Authors: Richard van Emden
Meeting the Enemy (2 page)
Despite the day-to-day cordiality that existed between British and German military officers, there was a growing presumption among the General Staff that the Germans also wanted war with Britain and were only waiting for the right moment to usurp Britain’s position as the dominant world power.
The General Staff in London predicted it would come in 1915 once the Germans had widened the Kiel Canal to take modern battleships. Even so, there were German-induced war scares in 1911 and 1913 and
Der Tag
– the day – when Germany would attack was on the lips of many, years before August 1914. When young Percy Johnson returned home from watching the parade on Oxford Street that summer morning in 1911, he told his father that he had seen the Kaiser in all his grandeur. ‘Oh,’ said his father, ‘there’s going to be a war, and not very long either. That bloke’s not here for nothing.’
Meeting the Enemy
tells the story of what happened when these two great economically and socially intertwined nations were sucked into war. Few foresaw, or cared to envisage, the consequences of embarking on a truly international war, from the inevitability of prodigious loss of life to the terrible long-term dislocation of civil society that would result. It is, in part, the social cost of war that this book will examine, on the Western and Home Fronts but always within the context of Anglo-German relations.
My previous book,
The Quick and the Dead
, explored the circumstances surrounding the death of soldiers in the Great War and the families who were left behind to mourn;
Meeting the Enemy
will look at what happened to those who, in the main, survived: survivors who were both the instigators and perpetrators of conflict as well as those who were required to bear the brunt of war’s vagaries and its vicious unfairness.
It would be easy to infer from the title alone that this book is about
direct
contact with the foe, that it begins at the point of the bayonet and ends, in the normal state of affairs, in a soldier being killed, wounded or taken prisoner. Likewise, as friends to whom I have mentioned this book have suggested, it must include, surely, the famous Christmas Truce – it does, but not just that of 1914, but, rather, the lesser known Christmas Truce of 1915. Then throw in a few spies, the odd temporary battlefield armistice to collect the dead and deserters who chanced crossing no-man’s-land, and that would appear at first glance to cover the obvious eventualities.
In fact, indirect contact was as important as direct contact. Letters written by soldiers to the families of the enemy, fallen or wounded, were more common than might be expected; exchanging effects of the dead required no meeting either. At a governmental level, communication between Britain and Germany, while necessarily formal and businesslike, continued throughout the war, using Dutch, Swiss and American intermediaries: enquiries or protests were made, replies sent, agreements brokered and concessions granted. Surviving correspondence makes for fascinating reading, for much of the official communication is about the minutiae of daily life. This includes anything from the requested return of a Heidelberg professor’s books, abandoned in Britain, to the proposed reciprocal supply of spectacles and trusses to prisoners of war.
War is nothing if not contradictory, abnormal and downright chaotic. It throws up the peculiar and the unusual as a matter of course, and provides a platform for highly improbable scenarios. Captain Campbell’s parole to England from a German POW camp to visit his ailing mother is just such an example. Similarly, why, did a patriotic British professor, of British birth and descent, honorably enlist in the German army in 1915? The answer is strange and yet ridiculously plausible.
And, just as war is extraordinary, so it is often banal and trite. What happened to the many thousands of British women married to Germans living in Britain or abroad? What happened to those naturalised British subjects of German origin who lived in Britain, many for decades, in peaceful, lawful harmony with their neighbours? What was the position of their British-born children? With whom would their allegiance lie? The answers are as surprising as they are often mundane or simply sad.
As with the majority of my books, I have, wherever possible, used a chronological approach rather than a thematic one, as I believe this to be of considerable advantage in showing the development of key characters and their context as the war progressed.
This book includes many unpublished letters and diaries. It draws upon official government documents, largely untouched until now, to tell a new story of the Great War. The story slips back and forth from the Western Front to the Home Front; from prisoner-of-war camps to internment camps; from trench dugouts to terraced houses; from shell holes in no-man’s-land to the drawing rooms of middle-class Britain. I examine fraternisation with the enemy and temporary armistices, reprisals and murder. And, as in all wars, the story will feature the nadir of human behaviour counterbalanced by the zenith of human endeavour and compassion. I am less interested in tactics or generals, weapons or strategy, than I am in human beings, and, when it comes to humans in war, one thing has become abundantly clear to me: you simply couldn’t make it up.
1
The dry summer heat had given way to a cool, pleasing breeze as the Reverend Henry Williams strolled to his flat in a side street off Berlin’s famous Kurfürstendamm. It was Sunday evening, 26 July 1914, and the thirty-seven-year-old priest was on his way home from St George’s Church where he served as chaplain. Built in the royal gardens in 1885, this very English church was physical proof of the close ties between Britain and Germany. It had been given as a silver wedding present by the then Prince and Princess of Wales, later King Edward VII and his wife, Queen Alexandra, to Edward’s eldest sister, the Crown Princess of Germany and later Empress.
The church register revealed an impressive list of high-status guests: Queen Victoria had visited in 1888, as had her eldest child, also named Victoria, the German Crown Princess; their signatures so similar, Williams reflected, that they might have been written by the same hand. Edward and Alexandra had signed the book, as had their son, Albert, and in 1913, during the last royal visit to Germany, King George and Queen Mary had stopped by. But perhaps most interesting of all was the name of the Kaiser himself, signed not as ‘Wilhelm’ but ‘William’ in recognition of his maternal heritage. The Kaiser had visited St George’s in 1904 as an honoured guest at the wedding of the British ambassador’s daughter. Yet, while the Kaiser’s English spelling was diplomatic, thoughtful even, to have assumed that his action was modest would have been wide of the mark, for his signature was made with a truly magnificent flourish, filling the entire page.
