A Plague on Both Your Houses

by Ian Porter

  Along the route to the church, revellers fell silent, removed their headwear and bowed in respect.

  Chapter 35

  “It was a grievous business having to listen every morning to the chief of staff’s recital of the number of influenza cases, and their complaints about the weakness of their troops if the English attacked again.”

  General Erich Ludendorff,

  German Quartermaster General:

  My War Memories

  Frau Burchardt had been shaken to the core by the car incident. She had dwelled on it at some length, and was no nearer coming to terms with the event, when the war had ended. This shock had jolted her out of her self-pity. It was time to receive some education from ordinary people about the conflict.

  She had asked those who had rescued her from the riot, to visit her. Considering it rather inappropriate to receive these guests in her opulent drawing room, an additional hard backed antique chair had been placed in the parlour. She sat in it surrounded by her injured chauffeuse, the soldier and nurse who had rescued them, and a woman called Ursula, who appeared to be something of a socialist firebrand.

  Social niceties having been observed and tea cups drained, they were now well into a conversation about the war, with Ursula holding court as to the need for equality in German society. And not just between the classes. She believed that the sacrifices of Berliners were ignored by the state compared to the rest of the country. As Prussians they suffered relative to Bavarians. She claimed that it was inequality that had cost the Fatherland the war and had led her to join the Spartacists. She had believed that if the Spartacists had taken over the government, the German people could have fought back against the English devils. Once Germany had better organised its agricultural requirements, it could have reduced the effects of the Allied blockade. But it was all too late now.

  The rant finished with a dig at royalty.

  “Had Wilhelm stood in the crosshairs, or stood in a line for potatoes, the Home Front would have been arranged differently,” she said knowingly. “It was not merely inequality but the black market which was the greatest pestilence of the people in this war.”

  This brought Aldo into the conversation.

  “Whoever doesn’t follow food regulations, belongs in prison. Whoever does, belongs in the nuthouse.”

  “Oh, do be quiet Aldo,” barked her tired, confused employer.

  Peter had taken a shine to the young chauffeuse, though not in any sort of romantic way. He was keen to have her now red cheeks return to a lighter shade, so went to her defence against her employer, whom Peter had down as a hypocrite. One moment the woman had been telling everyone to call her Frau Ute and the next she was lording it over them all, arguing that there had been nothing wrong with paying a little extra for things if one could afford them. Surely it was all good for the war economy.

  “Aldo is right of course. We did what we could to get through the war. We have fought for four years without enough food to go around. With farmers, the black market, factory owners and other crooks making their fortunes. But we kept going. It is the flu that beat us in the end.”

  He went on, stating that he knew nothing of what Ursula was saying but speaking purely as a simple soldier he was certain that once the German Spring Offensive had been halted and pushed back the war had been lost. The German army had been exhausted. The German Home Front had been decimated by the flu. The English must have been too, but managed to keep going somehow. They clearly coped with the lack of food and kept up their morale. Morale is everything in war. That is what won the English the war.

  Dorothea agreed with her soldier and was better able to articulate the point he was making. She appreciated that Britain must have better organised its rationing system, which had resulted in the enemy being better fed than the German people. English morale had received a boost from rationing that enabled them to withstand the terrible effects of the killer strain of the flu, just as morale in Germany had collapsed under the stresses and strains created by the virus. And once the war was won and lost on the Home Fronts, the military conflict soon followed suit.

  Ursula had not thought of this before but it fitted with her. The German people, the German army, had not been defeated by the English per se. It was a mix of bad luck that the flu had hit, and the capitalist government’s fault in failing to deal with it.

  The conversation ebbed and flowed for hours. Real coffee rather than the ersatz variety her guests would usually imbibe; and cake that was both Black Forest and black market, was consumed. Much of the talk educated Frau Burchardt about the ways of the world at war. The longer the chat went on, the darker the wealthy woman’s mood became and the greater her sense of guilt. She had been naïve, ignorant, and she had to admit greedy, as she had turned a blind eye to the horrors of the Home Front.

  Out of this naval-gazing came an epiphany. Whatever the reasons, whoever was to blame, it was clear to her that the German people had hit rock bottom. They could not continue like this. But despite the war ending, the English were not ending their blockade of German imports so things were only going to get worse in the short term. If the English would not take their boot off their throats, Germans had to find another way of getting their breath. Something had to be done. And she would be one of those to do it.

  Chapter 36

  “All the girls in the village…prayed every night for the war to end, and for the English to go away…as soon as their money was spent. And the clause about the money was always repeated in case God should miss it.”

  Robert Graves, Goodbye to All That

  The present socio political upheaval in Germany had put at the very least a temporary hold on Klaus’ entrepreneurial venture with Fritz. It was no time for them to be starting a new business. Klaus would remain a traditional farmer and Fritz would no doubt have plenty of black market duties to perform during such a period of shortages.

  And though the war might have been over, the Sunday ritual of city dwellers crowding on to trains heading for the countryside looking for food, would not abate until the Allies ceased their blockade.

