Meeting the Enemy (22 page)

Published in
The Times
on 7 July, Jellicoe’s Despatch gave the Admiral’s full account of the naval battle at Jutland a month earlier, a battle in the aftermath of which both sides claimed victory. With headlines such as ‘Enemy Severely Punished’ and ‘Enemy Vessels Constantly Hit’ the Despatch ended with a list of enemy ships sunk or disabled. It gave a very favourable spin to what was, in reality, an inconclusive battle. Whether newspaper reports of this nature undermined morale on either side of the trenches is questionable.

News that could not be given in print form could be posted on notice boards and placed either on the enemy’s wire or in no-man’s-land. Boards could be used as another form of fraternisation or friendly banter. ‘Today is BANK HOLIDAY – TOMMIES. Do not fire – give us a rest’ was an appeal stuck up on the German parapet.

Nor was a notice necessarily one-way correspondence. The 48th Infantry Brigade Diary records a patrol of the 9th Royal Munster Fusiliers bringing in a board that had been observed in front of the enemy wire. ‘The notice’, wrote the Munsters’ Adjutant, ‘seems to refer to some previous board displayed in our trenches before we took over the line. This would tend to show that the enemy had been unaware that a relief had taken place.’ The inscription read ‘Request for clearer explication [sic] by written or personally’. The following day, patrols and wiring parties from the 9th Royal Munster Fusiliers were sent out, one retrieving a notice board from the German trenches ‘which had evidently been taken by them from our lines before the Battalion took over . . . it was to this notice that the “Explication” of yesterday referred.’ The Munsters had relieved the 7th Royal Irish Rifles on the evening of 20 May.

Each side was adept at crowing at the other’s strategic misfortune, and notices frequently carried news of some recent catastrophe. The first months of 1916 proved a low point for the British, giving the Germans plenty to write about. ‘Interesting war-news of April 29th 1916. Kut-el-Amara has been taken by the Turks, and whole English army therein – 13,000 men – maken prisoners.’ And: ‘The English Ministre of War and the general kommandre Lord Kitchener is on the trip to Russia with all his generals officers trowened in the east see by a german submerin. Nobody is sowed [saved].’

Most signs were in English, and of variable literacy. One drawing, made by Acting Sergeant Herbert Gibson and sent to his sweetheart in Newcastle upon Tyne depicted a board near Mount Sorrel. The Germans had erected it in early March 1916 ‘to tell us of a big victory at Verdun against the French’, wrote Gibson on the back of the card. On this occasion the message was in German and boasted of the prisoners taken so far in the campaign, numbering 228 officers and 17,370 other ranks.

‘Did I ever tell you how eager the Germans are to supply us with news – of their own successes of course?’ wrote Lieutenant Melville Hastings in a letter to his family. ‘Yesterday a screen raised above the parapet informed us marooned Tommies of the fall of Kut, and last year we were similarly told of the fall of Warsaw’ [4 August 1915].

The notice board was a curiosity, and therein lay an obvious trap. ‘The Germans stick up a board with writing on such as “What about the
Lusitania
, how many dead?”’ wrote one soldier, ‘and God help anybody that looks over the parapet at it’, the inference being that a sniper was ready for the over-inquisitive. A board was also a provocation and bait. Second Lieutenant Stephen Hewett (14th Warwickshire Regiment), writing to his mother, described why.

I was out wiring the other night with four men for about an hour and a half, and I was tempted to go further out on a little expedition of my own – to destroy a great notice board which the Hun has put out in No Man’s Land, announcing the fall of Kut-el Amara: but certainly there must have been a machine gun trained on to it, and probably by touching it one would have exploded a bomb, - so it was safer left alone.

It was a sensible decision. Lieutenant Hugh Munro, an impetuous twenty-two-year-old officer of the 1/8th Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, did not resist and went after a German flag draped on the enemy barbed wire. According to his batman, Munro knew that the Germans had probably booby-trapped the flag but nevertheless sought to remove it. As he pulled the flag, a bomb exploded, instantly killing him.

