For those new to the line, the temptation to peer over the top was worryingly common: to take a quick look at no-man’s-land and see the enemy’s trenches. Some men were overeager to see for themselves where Fritz sat, maybe no more than a hundred yards away, perhaps less. Such curiosity was madness if the German trenches were near. To stick one’s head up above the parapet for more than a second invited the attention of snipers, who were adept at taking advantage of such naivety. And what would a man expect to see? Hardly a German looking back at him. At best he might see a grubby, meandering line of enemy sandbags and straggling lines of barbed wire. In the early days, before the great battles of attrition destroyed the ground, uncut crops or long grass swayed in the breeze. Roofless houses stood with disintegrating walls, abandoned farm machinery lay idle, and soldiers’ discarded tin cans and bottles littered the ground.
By late 1915 a complex, interlinking system of trenches, three lines deep, stretched over two hundred miles from the Swiss Alps to the Belgian coast. Long gone were the mere scoops in the ground dug by the men of 1914. Where the water table was low, trenches were dug eight feet into the earth, with ‘dog-leg’ turns every few yards. Sumps drained water away, and raised wooden duckboards kept the men’s feet out of the worst of the mire. Where the water table was high, digging was restricted to a couple of feet and a trench wall constructed above ground with literally millions of sandbags.
Trench life was routine to experienced soldiers, but to the uninitiated stepping into the front line could be a thrill. Corporal George Foley of the 6th Somerset Light Infantry felt that frisson of excitement. ‘There was no one between us and the enemy. It was a great moment for every one of us, and my diary announces with pride that on this night I “fired my first shot at them”. It was merely a blind shot in the direction of the Hun trenches, some 300 yards away.’
Casualties put paid to such attitudes. Private Martyn Evans’s first day in the trenches was marked by the unnecessary loss of good mates. ‘Cook and Dyer were killed outright during the morning and several men were wounded because they would not stop from looking over the top,’ he wrote. ‘Strict orders were given that during the day, except in case of attack, no one was to use anything but the periscope for observing the enemy.’
Interest in the German trenches, and by extension the Germans themselves, remained pervasive, especially when sightings were infrequent and generally fleeting. On a quiet night the noise of German transport rumbling along the back roads might be audible, but the enemy himself remained hidden, tantalisingly so. ‘It was queer seeing all those miles of trenches in front of us showing not a sign of life, and yet swarming with the enemy,’ noted Evans, serving with the 1/6th Gloucestershire Regiment.
As a reminder to everyone that this was a deadly war, the artillery exchanged shells morning and evening to dissuade anyone from using the half-light to attack. Bouts of machine-gun and small-arms fire peppered the parapet or whined overhead, with the occasional crash of a trench mortar and crack of the sniper’s bullet to ginger everyone up. At night, flares rose and fell for miles around, eerily lighting up no-man’s-land, and distant, continuous gunfire rumbled; it was not hard for a man to appreciate that he was involved in a gargantuan struggle.
Of course it was possible, with the curvature of opposing trenches, and the ground’s natural undulations, that a man might glimpse the enemy. Signaller Victor Cole, of the 7th Royal West Kent Regiment, was making his way along a battered, largely disused section of trench, looking for a break in a telephone wire, and as he went he took a quick look over the top. In two months on the Western Front he had yet to see the enemy. ‘To my surprise I saw a German about three hundred yards away digging at the back of a trench. I watched him for a moment and thought, “Well, I’m entitled to have a shot at him.” I aimed, pulled the trigger and saw a piece of cloth or leather fly off the side of his coat – he disappeared.’
In popular imagination, the Great War has come to symbolise a conflict in which suffering was unremitting, and conducted in a putrid landscape. Memoirs evoke scenes of carnage: the reek of cordite after a shell explosion and the shouts for stretcher-bearers. Diaries tell of the pitiless shooting of combatants in trench raids and fighting patrols and of men breaking down with shell-shock. These stories are just one side of a bigger, now forgotten picture. Eclipsed are the stories of humour, albeit much of it black, of passive, easy-going relations with the enemy and of the German-baiting fun that saved morale, particularly at critical moments. When the 1st Royal Scots were locked in desperate fighting at Ypres in April and May 1915, their response to ferocious German attacks was not to buckle but to raise a large piece of cardboard on which was the life-sized picture of a man’s head in profile with an outlandishly large hand. The fingers were outstretched, the thumb placed on the tip of the nose: the meaning transparent enough. It lifted spirits in the British trenches and it was raised every time the Germans opened fire.
