Authors: Richard van Emden
Meeting the Enemy (12 page)
Rifleman Graham Williams was one of the few soldiers from among the British Army’s rank and file who could speak German well. Williams began translating for those around him.
As I was talking, a chap came up to me, and he actually greeted me with the words ‘Watcha cock, how’s London?’ I said, ‘Good Lord, you speak like a Londoner’, and he said, ‘Well, I am a Londoner!’ I said, ‘Well, what on earth are you doing in the German army?’ and he said, ‘I’m a German, I’m a German Londoner’. Apparently he had been born in Germany, but had gone to England almost immediately afterwards with his parents, who had a small business in the East End of London somewhere, and he’d been brought up in England and gone to school in England. As by German law he was still a German national – he’d never been naturalised – he had been called up to go to Germany to do his national service: they did three years at that time. And afterwards he had come back to London, joined his parents and got a job as a porter at Victoria Station. He told me all this. He spoke absolute Cockney! It was most extraordinary.
The truce was an opportunity for both sides to compare notes. There had been so much propaganda that no one was entirely sure where the truth stood. It was a chance to set the record straight. Leslie Walkinton, aged just seventeen, was serving with the Queen’s Westminster Rifles, a territorial battalion in the London Regiment.
I talked to a German-American who seemed a very pleasant sort of lad. He had never been to England actually, though his ship had anchored off Plymouth. We tried talking war, but I found he was full of newspaper propaganda, as I suppose I was, and we couldn’t make any sense of it. He thought that the Germans had made a successful landing in England and were marching on London. I laughed. I told him that we expected to beat Germany by Easter and he roared.
‘They firmly believe they are winning and that they will soon have the Russians beaten,’ wrote Rifleman Ernest Blake of the 3rd Rifle Brigade to his mother.
We told them they were losing all round but they would not believe it. One fellow said to us ‘Today peace, tomorrow you fight for your country and I fight for mine.’ There was several of them that came from London, and one asked us to write to his wife, and gave her name and address.
Most men thought it prudent to keep off some of the war’s thornier issues, preferring to talk about home and family. Captain Edward Hulse was one of the few who addressed the issue of dum-dum bullets, and the ‘ghastly wounds’ they made.
They think that our press is to blame in working up feeling against them by publishing false ‘atrocity stories’. I told them of various sweet little cases which I had seen for myself, and they told me of English prisoners whom they have seen with soft-nosed bullets, and lead bullets with notches cut in the nose; we had a heated, and at the same time, good natured argument, and ended by hinting to each other that the other was lying!
There was a reluctance to begin shooting again and in some places the truce lasted several days. There were expressions of regret on both sides that the fighting would recommence; some claimed to be fed up with the war, but the view expressed to Ernest Blake, ‘Today peace, tomorrow you fight for your country and I fight for mine’, was not peculiar or unusual. Those British soldiers rewarded with a tour of the German trenches took mental note of salient features useful when war began again. One man shared a cigar with a German who was regarded by comrades as the best shot in the German army. As he smoked he noted the position of the German’s loophole through which, he had no doubt, the German had picked off many a British Tommy. He vowed he would get the German the following day.
One of the longest truces was upheld by the 1/6th Gordon Highlanders, a Territorial battalion. The Scotsmen had got on very well with the enemy since Christmas Day, discovering, as had so many others, that the German ranks contained men who had lived in Britain, including a waiter from London’s Hotel Cecil. There were barbers, too, among the German ranks and the Scotsmen willingly succumbed to a free shave in no-man’s-land.
The truce lasted until the afternoon of 3 January when a German officer, with an interpreter, approached the British line to be met by a captain of the Gordon Highlanders. The two saluted gravely, the German officer informing the captain that instructions had been received to the effect that the war must be resumed. Watches were compared and it was agreed the truce would end in one hour, after which a fusillade opened up all along the line. A message passed down the Scots’ trenches confirmed renewed hostilities. It read: ‘The Kaiser’s dead’. Wishful thinking indeed.
3
Any Edwardian woman engaged to a foreign national ought to have thought carefully about her future legal status before committing to marriage. With such a huge empire to police, the British were rather prone to fighting wars, and no one could be sure when an ally might become a dangerous adversary; for a woman, therefore, marrying a ‘home boy’ was a much more prudent course of action. This naturally required some prescience; and love is, after all, blind. In particular, those engaged to marry Germans were, from any objective standpoint, dabbling with danger when the likelihood of war between Britain and Germany steadily increased in the years prior to 1914. Then again, the royal family had not baulked at marrying Germans and surely what was good enough for them . . .
The British legal system’s treatment of women who went ahead and married a foreign national was paternalistic and inflexible and, in 1914, demonstrated that everything was far from fair in love and war. The law as it affected women was simple: anyone who married a male foreigner was deemed by Part Three of the Naturalisation Act of 1870 to have automatically adopted her husband’s nationality. Any woman subsequently widowed or separated remained an alien subject. This new law was introduced to bring English common law, which had hitherto kept entirely out of such matters, into line with the legal practice on the continent, including both France and Germany. The Act of 1870 added one further legal contortion. Should a German man decide to take British citizenship then his British-born ‘German’ wife would be issued with a certificate of naturalisation to confirm her new legal status – as a Briton.
The Aliens Restriction Act, requiring enemy aliens to register with the police, resulted in a steady flow of Germans and Austrians brought before the courts for non-compliance owing, typically, to the defendant’s ignorance of the law. With the expansion of internment in November 1914, British wives of enemy aliens were also required to register. Many women remained unaware of this fact or simply believed that the rules could not apply to them in the country of their birth, and so were shocked to be dragged through the courts to be imprisoned or fined.
