an NCO and six men.

  And the Supreme War Lord, Wilhelm II, Imperator Rex!?

  After he has fled across the border in a car, his adjutant, Lieutenant-Colonel Niemann, asks him why he didn’t seek death at the head of his troops. The Emperor replies:

  ‘The time for heroic gestures is over!’

  Even by the standards of German writers in the first half of the 20th century, Theodor Plievier led a life that was rich in drama and incident. Born in 1892 into a working-class family in Berlin, Plievier left home early, spending years as a vagabond and casual labourer in various European and South American countries. In between he went to sea. In 1914 he was more or less press-ganged into the German Imperial Navy. He was present at the Battle of Jutland and saw long service in the auxiliary cruiser SMS Wolf, raiding Allied shipping in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, before playing a leading role in the mutinies which were the prelude to the fall of the government of the Reich in 1918. Plievier’s first big success as an author was with The Kaiser’s Coolies (1931), which deals with his wartime experience at sea. In 1933, the book was one of those symbolically burned by the Nazis. Although he had been politically active as an anarchist in the 1920s, Plievier and his wife sought shelter in the Soviet Union. Several times ordered to move to different locations in Russia, they were lucky to escape arrest. After the Nazi attack on the Soviet Union, Plievier was allowed to read captured correspondence and to interview German prisoners of war. This led to the writing of his great Second World War trilogy Stalingrad, Moscow and Berlin. In 1945 Plievier went to the Soviet Zone of Occupation in Germany but moved to West Germany in 1947. He died in Switzerland in 1955.

  *The voyage of the ‘Wolf’ was certainly an epic one, but the tonnage actually sunk owing to its actions seems to have been about 110,000 tons (trans.).

  *In German the Battle of Jutland is known as the Skagerrak Battle (trans.).

  ARNOLD ZWEIG

  SNOW

  from The Case of Sergeant Grischa

  translated by Eric Sutton

  SNOW ON WESTERN RUSSIA! Somewhere above the forests lay the pivot of the storm. Round it, like the spokes and rim of a mighty crystal wheel, whirled legions of white flakes above the silent earth. The air was rent in pieces by the frenzied gusts. The storm swooped down, lashing and shrieking, upon tree-tops, hedges, and roofs – on all that stood up before it, and across the stretching plains that cowered beneath the blast. Myriads of flakes had begun to melt, but the cold laid hold upon them, and in a few hours the slush was covered with a solid and enduring robe of winter. The world was changing her face; it was becoming white, and black, and grey. The forests between Brest-Litovsk and Mervinsk were seething and howling with the storm. Flakes fell in the rivers and were drowned, but elsewhere they conquered. They swept over that vast land, falling thick and heavy among the tree-tops; the pine-needles were soon matted with their covering of snow, and in a few hours they would strain like sails beneath the storm. The stout sixty-year-old pines creaked in the wind like masts; they shuddered, bent, and swayed, but their roots held fast. The good months were over and the bad time had come again… The beasts crouched in their lairs and hearkened to the onslaught of winter: badgers and hamsters, who are always careful to keep a well-filled larder; foxes, bold and fearless – the snow does not spoil their hunting; but the hares with quivering ears and the rabbits would come off badly in the next few weeks. Mother lynx with her now strong and healthy brood sniffed fearlessly at the icy wind; once again there would be chances of pulling down young deer whose long legs had got caught in the undergrowth. In the plantations, where the old trees had been cut down, the roe-deer lay huddled side by side, and the stag, his eyes mournful with presage of the lean months to come, raised his steaming nostrils to the sky, and laid back his branching antlers. Winter had come upon the world. The men out yonder in the interminable trenches and dug-outs that war had made, watched drearily and grimly the beginning of yet another winter of war, drew gloves over their numbed fingers, piled wood into their stoves, and stamped savagely through the slush that squelched about their feet. ‘We shall be home for Christmas,’ said they, and they knew that they were lying; while above their heads the spirit of the snow danced a wild dance over the desolate places and the forests, and strove with all his might to entangle the branches of the trees together, and strew the ground with heaps, drifts, and swathes of snow.

  From Brest-Litovsk there stretched over the land a network of black lines in all directions: wires, flexible and coated with rubber, soaked in protective solution, and covered with twisted thread. Like thin black nerves, they coiled over the earth in shallow ditches, just beneath the surface, or traversed the air on tall poles. They accompanied the telegraph wires along all the railway lines; they crossed the forests on straight paths decreed for them. The telephone wires of the army hung high above the earth in the forest tree-tops; their course was marked on the map and the line was carefully secured wherever necessary. In the summer no one paid any attention to them, but in the winter they paid dearly for this neglect. The forests, where the wind-spirit waved his snowy hands, took little heed of these black rubber-coated wires. Suddenly the tree-tops and the branches would break under their great burden of snow, and bring the wire down with them. Sometimes it caught in the fork of a branch a little lower down, stretched taut like the string of a violin; and a wire, that had been laid loosely across the trees, now had to stand a strain and the contraction of the cold. If only it were made of copper which is so tough and classic! But for a long time past steel wire had been used for all the army telephones, except for the Imperial Section between Mitau and the Palace at Berlin which was of pure copper; so the wire, in obedience to the laws of physics, broke. It stood the tension stubbornly for a while and then snapped; one of the parted ends whistled through the air and curled round a branch like a lasso, tangled among the slender birch twigs; the other sprang back, caught in the undergrowth, and lay there in loose folds; in a few hours it was buried beneath half a yard of snow. At the edge of the forest, snow-drifts a yard high were heaped up before nightfall; the wind was the master-mason of this wall. Roaring and exulting he laid his snow-bricks against trunks, undergrowth, and tree-tops; the swirling air, like a solid thing, served him both as trowel and as mortar. To the right or left of the railway lines, according to the direction of the wind, there rose silently or in tumult, slanting dunes of snow, which could engulph a man up to his chin. Twilight fell, and winter howled and laughed and moaned.

