Meeting the Enemy (26 page)

Often the first Germans anyone saw were those who, half stupefied by the bombardment, robbed of all will to fight, surrendered tamely as their trenches were approached. Private Albert Andrews of the 19th Manchester Regiment watched as dozens ran through the advancing Tommies, hands in the air, desperate to reach Allied lines and captivity. Those Germans who stayed to fight, shooting until the last moment before throwing up their hands, were usually given short shrift. There were no rules of war, no rights of the prisoner in these moments. Individuals chose in their own maddened state whether prisoners would be accepted. Private Andrews jumped into the front-line German trench, or, rather, what was left of it.

Just near a dugout door there was a big barrel. As soon as I jumped in, a German leapt from behind the barrel but I was already on my guard and I had my bayonet on his chest. He was trembling and looked half mad with his hands above his head, saying something to me which I did not understand. All I could make out was that he did not want me to kill him! It was here I noticed my bayonet was broken and I couldn’t have stuck him with it. Of course, I had ‘one up the chimney’ as we called it – that is, a bullet in the breech, so that you only have to press your trigger. I pointed to his belt and bayonet. He took these off, and his hat and water bottle as well, emptied his pockets and offered the lot to me. Just then one of my mates was coming up the trench. ‘Get out of the way, Andy. Leave him to me. I’ll give him one to himself,’ he meant he would throw a bomb at him, which would have blown him to pieces. ‘Come here,’ I said. He was on his knees in front of me now, fairly pleading. I said, ‘He’s an old man’, he looked sixty. At the finish I pointed my thumb upwards towards our lines, never taking my bayonet off his chest. He jumped up and with his hands above his head ran out of the trench towards our lines, calling all the time. He was trembling from head to foot and frightened to death. I honestly believe he could have done me as I jumped into the trench if he had not been so afraid.

Given the intense nature of trench fighting, soldiers’ encounters with the enemy were necessarily brief. An incident might impress itself on the mind, but rarely did individual combat last more than seconds and took longer in the retelling that it did in the event. Private Ginger Byrne was an exception, his one-sided meeting with the enemy lasting most of the day. After going into action near the German-held village of Beaumont Hamel, he had been forced to take refuge in a shell hole close to the enemy wire but, in doing so, was spotted by a German machine-gunner. Byrne lay there with the ammunition boxes he was carrying and just four inches of earth above his head as protection.

I lay as I fell because I daren’t move. I had my legs folded under me and my bloomin’ bayonet was on my left-hand side. I was dying to move that bayonet out of the way so I could get my hip down lower. But that Jerry decided he hadn’t anything better to do than play his gun across my shell-hole. He knew I wasn’t hit. I knew what he was doing. I was a machine gunner myself, wasn’t I? He’d be holding the two handles of his gun, then he’d tap, tap so it played right across the top of the hole; then he’d turn the wheel at the bottom to lower the barrel and then he’d tap, tap the other side to bring it back again. He was hitting the dust just above my head and he smashed the bloomin’ boxes. Bits of ammo flew about everywhere. In a queer sort of way I was lying there almost admiring what he was doing, as though it wasn’t me he was aiming at. He was a fellow machine-gunner, wasn’t he? And he certainly knew his job. But he just couldn’t get that trajectory low enough.

As it was summertime, Byrne had to wait fourteen hours for darkness as the German machine-gunner kept ‘nagging away’, firing just over the hole. ‘Sometimes he’d stop for a bit and turn the gun on someone else; but he’d got right fond of me. Wasted a lot of ammo on me that Jerry did.’ When it was dark, Byrne crawled, then ran, across no-man’s-land and escaped the carnage. He was entirely uninjured.

While in action, it was not always easy to discern the ebb and flow of battle. Men saw only what was within instant comprehension; there was no standing about surveying the ground. Normally, shelter was, as in Byrne’s example, a shell hole from which observation was limited, or the inside of a trench, in which case the fighting was immediate and the wider context of who was winning or losing of practical irrelevance.

Under such circumstances, it was possible to take prisoners when it was in fact the enemy who was gaining the upper hand. One extraordinary incident took place as a platoon of the 1/6th Seaforth Highlanders was involved in the second assault on Beaumont Hamel, in November 1916. With his platoon, Second Lieutenant George Edwards was given the special job of capturing a battalion headquarters. Despite persistent fog, Edwards worked his way round to the objective, surprising and taking prisoner a large number of the Germans without opposition. The headquarters was in a deep dugout and the men surrendered when told that there were strong reinforcements at hand. These, however, failed to materialise and Edwards’s platoon was heavily outnumbered.

The story of what happened next was told by Edwards to General Burn and a fellow officer back at brigade headquarters. Edwards was killed in November 1917 but his story, as related by a fellow officer, was not forgotten.

The German Commanding Officer told him [Edwards] quite nicely and politely that the position was reversed and that he and his men were now the prisoners. There was nothing for it but to submit and Edwards accompanied the C.O. down into the dugout. Here he was given a drink, treated with every consideration and even invited to look through the periscope – a huge affair which gave its owners a commanding view of the surrounding country.

It was then, the fog having lifted somewhat, that Edwards spotted the arrival of the long expected reinforcements. Not to be outdone in courtesy by his German hosts he begged them to consider themselves once more as his prisoners and, as such, to accompany him to the surface. This they did, only to find on arrival that they were called upon to surrender for a third time – on this occasion by a chaplain and a party of Dublin Fusiliers.

Edwards went up to the Chaplain to explain the situation; the Chaplain promptly knocked him down and disappeared in the fog with his captives.

