by Ian Porter
It was an unusual stance on the war. But not unique. Ruby shared his beliefs. When she had first confirmed this to her husband, he had asked her if she was just being a supportive wife. If so, he would prefer it if she followed her own instincts even if they were opposed to his own. She had taken offense at this and told him so in no uncertain terms. He was informed that, as he very well knew, she was certainly no pacifist during her Suffragette time, and years of conversations with Sylvia had her seeing the war for what it was; economic imperialism gone mad. And having worked with so many nationalities while working on board ocean liners, she was convinced that if left to their own devices away from being corrupted by bigots, people were pretty much the same everywhere. And that included Germans. Admittedly, had she never met Nashey or Sylvia she thought she probably would be working in a munitions factory as a willing bit of Home Front cannon fodder, but fate had decreed something different for her.
But she had never become involved in her husband’s work. Which was on his insistence. If and when he was held to account by the government for what he was doing, it was important to him that Ruby not be implicated. When she had argued with him about this, he had told her that she needed to keep herself in reserve for the next women’s battle. Who knew what this government might get up to next against women? Perhaps conscription would be brought in for them too? Perhaps the vote would be taken away once the war was over? And when would women under 30 get the vote? She needed to be there to fight the good fight as and when.
She had agreed to keep her distance from his work, but it was difficult for her not to worry about the danger in which her husband was putting himself.
His most pressing problem at the moment was to find a hiding place for an objector named Wal Gilbert who had been to France as a non-combative soldier. The job Wal had been assigned by the army was digging up dead bodies for their identification discs, so the men could be confirmed dead rather than merely ‘missing in action’ and word sent home to their loved ones. The man he had been working with, a combative soldier in one of the ‘Pals’ battalions had by chance dug up his own brother and cried like a baby. It was at that point Wal had decided that if he ever made it back to Blighty, he would go Absent Without Leave. And this he had done, making contact with the No Conscription Fellowship, who had eventually passed him into Nash’s care.
Nash was having difficulty finding safe houses. He was a victim of his own success. He had successfully hidden so many men that he was being inundated with requests to hide even more. A further problem was that while some of his objectors were middle class men with private incomes, some were far less fortunate and had to be found work so that they could pay their way. But it could not be just any work. It needed to be the sort of casual, back street employment where no questions were asked about from where the latest recruit had appeared. These were usually poorly paid, physically demanding jobs that others wouldn’t do; but beggars could not be choosers. Nash had got employment for his objectors at a Bethnal Green coal yard loading wagons; at a Spitalfields brewery heaving barrels off brewers’ drays; at an Aldgate slaughterhouse lugging carcasses and sorting cow bones for glue.
And now he was going to deliver his latest man to a new safe house in nearby Mile End. The tenant of the house was Kosher Bill, a likeable gentle giant ex-boxer who had helped Nash protect Sylvia when the police were continually trying to re-arrest her under the Cat & Mouse Act in the Suffragette years. Bill was a man of limited intellectual capacity. Nash suspected that he had taken one fight too many and was a little punch drunk, though others who had known Bill longer insisted he had always been that way. As a Jew, Bill knew what it was like to be on the wrong end of a phobia, and he was also sometimes taunted for his simplicity by children in the street, so it was not so surprising that he would be accepting of someone who also faced challenges. Bill could also get Wal employment in his family’s cigarette-making business. And Bill’s very simple nature meant that he was the last person the authorities would suspect of being involved in any sort of subversive matters. But there was the rub. Could Nash trust him not to speak out of turn? Bill was no great conversationalist. Anyone standing at the bar of his local pub engaging him in a chat would be lucky to get much more than ‘yus’, ‘dunno’ and other vague one word answers. After a lot of thought Nash had decided that he could not think of anyone better. And besides, it appeared the war was drawing to an end in any case.
Wal had told Nash something that the government and newspapers were keeping from the populace. During his time in France he had joined demonstrations and strikes by troops at Etaples over mistreatment, and when he was on his way back home he had seen more protests in Boulogne. He had also heard of scores of Chinese and Egyptian soldiers in the British Expeditionary Forces having been shot and wounded after they had tried to break out of their camp. And there were rumours of even more serious and widespread protests with men being sentenced to death and shot for mutiny or sedition.
The Germans would be in Paris soon enough. Wal believed the only thing holding them back was widespread flu, of all things. The slowing of their Spring Offensive meant they must have the flu at least as bad as our boys, which was pretty bad. But it wouldn’t last of course.
Nash decided that even if Bill was to speak out of turn and get them all arrested, they might not have to spend too long putting up with the terrible punishment usually reserved for conchies and anyone who aided and abetted them.
Chapter 4
“In the mind of all the English soldiers there is absolutely no hate for the Germans, but a kind of brotherly though slightly contemptuous kindness – as to men who are going through a bad time as well as ourselves.”
