A Broken World: Letters, Diaries and Memories of the Great War

by Sebastian Faulks

  This message was a confirmation of what we foresaw – namely, that women of the belligerent countries, with all faithfulness, devotion, and love to their country, can go beyond it and maintain true solidarity with the women of other belligerent nations, and that really civilised women never lose their humanity.

  If English women alleviated misery and distress at this time, relieved anxiety, and gave help irrespective of nationality, let them accept the warmest thanks of German women and the true assurance that they are and were prepared to do likewise. In war time we are united by the same unspeakable suffering of all nations taking part in the war. Women of all nations have the same love of justice, civilisation, and beauty, which are all destroyed by war. Women of all nations have the same hatred for barbarity, cruelty, and destruction, which accompany every war.

  Women, creators and guardians of life, must loathe war, which destroys life. Through the smoke of battle and thunder of cannon of hostile peoples, through death, terror, destruction, and unending pain and anxiety, there glows like the dawn of a coming better day the deep community of feeling of many women of all nations.

  May this feeling lay the immovable foundation for the building up of German, English, and international relations, which must finally lead to a strong international law of the peoples, so that the peoples of Europe may never again be visited with such wars as these.

  Warm sisterly greetings to Englishwomen who share these feelings!

  MAUDE ONIONS worked as a signaller (in the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps) in France during the First World War. Her book, A Woman at War: Being Experiences of an Army Signaller in France 1917–1919, from which this extract is taken, was first published privately in 1928 and released publicly the following year. It is pacifist in tone, dedicated both to one of her friends and ‘to EVERY WOMAN (irrespective of nationality or creed) who hates war and loves peace’.

  I like to look back to eight o’clock on the morning of November 11th, 1918, because it was then that I tapped out the official message to the armies in the field, which helped to bring peace to a war-weary world.

  ‘Hostilities will cease at 11.00 November 11th aaa. Troops will stand fast at the line reached at that hour which will be reported to Army Headquarters aaa. Defensive precautions will be maintained aaa. There will be no intercourse of any description with the enemy aaa. Further instructions to follow.’

  In the little Signal Office at Boulogne nothing happened at eleven o’clock, nothing except a silence, and an involuntary glance at the clock. Outside, nothing happened. It was the first great silence of armistice. It was as though France had just heaved a vast sigh of relief. It was not until the afternoon that any signs of rejoicing became evident. Then, as I made my way down to the quay side, on the stroke of three, every siren and hooter was let loose, every church bell clanged out – a deafening roar. But not a sound, not a movement, came from the hundreds of human beings who thronged the streets. The stricken soul of France seemed to have lost even the desire to rejoice.

  A deafening noise, the flags of the Blighty boat ran up, and for the first time for four weary years she sailed without an escort. Some of us tried to cheer, but voice failed. Then suddenly through the noise and din, the sobbing of a woman, a few yards away – ‘Finis – finis – incroyable…’

  Almost unconsciously, I found myself in the little military cemetery behind the congested streets of the town, where our men were buried three deep, for land was dear in France, and where the graves had been so beautifully kept by the loving hands of a khaki girl. I could not distinguish the names, for the mist of tears.

  As I turned to go from that scene of peace, I stumbled and almost fell over something on the ground, a broken piece of wood, that had sunk so deep that it was scarcely visible. I knelt down to examine it, and it was with difficulty that I was able to decipher the lettering. It was the grave of a German soldier.

  Cautiously, afraid of being seen, I stooped and placed some flowers at the foot of the broken cross.

  Somewhere, a woman was sorrowing.

  STEFAN WESTMANN was a sergeant in the 29th Division of the German Army. He was interviewed in 1963 for the BBC Great War series. This is taken from the Sound Archive of the Imperial War Museum and was edited by Max Arthur in association with the Imperial War Museum, also reproduced in Forgotten Voices of the Great War.

