Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War (95 page)

Civilians behind the lines endured varying gradations of hardship at the hands of the armies. For most of the war, artillery fire provided background orchestration for the townspeople and villagers of south-western Germany and eastern France. Many innocents were shot as alleged spies. Local people often asserted that their own army displayed as much contempt for property as did the enemy. Belgian Pte. Charles Stein had an altercation with a farmer, one of his fellow countrymen, who complained bitterly about soldiers stealing straw to sleep on. Stein suggested that if the Germans were in their place, they would give him a much harder time. Not so, said the farmer doggedly, ‘we had Germans here before you came and they were good people who paid for everything they took’.

In enemy-occupied eastern France, however, two million civilians were subjected to a relentlessly harsh regime, which caused them to refer to the land beyond the lines as ‘Free France’. The Germans imposed their own
time zone, one or two hours ahead of Paris according to the season. A few bold spirits contrived to escape westwards because, as a citizen of Fontaine au Pire wrote, ‘living at Fontaine was no longer France – we were living by German time’. Passes were required for all travel, public gatherings were banned. The occupiers devised a range of extortionate financial levies. Yves Congar, a boy living in Sedan, had to see his family’s dog killed to escape a German tax on pets.

The occupiers ignored the provisions of the Hague Convention and conscripted tens of thousands of civilians for forced labour. One old man of seventy-four was obliged to sweep the streets of Lille in all weathers, ‘scarcely fed, exposed to both sides’ shellfire. He patiently endured a harsh form of slavery.’ A priest likewise described how all age groups and both sexes were set to work, ‘the children to mind their animals and pick apples, while young girls had to sweep the streets, the stables, houses occupied by Germans; others to work in the fields or stitch machine-gun belts. Meanwhile the young men were set to digging graves in which to bury the many dead brought back from the front.’

Not all the occupiers behaved brutally to their unwilling French hosts. At Cannectancourt in October, medical officer Lorenz Treplin organised a boys’ race in the village which attracted a crowd of both soldiers and civilians – the winner was awarded a prize of peppermint candy. When a tearful woman came to protest about soldiers removing her cow, saying that she had to nurture both a one-year-old baby and a ninety-year-old grandfather, Treplin wrote: ‘After I convinced myself that both alleged milk-consumers were real, we returned the cow to her on the understanding that she would provide us with several litres of milk daily. With that, all parties were satisfied.’ During the long winter lulls between offensives, the medical officer opened his surgery to local people, who rewarded him with pears.

Maurice Delmotte, an elderly farmer in Fontaine, described how at first German officers billeted in French homes would eat with their weapons handy. But as both unwilling hosts and lodgers grew to understand that the war might last a long time, most families contrived accommodations with ‘their’ Germans. Paul Hub, a soldier billeted in the Belgian village of Pipaix, wrote to his wife Maria asking for a pocket French-German dictionary: ‘The people are very friendly and kind to us.’ Paul Kessler was stationed in Lille, where he worked in the army postal service. He recoiled in dismay from the harsh tone adopted in a German–French phrasebook issued to occupying troops. Men entering billets were invited to address
their involuntary hosts with such lines as: ‘Show me to my room immediately’ … ‘This cruddy hole? How dare you!’ … ‘Open all the doors immediately’ … ‘I shall hold you liable for …’ The phrasebook had been compiled in Berlin long ago, for the enlightenment of soldiers serving with victorious occupation forces. Kessler found himself perusing the 33rd edition, issued in 1913. He wrote to his wife Elise: ‘Great – you can be happy if you do not belong to the other side. I have never adopted such a tone … It is possible to be both friendly and vigilant.’

Georg Bantlin, a twenty-six-year-old staff surgeon who was also his regiment’s billeting officer, found himself wrestling with the problem of accommodating in the small Belgian town of Ronquières (pop. 7,000) two headquarters staffs, an infantry regiment, two ammunition trains, an artillery detachment, and two medical companies – in all, almost 5,000 men and seven hundred horses. Ordinary soldiers slept on straw, laid on the floor of almost every living space. Only officers were allocated beds, and ate in a local château. Bantlin wrote home: ‘We eat in the magnificent dining room overlooking gorgeous gardens … Carefully-prepared dinners and superb wines eaten off a nobleman’s service taste a little different from field-kitchen soup eaten with tin spoons off tin plates. We make rather a sharp contrast to our surroundings: nailed boots tread on beautiful Persian carpets. Our weather-worn uniforms clash strangely with silk-upholstered armchairs, Flemish leather wallpapers and old Gobelin tapestries.’

