A number of Germany’s camp commandants, doctors and guards had lived in Britain, and some returned to Germany as war broke out. Yet residency did not necessarily make Anglophiles of these men. Privates George Kitson of the Scots Guards and Patrick Leavy of the Highland Light Infantry gave interviews at the end of the war in which they spoke of an interpreter at Fort MacDonald, an infamous transit camp in Belgium. Here a German guard was recognised as being a former shipping manager from Scotland, a man described as being around thirty-five years old, slim, sallow, with rounded shoulders and ‘vicious to our men’. His wife and children were in Britain and it was their likely predicament, and his family’s enforced separation, that informed his attitude to British prisoners whom he regularly assaulted.
By contrast, others were humane. In Cassel, Doctor Noyes, one-time consultant at St Thomas’ Hospital in London, looked after the sick and wounded as well as circumstances allowed. After Noyes left, Doctor Simon arrived, and was considered by prisoners to have been just as professional. Simon had friends in Manchester and was very keen that wounded men marked for exchange relayed to his friends that he was doing his best. In the same camp, a British sergeant major, a policeman in civilian life, recognised the camp’s censor, a pleasant enough man, as an employee of the Deutsche Bank in London’s Mincing Lane. The erstwhile constable had been sent to arrest this man but the German had given him the slip, leaving for home that morning.
Unsurprisingly a number of interpreters and censors were formerly resident in Britain. At Libau, the interpreter, Sadler, had owned a shop in London’s Fleet Street. Leonard, the censor at Friedrichsfeld, had also been a shopkeeper, in Nottingham. In one of the more curious episodes of Anglo-German relations, Leonard cajoled prisoners into helping a visiting professor with his research into dialects and phonetics. The professor, Wilhelm Doegan, a graduate of Oxford University, asked men to speak or sing into a gramophone; some refused but others did take part and their efforts survive as an archive in both Berlin and the British Library. Leonard had lived in Nottingham concurrently with the commandant of Langensalza camp, a former laceworks owner. It was said that Hauptmann Alexander had been so happy in Nottingham that he openly favoured men from the town, giving them the best jobs on work kommandos.
Prisoners were not passive recipients of good or ill will. Those who knuckled down, and did not kick against authority, had an easier time than those who proved belligerent or resentful. Commandants rarely tolerated impudence and, if ordered to transfer men to camps that used prisoners in coal and salt mines, selected those they considered the obstinate and ill-mannered first. Conditions in these mines were appalling and prisoners often died of injuries and illness. By contrast, prisoners who showed themselves not only amenable but cultured, too, could thrive in POW camps and were permitted to construct theatres, form bands and print newspapers.
Nonetheless, the claustrophobia of a POW camp and the enforced communal life only helped to magnify resentments and petty jealousies between fellow prisoners. Worst of all, not every prisoner remained loyal to his comrades.
Only privates and lance corporals were expected to participate on work kommandos. With this in mind, some prisoners added two or more stripes on their arms to fool the Germans into thinking that they were senior NCOs and therefore not eligible for outside work. This trickery threw the onus of extra work onto the remaining men. Bona fide NCOs felt they could not expose the fraud for fear that cheats would be sent to the salt mines. Equally, they were angry that men who did not take the responsibility of NCOs in the trenches were only too happy to take advantage in Germany.
Did all these NCOs really care about the plight of the men given extra chores owing to the selfishness of others? Or were they instead, as some privates and lance corporals believed, simply cherishing those privileges granted senior NCOs, and protecting their rights? At Senne, Sergeant Major Thomas of the Warwickshire Regiment was nicknamed ‘von Thomas’ because of his alleged enthusiastic co-operation with the enemy, to the detriment of comrades. It was easy for enmity against such men to fester. One old regular, Private Alfred Hoare, captured during the Retreat from Mons, let his bitterness slip during an interview he gave on returning home in 1918. Hoare had been held at Döberitz camp for most of the war.