Among the setbacks in early 1916, the situation in Ireland was of grave concern to the British government. The Easter Rising on 24 April and the bitter fighting that erupted in Dublin was a cause for German satisfaction. Their attempt to encourage an Irish Brigade was an abject failure but they could still enjoy posting barbed messages designed to upset Irishmen fighting for Britain. On 10 May, just over a week after the Uprising was quelled and the ringleaders arrested, the Germans raised a notice board above the parapet that was recovered by an officer of the 8th Royal Munster Fusiliers.

‘Irishmen! Heavy uproar in Ireland. English guns are firing at your wifes and children! 1st May 1916.’

The Germans knew who occupied the trenches opposite: three days earlier they hailed the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, asking not which regiment they were but more specifically which battalion, 8th or 9th. Now, armed with news from Ireland, the Germans were keen to pass on information that might cause unease among the Munsters’ ranks.

The German attitude towards Sir Roger Casement had darkened long before the Uprising. Casement’s failure to achieve anything worthwhile with the Irish Brigade aggravated the Germans, who looked to cut him adrift. They cared little for his fate when he was taken by German submarine to Ireland three days prior to the Uprising. Casement was quickly captured. In mid-May a patrol of the Munsters made an effigy labelled ‘Sir Roger Casement’ and suspended it by the neck from a tree in full view of the enemy. A few days later it was brought in riddled with bullets. ‘It appeared to annoy the enemy,’ wrote the Adjutant in the Munsters’ War Diary.

The Munsters’ overwhelmingly Catholic contingent must have known of Casement’s arrest, and of the Uprising and its suppression. It also seems likely that news had filtered through of the execution of the rebellion’s ringleaders, seven of whom were signatories to their Proclamation of Independence. It was widespread revulsion at the execution of fourteen rebels between 3 and 12 May that caused the British authorities the greatest loss of common support in Ireland rather than the suppression of the Uprising itself, which had proved unpopular among the civilian population. Hoisting Casement’s effigy from a tree, the Munsters’ attitude and the subsequent German response were very enlightening.

In January 1916, the British government introduced conscription; it really had no alternative. After the great civilian rush to enlist in 1914, the army had seen a remorseless decline in the number of men willing to volunteer, a decline coinciding with a rapidly growing physical and material commitment to the war overseas. The German attacks around Ypres in April and May 1915, followed by the Allies’ first combined offensive in September, accentuated the need for more men in steady, predictable numbers. In August 1915, a day of National Registration was held in which every citizen aged between fifteen and sixty-five was obliged by law to supply the government with personal details including nationality, age, marital status and occupation. Although originally intended as a means to utilise efficiently the services of all men and women for the war effort, this information would also be used as preparatory groundwork for military compulsion, ensuring every able-bodied man would play his part, irrespective of background.

Ironically, among one much-maligned group of subjects, the British-born sons of German parentage, loyalty and patriotism had often been demonstrated. Many of these lads decided that their allegiance was to the country of their birth, not the country of their ancestry, and had enlisted into the British Army.

Sergeant Herman Schultz from Liverpool, the son of German-born parents, John and Mary Schultz, served with the Loyal North Lancashire Regiment. He embarked for France in December 1915 and later won both the Distinguished Conduct Medal and Military Medal. George Schumacher, aged seventeen, a lad from Leith in Scotland, was serving with the 1/7th Royal Scots and died in May 1915, in the Quintinshill train disaster on his way to the front. And then there was Alexander Fischer, an undergraduate at Cambridge University and son of a Prussian father. Alexander enlisted on the morning after the outbreak of war, aged eighteen, and was killed serving as a lieutenant in the Devonshire Regiment in May 1916.

Ten common German names, including Hoffmann, Meyer, Wagner and Fischer, contributed well over a thousand recruits to the British Army according to the army’s post-war Medal Roll. But how many more men with German ancestry had altered their names both before and during Registration? The Army Council entirely accepted that an unquantifiable number had done so.