  One of the latest bits of the German language Klaus’ POWS had learnt was ‘hamsterfahrt’ meaning foraging jaunt. They found the word highly amusing and would shout ‘hamster fart!’ towards city dwellers when such people had indeed made their way to the farm on a foraging mission. If this was next shouted on Sunday, some bright spark Berliner would surely shout some sarcastic congratulations or abuse at them in English about the Armistice.

  The problem for Klaus was that he had chosen not to tell his British workforce that the war was over. As soon as the news had come through, he had astutely bribed the guards not to tell the enemy that they had won the war. He did not have to bribe them with very much. A few eggs and an appeal to their patriotism, telling them with a wicked sneer that the pig dog Englishmen could give the Fatherland some free labour. It was the least they could do.

  He had initially believed that with a bit of luck he could get away with this for a few weeks. From what he had heard, the repatriation of troops was going to be a slow process. And the local area’s Corps Commander in charge of organising the POWs in the district was in a spat with the head of the local Spartacist revolutionaries, which was going to ensure things proceeded at a glacial pace.

  But it was inevitable that his POWs would find out about the end of the war as soon as they came in to contact with anyone from outside the farm. So the plan was to have all the Tommies work in the top field on Sunday. This would keep them as far away as possible from visitors who arrived by walking up the lane to the farmhouse. But such people were becoming increasingly cheeky. Some were circumnavigating the entrance to the farm so they could sneak in to the fields to steal any vegetables they could lay their hands on. Klaus simply hoped that any such characters would be too busy stealing and running off with their loot to engage in conversation with men of the victorious enemy.
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  A Danish Red Cross vehicle turned up at the farm, laden with a truck load of bread, tinned beef, pork & beans, dried apricots, cocoa, bars of Sunlight soap and good news. All for the British prisoners of war. They were to be repatriated from Danzig or Hamburg. They would be taken by ship to Rotterdam, from where the British authorities would be sending them to Hull. Accompanying the Danes was the local official whom Klaus usually liaised with, and an English-speaking German army officer, who was to formally tell the men of all this.

  Klaus’ plans lay in tatters. And who knew what the penalty might be for having kept the news of the Armistice from the POWs. He decided to play the stupid, frightened country bumpkin card. He told the officials that he had not told his POWs that the war was over because he feared they would overpower his poor injured soldiers and attack him and his wife. He claimed the Englishmen were a surly bunch, who had done as little work as possible. He looked knowingly at the local official, encouraging him to back him up on this.

  This he did, and the German army officer appeared too exhausted to be bothered one way or the other, so although the Danes were exasperated by such behaviour, the old farmer got away with nothing more than a verbal slap on the wrist.

  The POWs knew something was up when, instead of being called ‘schweinhund’, a German army officer whom they had never seen before, addressed them as ‘gentlemen’.

  “I don’t want you to make much noise, but Germany has lost the war and is finished,” he said in strongly accented English.

  He said this so quietly and matter-of-factly, as if he were chatting to a friend in his sitting room, that the obvious cheers and screams of delight were not immediately forthcoming. The men had been captured at a time when it was the Allies who were losing the war.

  Had the Hun got his English language arse about face? Why add that his country was finished? Did he mean England had lost the war and was finished?

  The silence that followed had a member of the Danish Red Cross step forward to emphasise in rather better English that Germany had surrendered. The war was over.

  It was the last sentence that did it. The men collapsed into delirium. Five minutes later, ‘knees up Mother Brown’ was in full flow. But the men were so weak from their deficit of work over calorie intake that the singing and dancing did not last long. And they were soon boiling up cocoa and stuffing their faces with food.

  Within the hour reciprocal arrangements were in evidence between soldiers no longer at war with one another. Germans cut off epaulettes from their uniforms to swop with their souvenir hunting English counterparts. Not that there was any desire for scraps of British tunics in return. Food was handed over as the British side of the bargain.

  The guards received further Red Cross proceeds in return for escorting all but one of the Tommies into the nearby town where, armed with a large tin of cocoa and a couple of bars of soap, they descended on a bar which supplied the men with ersatz beer until they were nicely drunk. In their weakened, excited state, it didn’t take long.

  The teetotal conscientious objector Albert Walker was the exception. He paid a German soldier with food to take him into central Berlin for some sightseeing. They wandered Unter den Luden, the Reichstag and the Teirgarten. They also followed a crowd to see a Spartacist leader; a gesticulating, volcanic figure with a vivid face, wild eyes and the distorted mouth of a Greek tragic mask, address a mass crowd with red banners. The Englishman had no idea what was being said but the atmosphere was intense, and he thought that a British uniform, albeit one so filthy from farm work to be barely recognisable, was not the ideal attire to be on display at such a meeting, so he and his guard-turned-guide started to make their way home.

  The two men were not the only tourists in town, and hawkers had been quick to respond. Emaciated women dressed in rags, selling albums of views of Germany, spotted the British uniform and headed towards it shouting ‘Engleesh!’