Posters in the streets of every occupied community assured the inhabitants that they had nothing to fear so long as they respected German regulations; contrarily, if these were breached they would be shot. Initial attempts were made to persuade men voluntarily to enlist for labour service, which in 1916 became compulsory and brutally harsh. Local roll calls were held twice weekly in every community. Some Germans behaved entirely correctly to their French and Belgian hosts, and were usually repaid in kind. Others, however, seized whatever property took their fancy. One soldier wrote to a friend of an experience east of Laon: ‘We take from the French population all their lead, tin, copper, cork, oil, candlesticks, kitchen pots … which are sent off to Germany. I had a good haul the other day with one of my comrades. In a walled-up room we found fifteen copper musical instruments, a new bicycle, 150 pairs of sheets, some towels and six beaten-copper candlesticks. You can imagine the fuss made by the old hag who owned them. I just laughed. The commandant was very pleased.’

Paranoia, not merely about
francs-tireurs
, but also about duplicitous pigeons bearing messages to the French lines, infected the entire German army. Adolf Spemann in Lorraine noted in his diary that fulfilling an order to shoot down all passing pigeons ‘has become quite a popular sport’. ‘A flock took wing in the village behind us and flew straight and fast towards the west. These poor minxes now cop it, too, but that’s better than Germans [dying].’ The occupiers inflicted savage communal punishments on communities they believed guilty of harbouring
francs-tireurs
. On 19 October Lt. Hans Rensch, a Leipziger serving in a rail-construction company, drove through the village of Orchies, which had been put to the torch ten days earlier: ‘It is a heap of ruins. I saw a sobbing woman with her small child standing in front of the remains of her house. It’s such a shame and misery. I nearly broke down as I saw some twenty women and children digging around in the ruins of their homes. But what’s the use? If the population acts bestially against wounded [Germans allegedly attacked by
francs-tireurs
] the whole locality has to be burnt. The guilty ones are hard to find, the 99% who are innocents must suffer. A nameless misery has come upon the French people. And what will [this place be like] in winter?’ Rensch’s scruples did not extend to property, however: when a friend from home offered to send some comforts for his men, the lieutenant dismissed the idea, saying that they were already spoilt for good things, for the French were obliged to supply them with anything they wanted. ‘We never find ourselves short of clothing or food. Our men “discover” those things France does not hand over. Our fellows have a flair for that. They ferret out the loveliest stuff even in wrecked villages.’

One day early in December, the regiment of Louis Barthas, the former barrel-maker from Aude, exulted on receiving orders for their relief, with departure at 4 a.m. for rest billets in Mazingharbe. But lips curled in cynicism when, as they marched joyfully to the rear, they halted four miles from Mazingharbe and were issued with two days’ rations. They understood that they were to fight once more. Their officers told them they would attack at dawn. Barthas wrote bitterly: ‘So this was to be our rest; yes – eternal rest for some … But why this ridiculous comedy, this hateful trickery. What do they fear, a mutiny perhaps? They value us so highly that they think us capable of some small gesture of protest as we are led to the abattoir. We were not citizens but a herd of beasts of burden.’ Their bitterness intensified when they learned that their own assault was designed merely as a diversion, to cover a British attack on La Bassée and a French
operation against Arras. ‘Oh
Patrie
, what crimes are committed in your name!’ lamented Barthas.

Carnage followed: the regiment became pinned down by fire as it advanced across a field of sugar beet, ‘providing mere target practice for the Germans’. Barthas found himself struggling vainly to staunch the wounds of a comrade whose cheeks, tongue and entire jaw had been torn open by shrapnel. After a night spent carrying the wounded to the rear in the absence of stretcher-bearers, Barthas’s unit renewed their assault next morning. Their officer, Lt. Rodière, became wildly excited and apparently drunk. He strutted along their trench under a barrage waving a German bayonet and promising to ‘skewer the Boche with his own steel’. A few minutes later he was dead, hit as he peered incautiously over the parapet.

