That sense of ‘brotherhood on a large scale’, of comradeship ephemeral in reality but eternal in spirit, was truly universal.
In all these respects, the armies on the Western Front were like mirror images of one another. Indeed, towards the end of Under Fire, a wounded French aviator relates a striking vision of the trenches from the air which makes precisely this point:
… I could make out two similar gatherings among the Boche and ourselves, in these parallel lines that seem to touch one another: a crowd, a hub of movement and, around it, what looked like black grains of sand scattered on grey ones. They weren’t moving; it didn’t seem like an alarm!… Then I understood. It was Sunday and these were two services being held in front of my eyes: the altars, the priests and the congregations. The nearer I got the more I could see that these two gatherings were similar – so exactly similar that it seemed ridiculous. One of the ceremonies – whichever you liked – was a reflection of the other. I felt as though I was seeing double.
HATRED IN THE TRENCHES
All the resemblances between the combatants have led many writers before and since to wonder why the opposing armies did not fraternize more with one another. Famously, some British and German soldiers did just that on Christmas Day of 1914 when they played football together in no man’s land as part of an unofficial truce. Less well known is the fact that over a longer period a kind of ‘live and let live’ system evolved in certain relatively quiet sectors of the line. Yet the hopes of socialists that soldiers would ultimately repudiate their national loyalties for the sake of international brotherhood were never realized on the Western Front. Why was this?
The answer is that as the war went on, mutual hatred grew, expunging the common origins and predicament of the combatants. ‘The German officers,’ reflects Barbusse’s Tiroir, ‘oh, no, no, no, they’re not men, they’re monsters. They really are a special, nasty breed of vermin, old man. You could call them the microbes of war. You’ve got to see them close to, those horrible great stiff things, thin as nails, but with calves’ heads on them.’ In the harrowing attack that is the climax of Under Fire, the enemy become simply ‘the bastards’:
‘You bet, mate, instead of listening to him, I stuck me bayonet in his belly so far I couldn’t pull it out.’
‘Well, I found four of them at the bottom of the trench, I called to them to come out and each one, as he came, I bumped him off. I was red right up to my elbows. My sleeves are sticky with it.’…
‘I had three of them to deal with. I hit out like a maniac. Oh, we were all like beasts when we reached here.’
Likewise, when they go over the top, the soldiers in Middle Parts of Fortune hate the enemy. ‘Fear remained,’ Manning writes, ‘an implacable and restless fear, but that, too, seemed to have been beaten and forged into a point of exquisite sensibility and to have become indistinguishable from hate.’ Almost deranged by Martlow’s death, Bourne runs amok in the German lines:
Three men ran towards them, holding their hands up and screaming; and he lifted his rifle to his shoulder and fired; and the ache in him became a consuming hate that filled him with exultant cruelty, and he fired again, and again… And Bourne struggled forward again, panting, and muttering in a suffocated voice.
‘Kill the buggers! Kill the bloody fucking swine! Kill them!’
As Manning admits, this blood lust has a pleasurable quality: he even talks of ‘the ecstasy of battle’, by comparison with which even ‘the physical ecstasy of love… is less poignant’. A certain type of soldier, he notes, ‘comes to grips, kills, and grunts with pleasure in killing’. Bourne himself is ‘thrust forward’ by:
a triumphant frenzy… [He] was at once the most abject and the most exalted of God’s creatures. The effort and rage in him… made him pant and sob, but there was some strange intoxication of joy in it, and again all his mind seemed focused into one hard bright point of action. The extremities of pain and pleasure had met and coincided too.
This is very close to Remarque’s account of combat in All Quiet, in which Paul Bäumer and his comrades ‘turn into dangerous animals’:
We are not fighting, we are defending ourselves from annihilation… W e are maddened with fury… we can destroy and we can kill to save ourselves, to save ourselves and to take revenge… We have lost all feelings for others, we barely recognize each other when somebody else comes into our line of vision… We are dead men with no feelings, who are able by some trick, some dangerous magic, to keep on running and keep on killing.
The Frenchmen whose positions they overrun are killed horribly, their faces split in two by entrenching tools, or smashed with the butt of a rifle. Attackers and attacked are simultaneously reduced to the level of animals.
