Meeting the Enemy

by Richard van Emden

  ‘I think I had better take the lantern off you,’ he said.

  I was so shocked that I just gawped. Incredulously I listened while it was explained to me that I was now suspected of being a spy who had gone out to the cliffs to signal with a lantern to a ship, or more probably a submarine. I was promptly arrested.

  Harry Siepmann was taken to Falmouth Castle from where he was quickly released. No one bothered to ask why a man would attempt to signal to a submarine with a lantern in fog dense enough to reduce visibility to a few yards.

  For the first time, Harry felt acutely conscious of his name and the national hostility to all things Germanic. In his own mind he was English: he had been educated at Rugby School and joined the Officer Training Corps (OTC) there before going up to New College, Oxford. He graduated and in 1912 he had become a civil servant employed at the Treasury. Suddenly, he was under suspicion. At his father’s home in London, windows were broken and slogans daubed on walls even before the declaration of war, acts of stupidity that Harry assumed would abate. But family friends turned vindictive and spiteful and, after the incident in Cornwall, Harry realised that his optimism was misplaced. He determined to join the army. ‘At least my father would be able to point to that mitigating fact the next time a brick landed on the sitting-room floor.’

  No one could have predicted the rising public excitement when MPs passed the Aliens Restriction Act requiring foreigners to register themselves with the police. Nationwide announcements in the press circulated the information and by 10 August the Manchester Guardian reported a motley queue of people outside Tottenham Court Road police station including: ‘many quiet looking old ladies, probably teachers, young German girl students, tourists caught without money, barbers, stockbrokers, shipping clerks, waiters, bankers and some of the much less reputable occupations.’

  Their number included one London-based German, name unknown, who joined a queue, little realising the confusion that lay ahead:

  . . . Yesterday morning [8 August] I went straight to the police station to register myself which I thought would take me 1 to 2 hours at the outside. Well, I joined the queue outside the police station at 9.10 a.m. and I got inside at 20 minutes to 7 p.m.!!! It was a terrible experience to stand there for 10 hours in an awful crush whilst it was raining all the morning and with nothing to eat since breakfast.

  The cause of the delay was not one of numbers but the intricacies of the government form, bamboozling police officers unused to such detailed questions. Blunders were made in understanding the full requirements of the law. The anonymous German continued:

  I just had to go through it and left the Police station at 8.45 p.m. more dead than alive . . . As you will be able to see from the papers my position as a German here in London is a most serious one: whilst I have not the slightest wish or desire to do anything against this country I must be prepared to be arrested on suspicion. Of this I hope you are all convinced . . . I am very much troubled, not for my own safety or comfort, but for the sorrow and disaster that will follow out of this terrible war which is caused by the folly of my countrymen!

  Those registering gave details as to nationality, occupation, appearance, residence and ‘service of any foreign government’. Quite reasonably, enemy aliens were banned from owning firearms, signalling equipment, carrier or homing pigeons or the means of conducting secret correspondence. They were also banned from owning cameras and naval or military maps. Germans had until 17 August to register and Austrians a further week; those failing to do so could be subject to a £100 fine or six months in prison - a harsh punishment for those who, ignorant of the law and fearing their neighbours, went into hiding, although, in reality, most were allowed to register late on explanation of the facts.

  Julia Jacobitz was one of the ‘quiet looking old ladies’ who registered at her nearest police station in Bournemouth. A retired school governess, she had lived in the popular seaside town for sixteen of her twenty-three years in Britain. She was scrupulously law-abiding and on cordial terms with the local police. Several years earlier, her home had been burgled and ransacked and she now made a point of letting the police know whenever she went away and leaving them a door key should it be needed.

