You can’t think how, under these circumstances, one goes silly when a letter does come and I can tell you that I read the two I have received again and again until they’re very dirty with my finger marks.
They’re feeding me up here for a little operation which I’m going to have . . . Isn’t it a nuisance about this leg? If it had been done properly at the start I should be walking about now. However as you know well, I’ve always been in some sort of similar trouble since I was a nipper – however it will all come right as it has before.
Two German specialists performed the complex operation to extend his shortened left leg. The surgery was carried out without anaesthetic but was highly successful and, according to the patient, only moderately painful. Birt was then encased in plaster of Paris from his left foot to his chest, although he still managed to pencil a letter to his wife the following day.
The doctor this morning lifted me off my bed and I stood up for the first time since the 26th Sept! Awfully dizzy business and I sat down after about 30 seconds. They’ve certainly done me most awfully well here and I look upon the doctors – especially my doctor Herr Maier – as awfully clever and painstaking. [This is a] proper first class German hospital with good doctors and careful attention.
Birt’s eulogy to his surgeons could not have been more enthusiastic, and he looked forward, as he said in a letter, to one day coming home.
In the German city of Cologne a solemn cortège was wending its way through a large municipal cemetery, the Sudfriedhof, on the city’s southern edge. The coffin was followed by a group of four prisoners of war, all officers. One of them, Lieutenant Charles Wilson MC, had served in France with the 10th Hussars in 1914 before joining the Royal Flying Corps, serving with 15 Squadron. Shot down over Ypres, he was a recent arrival in Cologne. Another, Mostyn Llewellin, a captain in the Monmouthshire Regiment, was a cousin by marriage of the man whose coffin they were following. As they walked along the pathway, the men passed by the graves of German soldiers who had died of wounds and who now lay at rest among the tall, dominating conifers. Then the cortège emerged into a clearing and a rapidly growing military cemetery containing the graves of British soldiers who had died in captivity.
That morning a new grave had been prepared, ready to receive the body of Captain Wilfred Birt. His death four days earlier was as sudden as it was unexpected, causing considerable sorrow among fellow prisoners and the German doctors and nurses who had treated him for months.
It was only a couple of weeks since Birt had sent a card to his sister thanking her for a parcel of food and asking for British bread. For reasons unexplained, he had written that he hoped their father was playing golf again. Birt’s leg was painful and it was still being stretched after the operation but, all in all, it was getting better and he sent his love to everyone at home.
Wilfred Birt’s leg was no longer the issue, however. Instead, doctors were now becoming gravely concerned about a serious intestinal problem. Two specialists were brought in and an emergency operation was performed, without success. Birt recovered consciousness but was now beyond help. Lieutenant Wilson, who shared a room with Birt and with whom he had become good friends, went to see the stricken officer. He noted that Birt stirred briefly but died that evening, peacefully and in no pain. The doctors maintained that the cumulative effects of his thigh wound had left him ‘too weak to withstand the subsequent trouble’. His death certificate recorded death owing to ‘cardiac weakness’.
The atmosphere at the burial service was in stark contrast to the hurried and covert committal of Major Charles Yate well over a year earlier. Then, no fellow officers were able to attend the funeral for fear their presence would stir up trouble among the civilian population. Public war fervour had calmed to such a degree that Captain Llewellin had been allowed to travel by public train from his camp in Crefeld to Cologne, a distance of forty miles. In a letter to Veronica, Birt’s wife of six years, Llewellin described the funeral service.
The Commandant here received a letter from the Commandant of the hospital in Köln [Cologne] to say that Wilfred had died there, and out of respect for him he would like me to attend the funeral the following day . . . I gave my parole and went to Köln next morning arriving in time for the service in the hospital courtyard after which the coffin was borne by the English tommies (wounded) to the hearse. At the cemetery it was met by the General in Command at Köln and other military representatives. The funeral was very well done – nothing could have exceeded the attention and consideration bestowed by the Germans who were sincerely moved by his death – he had earned their deepest regard and admiration. The General for himself, and on behalf of the other officials, expressed his deep sympathy and condolence. There were nice wreaths including one from the Town of Köln. When the graveside service was concluded a Roman Catholic priest who had known him gave an address in English speaking of their high esteem for him – he told me he would see the grave was kept up . . . The doctors were very attached to him, and grieved at his death. It was most considerate my being sent to the funeral, and I was glad to be there.
Apart from Captain Llewellin, the three other officers are not identified in photographs taken at the time, yet one is clearly an officer of the Royal Flying Corps wearing the medal ribbon of the Military Cross. He is almost certainly Lieutenant Charles Wilson; the other two were probably officers with whom Birt had shared a room in hospital.
Birt’s possessions were gathered up and forwarded to Veronica. As well as a letter detailing the precise cause of the captain’s death and the general regret at his passing, a very personal eulogy was added by a German whose identity is unknown:
Captain WB Birt of the English Army was carried to his last rest at the South Cemetery having died of severe wounds. In the long list of military funerals which take place almost daily, this example would call for no particular notice if it did not deal with the case of one who through the uprightness of his character his truly chivalrous disposition and his unprejudiced understanding of German characteristics had won in the highest degree the respect of his adversaries . . . Grief for his death went deeply to the heart of friend and foe.