That these women were no longer considered British was made explicit by the legal expectation that it was for the German government to provide welfare to British-born wives of German internees in Britain. Payment was made through the American Embassy and was a sum roughly similar to that paid by His Majesty’s Government in separation allowances to the wives of soldiers serving at the front. This act of charity was reciprocated by the British government, providing welfare to German-born wives of British subjects in Germany.
This arrangement worked in Britain’s favour owing to the fact that there were more ‘Germans’ to support in Britain than there were ‘Britons’ in Germany. Whether this dawned on the enemy is unclear; perhaps it was spite that caused them to terminate the agreement at the end of November 1914 when notice was given that funds would no longer be available to British-born wives of interned Germans. In response, the British no longer sent money to German-born wives of interned British men. Whatever the reasons for the change in policy, these decisions had serious ramifications. The law that imposed a husband’s nationality on his wife stood, but suddenly, and through no fault of their own, these women were no longer entitled to the same support or protection given to all other wives.
In Britain, the Treasury channelled money through the Local Government Board to Boards of Guardians to support British-born ‘German’ wives, although the amount paid was halved compared to separation allowances. In Germany the situation was more serious. Owing to the federal state, the German government told the British authorities that it had no mechanism to distribute monies to German-born wives of British internees and that they would have to throw themselves on the mercy of local charitable organisations for relief. As if British internees did not have enough to contend with, they were forced to write to their own government back home asking what they - the internees - were meant to do for their German-born ‘British’ wives and children cut off without a penny.
On 22 February 1915, Albert Cresswell sent an urgent letter from Ruhleben camp to the Home Office in London. His German-born wife had lost her British allowance and, on turning to the German authorities for relief, she was told that the only support she could expect would be inside an internment camp.
‘The English Government are granting support to English born German women living in England, and leave it to the German government to likewise provide for the German born English women living in Germany,’ he wrote, describing how the German government was abrogating its responsibility by leaving relief to local charities. ‘I do not for a moment think that it is the wish of the British government that English women should be subjected to such treatment.’ If his letter were made known in the right quarters, Cresswell believed, then surely financial assistance would be forthcoming. ‘I am terribly worried on account of my wife as it is an awful feeling being penned up here and not knowing how things are at home [in Germany].’
There were two other signatories to Cresswell’s letter: Arthur Harvey and Edgar Gillon. All three men were in similar circumstances although, if anything, Gillon’s was the most pressing. His wife was due to give birth in five weeks. In a further letter, Gillon assured the authorities in London that his wife would travel to England as soon as possible but was in no position to do so while heavily pregnant. ‘I have no means whatever, so trust in God for help from the Home Government without further delay. Remittances can be made to Mr Harris, American General Consul, Frankfort A/M to be forwarded to my wife.’
In an internal Home Office memo, a discouraging note was added to the file containing both letters. ‘Unfortunately Mr Cresswell married a German girl’, and so under the new arrangements there could be no help for her despite her legal status as ‘British’. Meanwhile, the Home Office was still trying to establish the nationality of the wives of both Gillon and Harvey: both wives were German-born.
Paradoxically, while the British government would not countenance sending financial support to these wives in Germany, there was no restriction on their entry into Britain where presumably they would be entitled to some, albeit minimal, welfare. Cresswell’s letter informed the British government that the wives of all three internees would ‘leave for England as soon as weather and circumstances permit’. Undoubtedly the harsh reality of living in Germany, cut off from state support, must have been the primary reason for the decision to go. But just how bad were conditions that made women leave their homes, travel across Europe, presumably through neutral Holland, to land in a country that they might never have visited before and where they could probably not speak the language? For these three German-born ‘British’ wives, the fear of the unknown must have been excruciating and there were no guarantees as to their future health or security.
When David Russell, another Ruhleben internee, heard that his German-born wife and four children had been sent by order of the German authorities from Leipzig to England in January 1915, his concern turned to misery. Within a week of disembarkation his entire family had been forced to enter a workhouse in Hull. Mrs Russell did not speak a word of English and was destitute. Worse still, all four children, aged nine, six, two and one, were removed from their mother, as was workhouse policy at the time. David Russell wrote pleading that his family might at least stay together but received a perfunctory reply: ‘It is not practicable to arrange that a mother and children shall live absolutely as a family in a poor law institution. Hull guardians have been instructed to allow Mrs Russell to see her children at reasonable intervals.’
The letter to David Russell was sent nine months and one week after Mrs Russell entered the workhouse. The only beacon of hope was a note that Mrs Russell’s children had ‘with other children chargeable to the Guardians, been at the seaside during the summer months’, although sadly not, it appears, with their mother.
These four women - the wives of Cresswell, Harvey, Gillon and Russell - while legally British, were Germans moving to Britain in time of war. The indigenous population was hardly likely to be aware of, or be interested in, the subtleties of a law that altered without consultation a wife’s nationality: the reception these women could expect would be, at best, cold and indifferent, and, at worst, aggressive and even violent. For all such wives, both in Britain and in Germany, the shock of being treated as pariahs and effective outcasts from the countries of their birth must have been deeply wounding and was tantamount to being stateless.
What is interesting about the Russell case is that the British authorities did not seem to have been aware of Mrs Russell’s imminent arrival. She had met David Russell, a black Jamaican and British subject, in Leipzig and the pair had cohabited for eleven years, having two ‘illegitimate’ children before marrying and having two more. The Foreign Office paperwork states that Mrs Russell had been sent to Britain seemingly without discussion and not at the behest of the British. There was no policy in either country of enforced repatriation of women who purely through marriage had changed nationality. There was, perhaps, more than a whiff of racism attached to this particularly sad case.