  On registration, all enemy aliens were given strict rules as to where they could live and where they could or, more to the point, could not go. One provision of the Aliens Restriction Act forbade Germans from living close to the sea. Julia Jacobitz’s whole-hearted cooperation with the police was, as she later pointed out, ‘hardly the manner dangerous persons would adopt who wished, or had, to hide their business’. She was concerned that she might be forcibly moved and so was grateful when Bournemouth police reassured her that that would not be the case for someone such as her, living by herself and in her mid-sixties. She was a German who desired to stay in England and wished only to be left alone.

  Many Germans who had lived in Britain for a generation or more wanted to be left alone, too, and hoped that Reginald McKenna’s parliamentary reassurances to respect law-abiding enemy aliens would be honoured. Meanwhile, others were packing up. Leaving from Parkstone Quay, Harwich, was the German ambassador. On 6 August he was escorted to the port by an armed guard from the Rifle Brigade along with scores of embassy staff, their families, assorted luggage and prams. There were no restrictions on who left, then or during the following days, for the Act gave Germans until midnight on 10 August to leave from any of thirteen designated ports.

  Princess Evelyn Blücher, née Stapleton-Bretherton, the British-born wife of Prince Gebhard Blücher, travelled with the ambassador’s party. The Princess and her husband had been staying at their London home where a steady stream of friends and relatives had come to help her pack and say goodbye, including her brother Vincent, one of her four siblings who were serving as officers in the British Army. The Princess was taken to Liverpool Street Station.

  Even at that early hour, we saw placards and papers everywhere announcing German disasters and 3500 Germans killed. The scene at the station I shall never forget, with 250 Germans and their luggage congregated on the platform, and the special train in readiness.

  The Ambassador and Ambassadress arrived at the last minute and got straight into the train, the Ambassadress quite heart-broken, and making no attempt to hide her grief. The train steamed out of the station amidst a hushed silence, people on the platform weeping, and the men with hats off standing solemnly silent. It was as if a dead monarch was being borne away . . . it was difficult to realize we were going out of this country to become its bitterest enemy.

  I could not face the departure of the ship, and went down to hide myself in the cabin. I could not look upon the shores – of my beautiful England fading from sight.

  The ship reached open sea where it ran across a flotilla of British torpedo boats, one of which opened warning fire, a shell landing thirty yards away. The ship was meant to carry a German flag on the mainmast and a Union Jack at the stern, but the Union Jack had proved too small to be seen. The English captain of the ship hauled down the German flag to avoid any further repetition and the flotilla moved away.

  ‘We made great friends with the Captain,’ wrote Princess Blücher in her private journal,

  and when he found out that I was English, and a sister-in-law to one of the Admirals whom he knew well, he became most friendly and sat in our cabin for a long time, giving us his views on the war, etc. He also promised to take some letters back to England for me, and to send a wireless message to my family to say we had arrived safely as far as the Hook.

  We had many interesting conversations during the journey. The sadness and bitterness of all these Germans leaving England struck me intensely. Here we are, they say, being dragged away from the country that has been our home for years, to fight against our best friends. They all blamed the officials in Berlin, who had, they said, grossly mismanaged the negotiations.

  By today’s standards of migration, the exodus appears inconsequentially small, in thousands not tens of
thousands during six days of ‘grace’. The largest number left immediately on declaration of war between Germany and Russia, and then France. After Britain’s entry, there had been no directive to stop Germans of military age returning home, although two hundred young men were halted at Folkestone on the morning of 11 August and later interned. However, as a government report concluded, Germans of military age ‘had ample opportunity, to go home, if they so desired’. After 10 August only male Germans aged over fifty-five, along with women, and children under the age of seventeen, were given permission to leave.

  The requirement for travel permits in Great Britain and Germany slowed repatriation traffic to a trickle. Germany forbade civilians of enemy nations to travel other than through Berlin and many foreign nationals feared going to the capital. Hilda Pickard-Cambridge eventually ‘escaped’ at the end of August with a family of Americans on whose permit she contrived to travel to Rotterdam. Elizabeth Pratley remained in hospital in Germany until, with the aid of a Friendly Society, she was given a permit to leave in November and would go on to tell her story about the murder of Henry Hadley to the British government.