Trench life, in quieter and less contested parts of the front, was punctuated by only short periods of intense excitement and fear; otherwise it was dull. If one side looked for trouble, trouble was returned, and with interest, as Denis Barnett, a second lieutenant serving with the 2nd Leinster Regiment, was well aware. If German artillery opened up, British guns responded, but rather than searching out the enemy’s batteries, the guns pummelled a village where it was known the enemy had billets. It was tit for tat but on an impressive scale.
All these things work out on very human lines. If we turn a Maxim on to a German fatigue party, that night they’ll keep firing to spoil our night’s rest. If they try to pump water into our trenches, we fire rifle grenades where we see their smoke rising. It’s all very amusing. If one side does not annoy the other, they live side by side in perfect concord without interfering with one another.
To break the daytime monotony, shouted conversations with the enemy were heard and might begin with a simple ‘Morning, Fritz’ and other pleasantries, or with bullish insults, depending on the mood.
‘I had a conversation with a German the other morning,’ wrote Barnett in a letter. ‘It began just at dawn: “Guten Morgen, Allyman,” and we soon got going. I told him about the Kaiser, and he said we were all sorts of things I didn’t know the English for, and also one thing which is a favourite appellative among the lower orders of English society, which he was awfully pleased with.’ Acknowledging that Germans had been the mainstay of London’s pre-war restaurant and café staff, Barnett parted with a badinage with which he was particularly pleased. ‘I shouted “Waiter!” and one sportsman said “Coming, sir, coming, sir!”’
It was usually boredom that made the fur fly, and not always between opposing trenches. When tedium got the better of two men in Barnett’s platoon, the disagreement was settled on top of the parapet in full view of the enemy. The scrap was a welcome distraction for all, including the Germans who encouraged the two protagonists by cheering and firing their rifles in the air. There was no question of sniping at the men.
During daylight, both sides regularly inspected no-man’s-land to see that there was nothing untoward. A visual inspection was undertaken with a variety of trench periscopes raised above the parapet or telescopes slid through a concealed hole in the sandbag defences, known as a loophole. Routine observation was that nothing had altered, although that did not prevent surprises. Brigadier Philip Mortimer, serving with the 3rd Meerut Divisional Train, borrowed a telescope belonging to a Machine Gun officer, and, as he peered at the German trenches:
I actually saw as clear as daylight, the reflection in the top mirror of his periscope, a German officer’s head as he searched our trenches through his periscope, a most uncanny sight – the grey peaked cap and face as he looked down into the bottom mirror could be clearly seen. It was decided to ‘strafe’ the periscope with a Maxim which after being trained on it carefully was let off to the tune of about 15 rounds. The periscope immediately disappeared.
Looking through binoculars, Private Percy O
gley, serving with the 1st York and Lancaster Regiment, was in a position to see beyond the enemy’s trenches and was intrigued by a small cloud of rolling dust. It was a dispatch rider on a motorbike taking a message to the trenches and Ogley was able to observe the man dismount, run into a dugout then reappear a few minutes later when he was seen to strap a bag onto his back and ride off. On the Somme, in the summer of 1915, Lieutenant James Pennycuik, serving with the Royal Engineers, studied a German in the village of Curlu. Pennycuik was sitting in a French observation post and through a telescope watched with almost voyeuristic interest the sentry in front of a house. He recalled watching a ‘rather sloppy individual’ lounging about and talking to a lady. He also saw the Colonel’s cook dressed in white overalls and an apron, as well as two other Germans, some children and a number of cows. It was, he claimed, an amusing half-hour.