I was sent out on kommando when attending hospital. This was the fault of the English Sergeant Major who made it pretty hot for us. I could also tell tales of bad treatment by the NCOs and RAMC men but I prefer not to give any information as to this. The world is not very big and I might meet some of them after the war and if I do I will take the law into my own hands.
Those in camp who held privileged positions attracted dark suspicions from men who did not. Red Cross food parcels sent to Germany proved a lifeline for soldiers who could barely stomach the enemy’s dire rations. These parcels were collected from nearby railway stations, stored, and then distributed by a parcel committee run by the prisoners themselves. At Cassel there were accusations that the prisoners who ran the committee were stealing from other prisoners’ parcels, a view apparently confirmed when the hut and parcel records went up in smoke shortly after the Armistice.
With food in short supply, the smallest discrepancy in allocations drew vehement protest. At Ohrdruf Hospital, Private James Harlock suspected Corporal Rowley of stealing from parcels. Rowley, as the principal member of the parcel committee, had the job of opening and overseeing the distribution of parcel contents. ‘Frequently the tins were changed,’ complained Harlock, ‘in my case butter into margarine and meat pudding into jam . . . some [tins] were missing.’ Harlock believed that Rowley sold tins to German guards who were, by 1917, very short of quality foodstuffs themselves. It was an accusation he repeated when interviewed at the end of the war.
Sapper Milner told me that Corporal Rowley once showed him ten 20 mark German notes and was bragging about what he had got, and said he had got some cognac. He seemed to be in favour with the German Guards and to be able to go about and do as he liked. All of us in the barracks suspected him of making money out of the parcels, and he was still in charge of them when I left.
Hunger and mental fatigue undermined the morale and morals of weaker men. It would be no surprise that some prisoners availed themselves of the chance for an easier life at the behest of the enemy and at the expense of comrades.
The worst betrayal of all began when prisoners broke ranks entirely and aligned themselves with the enemy. In interviews with exchanged or returning prisoners of war, men picked out individuals who passed well beyond the boundaries of fraternisation with the enemy, resorting instead to outright collaboration. ‘Private Owen did not conduct himself as a comrade with the exception of a few of his own friends; he took the side of the German authorities and frequently declared men fit to work who were seriously ill,’ claimed Private Ernest Barton, of the 2nd Manchester Regiment, insisting that the accused also assisted in the thrashing of two prisoners of war who had tried to escape. ‘Owen’s conduct cannot be too severely censured.’
Chalmers of the Gordon Highlanders was just as treacherous, claimed Alfred Amey, a crewman of HMS Nomad sunk at the Battle of Jutland in 1916. Amey assured his interviewer that Chalmers, who spoke fluent German, was given command of his hut and sorted out work shifts. In this capacity he was given an official title. ‘The Germans issued a notice to say that he held the position of a German Unter-Officer and had an order put into the hut to that effect. Any man who struck him would be court-martialled and punished in the same way as for striking a German non-commissioned officer.’
Private Mark Nathan of the 2/7th Lancashire Fusiliers had no honorary rank bestowed upon him but he was ‘very thick with the Germans in the Guardroom’, according to Private Ernest Brown of the Machine Gun Corps. ‘Nathan would not mix with us, drinking the Germans’ beer and smoking with them.’ It came as no surprise to Brown that Nathan was attacked by another prisoner, who was charged and given seven days’ punishment. Like Chalmers, Nathan spoke fluent German and was us
ed as an interpreter. He was seen, Brown said, as being very ‘pro-German’, getting rations reduced whenever a man went sick, or claiming that men were malingering.
Owen, Chalmers and Nathan might successfully have rebutted such accusations had they ever been asked to do so. Anyone acting as an intermediary with the enemy had to be shrewd and even-handed. It is possible that these men were attempting to ameliorate the more stringent German demands on British prisoners, but then failed to appreciate the negative image they portrayed to those around them. It is possible, but unlikely. Whether these men did collaborate with the enemy will never be known for sure. Their names and their deeds have passed into obscurity, unlike those of another man whose presence in several prisoner-of-war camps in 1914 and 1915 was to cause an international sensation.