Critical to the process of being taken prisoner was making a connection with the prospective captor and the act of surrender unequivocal. It was vital that the would-be prisoner made himself appear unthreatening, that he was just as much an ordinary family man, sick of war, and not the stereotypical enemy of propaganda. Holding up a crucifix or pictures of wives and children helped, as did removing the paraphernalia of war, such as a helmet, although with so many bits and pieces flying around this was in itself a calculated risk. Conversely, hands in the air but eyes that glistened hatred or aggression was a stance unlikely to gain much other than a bullet, as indeed would shooting until the moment when defence was no longer tenable, then calling out ‘Kamerad’.

Emptying pockets, offering gifts, bought time for prisoners during which fever-pitch tension might ease. Chapman’s friend was morally shocked at the shooting of the German officer because, in handing over his field glasses, the unspoken transaction of turning a soldier into a prisoner was seemingly cemented. And in just the same way that transactions are completed by the shaking of hands, so it was astute, if possible, to make physical contact too, as Lieutenant Bradford Gordon, of the 9th Kings Own Yorkshire Light Infantry witnessed, when one haggard-looking German surrendered to him.

Several of my men were about to stick him with their bayonets, but he had been badly wounded in the face, and was unarmed, so I stopped them. Seeing this, he tried to shake my hand, and said ‘Kamerad’. But I shook him off, and searched him . . . When he understood he was not to be killed, his gratitude was extraordinary. As I would not shake hands, he insisted on shaking hands with a Somerset, who, a few minutes before, had been about to bayonet him.

During the fighting around the Somme village of Lesboufs, Guardsman Norman Cliff was also approached by a German who offered his hand, though whether Cliff took it is not clear from his memoirs. What helped broker the German’s surrender was his excellent English.

As our section advanced across open country with bullets whistling around we sighted a machine gun post, and as we cautiously drew nearer, the German team sprang to their feet, threw up their hands and came forward led by a young officer with an Iron Cross dangling from his chest. Automatically we lowered our rifles and the officer held out his hand, and in English asked us to accept his surrender.

‘Where did you learn your English?’ I asked.

‘In London where I worked,’ he replied.

I was struck by his dignity in a desperate situation, and there was no question of butchering them. Realising that he and his team were to be spared, he burst out, addressing me: ‘You’ve been so decent to us I would like to present you with this,’ indicating his Iron Cross.

‘No! You must have done something fine to get it, and I wouldn’t dream of taking it from you.’

Suddenly one of our young officers and a sergeant appeared, and the officer yelled: ‘What’s going on here? Send those Huns to the rear immediately!’ Then, noticing the Iron Cross, he exclaimed: ‘Oh, Sergeant, he’s got an Iron Cross. I want that!’ Whereupon the Sergeant snatched the medal from the German’s chest, kicked him in the backside and prodded the group like cattle towards the rear. I felt ashamed and could not refrain from comparing the disgusting behaviour of this perhaps untypical British gentleman with the good manners of the ‘uncivilized Hun’.

A soldier’s status as prisoner was never entirely secure and making oneself as useful as possible was a good idea. Cliff watched at Lesboufs how a number of Germans ‘surprised and relieved not to be bayoneted, helped to buttress the captured trenches’. It was, he claimed, ‘one of the few occasions when live Germans were calculated to be better than dead ones’. Such impressed work was illegal but who was there to argue? At the fighting at Gommecourt on 1 July 1916, the Regimental Sergeant Major of the 1/5th Sherwood Foresters was captured deep in the enemy lines when Germans unexpectedly emerged from a dugout. He testified that the Germans set him to work carrying bombs from a dugout to the Germans in the front line. With self-preservation in mind, the RSM did as ordered until he seized an opportunity to jump over the top and make a dash for a shell hole where he lay until dark before regaining his own lines and telling the story to the Commanding Officer. More generally, prisoners were ready to tend or dress enemy wounded, and were quite happy to be given a stretcher case to carry so that both patient and prisoner could extricate themselves from the battlefield. Those who stood on their dignity and refused to help were being foolish in the extreme.

When Lieutenant Richard Hawkins was badly wounded in the fighting near Boom Ravine on the Somme, he was removed to a Advanced Dressing Station where his wounds were dressed. A number of German prisoners were milling about and three were ordered by the doctor to take the corners of the stretcher and carry Lieutenant Hawkins away. As the men went to the stretcher, the doctor looked around for a fourth man and spotted a young German officer whom he ordered to help; the officer refused. Speaking English, the man told the doctor that it was not his job as an officer to take hold of a stretcher with three private soldiers. This may have been strictly true, but it was not advisable to say so. The doctor ordered the officer again but once more the man refused. Richard Hawkins looked on from his stretcher.

Doctor Sale was a pretty busy man. He was also a very good rugby three-quarter and he stuck his boot into this fellow’s behind and he took off. They started to go round in a very big circle, down in the shell holes, and up the other side, the doctor launching a kick at this officer every few yards and missing practically every time because of the impossible state of the ground. In the end, dear old Sale caught him and kicked his backside several more times, after which the officer decided he would take the end of the stretcher after all.

There was another option for prisoners and that was to curry favour with useful information. Colonel Roger Tempest, commanding the Scots Guards at Flers, in September 1916, recalled taking his four company commanders to a trench on the crest of a low hill to show them the line of advance. Once there, the men met a German officer who willingly pointed out the spire of Lesboufs church, ‘and so’, wrote Tempest, ‘we were able to advance with the definite knowledge that we were advancing in the right direction’. In another example, a German prisoner volunteered to show where the enemy had mined a road along which British troops were about to walk.

And then the prisoners were led away. The greatest threats to their survival were the actions either of a madman (one captured Australian private watched in horror as a German ran up and threw grenades among a party of twenty-five assembled prisoners), or the effects of desultory shelling from either side. Otherwise, with every step away from the trenches, so the chance of survival grew. Prisoners might be verbally assaulted or kicked, but they were rarely attacked.