  While the Prince Regent of Bavaria launched an attack on Neuve Chapelle on January the 25th, this was only a feint to get the enemy to concentrate on the wrong area. Our attack was launched against the French and British trenches on the south of the Aire-La Bassée canal.

  We got orders to storm the French position. We got in and I saw my comrades start falling to the right and left of me. But then I was confronted by a French corporal with his bayonet to the ready, just as I had mine. I felt the fear of death in that fraction of a second when I realised that he was after my life, exactly as I was after his. But I was quicker than he was, I pushed his rifle away and ran my bayonet through his chest. He fell, putting his hand on the place where I had hit him, and then I thrust again. Blood came out of his mouth and he died.

  I nearly vomited. My knees were shaking and they asked me, ‘What’s the matter with you?’ I remembered then that we had been told that a good soldier kills without thinking of his adversary as a human being – the very moment he sees him as a fellow man, he’s no longer a good soldier. My comrades were absolutely undisturbed by what had happened. One of them boasted that he killed a poilu with the butt of his rifle. Another one had strangled a French captain. A third had hit somebody over the head with his spade. They were ordinary men like me. One was a tram conductor, another a commercial traveller, two were students, the rest farm workers – ordinary people who would never have thought to harm anybody.

  But I had the dead French soldier in front of me, and how I would have liked him to have raised his hand! I would have shaken it and we would have been the best of friends because he was nothing but a boy – like me. A boy who had to fight with the cruellest weapons against a man who had nothing against him personally, who wore the uniform of another nation and spoke another language, but a man who had a father and mother and a family. So I woke up at night sometimes, drenched in sweat, because I saw the eyes of my fallen adversary. I tried to convince myself of what would’ve happened to me if I hadn’t been quicker than him, if I hadn’t thrust my bayonet into his belly first.

  Why was it that we soldiers stabbed each other, strangled each other, went for each other like mad dogs? Why was it that we who had nothing against each other personally fought to the very death? We were civilised people after all, but I felt that the thin lacquer of civilisation of which both sides had so much, chipped off immediately. To fire at each other from a distance, to drop bombs, is something impersonal, but to see the whites of a man’s eyes and then to run a bayonet into him – that was against my comprehension.

  E. M. FORSTER (1879–1970) is best known for his novels A Room with a View (1908), Howards End (1910) and A Passage to India (1924). During the war, he worked in Alexandria, Egypt, as a Red Cross searcher: the job entailed interviewing wounded soldiers in hospital in order to locate the missing. The article below, ‘Reconstruction in the Marne and the Meuse’, was published shortly before he took on this role and was initially published in the Westminster Gazette on 30 August 1915.

  Anyone who attended a picture-palace in the early months of the war may remember an ingenious device that illustrated the battle of the Marne and the subsequent German retreat to the Aisne. The Germans, represented by little black blocks and an occasional eagle, were seen leaping and sliding across the map of France towards Paris, their prey. Outside Paris the Allies, shown as shaded blocks, checked them, the turning movements were executed, and then the eagles slipped back eastward, pursued by the strains of ‘Rule, Britannia’ and the ‘Marseillaise.’ It was an interesting film, and brought home to the ordinary man the strategical side of the September invasions. But there is one side
of invasion it could not bring home: the destructive. France is not a map, but France, and the German armies do not advance over white paper and retreat leaving it white, but into civilisation that they leave a desert. Each of those little black blocks leaves a stain behind – more than a stain, a festering sore that eats inwards and spreads. Invasion is more than the destruction of property, it is more even than murder and pain. It is the herald of spiritual death. The survivors, when the tide of horror retreats, feel that it is sure to return, and that even if it does not, life is not worth living again. Before it came they could not imagine anything else. They have had an experience of which we, in our isled security, can have no conception; their mental state is now as far removed from ours as if it was on the other side of the grave.