Perversely, it was when the trenches were far apart that the enemy were more evident, lazily confident that distance made them safe even from excellent snipers. Private Sydney Fuller watched one German repairing a trench with sandbags. Judging the distance to be about 1,400 yards, he and another sniper set their sights. Their shots had no effect on the German other than to make him stop and glance up. Only later did machine-gunners use a range finder to accurately measure the distance; it turned out to be half Fuller’s estimate. A Lewis gun was then brought to bear on the same spot where three Germans could now be seen; the first burst scattered all three.
Most marksmen considered any target over 400 yards as ‘hard’ and shooting over extreme distances was as much about having fun as anything else. Jack Rogers and Charlie Shaw, snipers serving with the 1/7th Sherwood Foresters, were sent to an observation post, Charlie looking through a telescope, Jack using binoculars. The two opposing lines were at least 1,500 yards apart, with the German trenches on a low crest.
‘All of a sudden, Charlie said “Look!” and over the top, out over the German lines, two men appeared walking down the slope, both of them carrying shovels. They hadn’t got down a long way before they started digging quite a large hole.’
It became apparent to Charlie that the men were digging a latrine, utterly unaware that they could be overlooked. ‘They haven’t got the cheek to build a toilet there, surely,’ Charlie said. ‘I mean nobody’s going to use it, are they?’
‘It wasn’t very long before another soldier appeared,’ recalled Jack. ‘He came walking down to that toilet and began to pull his trousers down, sat on the toilet and had the nerve to pull out a newspaper.’
The German was the best part of a mile away and it was decided that Charlie would shoot and Jack would observe. ‘Charlie loaded his rifle, got it poised. “Ready?” I said “Yes.” “Right,” said Charlie, “watch out”, and he fired. I don’t know how near he was to the German but that man never stopped to pull his trousers up. He just got up and tore away as best he could over the top of the hill out of sight.’
Private Tom Tolson, serving with the 8th Kings Own Yorkshire Light Infantry, had trained at the Second Army Sniping School. He was frequently sent to a hidden observation post (OP) keeping a log of what he saw, noting enemy machine-gun posts suspected, known and inactive. He also looked for enemy OPs, sniping posts, obstacles in no-man’s-land, and the state of the enemy wire, its strength and depth. Finally, and as importantly, he watched the enemy, describing their activities and noting uniform insignia to aid identification of opposing units. Map references were written down with observations. ‘Enemy seen bailing water out of trench at point F 19 C 05 50 . . . German showing head and shoulders, another handing sandbags up to him apparently strengthening the trench.’ In noting what he saw, he also revealed the confidence with which the enemy openly carried on his activities:
1.05. Observed enemy looking over the trench for a few seconds and then disappeared wearing field grey uniform and round cap. One man looked over this particular spot every fifteen minutes. F 19 C 1 1¼ 8¼.
2.10. Observed earth being thrown out of the enemy front line trench at different points.
2.45. Observed four Germans looking over the parapet. One of them wearing glasses and very stout. They were talking to our men and waving their hands. The conversation lasted five minutes. German got up and held a piece of white bread in his hand. Showed it to our men and then commenced to eat it with pocket knife in his hand.
9.30. Observed two German officers showing half figure wearing polished peak cap and grey uniform, smoking and laughing and waving their hands to someone in our trench. They drank something out of a bottle, remained in view for three minutes, then disappeared again. Could have shot them at F 19 c 1¼ 2¼.
Intelligence was keenly pursued and included night-time raids that would not only cause disruption and alarm in the enemy’s lines but which offered an opportunity to seize a prisoner. Private Percy Ogley was involved in an attack on a German machine-gun post. The officer in charge led the men to within a few feet of the enemy, so close in fact that the Germans could be heard talking to one another while one man tapped the machine gun as if it were out of action. Then a German stepped forward, unfastening his trousers.
He saw us and stopped dead in his tracks. He was flummoxed. He didn’t know whether to run, shout, or what to do. Our officer decided for him. Lifting his revolver, the officer took aim and fired at point-blank range.