  After being stuck for several weeks, Miss Waring was finally authorised to travel to Switzerland at the end of September 1914. Beginning the war in Münster, she had eventually ended up in the famous spa town of Baden-Baden, in the foothills of the Black Forest. This town, she wrote, ‘is surely one of loveliest places in the world, we could not have wished for a more beautiful “prison”, but the lack of liberty spoils everything’. Then the German press began reporting their army’s victories. Church bells were rung, flags came out and bands played in the street. ‘Germans are bad victors, it makes them bullies,’ Miss Waring opined, and, of course, the news was always reliable: ‘One German lady told me their press could say nothing but the truth, because the censorship was so strict!’

  ‘Bad victors’ was an expression likely to have been on the lips of an English girl named Dorothy. Born in a country where the art of understatement had been honed to perfection - ‘false modesty’, other people might call it – Dorothy was surprised to receive a letter from her German friend Lotte in Görlitz. It was dated 14 September, and the first serious check to the Germans’ offensive in France had yet to reach the press in Saxony. Lotte could not control her pride at news of German victories or her conviction that Britain’s declaration of war had been anything other than cynical opportunism. It is worth quoting at length.

  My dear Dorothy . . .

  I write you now to tell you something about our victories, for we did not sustain only one defeat as you are thinking. Dorothy, I do not want all this to hurt you, but we know that you do not know the truth about the war, the battles and our people, you only hear cruel things of our soldiers and much of our defeats but all this is not true, I hope you will believe me. Your Government is only too cowardly to speak the truth, it hopes to make us more enemies by all these lies, but till now we are the conquerors and we shall slay them . . . I can tell you so many and so cruel things about our enemies, it is really terrible. The French and Belgian people had cut off the tongues of our wounded soldiers, their arms, their hands, they have struck them blind!

  But you wish to annihilate our dear Germany, oh, you shall not succeed. We are so strong, much stronger than you can imagine. We must win, we want to win and so we shall win. If you could see the enthusiasm of our people that is resolved to give all for this country, or the soldiers how gayful they are going into the war, you would be astonished . . .

  Oh, Dorothy you are all so very afraid of our dear Germany. In fourteen days we got seven declarations of war, but we laughed about them! And the eighth was that one of Japan – and this was your work! Dorothy, once I told you that I hated France and liked England. Today I shrug the shoulders about France but I despise England! Why did your Government declare us the war? Because we have broken the neutrality of Belgium. Now you may hear that France broke it much earlier, our soldiers found French officers at Liege, and your Government knew it surely but did not say one word, so that it was only a pretext for the war. You wanted the war with us because you are enemies of our navy and our power. Now you felt not strong enough to fight alone against us on the sea . . . You have betrayed us.

  And not only that, you did not fight with us with honourable arms, our soldiers found at the French army and yours anti-social shots that make the terriblest wounds you can imagine. Sir Edward Grey disputes it, but he is a liar. I send you a picture of those shots. I hope you will be honourable enough to dispute the doing of your Government after knowing all this. All the English living in Germany now disputes his politics. Now when you can write me soon what are you thinking. Though your navy destroyed some of our ships we are not a bit afraid of it, we shall see which will be the stronger one, you have lost several ships too, perhaps you do not know it. But do you know that you destroyed one of our ships when it was lying in a neutral port? That was anti-social too, you may be ashamed of it . . .

  I must go to dinner now so I must end the letter. Please tell your friends all I wrote you. Many greetings for you, your father and sister, Lotte

  Lotte’s letter lacks all subtlety but it does capture the prevailing Zeitgeist in Germany: the public impression of British betrayal and the sense of national euphoria at imminent victory.

  It was three weeks since German and British forces had clashed just outside the Belgian town of Mons on 22 August, as forward units of the British Expeditionary Force met with advancing German forces of General Alexander von Kluck’s First Army.