  What is being done for those survivors, for those who lay in the line of that German retreat between the Aisne and the Marne? France is a first-class power, with a past as splendid as our own and a reputation for humanity as great, and at first sight it seems impertinent for English people to offer her any assistance in connection with her war victims. But it must be remembered that on France falls the brunt of the war in the west – a war in which England has hitherto played a minor part. France is not negligent, nor is she poor, but she is busy, desperately busy. Though she can provide much of the stuff, e.g. materials to build huts, horses and petrol for transport, hotels and houses for hospitals, she cannot provide time and she cannot provide labour, because all her energies are employed in expelling the Germans. Consequently, she has been willing to accept the offer of the Society of Friends to work in the evacuated departments of the Marne and the Meuse, and the reports that they have issued – now about a dozen in number – give a vivid account of the destruction and of the attempts at reconstruction.

  ‘Imagine,’ writes one of the workers, ‘a village in England – one that you are acquainted with: it may even be your home – with some 700 houses, of which 650 have been burned to the ground, and then you will be able to form some idea of what is S— now. The inhabitants left in astounding bewilderment, hardly able to believe that the German army was so close, and so in the hurry and scramble to get away they left everything behind them, innocently expecting to find their belongings again when they returned, scarcely crediting the Germans with such viciousness as led them to burn S— to the ground. And so when they returned a few days after the German retreat, conceive their sorrow and chagrin on finding their homes razed to the ground and all trace of their possessions gone. All their hay and crops – no sight sadder than the grey heaps of powdered ashes – cattle, rabbits, and everything, burnt or destroyed. How I admire their courage as I see them grubbing about amongst their ruins, searching for some lost thing, or beginning – where would you begin? – to clear away the débris?’

  The Society of Friends begins by sending out investigators, who are usually women who have been trained in social work. In accordance with their reports the other workers follow. Nurses visit patients in their own homes, builders erect huts for the peasants (who must get back to their ground and have nowhere to live in), and there is a growing department of agricultural relief. These are the four main divisions of activity, and about 125 volunteers from England are at present engaged in them. ‘It is not only the material help given,’ writes the secretary of the Relief Committee (Miss Ruth Fry): ‘the most important aspect of it all is the courage raised anew in these much-tried sufferers, to whom the coming of these helpers is a very impressive sign of the reality of our friendship.’ And she tells how the children in a ruined village will, at the investigating visit, stand about, bored and apathetic, as if life contains nothing but stagnation and despair, and how, when the Friends return, girt with a pleasing bustle of medicine bottles, or agricultural implements, or planks, the children will gradually recover interest and end by screaming at the motor-cars, as all well-conducted children should. ‘Were the Germans to reoccupy the districts tomorrow, our work would not be wasted, because we have kept the people from idleness for a little and helped them to regain hope.’

  The work began in November, and at first the medical side predominated: for instance, a Maternity Hospital for the Marne refugees was organised at Châlons. Miss Pye, one of the organisers, thus describes a patient whom she went to fetch by car:

  In spite of the fact that we were unknown to Madame L., of a foreign county, arriving late in the dusk of a winter evening, she rose up, laid down her sewing, put on her hat and cloak, and came away with us into the dark. It was her first baby. Her husband, a compositor in Reims before he was called up, had been seriously wounded four months before, and since then she had had no news at all. She spoke during the long ride back of their happy life together, then of his being called out, of the horrors of the bombardment, and her six weeks’ nightly sojourn in the cellars. She spoke of the Germans in Reims, but said they were ‘très gentils,’ and that many of her friends had found the same. One she met had been so sad, and had wept over having to fight and leave his wife and children. She showed him the picture of her husband, and he wished her good fortune and his safe return. Her courage was splendid. She said, ‘If he never comes back to me I must bring up my child and work for him; one must have courage these days; one has moments, but it is no good to weep, it only brings weakness.’ Just before a little daughter was born to her the news came that her husband was dead. Her courage never failed. ‘For my dear little girl I want to be strong,’ she said.