Among the many wreaths was one worthy of note: it bore a simple inscription by the doctor of the German garrison of the Fortress Hospital in Cologne in the name of the medical staff to the distinguished memory of one too early dead: ‘Captain Birt’s notes and explanations [as to the quality of his treatment] will be an efficacious means some day to help truth to prevail even in England and therefore his memory remains blessed by all who knew him.’
‘Even in England’? What exactly was that truth? That the Germans were looking after all prisoners as well as they very evidently looked after Captain Wilfred Birt and his comrades? The picture on this point was decidedly mixed.
Despite the heinous casualties suffered by the East Surrey Regiment, the offensive at Loos did deliver some early success, with serious disorder in the German lines. However, the offensive ran into difficulties, with problems of supply and of battlefield control forcing the British on the defensive once the Germans recovered their poise and mounted strong counter-attacks. After heavy fighting, there was a pause before the British renewed the offensive in mid-October, but this was repulsed with heavy losses. With the onset of bad weather and the approach of winter, the battle was brought to a close. Once again, both sides faced one another as Christmas approached, and not a few must have wondered if there would still be enough seasonal bonhomie for another Christmas Truce.
Knowledge of the first Christmas Truce had spread quickly among the soldiers in France and Belgium. Within days the British public knew about it, too, for not only did sons and husbands write copiously about the extraordinary events, but their stories and personal photographs also reached the British press.
Newspapers ran images of smiling British and German soldiers at ease with one another, all wrapped up warm against the winter weather. The photographs appeared in newspapers such as the Daily Mirror a
nd the Daily Sketch. And when photographs were not readily available, artists’ impressions were drawn instead for the Illustrated London News and The Sphere.
British Army Headquarters were furious. Letters written by serving soldiers spoke of British and German soldiers ‘arm-in-arm with exchanged caps and helmets’, and having their photographs taken; ‘. . . they [the Germans] were jolly good sorts,’ wrote one man of the London Rifle Brigade, his letter being published in The Times, and at length. ‘I have now a very different opinion of the German . . .’
The images that hit the press went a long way to persuading the Commander in Chief to ban the use of private cameras on the Western Front and there would be stricter censorship of letters. The incident, they instructed, was never to be repeated and a year later firm orders were issued that no fraternisation with the enemy would be tolerated. The four battalions of 140th Infantry Brigade, 47th London Division, for example, were given the following warning: ‘The Brigadier [General] wishes you to give the strictest orders to all ranks on the subject, and any man attempting to communicate either by signal or word or by any means is to be seriously punished. All snipers and machine-guns are to be in readiness to fire on any German above the parapet.’
The Germans were issued with much the same instructions so that no one was in any doubt as to the inadvisability of another truce.
Forty-one-year-old Captain Miles Barne had been made temporary Commanding Officer of the 1st Battalion Scots Guards three days before Christmas 1915. A week earlier the battalion’s Commanding Officer, Lieutenant Colonel Lennox, had gone home sick and Captain John Thorpe who had taken over was now wounded, so it would be down to Barne to maintain discipline when the battalion was in the line near the village of Lavantie.
As Christmas approached, Barne was spoken to by the brigade major, 2nd Guards Brigade, Major Guy Rasch. He told Barne that orders issued by the Divisional Commander were that everything was to be the same on Christmas Day as on any other. With this information firmly fixed in his mind, Barne ordered two of his companies, B and C, to go up for a two-day spell in the trenches.
Private William Gordon had been in France twelve weeks, serving with B Company. As darkness fell, the men set off heavily laden with extra ammunition, extra water and sandbags full of charcoal for cooking. After the usual struggle along the communication trench, B Company reached two round-shaped forts, a hundred yards behind the front-line trenches being held by C Company.
It was a quiet night, dry and cold, with just the odd sniper’s bullet to break the monotony. At about 9 p.m. the German artillery opened up with a short barrage of whizz-bangs, 14-pounder shells that caused considerable damage to communication trenches, but there were no casualties. Silence resumed, broken by the sound of Germans singing hymns and songs in their trenches. William Gordon listened intently.
Around daybreak the Germans began shouting ‘Tommy Tommy Good Christmas’. The Scots returned the calls, followed by men of the 1st Battalion Coldstream Guards with ‘Good old Fritz, Merry Christmas’.
As the darkness slowly disappeared, a Sergeant of the Coldstreams, away on our left, who possessed a most powerful voice, shouted out to the Germans and at the same time stood up on the fire-trench showing himself from the waist up and at the same time beckoning to the Germans in their trenches to do likewise.
C Company was commanded by a superb leader of men, Sir Iain Colquhoun. He was the British Army’s lightweight boxing champion and he would go on to win the Distinguished Service Order twice. He was also well connected and in 1915 he married Geraldine Bryde, niece of the Prime Minister’s wife. In his diary he records that the men were having breakfast at 9 a.m. when he was made aware that the Germans were actually walking towards the British parapet. Colquhoun immediately left to investigate.