Visitors offering help to British prisoners in Germany were likely to be warmly welcomed and remembered, especially if they were English-speaking. The American ambassador, or more likely his representative, John Jackson, was seen occasionally, busying himself with soldiers’ welfare. Then there was the Reverend Henry Williams, the chaplain of St George’s Church in Berlin, who used his special licence to move freely across Germany to pursue his ministry. And then came another English-speaking visitor who attracted attention for very different reasons. His name was Sir Roger Casement. With the active encouragement and material support of the Germans, this Knight of the Realm-turned-devout Irish Nationalist came not to offer help but to procure it from among Irish Catholic prisoners. The intention: to enlist a ‘Brigade’ of men to be used in a planned uprising in Ireland.
Although Dublin-born, Casement was raised by paternal relatives in Ulster. An Irish Nationalist in his youth, he nonetheless rose to become a British consul, employed in Africa. After the Boer War he became an anti-imperialist, yet continued working for the British government, compiling a report on human rights abuses in Belgian-controlled Congo, for which he was knighted in 1911. His findings helped recharge his own interest in the right to self-determination and Irish Nationalism. In 1913, after retiring from consular service, he helped form the Irish Volunteers, a group that would ultimately fight for Irish Independence in 1916. His decision to travel to Germany to raise a force to fight for Irish independence was a huge gamble and an act of high treason that ultimately cost him his life.
Casement arrived in Berlin on the last day of October 1914 and soon came to the somewhat startled attention of Princess Evelyn Blücher.
The wonder was how an Irishman, and an ex-consul of the English Government, could have found his way there. But we were more interested than most, as we knew him well. He had been in Africa with my husband, and we had also seen a good deal of him in London at various times. We knew his anti-English feelings well, and his rabid Home Rule mania, but we did not expect it to have taken this intense form of becoming pro-German . . .
My husband went to see him shortly after his arrival and tried to show him what a false position he had put himself in, and that he had better leave the country as quickly as possible, but it was no use . . . he was most enthusiastic and certain of success.
Casement received the cooperation of the German State Secretary for Foreign Affairs for his plans to form the Brigade. To begin with, Irish Catholics were separated from other British prisoners. In Sennelager, where 400 Irishmen languished, a German Feldwebel addressed the men, offering improved food, accommodation and clothing. The offer was resisted by senior Irish NCOs who did not want preferential treatment but, despite their protests, the men were moved into newly constructed huts.
If Casement was to make an appeal to 2,200 Irish Catholic prisoners then they would have to be brought under one roof. By mid-December all were concentrated at Limburg camp, thirty-five miles north-west of Frankfurt-am-Main and in a strongly Catholic region. The camp was one of the best in Germany with excellent sanitation, good quality wooden huts and plenty of blankets. Cigarettes were handed out freely and the men were addressed directly by Casement. Private Andrew Duffy was one of the men listening. ‘He said, “I have come here to form an Irish Brigade, to strike a blow for Ireland”. The men hissed and hooted at him. He saw it was no use and left, the men would have pulled him to pieces.’ Private Tim Macarthy of the RAMC took note as Casement ‘addressed us on how badly England had treated Ireland and why should the Irish fight for England’. The appeal fell flat. ‘He told us we were no Irishmen. We booed him out of the place.’ Only two men approached Casement to enlist.
The Germans made every effort to help procure the men needed. Those who agreed to join would be given all the comforts the Germans could muster, and absolved of all work. Posters were printed to convince Irish Catholics of their true allegiance, and it was not to the English. ‘Remember Bachelors Walk’ exhorted one poster, referring to an incident just days before the outbreak of war when British troops opened fire on Irish Nationalists, killing three and injuring thirty-two. A leaflet was handed out giving ‘Reasons why you should fight for the Germans’, followed by another: ‘Reasons why you should not fight for the English’. Private Daniel Merry was given what he called an Irish ‘manifesto’. This explained that fighting for England in Belgium meant no more to Irishmen than the Fiji islands. An Irish Brigade, it clarified, would be fully equipped and financed by Germany; in America ‘brothers’ were forming a league to help the Brigade and, after the war, anyone who wished to leave and settle in America would be given free passage and a grant. Finally, those who remained in Germany post-war would be welcomed on the streets of Berlin and treated as guests.