  Throughout the land, in corrugated-iron hutments, the timber houses of the country, and cabins of tarred pasteboard, were scattered the signallers, the telegraph-companies, repair-parties, and labourcompanies. They knew there would be plenty for them to do next day, so they sat listening to the spirit of the snow as he clapped his hands and drummed and beat upon their walls, and they watched the cracks which had let in so many draughts, getting gradually blocked up, so that a genial warmth began to spread about the room. There were some pleasant trips before them in the morning, but they would not think about that now. This evening they would play skat under the lamp or sleep in their bunks. It would do no harm to grease their boots again, oil the soles, and hold their puttees up against the light to see if there were any holes in them.

  Snow upon Mervinsk… The city, on the slope of its low hill, was protected from the weather, and some distance from the centre of this whirling storm. But at nights the street grew full of snow. Winter had begun. It was now time to see whether there was wood enough stacked up in the courtyards, so that at least they might keep warm. The Jewish and Polish cab-drivers were polishing up their little Russian street-sleighs. Over the open spaces on the outskirts of the town, between railway buildings, platforms, hutments, store-houses, and over the town itself, blew an icy wind with flurries of snow, a faint image of the storm that roared and revelled in the forest. But no one minded the
windy tournament in the sheltered streets of the town that was their home. This time the snow was falling heavily. It had begun the day before, and now it was lying two feet deep. Electric light had been newly installed, and a sturdy little dynamo made the wires hum with throbbing life. Would the snow bring them down? – that was what everyone was thinking about. If they held, they held. If they broke, offices, hutments, and prisons would be plunged in darkness till they were repaired.

  *

  When, early in the morning after Lychow’s departure, an order was received from the Kommandantur that the prisoner Bjuscheff was not to leave his cell that day, the corporal on duty whistled through his teeth and merely said:

  ‘So soon?’

  Daylight was slow in coming. When they crowded into the yard for parade, some rubbed their eyes and thought the snow looked very comfortable, others hoped for a little snowballing. But the sergeant-major detailed the men for duty and kept them busy supervising the gangs of civilians who were sweeping away the snow; after which, quite casually and without any explanation, he gave the order about Grischa; and so Grischa was allowed to snore in peace.

  He slept on in happy ignorance, and as the day was dark, he slept till late into the morning, and the guard were not disposed to wake him. As compared with Lychow, he was but a mole, he could not know what was happening in the kingdom of the gods, how his protector had gone on leave, though he had left Winfried with full authority to represent him in the matter. When Grischa at last awoke about midday, much refreshed by his sleep, but hungry and chilled to the bone, he had a somewhat uncanny feeling. The sense of time, which never entirely forsakes a man, told him that several hours of the day had already gone. He was amazed that nobody had opened the door, that he had not been called for parade or for breakfast. Under his bed was a secret and forbidden store of cigarettes, bread, all sorts of odds and ends, and a little money. The stove would want stoking up to-day, he thought; he felt terribly cold. Unfortunately he had given Max’s bottle of schnapps to Babka. He had, however, such profound confidence in his friend the General, that he merely thought some detail of the daily routine had gone wrong; he never guessed that his own life was at stake. He drew his stool up to the window: a thick cushion of white snow lay along the narrow projecting ledge in front of it. Snow lay everywhere. Grischa’s heart rejoiced. Snow meant home: snow meant Vologda, and the little sledge in which Grischa raced over the steppes drawn by his grandfather’s solitary dog. Snow was an infinite playground: snow was so clean that a boy might eat it, snow was so soft that a boy might roll in it; it was warm and it was cold. A snowfall in Mervinsk might well have surprised him; but it merely gave him intense pleasure. For in his home at Vologda, towards the end of October, the great snowstorms had already begun to sweep over the long-since frozen steppe, and with the snow came sledges in which men travelled all the faster to their friends. ‘This snow,’ said Grischa to himself with a smile, ‘is blowing in the Germans’ faces.’ As he was hungry, he lit a cigarette and smoked with tolerable contentment though he was shivering with cold. He unfolded his cloak which had served him as a pillow, and put it on. ‘Ah, that’s better,’ he thought with satisfaction, ‘now I don’t mind what happens.’ And something did happen. He had not smoked a third part of his yellow cigarette when a guard hammered on the cell door.