It has been brought to the notice of the Council from time to time that a number of British born sons of enemy aliens assumed, when registering themselves, British surnames in lieu of their proper names and, when subsequently called up, were posted to combatant units owing to the fact of their enemy parentage being unknown. The Council can only conclude that the course followed by these men was deliberately undertaken with a view to the avoidance of any suspicion of enemy connection . . .

It is no coincidence that Fischer, one of the most common surnames and the easiest to anglicise, contributed only thirty-three men with the German spelling. It would have been uncomfortable for anyone to serve in the ranks with a German name, and altering or adapting names so as to appear British was the easy solution, allowing volunteers with names such as Lautenberg to become Lawton and Fritsch changing to Fitch.

Not all Germanic names were identifiably foreign. Julius Ring, of Dalston, north London, was forty-two and an internee on the Isle of Wight. He had moved with his wife to Britain in the 1890s and all four of their children were born in England. In October 1915, he received news that his son William had left work as a butcher’s boy and joined up, aged just fourteen. In a panic, Julius contacted the Westminster-based Emergency Society of Germans and Austrians in Distress for help. They informed him that his son Willy had been ‘overcome with patriotic fervour’ and was ‘serving his King in the Army’. William had given a false age and address and joined the 1st Royal Fusiliers. He had not been heard of since. Representations were made to the American ambassador in London who made contact with Sir Edward Grey. On 1 July 1916, Private 5024 William Ring was discharged as having ‘made a misstatement as to age’.

Such lads may have been keen to do their ‘bit’ but to their fathers, suffering the indignity of internment, the idea that their sons would fight for the British was, for many, intolerable. In May 1915 William Kunz wrote to the authorities from Knockaloe internment camp on the Isle of Man claiming that his son, William, had been ‘forced by his employer’ to join the ‘English’ Army. ‘I do not want him to fight against his own flesh and blood. He is consequently the son of an unnaturalised German.’ The fact that he was such was actually of no consequence. The father was German, and his British-born wife German by marriage. It might have appeared to William Kunz Senior an anomaly that a child of German parents was legally British, but if that child was born in Britain then he was British until or unless he renounced his citizenship. This he was entitled to do once he had reached the age of majority (twenty-one), but William Junior had not.

Conscription did not alter the legal status of these boys but it did create one unforeseen problem. In January 1916, all men aged between nineteen and forty-one were according to law deemed to have enlisted for General Service. Exemption from service could be granted only if, for example, the army had previously rejected a man on medical grounds. It was all very well the army holding on to lads of German ancestry who had shown their colours by volunteering, but what should the military authorities do with thousands of British-born children of German fathers unpersuaded by patriotism to freely enlist? By rights, these boys could expect to be called up, but with which country did their allegiance lie? If they were ambivalent about serving, could they be relied upon in battle? It was an issue that was without precedent.

In early 1916 the Swiss Legation in London passed on a number of letters to the Foreign Office. They were from Germans interned in Britain, pointing out that, while their children had been called up for service by the British, they, the children, were also pro-German.

Wilhelm Roderwald had lived in Britain since 1890 and his son, Gerald, was born in January 1897. Wilhelm was interned at Alexandra Palace, and he was in no doubt as to where his and his son’s allegiance lay. Wilhelm had registered himself again as a German subject at the Imperial German Consulate in 1900, to ensure that he remained unquestionably German, and he therefore believed his son to be German, too. ‘My son is entirely German as far as his sympathies are concerned.’ Other letters of protest included one from Peter Viel and his sons Johann and Andreas. ‘I, the father, most emphatically forbid my sons to serve in any capacity with the British or Allied Forces . . .’ while Bartholomus Eid asserted that his son ‘would rather be interned than join the British Army’. Was this in fact simply a question of fathers speaking
for
their sons and not on their behalf? It was impossible to know.

In May 1916, Carl Martini objected to the conscription of his sons, Charles and Heinrich, aged twenty-three and nineteen respectively. Both sons had been registered in Germany as of German nationality and were, if anything, he claimed, liable to serve in the German army. Unfortunately, Charles, while old enough to choose his nationality, had made no effort to relinquish his British citizenship at the age of twenty-one and as a result was still liable to serve.