by Colin Smith
He got there about an hour before dusk and told the driver to wait for him. It had been another baking day but the graveyard was well shaded by the plane and cypress trees that had been planted around its edges and its turf textured to velvet. A parade of white head stones from the other war belonged mostly to Allenby’s cavalry who had died in the summer of 1918 when the Turks, having lost Jerusalem, were clinging to northern Palestine.
This war’s dead lay nearer the road and had not yet been issued with headstones. For the moment their graves were marked with white wooden crosses on which painted in black were names, ranks units, ages and date of death. Army, navy and airforce were all there, presumably died of wounds or washed ashore. Some of the army’s were from the kind of rear echelon units not usually much in evidence in military cemeteries. The Templer assumed that most of these were the result of the large number of road accidents deplored in a recent Palestine Post editorial. There were far too many new young drivers on the Mandate’s roads and the blackout didn’t help. The Wehrmacht had the same problem in Greece. Young soldiers invariably drove too fast.
Alongside each other two open graves awaited occupation, freshly dug with the spoil piled besides them. For a moment the Templer paused to look into them, noted they had been dug to the proper depth and wondered whom they might be for. Then he started towards a line of palm trees at the back of the cemetery that had been planted there about twenty years before in order to screen the military graves from what lay beyond.
For here there was a lost village of the dead, overgrown as the stones of Angkor Wat. In places, arms at shoulder height, he had to wrench this jungle apart to reveal the exuberant marble mausoleums beyond where the guardian angels and cherubim of the last decades of almost universal faith maintained their loyal vigil. Angled shafts of sunlight dappled leaves but failed to reach those dark corners where only bloodshot reptilian eyes lit up the gloom. Cicadas rattled in panic against the dying of the light and at his feet through cracks in the best Italian marble the intruder noted lizards threading themselves to their unspeakable trysts.
In the gathering dusk, it took the Templer a while to find his way around and he began to wonder whether it had been removed. Then he almost walked into it, feeling its roughness beneath his outstretched hands. It was exactly as it was when, along with the other veterans, he had attended its unveiling: a squat stone obelisk erected in one of the main paths with an embossed bronze Maltese Cross and the words: Ihren im Weltkrieg 1914-1918 Gefallenen Mitburgern Die Deutsch Kolonie Haifa. He had half expected to find it vandalised but it was unchanged, hardly weathered and as he rubbed the bronze cross he thought about the first time he saw it.
It was 1927 and he was 31. After the speeches and prayers a photographer hired for the occasion by Die Jerusalemer Warte, the Templers’ own newspaper, had asked him and a few other veterans to pose in front of the stone. He remembered one of them had whispered, ‘We used to wonder which side you’d end up on.’
He was the only child of a British mother who after her first birth was unable or unwilling to have more children. His maternal grandfather was a religious maniac who had settled his family in Ottoman Jerusalem in order to squander a decent inheritance by establishing an English language school off the Jaffa road. This was a cover for his main purpose in life: the conversion of the Jews. (He was not a total failure. One of his pupils would grow up to become an Anglican bishop.) He admired the Templers - honest God fearing folk unafraid of hard work – and when the Englishman closed his school and moved his home to Haifa to be near the sea he was pleased that his rather spoilt youngest daughter wedded into one of their trading families. They had been married for over thirty years when, shortly after the German war dead had been in honoured in the Haifa cemetery, the Termpler’s father died of a stroke during a visit to Frankfurt.
He was in Germany to buy some of the agricultural machinery he regularly imported into what had become British Mandate Palestine. For a while his son had tried to keep the family business going but his heart wasn’t in it. Not long after the ‘29 Crash it went bust. Much to his surprise, his mother responded to this by announcing that, if she was going to be a pauper, she would rather be one in England and was leaving for a birthplace she hardly knew.
***
Her son knew it much better. From the age of thirteen he had spent the best part of five years there, knocked from pillar to post at first until he realised he was big enough to knock back, had the weight to make a difference in the scrum, learned to box and eventually made his mark in its Officer Training Corps as a cadet drill sergeant with a convincing parade ground manner. It had not been easy. With his background, gaining acceptance in a minor English public school was always going to be hard. In the new century’s first decade it was very hard indeed.
The Templer soon discovered that his mother’s homeland was obsessed by a paranoid fantasy that it was about to be invaded by the Germans – a people to whom they were distantly related and had never been at war. With minor variations, Boys’ Own magazine seemed to print a fresh story about plucky British schoolboys unmasking the Kaiser’s treacherous agents in almost every issue. More mature readers had already bought over two million copies of the yachtsman Erskine Childers’ thriller The Riddle of the Sands. A naval arms race was going on and life was indeed imitating art with First Sea Lord Winston Churchill happy to oblige the Royal Navy with the extra North Sea bases it demanded to take on the Black Eagle fleet lurking in the author Childers’ foggy Frisian archipelago.