Ten years later, Anglo-German fraternity was about to be torn apart. The political skies over Europe had darkened rapidly after the assassination of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne. During a visit by the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophia, to the Serbian capital Sarajevo in June 1914, a young Serbian nationalist had shot them both dead. One diplomatic crisis followed another as what at first seemed to be a local crisis in the ever-turbulent Balkans had instead spread the contagion of war across a continent. The European system of political alliances and military guarantees was awoken. In the event of war, Berlin would back Vienna in its dispute with Serbia. In response, Serbia would look to Moscow for support, and Moscow, in turn, would look to Paris; Paris looked towards London. On the afternoon of 23 July, the Austro-Hungarian Empire handed a ten-point ultimatum to Serbia. In effect, the Serbs were being ordered to cede sovereignty. They had forty-eight hours to reply or there would be war, with the implicit threat of invasion.
The Reverend Williams read the newspapers and fretted over the prospect of conflict. ‘From week to week I had watched the threatening storm approaching without believing that it could ever burst.’ The Kaiser had left for his summer cruise in Norwegian waters and, while he was there, thought Williams, ‘What need to worry?’ But the Kaiser was breaking off his cruise and returning to Berlin. That Sunday, as Williams made his way home, he could literally hear the drums of war.
I had reached the Palace-bridge [when] I heard the distant sound of a band approaching, and stopped to see it pass. Borne aloft at its head was the eagle surmounted with its waving plumes and tinkling bells that always preceded the goose-stepping guards as they marched down the Unter den Linden on their way to the Palace, according to custom. But on this particular Sunday it was not the usual jaunty regimental march that was being played but the Deutschland Deutschland über Alles, and that could have only one meaning, things were getting definitely serious – War, of which we had so often heard rumours, but which had always seemed so utterly incredible, might be really coming at last!
It was coming, and it was coming fast. Two days later, the Austro-Hungarians declared war on Serbia, and their forces immediately invaded the country. It was only a matter of time before Russia would enter on the side of its old ally.
The Kaiser arrived back in Berlin via Kiel and Potsdam and went straight to the palace. At the same time, the Reverend Williams walked once more to the city centre to see what was happening. The public excitement was extraordinary, and then he saw the Kaiser.
As his car drove up the Unter den Linden towards the palace, the crowd was so dense that it was forced to go slowly, and I found myself pushed so close to it as it passed that I could have touched its royal occupant. I noticed that he was wearing a brass curassier’s helmet that covered the back of his neck as well as his forehead. His face looked bloodless and yellow, while his eyes stared fixedly ahead with a hard, almost fierce expression . . .
That evening, Williams returned yet again; the public clamour for war was almost tangible. ‘I found Berlin gone mad,’ he wrote.
Inside the Brandenburger Tor I got caught in a dense, shouting mob that was pressing forward. Groups of young men arm-in-arm yelling ‘Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles’, were eddying in the current of the tide of surging humanity that swept slowly forward carrying me with it. Somewhere near the corner of the Friedrichstrasse I saw a large printed placard bearing the fateful words ‘ultimatum an Russland – Frage an Frankreich’. Now I knew what was urging the crowd to frenzy. The Day had come at last! When eventually I reached the Palace-bridge at the end of the Linden, the crowd was so solidly packed as to make any further progress impossible - it was about ten o’clock that a sudden roar of voices away ahead told me what I could scarcely see, that the Kaiser had appeared on the palace balcony. Though his words can scarcely have been audible in the prevailing din, he was believed to have said, ‘Tonight our beloved Fatherland stands on the verge of war. I bid you all go home and say your prayers. God with us!’ . . . ‘Deutschland!’ yelled the young men again and again, ‘Deutschland über Alles!’ screamed the crowd.
It was then that there came to me one of the strangest sensations of a lifetime – I seemed to be aware of a dark winged form hovering over that vast, frenzied crowd that filled the broad thoroughfare of the Unter den Linden from end to end and the thought came to me, ‘How many of them will death not have claimed before this war that they are now hailing so jubilantly, and vociferously, is over?’ And as I walked my two-mile way home, past open-doored restaurants and beer-houses filled to capacity, where everyone was frantically applauding the gesticulating speaker of the moment, I felt strangely depressed and lonely. For had not I alone, as it seemed, perceived the ghostly presence of the Angel of Death, watching and waiting as he brooded that night over a bawling multitude of the doomed and blinded in Germany’s capital, and heard the rustle of his wings.
Two hundred and sixty miles away, in the city of Cologne, Harry Miles was staying as a guest of the Hahn family. This city, renowned in Germany for its liberalism and friendliness, was in just as much of a frenzy as the capital. On 29 July, Harry wrote to his father in England describing the developing crisis, how a continent teetered on the edge of a war the like of which had ‘never been known and the result of which is too dreadful to contemplate’.
Those people here who want war are trusting that England will remain ‘neutral’ and leave Germany to wreak havoc as she surely will do if Russia intervenes . . . and those who are for peace are hoping that England will with that characteristic calmness yet iron firmness, demand the peace of Europe . . .
The last few evenings have been very exciting in the town. Crowds gathered round the newspaper offices eagerly awaiting telegrams from Sir Edward Grey and others – processions form with flags and parade the streets singing patriotic songs – the orchestras in the cafés strike up the Fatherland’s anthem and the usual pandemonium follows. I’m sorry if I have bored you only you see all this has been intensely interesting to me here, on the spot, as it were.
Today Karl [Hahn], the son who has been doing soldier’s training, has returned – though we didn’t expect they’d let him owing to the ‘trouble’. He says there were great scenes in the Barracks when the news came through. He is rather wondering how long he will remain at home!!