  It flashed through Albert’s mind that perhaps he ought to buy something. After all, it was the least he could do. But then reality hit him. Some of the sights in those albums probably no longer existed, courtesy of the British or French armed forces. And what would he do with such an album? Have it as a keepsake of the war? Show his friends back in Blighty what Germany used to look like? What German people used to look like? Before the war reduced them to what stood in front of him now. He had decided it would be the height of bad taste to buy something, but was toying with the idea of simply giving one of them money. But which one? There were a half a dozen women surrounding him, but he only had a single coin in a breast pocket of his army tunic, given to him by his guide in return for a few dried apricots.

  He saw how the women tugged at their clothing to stop it from falling off them. Even their rags were too big for their thin bodies. They were clearly white German women but could have been from the streets of Cairo or Baghdad, their weather-beaten wrinkled faces, billowing clothing and head scarves could have them passing for Arabs. But they had nothing of the exotic tales of A Thousand and One Nights about them. There was nothing romantic in starvation.

  As they gathered closer to him, their bony hands thrusting their merchandise his way, he found these insistent, desperate women strangely intimidating. They should be shouting insults at him, at this Englander, not begging him to be their client.

  “Eengleeshman! Kekse! Shokolade!”

  The shouts had come from the opposite direction to the one from which the women had arrived. In high pitched, excited voices. Albert whirled round to see a gang of children running towards him. Within moments the urchins were elbowing their way through the entourage of women encircling him to get to their target. Demands for biscuits and chocolate were repeated. But the Englishman had not thought to bring any of his Red Cross parcel fare with him, so he had to splay both his empty hands in guilty submission to show he had nothing to give them. He pulled out what little was left of the lining of his trouser pockets, complete with holes, to add emphasis.

  He wanted to turn on his heel and quicken his pace to get away from the children and women alike, but believed his German soldier guide, who had a heavy limp courtesy of a Somme shrapnel wound, was in no condition to make any sort of a run for it. But just as he considered this, he saw the soldier scuttling away as quickly as his heavy limp could take him. To see such a badly disabled man moving with such jarring difficulty had something of the grotesque about it. Albert wondered what on earth the man was doing.

  The question must have been written in his face as he looked towards the soldier. He received a speedy reply by return of glance.

  “Grippe!” shouted the soldier.

  As a child Albert had been a bright boy. Top of his class or close to it in all but one subject. French. He found learning a foreign language incomprehensible. And when, last year, he had been captured and sent to the farm, the stream of German words that had come his way had gone in one ear and out the other. All but one. Grippe. The German, the French, the international term for influenza. It seemed such a horrendously perfect, ironic word for this new strain of a virus which was gripping the war by the throat and slowly increasing its grip to throttle the life out of it. The word had stuck immediately.

  The soldier was clearly concerned that having such a large group so up close and personal was a recipe for catching the deadly virus. The Englishman ran to catch up his German minder.

  Chapter 37

  “The Germans… are going to be squeezed, as a lemon is squeezed – until the pips squeak.”

  Sir Eric Campbell-Geddes,

  Minister without Portfolio,

  Cambridge speech, 1918.

  Having a telephone was all very well but the problem was that few people of her more recent acquaintance were equally blessed. Frau Burchardt therefore summoned Fritz Patemann by messenger delivered letter. You could not call it a request that he present himself to her as soon as possible. It was more a demand, and Fritz noted t
hat his client had used her surname rather than her usual Frau Ute. The messenger was sent back with a missive asking if he might have the temerity to ask Aldo to pick him up in the motor, as he was feeling poorly. The messenger’s foot leather had more miles put on it, Frau Burchardt agreeing that such a request was indeed the height of temerity, but it could not be accommodated as she no longer owned a motor car. She would expect him within the hour.

  Despite the tidy profit he had made from the flu remedy and elephant deals, he was too tight with his money to hail a taxi. He wanted to keep every penny he had, in case his business venture with the old farmer could be resurrected once the present turmoil ceased. So he crammed his aching limbs on to a crowded tram and then had a fair walk to his client’s house. By the time he got there, he was feeling terrible.

  He had seen Frau Burchardt’s cook quite a few times of late, having used the tradesmen’s entrance to take his orders from her in the kitchen, and returning with the requisite items within the day. But the last time Fritz had met the mistress of the house had been some time ago, at her bank, when he had handed over the considerable return she had made on her investment in elephant steak. His investor had ushered him into a discreet little wood panelled private booth inside the bank, where he had been encouraged to pass over the money speedily and be on his way. There had been very little social chit chat, though it had been evident that Frau Burchardt had assumed that a well-to-do restaurant, of a five star hotel perhaps, had bought the carcass and Fritz was certainly not going to disavow her of that assumption.

  He had smiled to himself. He would have liked to have seen the look on her face if she ever walked through the doors of the huge Bavarian style bar restaurant that had bought the beast. Not exactly the sort of establishment to which she was accustomed. And a cheap plate of steak and sauerkraut washed down with a disgusting ersatz beer was probably not what she would have in mind as her meal of choice.