Nothing illustrates the intensification of front-line animosity more strikingly than the change that occurred during the First World War in attitudes towards enemy prisoners. The laws of war made it clear that men who surrendered had to be properly treated; it was a crime under the Hague Conventions to kill prisoners. Contemporaries also clearly understood the practical benefits of taking prisoners alive, not only for the purposes of gathering intelligence through interrogation but also for the sake of propaganda. A substantial proportion of the British film The Battle of the Somme consists of footage of captured Germans. Sergeant York’s capture of 132 Germans was one of the highlights of American war propaganda in 1918. The humane treatment of prisoners also came to play an important part in the propaganda directed at the enemy. Towards the end of the war, a sustained effort was made to convey the idea that Germans would be well treated if they surrendered; indeed, would be better off than they were in their own lines. Thousands of leaflets were dropped on German positions, some of them little more than advertisements for conditions in Allied prisoner-of-war camps. Official British photographers were encouraged to snap ‘wounded and nerve-shattered German prisoners’ being given drink and cigarettes. The Americans even devised cheerful cards for surrendering Germans to sign and send to their relatives: ‘Do not worry about me. The war is over for me. I have good food. The American army gives its prisoners the same food it gives its own soldiers: beef, white bread, potatoes, beans, prunes, coffee, butter, tobacco etc.’
Nevertheless, many men on both sides of the Western Front were deterred from surrendering by the growth of a culture of ‘take no prisoners’, part of the cycle of violence that grew spontaneously out of the war of attrition. The rationales offered by men for killing prisoners shed startling light on the primitive impulses that the war unleashed.
In some cases, prisoners were killed in revenge for attacks on civilians. The Germans had been the first to cross this threshold during the opening weeks of the war, when their troops carried out brutal reprisals for alleged attacks by francs-tireurs (snipers in civilian clothes). Entire villages in Belgium, Lorraine and the Vosges were razed and their male populations summarily shot, despite the fact that many of the ‘attacks’ were in fact friendly fire by other trigger-happy Germans, or legitimate actions by French regular forces. In all, around 5,500 Belgian civilians were killed, victims more of nervousness verging on paranoia on the part of the invaders than of a systematic policy of terrorizing the local populace. These ‘atrocities’ certainly happened. One soldier, a physician from Stuttgart named Pezold, recorded in his diary the fate of the inhabitants of the Belgian village of Arlon, more than 120 of whom were shot dead for alleged sniping and molestation of German wounded:
They were then dragged by the legs and thrown onto a pile, and the corporals shot with their revolvers all those who had not been killed by the infantry. The whole exceution was witnessed by the pastor, a woman and two young girls, who were the last to be shot…
Such incidents were, however, luridly embroidered in Entente propaganda; in addition to shooting civilians, the Germans were accused of rape and infanticide. As early as February 1915, B.C. Myatt, one of the ‘Old Contemptibles’ of the British Expeditionary Force, noted in his diary:
We
know we are suffering these awful hardships to protect our beloved one’s [sic] at home from the torture and the rape of these German pigs [who] have done some awful deeds in France and Belgium cutting off childrens hands and cutting off womans breasts awful deeds [sic].
An Australian soldier described in August 1917 how an officer shot two Germans, one wounded, in a shell hole:
The German asked him to give his comrade a drink. ‘Yes,’ our officer said, ‘I’ll give the ——— a drink, take this,’ and he emptied his revolver on the two of them. This is the only way to treat a Hun. What we enlisted for was to kill Huns, those baby-killing ____.’
The Germans were also the first to bomb cities; the Zeppelins over Scarborough and London were harbingers of a new era in which death would rain down from the sky on defenceless town-dwellers. These attacks too incited reprisals. One British soldier recalled how a friend had to be restrained from killing a captured German pilot:
He tried to find out whether he had been over [London] dropping bombs. He said, ‘If he’s been over there, I’ll shoot him! He’ll never get away.’ He would have done too. Life meant nothing to you. Life was in jeopardy and when you’d got a load of Jerries stinking to high heaven, you hadn’t much sympathy with their Kamerad and all this cringing business.