  In the later reports it is agriculture that figures. The two departments are almost entirely rural, and a great effort is being made to continue their life. Most of the farm machines have been destroyed by fire – that is to say, they survive, but the iron is so soft that it bends at a touch – and to replace them about eighty mowing machines have been distributed among the villages on the co-operative system (an innovation among the French peasantry, this; in some districts there was opposition); while the Agricultural Relief of Allies Fund is helping the Friends to provide reapers and binders for the forthcoming harvest. This harvest was sown by Frenchwomen last autumn, who went out into the fields immediately after the German retreat and, as though they were themselves some process of nature, carried on the labour of countless generations, and prolonged the fertility of France into another spring. In comparison with their courage, their patriotism, what are the instruments of destruction? Like Madame L., they nurse the inviolable hope, they are tending the life of the earth, and it is to help them in this faith, beside which war is a phantom, that the Society of Friends is working.

  To an outsider, this insistence on hope, this attempt at spiritual reconstruction, whatever the fortunes of battle, seems particularly characteristic of the Quaker mind. The supreme evil of war is surely not death, but despair – the feeling that the incursion of the soul into matter has been a mistake, that we may just as well sit brooding among the ashes of happiness and beauty, that it is useless to work, useless to give help and even to receive it. We know this feeling even in England, where the war has touched us comparatively little. As casualty list succeeds casualty list, the whole of civilisation seems sliding; and what must it be for the French, who have known war’s full physical horror? Against such despair the Quaker fights. He believes that though civilisation may slide, the power of which civilisation is only a partial expression stands firm, being rooted in humanity. Or – to adapt that image of the cinematograph and its shifting blocks – he believes that no space that the armies of love have once traversed is ever the same again. There is always a radiant trace, always a lingering glory, always a glow that strengthens inwardly and is ready to shine outwardly as soon as clouds lift and the battle smoke thins under the winds of time.

  EDITH WHARTON (1862–1937) was born in New York and won the Pulitzer Prize for The Age of Innocence (1920). Her war writing includes Fighting France: From Dunkerque to Belfort (1915), The Marne (1918), and A Son at the Front (1923). While in Paris, she volunteered for relief work for refugees from Belgium and Northern France. In 19
16 she compiled an anthology called The Book of the Homeless, proceeds from which would benefit war refugees. The excerpt below is from Wharton’s preface, in which she tells an anecdote about a ‘little acrobat’ displaced from his home.

  Last year, among the waifs swept to Paris by the great torrent of the flight from the North, there came to the American Hostels a little acrobat from a strolling circus. He was not much more than a boy, and he had never before been separated from his family or from his circus. All his people were mummers or contortionists, and he himself was a mere mote of the lime-light, knowing life only in terms of the tent and the platform, the big drum, the dancing dogs, the tight-rope and the spangles.

  In the sad preoccupied Paris of last winter it was not easy to find a corner for this little figure. But the lad could not be left in the streets, and after a while he was placed as page in a big hotel. He was given good pay, and put into a good livery, and told to be a good boy. He tried … he really tried … but the life was too lonely. Nobody knew anything about the only things he knew, or was particularly interested in the programme of the last performance the company had given at Liège or Maubeuge. The little acrobat could not understand. He told his friends at the Hostels how lonely and puzzled he was, and they tried to help him. But he couldn’t sleep at night, because he was used to being up till nearly daylight; and one night he went up to the attic of the hotel, broke open several trunks full of valuables stored there by rich lodgers, and made off with some of the contents. He was caught, of course, and the things he had stolen were produced in court. They were the spangled dresses belonging to a Turkish family, and the embroidered coats of a lady’s lap-dog…

  I have told this poor little story to illustrate a fact which, as time passes, is beginning to be lost sight of: the fact that we workers among the refugees are trying, first and foremost, to help a homesick people. We are not preparing for their new life an army of voluntary colonists; we are seeking to console for the ruin of their old life a throng of bewildered fugitives. It is our business not only to feed and clothe and keep alive these people, but to reassure and guide them. And that has been, for the last year, the task of the American Hostels for Refugees.