Down fell the German. His pals in the outpost took to their heels, and legged it back to their trenches.
‘Come on chaps,’ said the officer. ‘Quick as you can, lift him on your shoulders, come on, tout suite.’
Ogley was given the job of carrying the wounded German.
The officer and one man walked several paces in front and the other two followed behind. The poor Jerry was in some terrible pain, blood trickled down my back, and I felt ready to drop from exhaustion; all the time he groaned. The other chaps had their turns of carrying our prisoner, and finally we reached our lines, here we had a tot of rum, and examined the German’s wound.
Raiding the enemy’s positions was exceedingly risky, and could result in losses greater than those inflicted on the enemy. Private Ogley was involved in a further raid but the enemy’s artillery was alerted and a hasty retreat made under fire. In taking cover in a shell hole, Ogley became aware of another man’s presence; in the dark he took the man to be his officer, Lieutenant Thomas Bassett. As the gunfire died down, Ogley turned: ‘“Come along Sir,” I said, “I think we can make it now.” I had my face buried in my arms but when I looked at the chap next to me, I sent up a yell, jumped to my feet and off I went like hell.’
The man was a German in an advanced state of decomposition. The hideous sight galvanised Ogley into action but in his fright he ran the wrong way down a sunken lane where he was sent flying by a shell explosion. Shaken but relieved, he made the front-line trench where he was greeted with well-earned tea and a cigarette. Ogley reported what he had seen to Lieutenant Bassett who, to Ogley’s dismay, asked to be taken to the shell hole to ascertain the dead man’s regiment.
On our bellies we wiggled through the wet grass and up to the shell hole where I had seen the dead Jerry. By heck he was a tall chap. He must have been six feet eight inches. We two were like pygmies at the side of him. Our officer cut off the chap’s epaulettes on which were stamped the chap’s regiment, he also took a large canvas sheet from the chap’s back, searched all his pockets and got all the information he wanted. He said the chap was a Bavarian.
Although the British Tommy broad-brushed the enemy as Fritz, Boche or Hun, he appreciated that there were significant regional differences among German troops. Prussian soldiers were noted for their aggression, and a feud was widely believed to exist between the Scottish regiment of the Black Watch and the Prussians over alleged battlefield atrocities. The Bavarians had a bad reputation although not as bad as the Prussians, while, conversely, the Saxons were broadly liked for their easy-going nature and quiet disposition in the line. Perceived fracture lines between regions could be exploited,
especially with the more approachable Saxons, as Second Lieutenant Barnett recorded in a letter home dated May 1915.
The other night a couple of men of the Rifle Brigade went up to the German wire with a newspaper account of how the Prussian gunners wiped out some Saxons who wanted to surrender. I hope our friends the 133rd [Saxon Regiment] will take it to heart, and do the dirty on their Prussian friends at the earliest opportunity.
As Anglo-Saxons, these men shared a common bond of sorts with German Saxons, and Saxons were not shy of reminding British troops of the link. It was the Saxons who initiated many of the festive truces the previous Christmas. And when large working parties were sent to work on the front line in January 1915, Lieutenant Graham Hutchinson, 2nd Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, watched as Saxons shared a heavy iron-headed hammer with men of the East Kent Regiment, the tool being alternately thrown across the barbed wire.
Serving in the same battalion was Lieutenant Alexander Gillespie. He noticed how Saxons used the general surfeit of water to float friendly bottled messages downstream to British trenches. And it was this placid nature that reasserted itself at the year’s end when, in November, flooded trenches forced Saxons again to abandon their positions. This time they walked about quite openly, bailing and pumping water from their front line into a mine crater. The following morning the Saxons were in cheery mood as Lieutenant Frank Hitchcock, 2nd Leinster Regiment, observed.
The enemy shouted out ‘Good morning’ to me . . . I watched six Germans coming up in the open, and getting into one of their advanced posts. Six more got out with their rifles slung, and with braziers in their hands, yelled ‘Good-bye’ to me and went back to their main trench. The relief started to try and fraternise with us immediately.
Meeting the Enemy Page 13
