Meeting the Enemy (10 page)

Internment began again in early October when gruesome and largely unsubstantiated tales of enemy atrocities caused public outrage. Within days, perennial problems of accommodation caused authorities to backtrack and Chief Constables were once more instructed to halt arrests while accommodation was found. The War Office would notify Chief Constables as beds became available, allowing arrests to resume. In fact the government did not revisit the issue of internment until the next bout of anti-German paranoia hit Britain the following May by which time, conversely, 3,000 enemy aliens had been released back into the community to ease the pressure on space.

The government’s logistical problems were mostly of its own making. In peacetime, Britain’s regular army numbered 250,000 men, but of these well over half were stationed overseas on garrison duty in such places as India and South Africa. Britain relied on its navy for national security and the regular army was small in comparison to those of its European counterparts. On the outbreak of war the new Secretary of State for War, Lord Kitchener, set out his stall for a New Army made up of civilian volunteers. In five months nearly 1.2 million men responded to the call to enlist, swamping the army’s ability to house, let alone train and equip them. Out of necessity, 800,000 soldiers were billeted in private dwellings by the autumn, while hundreds of thousands more were living in existing or hastily erected camps. Many men, rather than being billeted in huts, were still under canvas; all right in summer but with autumn rains and colder nights, these once happy-go-lucky civilians were becoming disgruntled soldiers slopping around ankle-deep in mud.

While poor living conditions bedevilled camps for Kitchener’s volunteers, there was little chance that the authorities were going to expend energy on the comforts of enemy prisoners and internees. With suitable accommodation at a premium, civilians were packed into anything available and this varied greatly in quality. The War Office, for example, requisitioned nine transatlantic liners at a cost of around £75,000 a month. The ships retained their three classes of accommodation and fortunate was the German who could afford to pay for the privilege of a first-class suite and, if he was prepared to find six shillings and sixpence extra, even better food and waiter service. This was a far cry from the worst examples of accommodation such as that given over to 700 civilians sent to an old wagon factory in Lancaster. The floor, made of wooden blocks, was filthy; there was no heating or artificial light and scant bedding or furniture of any kind. Sanitary arrangements were inadequate and fresh water in short supply. At Newbury racecourse, internees slept in horse boxes, six or eight stretched out side by side. All were locked up from sunset until morning with no heating and the grounds a quagmire. Only when a large camp was constructed at Knockaloe on the Isle of Man were unsuitable camps closed.

Private Thomas Hughes, a recruit serving with the 1/28th London Regiment (Artist’s Rifles), was sent with other men in the battalion to mount guard at the Olympia exhibition centre. Here, as on the transatlantic liners, position and relative wealth made a difference, however small, to a man’s quality of life.

The wretched Germans are herded together in pens in the annexe, with a large pen at the far end, called the House of Lords, where about 20 men were, owing to their blood and wealth. [These men are] kept apart and allowed chairs to sit on and to buy extra food beyond the half pint of tea and two slices of bread and butter allowed to the proletariat, who only get meat once a day. Five men had blood of such blueness or purses of such length that they were allowed to go out into the yard for an hour a day with a sentry. The rest only walk round and round the main hall in fours for an hour every afternoon, a grim procession of lost souls.

At Olympia, as elsewhere, internees became the target for repeated degradation and even physical violence, much to the obvious disgust of Private Hughes:

Only one man, an Irish Guard, was a sufficiently advanced cad actually to knock the prisoners about and he only just hit the very small ones who were unlikely to retaliate, but every humiliation was turned upon them. They have to give up their blankets and mattresses every morning and have them dealt out again at the point of the bayonet every evening. There are not enough of either to go around and they get different ones each night so that the talk of keeping free from vermin is well nigh impossible.

Britain’s policy of internment brought retribution. After remonstrating with the British government, its German counterpart announced on 6 November that all unnaturalised British male civilians of military age would be held. But there were fewer than 3,900 Britons in Germany who were eligible. One huge camp on Ruhleben racecourse, near Berlin, was turned over for their confinement. Here, too, internees were forced to sleep in brick stable buildings and haylofts until a vast complex of huts was eventually built.

Finding suitable secure accommodation for prisoners of war was a greater struggle for the Germans than it was even for the British. With its requirement that all young men undertake at least two years’ military service, and very commonly three, Germany had a large number of barracks that could be used to hold prisoners. The problem was that Germany was also calling up vast numbers of young men and they would also require accommodation. The Germans were also fighting a war on two fronts, and with substantial and easy victories against the French in the west and the Russians in the east, 815,000 prisoners only exacerbated the difficulty. These men arrived in Germany at an average rate of over 100,000 per month, vastly more than the 7,000 German soldiers removed to Britain over the same period. Indeed, prior to the Battle of the Somme in July 1916, the British held fewer than 14,000 German prisoners of war.

Private Charles Duder, serving with the 4th Royal Fusiliers, described his POW camp at Sennelager. It was September 1914 and the men lay in the open, with no tents or mattresses.

This lasted some two or three weeks, during which time we got two dirty old blankets. The food was bad and insufficient . . . Afterwards we got into tents, accommodation very bad, very wet, lying on straw, which got like floating mud. We soon got covered with vermin. After being in the tents some time we went to Senne II. First of all we were in stables and then as soon as the huts were built, we were moved into them; this would be some time in December.