A German officer came forward and asked me for a truce for Christmas. I replied that this was impossible. He then asked for ¾ hour to bury his dead. I agreed. The Germans then started burying their dead and we did the same. This was finished in ½ hour time. Our men and the Germans then talked and exchanged cigars, cigarettes etc for ¼ of an hour.
Sir Iain’s matter-of-fact record of the incident contrasts with the more excitable account of Private William Gordon who was enthralled by what he saw as both sides met in no-man’s-land.
I was observing all this from standing on top of the parapet of my trench. The Sergeant in charge of No 5 platoon was Sergeant [George] Moore, a fine type of pre-war soldier and a Boer War veteran who had been called up on the outbreak of the War. He had forbidden anyone to leave the fort but on my suggestion that I go forward to see what was happening, he let me go. Very promptly I shed my equipment and set off to the front line, wearing my leather jerkin on top of my ordinary khaki uniform.
Scots Guards officer Lieutenant Wilfrid Ewart was much closer. He had begun that day gazing over the parapet at a drab landscape, noting the rise and fall in the ground, the irregular line of trenches and the untidy sandbagged parapets. He could see a stream marked by ‘a line of twisted brown willows bent to every conceivable shape’. The stream ran down the middle of no-man’s-land, where the coarse grass hid ‘little mouldering heaps of grey and khaki’, like ‘heaps of old clothes or fallen scarecrows’. These were the dead from the battles of Festubert, of Neuve Chapelle and Loos, and it was among the fallen that the Scots Guards and Germans met.
The men mingle together in a haphazard throng. They talk and gesticulate, and shake hands over and over again. They pat each other on the shoulder and laugh like schoolboys, and leap across the little stream for fun. And when an Englishman falls in and a Bosche helps him out there is a shout of laughter that echoes back to the trenches. The Germans exchange cigars and pieces of sausages, and sauerkraut and concentrated coffee for cigarettes, and bully-beef and ration-biscuits and tobacco.
They express mutual admiration by pointing and signs. It is our leather waistcoats and trench-coats that attract their attention; it is their trench-overalls, made of coarse canvas, that attract ours . . .
Confidences are exchanged in broken English.
‘When’s the war going to end?’
‘After the Spring offensive.’
‘Yes, after the Spring offensive.’
‘What sort of trenches have you?’
‘Rotten! Knee deep in mud and water. Not fit for pigs.’
‘Aren’t you sick of the war? We are!’
‘Not a bit.’
And the information is even vouchsafed that our Christmas Eve bombardment had caused the Germans a lot of casualties.
Meanwhile, Private William Gordon was making his way to join the throng that he estimated to be around two hundred in number.
Within minutes I had reached the main crowd in No Man’s Land, the Germans dancing to their harmonicas which they had brought with them . . . I got talking to a few Germans, some of whom could speak a little English. One especially, I liked, was a fairly tall young man who some years before the war had been a waiter in the Savoy Hotel, London . . . I suggested to him that we get busy and bury some of the dead that were lying around both German and British. These men were either killed during the May fighting or were killed whilst on night patrol, their bodies not being recovered. Anyway, the two of us got started, removing the identity discs from the British soldiers whilst my ex Savoy Hotel friend did likewise for the German dead.
During this job of ours, I saw several German officers approach from their trenches and on reaching where we were grouped, saluted the officers of C Company, then headed by Sir Iain Colquhoun, who returned the salute but did not accept the offer to shake hands.
After I had finished burying some of the dead, I drifted off towards the German front line to check on his barbed wire strength, having been that way some nights previously. Daylight confirmed my night patrol report, ie in strength and in good repair. Time was getting on and sometime between 10 and 11 a.m., news was received that the 9th (Welch) Division on our right of the trenches had orders to com
mence at 12 noon artillery fire on the ground where the unofficial cease-fire soldiers were still talking together. The news of the artillery fire was passed on to the Germans and a general drift back to their respective trenches then took place.
Clearly, Gordon’s memory of the truce is that it lasted far longer than that reported by Colquhoun. Ewart agreed with Gordon that the fraternisation began around 8 a.m., not 9 a.m. as noted by his Commanding Officer, but agrees with Colquhoun that it lasted only a short time. Whatever the exact truth, Sir Iain had permitted a short fraternisation to continue after the burial of the dead, then:
When the time was up, I blew a whistle and both sides returned to their trenches. For the rest of the day the Germans walked about and sat on their parapets and our men did much the same, but remained in their trenches. Not a shot was fired.
That night the Germans put up fairy lights on their parapets, and their trenches were outlined for miles on either side. It was a mild looking night with clouds and a full moon and the prettiest sight I have ever seen. Our machine guns played on them, and the lights were removed.
The Christmas Truce was over, but the ramifications of this fraternisation were about to be felt at divisional headquarters where the festive spirit was in shorter supply. The war history of Scots Guards records that Captain Barne heard about the incident while at battalion headquarters. News came not from the front line but from brigade headquarters that had, in turn, heard from corps headquarters. Barne at once went off to the trenches to put a stop to the fraternisation, but by the time he got there it was all over, and the men were back in the trenches settling down to the day’s routine.
Meeting the Enemy Page 15
