HISTORICAL REFERENCE WITH A DIFFERENCE

As the centenary of the Great War approaches, a tide of new books about it is due for publication. It must be the most written-about war in history.

Richard van Emden’s ‘Meeting the Enemy: The Human Face of the Great War’, though, is a World War I historical reference with a difference. Emden is a specialist who has found a literary niche, little explored, charting the personal contacts between Britons and Germans and their feelings about each other as the war progressed.

It began on both sides in a blaze of patriotic bluster. Crowds poured into Berlin’s main thoroughfare, Unter den Linden, as they did in London’s Piccadilly and Pall Mall. In Berlin they bellowed, ‘Deutschland, Deutschland, Über Alles’; in London, ‘Rule Britannia!’

The phrases of the hour in Britain were: ‘We must stand by France’ (German troops were already in Belgium) and ‘It will be over in three months’. Why three months, nobody precisely knew.

There were many more German immigrants in Britain than Britons in Germany. They faced internment, with dire consequences for their families, who were eventually supported by meagre grants from their government.

There was fury in Germany at Britain’s declaration of war, along with widespread feelings of betrayal. Only the previous year, George V visited his cousin the Kaiser, and was pictured wearing a ‘pickelhaube’ – a spiked, plumed German helmet matching the German leader’s. Now King George was pictured on a postcard as ‘der Judas von England’.

The Kaiser was honorary colonel of a regiment of British dragoons and an Admiral of the Fleet to boot. His British orders and decorations were packed in brown paper and delivered to the British Embassy with a message that he had no further use for them.

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NEVERTHELESS, he ordered that the English Church in Berlin, built as a present to his English mother, was to be kept open, and its pastor, the Rev Henry Williams, left at liberty for the duration.

The diaries of Rev William’s are much quoted, describing how life in Germany deteriorated when the Allied blockade began to bite.

Anti-German feelings ran high in Britain at the war’s opening and flared again with the sinking of the Lusitania off Southern Ireland in 1915, drowning more people than the Titanic had.

A remarkable book reveals how warring troops bonded in the trenches.

There were riots in the Lusitania’s home port of Liverpool, with the shops of German immigrants being looted and burnt. This rancour was markedly absent from the front line in Flanders, where the famous Christmas truce took place in 1914. Everyone knows that it started with men in both trenches singing Christmas carols and shouting ‘Merry Christmas’ to each other, then climbing out of their trenches to exchange gifts and friendly talk in no man’s land.

In some places the truce lasted into January, until orders came from above that war must be resumed. Officers on both sides synchronised their watches, agreeing to start again in an hour, saluted each other and went back to their respective trenches.

Those in the higher echelons of the British Army were furious at the spontaneous fraternising – pictures of which appeared in the newspapers. When Christmas approached in 1915, they threatened dire punishment if it should happen again.

But it did – at least in the Scots’ Guards section of the front. Their company commander, Sir Iain Colquhoun, agreed to a German suggestion of a truce to bury the dead lying in no man’s land. This developed into full-scale fraternising. The Germans danced to a mouth organ.

Captain Colquhoun was court-martialled and reprimanded. All leave was cancelled for six months as punishment.

Some other friendly contacts were surprising. When the British took over part of the French sector in 1915, they were met with a message left on the barbed wire, fixing a rendezvous for the exchange of newspapers.

One British officer was told that German officers had been in the habit of crossing over in the evenings for a game of bridge with their French opponents. That stopped when they found the British waiting for them.

Many deserters crossed the line at night to surrender and escape further fighting. A Sergeant Dawson, bogged down in the mud of no man’s land, could only wait to be captured. When he surrendered to the five Germans who pulled him out, they assured him: ‘No, we are your prisoners. Take us to your headquarters.’ He was helplessly lost, but they knew the way.

Prisoners were remarkably well-treated. Captain Wilfred Birt, who died in Cologne hospital after a stoic struggle with painful wounds, was given a slap-up military funeral in the cathedral by Germans. Serving British officers were invited to attend, and were allowed free passage back to their side afterwards.

Another imprisoned British captain was allowed three weeks’ leave to go home to see his dying mother. He gave his promise to return, kept his word … then set about trying to escape as usual.

The highest display of mutual esteem occurred between the fighter pilots who were in combat above the lines. They carried no parachutes, as they were too bulky for narrow cockpits. So when a machine caught fire, the pilot was faced with the choice of burning or jumping.

German pilots made a habit of finding their victims, alive or dead. If dead, they dropped details of their names and burial sites over the British lines. If alive, they would invite them to a slap-up meal in their mess.

Both sides were ruthless to each other in the air but observed the rules of chivalry on the ground. When the German ace Max Immelmann was killed, a British pilot dropped a wreath and message of condolence on his airfield.

When fellow ace Werner Voss was shot down doing battle against seven opponents at once, the victorious pilot said: ‘If only I could have brought him down alive.’

This illustrated the difference between personal combat and the industrialised warfare of machine guns and artillery barrages on the ground. When it was possible to know your enemy individually, hatred was seldom shown.

A brigadier, Hubert Rees, who was captured during the Germans’ last offensive in March 1918, was ordered to a car that took him to the top of a plateau. Here he was ushered forward to meet the Kaiser, who questioned him then said: ‘Your country and mine ought not to be fighting each other. We should be fighting together. I had no idea that you would fight me.’

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HE ASKED: ‘Does England wish for peace?’ Rees replied: ‘Everyone wishes for peace.’

After the Kaiser had gone into exile and Rees had been released from captivity and was wandering about Berlin, he witnessed the return of the Prussian Guards to the city, often described as a ‘triumph’.

Rees had a different word for it – pathetic. ‘Companies of boys and over-age men. Officers without swords. Rusty weapons, broken-down horses drawing limbers. As a military spectacle it was lamentable.’

As British troops occupied the Rhineland, a British guardsman wrote: ‘The people welcomed us as rescuers from anarchy.’ Also from starvation. Their British ‘guests’ were a vital source of food from the Army’s well-stocked canteens.

The ban on fraternisation had to be lifted. ‘Our fellows would open their tunics to show their scars. The German boys would do the same,’ wrote a private soldier. Only weeks after they had been doing their best to kill each other, they behaved like comrades in arms.

– ‘Meeting the Enemy: The Human Face of the Great War’ written by Richard van Emden is published by Bloomburg at £20.