Inevitably, his school nickname was The Hun and it stuck. At first some of the cleverer boys had tried Attila but that didn’t catch on. It was, of course, a flogging school and in the normal way much of it done by older boys who had attained prefect rank. “Bend over my little Hun and see if you can take a British cane,” had been the Captain of Games’ introduction to these hallowed rites. His crime was to be late for a House match because somebody had dropped his rugby boots down a lavatory. Only masters were allowed to chastise bare bottoms à la Eton, the school’s role model for any uplifting activity that cost them nothing. But this only happened to him once after he had been caught cheating at a Latin exam with a crib so brazen it wasn’t noticed until he was spotted casually folding it into a pocket as he left. The pain was not as bad as he expected, his anguish at the carelessness that had ruined a good plan much worse. Even so, he was surprised to discover that blood had been drawn.
It had been his mother’s insistence that they could afford to send him to an English boarding school and an idea he had readily fell in with because it was going to be such a wonderful adventure. Furthermore, he was going to the same place two second cousins were attending. They were the sons of his mother’s cousin, a person she had apparently been quite close to before her father decamped to the Holy Land. Henry was his own age and Edward a year younger. During his only previous visit to England he had got on famously with them and returned with fond memories of long bicycle rides and Pike fishing in the Fens.
At first his father had demurred, saying he was too young to leave home. Then, seeing his son’s disappointment, he had conceded it might be useful for him to learn something of his mother’s birthplace and acquire a native’s command of its widespread tongue. He was already almost bilingual. His parents had made something of a grand tour of it, taken him on the French mail boat from Haifa to Marseilles and thence by the Calais-Dover rail ferry to his final destination in the island’s misty hinterland then returned to Marseilles by a circuitous route that took them to Hamburg - where his father had business – and thence to Berlin where they merely wanted to see the sights.
The Templer had arrived at the school anticipating an exciting reunion with his cousins but it turned out that he had been put in a different House because there wasn’t a bed available in theirs. His mother, bidding him a moist farewell, had been assured that this would be "straightened out" but it never was. It was twenty-four hours before he first clapped eyes on his kin and when he di
d he found them aloof and anxious to make it plain to their coevals that they hardly knew him. “You have to make your own way here,” Henry had muttered to him during one of their brief encounters during a miserable first term. “Sink or swim.”
When the holidays came it had long been arranged that he would spend his first Christmas away from his parents at his second cousins’ home near King’s Lynn. He had been dreading it but it worked out surprisingly well. They travelled there together and the brothers acted as if there had not been the slightest distance between them. It was his first experience of the way some people could compartmentalise their lives and he learned something from it. Gradually he made his own friends and was sometimes invited to their homes for half terms and the Christmas and Easter breaks. Summers were mostly spent at home in Haifa despite the heat. The quickest way there was still by train to Marseilles and a two day trip to a Levantine shore in its last years of Ottoman decay on a French ship that, thanks to the new refrigeration, served the most delicious ice cream.
Then at Easter 1914, just before his 18th birthday, the Templer had been removed from his school a term early. At the time he had resented it. He would miss the cricket and he had put in a lot of net practise. Worst of all he would miss his last Joint Schools Officer Training Corps’ summer camp on Salisbury Plain. But his father was adamant. Playtime was over. He had arranged employment for him in a Hamburg shipping office. He was there by June, sharing digs with other young clerks and after work carousing with them in the beer halls off the narrow lanes of the Aldstadt where, on certain corners, painted females whispered exciting invitations. Not that he dared, not then. Instead, he and some of his friends attended a Viennese dancing school where some of the tutors were young ladies who hinted they might be prepared to do more than dance with them but, to his knowledge, never did. At least, they learned to dance.
The Templer had a nodding acquaintance with London: the city’s busy mainline stations that handled the boat train connections to France and a bit of sightseeing during a half term holiday staying with a school chum’s parents in Kensington. But in the summer of 1914 nothing he had experienced compared with being alone and on the threshold of manhood in Hamburg. The port called itself Germany’s Gateway to the World and it was true. Its bars were packed with drinking and whoring sailors of every nationality. Its wharves and docks were crowded with the ships that had come up the Elbe’s broad estuary from the North Sea and beyond. The Hamburg-America line rivalled Cunard. Days after his arrival the Kaiser himself was at the Blohm & Voss shipyard to launch the hull of the SS Bismarck, then the world’s biggest passenger liner and not to be confused with its namesake battleship.
Hamburg with its electric lights, trams and telephones surely summed up all that was good and strong and infinitely superior about modern Germany. It was full of admiring foreigners like himself: not just the neighbouring Danes and the other Scandinavians but Wyoming ranchers, Transvaal mining engineers, Brazilian coffee traders and various other Latins from southern Europe as well as the Americas. It was a glorious summer, and its well-kept streets were full of pretty girls in broad brimmed hats. The best looking ones were often to be seen on the back seat of an open Mercedes, winners of the recent French Grand Prix much to the distress of Peugeot. As he crossed the Elbe over the Lombardsbrücke on his way to work, or admired the architecture of its magnificent Rathaus, or learned to drink lager beer with his new friends the Templer realised that here he didn’t have to work at being accepted: at last the Hun was among the Huns.