A recruiting office was opened at Limburg and twelve men at a time taken to see the sort of food they might eat, including roast beef and potatoes. In spite of all the incentives and arm-twisting, the men remained almost impervious to persuasion. This infuriated Casement. An Irish Brigade ‘black book’ was created and the names entered of those declining to help, so testified Private Cullen of the Royal Munster Fusiliers. ‘Those men (of whom I was one) were given reduced rations and made to do all the “dirty work” in the camp.’
Those resistant to persuasion were sent away, as the Reverend Henry Williams discovered. Williams had made an application to visit Limburg but the camp commandant turned it down: ‘My services were not required as all the prisoners were Roman Catholic.’ Williams wrote in his diary that Casement had become convinced that a few loyalist ringleaders swayed potential volunteers and that if these loyalists could be identified, weeded out and removed, then the others would soon join the Brigade.
The consequence was that week after week small parties of these supposed ring-leaders were singled out for punishment and sent to other camps containing several thousands of Russians but no British. It was in these camps that I met them and soon got to know their story. The presence of these small groups of Irishmen at Sagan, Spottau, Guben and other camps puzzled me at first.
Seventeen Irishmen were sent to Guben, where, on arrival, they were subjected to four days without food, mattresses or blankets. At Neuhammer camp, fifteen ‘ring-leaders’ were sent to live among some 20,000 Russian and Polish prisoners.
The testimony given by witnesses to Casement’s campaign varied in peripheral details but not in key facts. Casement returned to Limburg and with the additional help of an Irish-American priest, Father Nicholson, sought more recruits but without success, and only a handful of men enlisted. One recruit, Corporal Harry Quinlisk of the Royal Irish Regiment, would come to acknowledge ruefully the failure of the entire enterprise. ‘The Munster Fusiliers were more loyal than the English soldiers. Several Englishmen volunteered for the Irish Brigade, but we could never enrol them. Most of the men we interviewed asked how much money they would get.’ In all, just fifty-six NCOs and other ranks joined up and, although some effort was made by the Germans to enlist officers, none succumbed.
The few dozen prisoners who joined the Irish Brigade would live in a sort of limbo, their numbers too small to be of any material use in an Irish uprising. As a group, they would wear a dist
inctive Irish Brigade uniform described as green with red cuffs, with a shamrock on the collar, cap and cuffs. Being so conspicuous hardly mattered: all their names were known to their erstwhile comrades. Eventually, in July 1915, they were taken from Limburg to Zossen camp, south of Berlin, where they remained segregated from other prisoners. James Gerard, the American ambassador, came across them in 1916. ‘The Irishmen did not bear confinement well, and at the time of my visit many of them were suffering from tuberculosis in the camp hospital. They seemed also peculiarly subject to mental breakdowns.’
Little wonder. No one, least of all the men themselves, knew what the future would hold for those who had thrown in their lot with the enemy.
4
The Lives of Others
Heavily laden soldiers funnelling through narrow, winding trenches understood that there was a claustrophobic side to front-line life. The twisting route up deepening communication trenches linking the reserve, support and front lines felt interminable to those who shuffled, puffed and grunted their way forward. Theirs would be a worm’s eye perspective on the world, crumbly earthen walls, a parapet lined with sandbags, wooden duckboards on which to walk. Here, hemmed in by earth, they would feel relatively safe just as long as the trenches were sensibly located, properly constructed and deep. Men would stay here for three days or more, venturing out at night, using the protection of darkness to undertake trench repairs, strengthening barbed wire defences or patrolling no-man’s-land. Only during the day was there time to rest, pen a letter home or chat to mates.
Meeting the Enemy Page 12