In several French units there were the first spasms not of mutiny, but of resistance to such mindless follies. ‘Some reservists,’ wrote François Mayer, ‘have lost the habit of discipline, and indicate to their leaders that they don’t care to advance under fire under their command – some speak of going to join another company, properly run.’ As Louis Barthas gazed upon the horrors before him, he thought savagely about ‘all those pictures of battle which adorn the walls of our museums or illustrate the pages of our history books, in which commanders are depicted on plumed horses, amid waving flags, bugles, drums, cannon sounding, illuminated by heroic frenzy and intoxication. Where are our great commanders and even our lesser ones today? Holed up in some dugout with their ears to a telephone.’

Robert Scott-Mcfie had left the British Army as a sergeant in 1907 after seven years’ service, then at the age of forty-six re-enlisted in the Liverpool Scottish on the outbreak of war, and went to France in November. His company’s early experiences of the trenches were as ghastly as most. ‘We are none of us particularly well,’ he wrote to his father on 23 December, ‘and the whole battalion is weakened by an epidemic of diarrhoea which has been going on for several weeks.’ Marching forward along broken and waterlogged roads, ‘a pitiable number of men dropped out, unable to keep up … my first misfortune was to fall into a deep ditch full of water, right up to the waist. A little later I tumbled on my face in the deep slime, and with a heavy pack on the back … had some difficulty extricating myself.’ On reaching the line, the battalion immediately became engaged in a brisk firefight which cost a stream of casualties. Beyond the losses, wrote Scott-Mcfie gloomily, nobody seemed to care ‘that all our clothes are soaked, that we shall not have an opportunity of drying them for weeks, that half
our equipment is lost, our rifles clogged with mud, etc … There will not be much left of the Liverpool Scottish soon … It is amazing to me that I am among the survivors considering my age.’

German soldier Kresten Andresen wrote, after seeing a town in Picardy looted by his comrades: ‘How brutal and ruthless war is! The finest values are trampled underfoot – Christianity, morality, home and hearth. And yet, in our time, there is so much talk about Civilisation. One is inclined to lose faith in civilisation and [other] values when they are not shown more respect than this.’ Rudolf Binding described the scene of desolation in Flanders, then reflected despairingly: ‘everything becomes senseless, a lunacy, a horrible bad joke of peoples and their history, an endless reproach to mankind, a negation of all civilisation, killing all belief in the capacity of mankind and men for progress, a desecration of what is holy, so that one feels that all human beings are doomed in this war’.

Neither side had a monopoly of brutality. On 5 October Lucien Laby was in charge of an escort taking fourteen German prisoners to the rear, when their little column was suddenly beset by Senegalese troops determined to cut off the Germans’ ears. After a violent scuffle, the colonial soldiers were driven back. One big Senegalese saluted Laby and said wistfully, ‘O my lieutenant – you might have let me cut off two ears … just two ears!’ A French army chaplain, while applauding the terror that such colonial infantry inspired among the Germans, deplored the difficulties of dealing with their wounded as patients at his hospital: ‘the blacks from North Africa are almost as civilised as their Berber or Arab compatriots … [but] there are others from West Africa and the French Congo … who are very primitive indeed’. Few Moroccans, Tunisians, Algerians and the like even spoke the language of their colonial masters. A wounded Sudanese resisted being undressed, and when being treated ‘roared like a wild animal and bit the nurse’s hand badly … taken next day to the operating theatre for the draining of the wound, he looked curiously at the tube of ether and put it to his nose himself’.

A sense of shared victimhood was evolving among men of all the warring armies which progressively grew to transcend, in the minds of more than a few, commitment to a national cause. British officer Wilbert Spencer described an encounter with German prisoners: ‘An awfully nice lot of fellows. I was awfully popular, having simply crowds round me listening to my excellent German pronunciation. I had long talks with all and promised to go over to Berlin after the war to drink a bottle of Lager with them. They said they wished I could come oftener. They of course
were rather dirty after fighting and travelling but were really a gentlemanly lot on the whole.’ The socialist anti-militarist Jean Petit wrote in a later narrative of his own life as a PoW of the Germans: ‘French, Belgians, Russians, English all sleep jumbled up together. It is a new Tower of Babel. Each nation has its good and bad points; some are good, honest and clean, others are aggressive, rapacious and disgusting. They were our enemies once and today they are our allies. Neither they nor we know why. We are but toys or puppets.’