The living conditions for British POWs were shaped in part by the German belief that their own prisoners were being ill-treated. The American ambassador in Berlin, James Gerard, went to Britain to see conditions for himself, reporting back that prisoners were being reasonably treated, thereby improving conditions in Germany. Soon afterwards an agreement was reached that, on giving reasonable notice, the American ambassadors in London and Berlin or their representatives would have the right to visit POW camps in either country and converse with prisoners out of the earshot of camp guards. This sounded good in theory. However, owing to the federal nature of the German state the quality of POW camps varied immensely. Germany had been divided into Army Corps districts, each district presided over by a corps commander who had virtual autonomy, to the effective exclusion of outside civilian officials. It was
his
attitude to prisoners that dictated how good or how bad a camp became for its inmates.

By the beginning of September 1914, nearly 10,000 British officers and men were missing or captured. Their number included Major Charles Yate of the 2nd King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry, taken prisoner at the Battle of Le Cateau on 26 August. This officer’s story was remarkably similar to that of Captain Morritt’s last-ditch bayonet charge. Cut off, his ammunition exhausted and with all other company officers killed or wounded, Major Yate led twenty survivors in a bayonet charge against overwhelming odds. He was captured when a German officer kicked his revolver from his hand.

It was believed that Major Yate had been wounded, although a photograph taken shortly after his capture shows the forty-two-year-old surrounded by German infantrymen. He looks exhausted, but if he was wounded his injuries were slight. There was even an unsubstantiated report that Yate had tried to shoot himself rather than be taken prisoner and that the German officer’s action in knocking the revolver from his hand forestalled a suicide attempt.

Major Yate was sent to Germany with a number of officers, including Captain Walter Roche and Lieutenant Jocelyn Hardy, both of the Connaught Rangers, and Captain Arthur Hargreaves of the Somerset Light Infantry. All these officers testified that they received very rough treatment on their journey through Germany, as well as being jostled and heckled by civilians in the streets of Torgau, as Hargreaves reported.

On our arrival there, a vast crowd was assembled at the station. From the station to the Brückenkopf barracks (where we were to be imprisoned) was a seething mass of screaming men, women and children. The anger on their faces was terrible to see. They shook their fists, spat at us, and yelled themselves hoarse. I heard a woman (of the upper classes) shout out ‘Recht fur die Schweine!’

Unlike his travelling companions, Major Yate faced an uncomfortable and serious allegation of spying, serious enough, it seems, for two German officers to be sent from Berlin to interrogate him. There was some substance to the Germans’ suspicions of the major. Before the war, Yate had served at the War Office and the Germans were aware that not only was he fluent in German but that he had made numerous visits to their country. Taken to the camp commandant’s office, Yate rebuffed searching questions, according to Lieutenant Breen, a prisoner with whom he shared a hut.

Yate came to me to say that he was not quite clear as to what the German Military Authorities were aiming at, but that the German officers had tried by cross-examination to obtain an admission on his part that he had been engaged on Intelligence work in Germany before the War. He did not know what the next step would be. He was very reticent on this subject, and he did not say definitely to me whether he had been engaged on work of this kind or not. I remember that I reminded him that the usage of war and, I thought, even a definite clause in the Hague Convention, precluded the prosecution of a prisoner of war for espionage committed before the outbreak of hostilities. We agreed however that the matter was serious and that the German Military Authorities were not likely to recognize any usage or written convention when they had decided on a course of action.

The son of a German mother and English father, Charles Yate was born in Mecklenburg in 1872. His parents had moved back to England by the time he was two, but he spoke German with his mother and considered himself fluent in the language. In 1892 he enlisted in the British Army, serving on the North-West Frontier and during the campaign in South Africa. In 1904 he was attached to the Japanese army in Manchuria during the Russo-Japanese War and was awarded the Japanese War Medal. Significantly, it was while he was in Japan that he became influenced by the Japanese military tradition eschewing surrender. ‘It worried him considerably that he had been captured unwounded,’ wrote Breen, ‘in his opinion no officer should surrender while conscious.’

The camp commandant at Torgau was a reserve officer by the name of Brandes. He was also Professor of Entomology and Director of the Zoological Gardens in Dresden. As camp commandant he was out of his depth and ineffectual, and camp security was, temporarily at least, lax, as Breen well knew. ‘The German Authorities,’ he wrote, ‘showed little discrimination then, in their choice of Camp Commanders and Officers.’

Yate set his mind on escaping to Switzerland, believing that security would tighten as the war intensified. He would walk to Dresden, procure a bicycle and ride over the border. His determination to leave as soon as possible was reinforced by news that he was about to be interrogated again. As if to underline the porous security, workman’s trousers, a loose cloak, soft hat and black boots were procured for Yate who swapped his safety razor for a cut-throat razor so that it could double as a blade.

The dangers of escape were very real. Even if he got away from the camp he might well be stopped and asked for identification papers, which he did not possess. The mood of the local population had been established by the treatment received on arrival in Torgau: ‘Yate was convinced,’ wrote Breen, ‘that an Englishman, speaking fluent German, would be inevitably murdered by ignorant peasantry as a spy.’

On the night of 19 September, Major Yate was helped over the high compound wall by Captain Roche and Lieutenant Breen and lowered into a moat. In the dark, a sentry passed within two paces of their concealed position but saw nothing. Both Roche and Breen waited, listening intently for any disturbance that would indicate that the game was up. Nothing was heard.

Twelve hours later, Major Yate’s bloodstained clothes were returned to the camp for identification. It was reported that he had committed suicide, camp authorities refusing all requests for an RAMC officer or British chaplain to examine the body. The funeral took place four days later and, although the Germans laid a wreath on behalf of Yate’s comrades, not one British officer attended the interment. The camp commandant cited the volatile attitude of civilians as reason enough for his refusal to permit prisoners outside the camp. The burial took place at dawn (5 a.m.) so as to avoid any possible friction with local people.