But it was above all the Germans’ intermittent use of unrestricted submarine warfare against merchant and passenger ships that embittered men on the other side. ‘Some [surrendering Germans] would crawl on their knees,’ recalled one British soldier, ‘holding a picture of a woman or a child in their hands above their heads but everyone was killed. The excitement was gone. We killed in cold blood because it was our duty to kill as much as we could. I thought many a time of the Lusitania. I had actually prayed for that day [of revenge], and when I got it, I killed just as much as I had hoped fate would allow me to kill.’ In May 1915 the avant-garde sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska wrote from the Western Front to Ezra Pound, describing a recent skirmish with the Germans: ‘We also had a handful of prisoners – 10 – & as we had just learnt the loss of the “Lusitania” they were executed with the [rifle] butts after a 10 minutes dissertation [sic] among the N.C.[O.] and the men.’
More often, prisoners were killed in retaliation for more proximate enemy action. This pattern of behaviour manifested itself right at the start of the war, with German soldiers killing French prisoners on the ground that French soldiers had previously killed Germans who had surrendered. In his diary for June 16, 1915, A. Ashurt Moris recorded his own experience of killing a surrendering man:
At this point, I saw a Hun, fairly young, running down the trench, hands in air, looking terrified, yelling for mercy. I promptly shot him. It was a heavenly sight to see him fall forward. A Lincoln officer was furious with me, but the scores we owe wash out anything else.
Private Frank Richards of the Royal Welch Fusiliers recalled seeing another man in his regiment walk off down the Menin Road with six prisoners only to return some minutes later having ‘done the trick’ with ‘two bombs’. Richards attributed his action to the fact that ‘the loss of his pal had upset him very much’. Though sometimes spontaneous, this kind of behaviour seems to have been encouraged by some commissioned officers, who believed that the order ‘Take no prisoners’ enhanced the aggression and therefore the combat effectiveness of their men. A verbal order to finish off French prisoners was issued to some German troops as early as September 1914. But there was nothing peculiarly German about this kind of thing. One British brigadier was heard by a soldier in the Suffolks to say on the eve of the Battle of the Somme: ‘You may take prisoners, but I don’t want to see them.’ Another man, in the 17th Highland Light Infantry, recalled the order ‘that no quarter was to be shown to the enemy and no prisoners taken’. Private Arthur Hubbard of the London Scottish Regiment also received strict orders not to take prisoners, ‘no matter if wounded’. His ‘first job’, he recalled, ‘was when I had finished cutting some of the wire away, to empty my magazine on 3 Germans that came out of their deep dugouts, bleeding badly, and put them out of their misery, they cried for mercy, but I had my orders, they had no feelings whatever for us poor chaps’. In his notes ‘from recent fighting’ by II Corps, dated August 17, 1916, General Sir Claud Jacob urged that no prisoners should be taken, as they hindered mopping up. According to Arthur Wrench, battalion orders before an attack at Third Ypres included the words: ‘NO PRISONERS’ which ‘with the line scored through meant “do as you please”’.
Sometimes the order was given to kill prisoners simply to avoid the inconvenience of escorting them back to captivity. As Brigadier General F. P. Crozier observed: ‘The British soldier is a kindly fellow and it is safe to say, despite the dope [propaganda], seldom oversteps the mark of propriety in France, save occasionally to kill prisoners he cannot be bothered to escort back to his lines.’ John Eugene Crombie of the Gordon Highlanders was ordered in April 1917 to bayonet surrendering Germans in a captured trench because it was ‘expedient from a military point of view’. Other more spuriously practical arguments were also used. Private Frank Bass of the 1st Battalion, Cambridgeshire Regiment, was told by an instructor at Étaples: ‘Remember, boys… every prisoner means a day’s rations gone.’ Jimmy O’Brien of the 10th Dublin Fusiliers recalled being told by his chaplain (an English clergyman named Thornton):
Well now boys, we’re going into action tomorrow morning and if you take any prisoners your rations will be cut by half. So don’t take prisoners. Kill them! If you take prisoners they’ve got to be fed by your rations. So you’ll get half rations. The answer is – don’t take prisoners.