July was coming to an end and never once had he found himself pining to bowl a googly or to be on Salisbury Plain capturing the enemy’s flag. Nor were his horizons limited to Germany. His father’s country also had an Empire. His employers had an office in Dar es Salaam and there were prospects of a posting there. One of its old hands had assured him that, with his background, he wouldn’t have a problem learning Swahili because East Africa’s lingua franca was full of Arabic loanwords.
Then, quite suddenly it seemed to him that the city had become full of military bands oompah-pahing away. Perhaps they had always been in the background, faintly off stage, part of the general hubbub. Certainly, he couldn’t recall noticing them before. Mercedes’ splendid victory over the French at their Grand Prix had come only a few days after the Serbian nationalist at Sarajevo had shot the Austrian archduke and his duchess. Yet the way the Templer remembered it, these two events had received almost equal attention in the press. Even the respected Hamburgischer Correspondent had praised Christian Lautenschlager’s splendid race in a long editorial extolling German skill and engineering. But now these marching bands were out in force, sometimes followed by columns of young men waving their hats in the air as they shouted slogans.
One of his new friends, slightly older than himself, explained they were reservists who had been called up. He too was a reservist and awaiting orders to report to his regiment at any moment. Germany’s Austrian allies had responded to the assassin in Sarajevo by attacking Serbia and the Kaiser was mobilising because his cousin the Czar was assembling over a million Russian troops to support their fellow Slavs. And now the French had announced they were backing the Russians. So it left a patriotic German with only one choice didn’t it? His friend thought the British were unlikely to get involved. They had these problems in Ireland. Besides, they hadn’t fought a European war for almost 100 years.
On Monday 3 August Germany declared war against France and entered Belgium. On the same day the Templer enlisted in the 165th Infantry regiment whose depot was in Hamburg. He was given a week to put his civilian affairs in order before reporting to a barracks in Lübeck to begin his basic training. Next day Britain declared war against Germany in order to uphold Belgium’s neutrality for which, it reminded all concerned, it had been a guarantor power since 1839. Thirty-six hour hours later he had received a telegram from his parents ordering him to return to Haifa immediately. Unusually it was signed Mutti und Papa as if to emphasise that, in the face of this universal madness, they at least remained at peace. His brief reply explained he was unable to leave Germany for the moment and a letter would follow.
Less than a year later he received his first wound during Haig’s offensive at Loos. Three more had followed, two from the French and another from the British on the Ypres salient. At this point he had become a Gefreiter – corporal – and recipient of the Iron Cross 2nd Class. He was just turned twenty and well on the way to becoming an Unteroffizier should he live that long which seemed unlikely. He had been saved by his ability to speak English and a sympathetic doctor who discovered him doing it with a prisoner lying in the next bed. While the Templer was still convalescing the amiable doctor steered him into the hands of the intelligence corps, rightly suspecting they would never let him go.
At first it had mainly been translating captured documents and sometimes interpreting for interrogators trying to question captured English speakers from all corners of the Empire.
“Your English is as good as mine,” said one curious New Zealander. “Where you from?”
“I think we ask the questions.”
Later on, towards the end, they would dress him up as a walking wounded British lieutenant and put him in the holding cages just behind the frontline where they kept the recently captured. The idea was to see what gems could be picked up through general chitchat. A sling was necessary so that the doctor sent in to extract him could take him out for examination with the other wounded.
Outside Arras in Spring of 1918 he was well into his cage masquerade when a dishevelled and rather angry looking captain in torn britches had limped up to him.
“Weren’t we at school together? Aren’t you the Hun?”
Under the stubble the Templer had recognised a vaguely familiar face and raised a finger to his lips.
“Shush,” he pleaded. “I don’t want them to know I understand German.”
“Sorry,” said the captain and before long they had slipped into a revealing conve
rsation about what would or wouldn’t penetrate a British tank and the new models they were expecting any day now. “I don’t think they’ll have the right kind of artillery in their front line positions to stop us.”
It turned out he was right though not entirely because of the improved quality of British tank armour. When six months later the Armistice came the Templer had been among the many who retreated into Germany in good order. At Hamburg he collected his discharge papers from the same regimental depot he had enlisted at in August 1914.
Little had changed. He saw that the SS Bismarck was still in the Blohm & Voss dock awaiting the three funnels that should have been installed when the liner was launched in the last days of peace. For four years more warlike work had taken priority. Rumours that once she was completed the ship would be handed over to Cunard as part of war reparations would turn out to be perfectly true and one of the lesser trophies being demanded at Versailles. Shortly before Easter 1919 the Templer had glimpsed the lost liner for the last time as he sailed out of the port on a rust bucket of a freighter bound for Haifa. Nor was he the only one aboard to weep at the sight of the stolen ship, no longer a symbol of Germany’s greatness but its humiliation. A group of German Jews, Zionists taking up the British offer to allow them to settle in the Palestine Mandate, seemed equally upset. It turned out that several of them had fought for the Kaiser.
After his mother’s departure he had remained in Palestine for another four years and though they wrote to each regularly neither could really afford to visit the other. His surviving parent had been far from enamoured with British rule. While she conceded it was more hygienic than the Turks she held the prescient view that allowing mass Jewish immigration was bound to lead to an Arab revolt.