British army officer and poet,
Ivor Gurney, letter from the trenches
Berlin, May 1918:
There were rooks; fine glossy specimens. They made quite a din in their amiable rook way. Their musical accompaniment was the metallic screech of a rusting bar, swinging in the breeze somewhere nearby.
If this had been enough to initially rouse Dorothea Lipp from sleep, there were plenty of other noises-off to ensure turning over in bed and returning to the land of dreams was out of the question. Her bedroom’s window faced out on to a main road, where stallholders were setting up. They were seemingly engaged in some voice exercises in readiness for the day’s advertising that lay ahead. Their ribald humour, volleyed backwards and forwards at each other like tennis players at the net, filled the air while failing miserably to drown out the noisy clatter of stall erection.
Not that Dorothea minded the cacophony. The atmospheric, down to earth, cosmopolitan nature of the area, along with a good central location at a reasonable price, had been what had attracted her to move there five years earlier.
She was soon leaving her front door to set off for the first day at a new job. A rook caw welcomed her as she stepped onto the pavement of the main road.
Invalidenstrasse had been built by people who refused compromise with the local churchyard’s leafiness to the north or the River Spree and its attendant canals to the south. The road was a wide, straight, treeless main thoroughfare of faded, shabby chic Victorian grandeur.
Dorothea lived in one of the smallest houses along the street, less than a kilometre from where, a dozen years earlier, she had trained at the old Charite medical school and hospital. She remembered the concern of her family and friends when she had informed them she intended to live alone in such a down at heel area while training to be a nurse. She had reassured them that she would spend her entire time within the walls of the hospital or in her lodgings in a respectable house in Mitte, the much more affluent area nearby. She had kept to her word and waited for ragged evidence of the area’s poverty to walk through the hospital doors.
But it was one thing to have seen the walking wounded of the poor, it was another to actually see the cause of their afflictions. She had seen plenty of extreme poverty in her years
at the hospital but from what she had heard of late, the war torn slums of Berlin appeared to be on a whole different level of horror.
Heading for the local railway station, Dorothea took a short cut through the poorest part of her neighbourhood. It only saved her a couple of minutes, and the additional exercise would have done her good, but she wanted to remain aware of what this war was doing to people.
Her nose wrinkled as she passed courts, yards and alleys piled with stinking, rotting refuse which had mounted up quicker than the rooks, dogs and assorted vermin could recycle it. On her return, she would take the longer way round, sticking to the main roads. Not because she couldn’t face another taster of urban blight, but it would be dark then, and mean streets like these were no place for a lady at such time. On walking in through the entrance of the railway station she took a deep breath, followed by, she had to admit, a sigh of relief.
The extreme coal shortage, not to mention the paucity of locomotives, meant that trains were few and far between, and the timetable was a work of fiction. But within minutes, with some pleasant surprise, though not a little discomfort, she was standing on a packed train she had wedged herself on to, heading towards the East End.
The train passed alongside a canal. Towpath lamps were strung out in blinking white lines like a frost covered spider’s web illuminated by a sunrise. They provided a false sense of occasion before the train’s wheels rattled over points as rails funnelled to give a more accurate hint as to what was to come. The incongruously fine signage and insignia of a railway station terminus peeked out from beneath a liberal incrustation of soot.
Berlin’s Borse railway station enjoyed neither the cosmopolitan excitement nor the efficient blandness natural to such a place. The arms of its clock had lost their battle with gravity, twice daily accurately reporting to the world it was six thirty. Most of the artificial illumination had failed to spark into life, leaving the improving light to reveal the shape of waiting room, café and other facilities.
There were no voices, just the dreary procession of sleepwalking commuters, to give the bleak scene limited animation. The platform end, where a line of passengers allowed the ticket collector to live up to his job title, was decorated, as if by design, by tiny ragged creatures, elfin but clearly adult, since some of the female variety nursed at their breast perfect miniatures of themselves. Little groups of them sat independently apart, faces suitably haggard, hands in laps, watching the world pass them by.
They were there as Dorothea and her fellow early morning passengers arrived, and would no doubt still be there, squatting silent and motionless in unchanged positions, when the last trains departed.
Dorothea thought how much had changed since she had last used the station a decade ago, just before her new husband-to-be had insisted she give up nursing on marrying. A wife’s place was in the home. With great regret, she had demurred. All that training wasted. All those skills lost. But that was the way. Had she refused, his offer may have been retracted. And after all, as an upper working class woman, she was well aware how lucky she had been to have the good looks to attract a middle class suitor.