  The first ‘shot’, a cavalry-on-cavalry engagement, saw British Dragoons overwhelm German Curassiers, ending with a number of enemy dead and prisoners taken. These men, their horses and a wagon full of lances were paraded past excited onlookers including troopers serving with the Queen’s Bays, another cavalry regiment. Private Alfred Tilney, of the 4th (Royal Irish) Dragoon Guards who had taken part in the scrap, recognised a friend:

  He asked me where we had been. I pulled his leg, said we had been out to fetch a sample, and if they saw any chaps like these they were to shoot them, as they were Germans. When we reached the Regimental Headquarters, Colonel Mullens [the Dragoons’ Commanding Officer] asked, ‘Who caught this one?’ I stuck out my chest and said, ‘I did, sir’. He told me I was a damned fool.

  The men should not have been taken prisoner. Mullens’s order was that anyone surrendering was to be searched, stripped and turned away. Prisoners would hamper the work of cavalry on the move, especially when involved in such an important role as advance guard to the BEF. As it was, these Germans had to be passed back and up the chain of command. Before leaving, they had their wounds dressed by Captain Arthur Osborn, medical officer attached to the Dragoon Guards.

  Ploughboys in German uniforms – that was all they really were . . . I was not surprised, when I saw them, that several of these young Bavarians had turned tail. I could speak a few words of German and I asked them what they thought of the War. They said they did not know what to make of it, nor what it was all about. They had, they said, been called up for military training only a few weeks before War broke out . . . I asked one of the prisoners for a button, which he cut off – my first souvenir! Rather tearfully, he insisted that his brother had been shot in Munich for refusing to join up, and that he himself was very pleased he had been taken prisoner and would not have to take any further part in the war.

  An Operational Order issued by Brigadier General de Lisle, commanding the 2nd Cavalry Brigade, congratulated those who had taken part in the ‘spirited action’ that resulted in ‘establishing the moral superiority of our cavalry, from the first, over the German cavalry’, which in this particularly brief and frenzied encounter was undoubtedly the case.

  The next day the war began in earnest with British infantry battalions taking position on or close to the Mons-Condé Canal, a more than useful barrier on which to base a defence of Mons. Lance Corporal Alfred Vivian was there, serving with the 4th Middlesex
Regiment. He had been sent with several others to a cottage on lookout. After finishing a morning wash, Vivian and his mates sat sunning themselves behind a wall when a sentry bounded in.

  ‘Blimey! Corporal, grab your bloomin’ pop-gun and have a dekko at the Kaiser’s bodyguard prancing down the road, but be bleedin’ careful’ . . .

  Coming carelessly along the road towards us was a Uhlan patrol consisting of seven or eight men, then a scanty eighty yards away. The surprising nature of the sight robbed us of our breath and wits, and left us standing in a row gasping and looking like a lot of cod-fish.

  In their astonishment, Vivian and his friends gazed on, and it was the enemy’s officer who fired first. Brought to their senses by this brazen act, the Middlesex men returned the devastatingly accurate fire of professional soldiers, wiping out the German party ‘with an ease that was staggering’.

  We stood aghast, overcome with horror by the enormity of the thing we had done. We had despatched fine, big, healthy men, full of the joy and the vigour of the prime of life, into the great unknown with scarcely a warning. We were all, I believe, absolutely stunned by the shock of this revelation. I felt, unaccountably, physically sick [and] I had a distinct fear of the consequences of breaking one of the most solemn laws of civilisation . . .

  Accompanied by a volunteer, we approached the frightful scene slowly, and with great circumspection. On arrival, we found that, without any doubt, they had all been killed, the majority of them bearing at least two marks as evidence of the terrible accuracy of our fire. Neglecting precaution, we stood looking down at the sad fruits of our first clash with the enemy, the sight of these dead men exercising a dreadful fascination for me which I found very difficult to dispel. Thrusting aside its baneful influence, I pulled myself together with an effort, and we collected the peculiar headdress of these unlucky men.