On June 16, 1915, Charles Tames, a private in the Honourable Artillery Company, described an incident following an attack at Bellewaarde near Ypres:
We were under shell fire for eight hours, it was more like a dream to me, we must have been absolutely mad at the time, some of the chaps looked quite insane after the charge was over, as we entered the German trenches hundreds of Germans were found cut up by our artillery fire, a great number came out and asked for mercy, needless to say they were shot right off which was the best mercy we could give them. The Royal Scots took about 300 prisoners, their officers told them to share their rations with the prisoners and to consider the officers were not with them, the Scots immediately shot the whole lot, and shouted ‘Death and Hell to everyone of ye s—’ and in five minutes the ground was ankle deep with German blood…
In its most extreme form, however, prisoner killing was justified on the basis that the only good German was a dead German. When the 12th Battalion of the Middlesex Regiment attacked Thiepval on September 26, 1916, Colonel Frank Maxwell VC ordered his men not to take any prisoners, on the ground that ‘all Germans should be exterminated’. On October 21 Maxwell left his battalion a farewell message. In it he praised his men for having ‘begun to learn that the only way to treat the German is to kill him’. In the words of Private Stephen Graham, ‘The opinion cultivated in the army regarding the Germans was that they were a sort of vermin like plague-rats that had to be exterminated.’ A Major Campbell allegedly told new recruits: ‘If a fat, juicy Hun cries “Mercy” and speaks of his wife and nine children, give him the point – two inches is enough – and finish him. He is the kind of man to have another nine “Hate” children if you let him off. So run no risks.’
The fact that these attitudes could take root on the Western Front, where the ethnic differences between the two sides were in fact quite minimal, was an indication of how easily hatred could flourish in the brutalizing conditions of total war. In other theatres of war, where the differences were deeper, the potential for unconstrained violence was greater still.
Exactly how often such prisoner killings occurred is impossible to establish. Clearly, only a small minority of men who surrendered were killed in this way. Equally clearly, not all of those who received such orders approved of them or felt able to carry them out. Hundreds of thousands of German soldiers were taken prisoner, especially i
n the final phase of the war, without suffering ill treatment. But the numbers involved mattered less than the perception that surrender was risky. Men magnified these episodes: they passed into trench mythology. The German trench newspaper Kriegsflugblätter devoted its front page on January 29, 1915, to a cartoon depicting just such an incident. ‘G’meinhuber Michel’ advances on a Tommy; the Tommy puts his hands up; the Tommy then shoots at the advancing Michel; Michel then gets the Tommy by the throat; he proceeds to beat him to a pulp with his rifle butt, crying ‘I’ll turn ye into an English beef steak’ (Doass muass a englisches Boeffsteck wer’n’); and is duly rewarded with the Iron Cross. In real life, such incidents were more often than not the result of uncoordinated surrendering rather than duplicity; it only needed one man to keep shooting, unaware that his comrades had laid down their arms. But trench lore favoured the notion of trickery. And units that felt they had lost men this way were less likely to take prisoners in future. When Private Jack Ashley was captured at the Somme, his German captor told him that the British shot all their prisoners and that the Germans ‘ought to do the same’.
THE SURRENDER
The First World War confirmed the truth of the nineteenth-century military theorist Carl von Clausewitz’s dictum that it is capturing not killing the enemy that is the key to victory in war. Despite the huge death toll inflicted on the Allies by the Germans and their allies, outright victory failed to materialize: demography meant that there were more or less enough new French and British conscripts each year to plug the gaps created by attrition. However, it did prove possible, first on the Eastern Front and then on the Western, to get the enemy to surrender in such large numbers that his ability to fight was fatally weakened. Large-scale surrenders (and desertions) in 1917 were the key to Russia’s military defeat. Overall, more than half of all Russian casualties took the form of men who were taken prisoner – nearly 16 per cent of all Russian troops mobilized. Austria and Italy also lost a large proportion of men in this way: respectively a third and quarter of all casualties. One in four Austrians mobilized ended up a prisoner. The large-scale surrender of Italian troops at Caporetto came close to putting Italy out of the war. The low point of British fortunes – from around November 1917 to May 1918 – saw large increases in the numbers of Britons in captivity: in March 1918 alone, around 100,000 were taken, more than in all the previous years of fighting combined. In August 1918, however, it was German soldiers who began to give themselves up in large numbers. Between July 30 and October 21 the total number of Germans in British hands rose by a factor of nearly four. This was the real sign that the war was ending. Significantly, foreign exchange dealers in the unregulated Swiss market took the same view. They bought marks when the Germans bagged large numbers of prisoners in the spring of 1918 and dumped them when the tables were turned in August.
The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred Page 20