But when, five years earlier, her husband had died suddenly of cancer, she had resisted the urge to return to her old calling. For one thing, nursing was a tough life for any woman, let alone one on the wrong side of thirty. And whom had settled into a comfortable middle class ladies’ life which, in recent years had included little more physically demanding than bending down to show an errant gardener where he had been going wrong. And secondly, she’d had other things on her mind.
The life assurance money from her husband’s death and the nice house she then owned, had left Dorothea in a position where, if she moved to a more manageable abode where servants were no longer necessary, she need not work again. This she had achieved, before becoming an unpaid volunteer, working for the Bund Deutscher Frauen Vereine, a union of numerous feminist organisations, fighting for a variety of women’s rights.
The job had taken her over to England, the year before the war began, to meet, as well as look and learn from, British Suffragists. They had over twenty different law abiding groups campaigning for the vote for women, plus three militant organisations fighting for the same thing but by different methods.
She had done the rounds, visiting numerous groups, sitting in on meetings, going on marches, and her faltering but improving English had managed many an interesting conversation. She had found England fascinating. It was far more modern than Germany in its thinking towards women. Apparently a woman had swept to a landslide victory, with by far the most votes of anyone in the whole of London, in an election for a School Board, as long ago as 1870. And every Suffragist procession Dorothea had joined had been met by huge, friendly cheering crowds, many of them full of men. Her conversations had also informed her that a large majority of British MPs believed women should have the vote. And but for their Prime Minister Mr Asquith, and the machinations of politicians like Mr Lloyd-George, who would have welcomed women into the electorate with open arms if it had benefited his own career, British women would have had the vote years ago.
Before the visit, she had felt other feminist goals in Germany were more important than gaining the vote. Access to higher education, an end to state-regulated prostitution, free access to contraception and abortion, and divorce law reform. The last one, after she had been stuck in a loveless marriage for years, was particularly close to her own heart. But English women had impressed upon her that it was the gaining of the vote that was crucial, because once one got the cross in the box on election-day, all those other goals could rapidly be achieved.
Three years ago, with the war in full cry, she had journeyed to The Hague to attend an international women’s peace meeting. She and her friend Anita had represented their feminist organisation, and several other German women were also among the one hundred and twenty present. But due to the British government restricting their movement, only three British women had managed to attend. One of them, Mrs Pethick-Lawrence, had been a co-leader and the chief fund-raiser of the notorious Suffragettes. This woman had gone to prison early on in the Votes for Women struggle, which had such an effect on her that she had suffered a mental breakdown. Yet she went back to prison to serve another six terms. This had all been told to Dorothea in a matter-of-fact manner by the Suffragette as if it had been a perfectly natural and obvious thing to do. Long conversations between the two women had Dorothea fall under Mrs Pethick-Lawrence’s spell. She thought her the most amazing woman she had ever met, and when she asked her who she herself held as a heroine, she had replied in the same matter-of-fact manner.
“Why, most certainly it would be Miss Sylvia Pankhurst.”
When the obvious question was asked, Dorothea was told all about Sylvia and amongst other things, her exploits in the East End of London. And two of her acolytes there, a Mr & Mrs Nash, were mentioned too.
******
Klaus Winterhager was a bitter man. He believed his stupid government had ridden roughshod over him and his fellow farmers, and everyone else in food production, without any proper planning or vision. Having to run his farm without farmers and horses was bad enough, but running it without its stock in trade was ridiculous. The army had stolen all his skilled two and four-legged workers, and then the government had slaughtered a total of nine million pigs countrywide, including all of his, in the great schweinenmord of three years earlier. It had been an attempt to divert grain consumption from animals to humans, and had been a temporary boon to meat eaters. But now meat was scarce and without pigs, or nitrates and phosphates for that matter because the munitions factories had first refusal on those, there was no fertiliser. He had been reduced to being little more than a cow, chicken, turnip and grain farmer.
Klaus would shake his head with contempt every time he thought of such things. He also had a very low opinion of Austria. It was their useless railway system that failed to move grai
n efficiently from Hungary to Germany.
So now he was expected to do the government’s job for them. And how was he supposed to achieve even this? By acting as nursemaid to injured soldiers, prisoners of war and women; his new unskilled workforce. And as if that were not bad enough, the closing down of his much loved sport, shooting, meant he now also had to fend off armies of game birds from eating his crops.
The last straw had been when he visited the city with a consignment of eggs for the black market. He had felt a tinge of guilt as he loaded his truck with the contraband, only to arrive at his destination by passing city backyards and parks full of goats, rabbits, vegetables and pigs. Apparently such animal husbandry existed because city people believed their misery was due to inflation caused by exploitative farmers making huge profits from the war!
If he was believed to be an exploiter, then so be it. He would become one. It had been at this time that he had thrown in his lot with the black market. Rather than provide them with just a few excess eggs, they became his main buyer, at a better price than anyone else could give him.