Sir Iain records the arrival not of Barne but of a more senior officer. ‘The Brigadier (who came round my trenches 10 minutes after my truce was over) didn’t mind a bit, but Major General Cavan [Divisional Commander] is furious about it.’ Sir Iain was told to leave the trenches the following morning and give an account of what had happened and to explain his conduct. An officer arrived to relieve Captain Barne of his command.
The Scots Guards were taken out of the trenches on 26 December and went in to rest at La Gorgue. The seriousness with which senior officers were taking the meeting in no-man’s-land was beginning to make itself apparent, as Private William Gordon realised.
On reaching our farmhouse billets, we were instructed to remain where we were and in no case allowed outside our billets. Immediate action was taken re letter-writing and men warned not to mention any of the Christmas Day happenings. All letters were subject to censorship by company officers, that being the usual rule but in addition the men were informed that the issue of Green envelopes was to cease at once.
Leave to the UK for soldiers serving in France used to take place once in every eight months or so; but as a further general punishment and to block news of the event, all leave was cancelled for six months. In my case I was in France from early October 1915 to late January 1917 before I had my first ten days’ leave to the UK, so in a way I did pay for getting friendly with the Bavarians.
Despite the rising brouhaha over his company’s participation in a second, strictly forbidden, Christmas Truce, Sir Iain Colquhoun was surprised to be handed a note from the Colonel placing him under arrest for his ‘share’ in the Christmas Day fraternisation; Captain Miles Barne was also held.
Both men were charged with conduct to the prejudice of good order and military discipline and ordered to attend a court martial hearing set for 17 January. In the event, Miles Barne was acquitted, and exonerated of all blame. When Sir Iain’s case was heard, he argued that, as he noted down in his diary, when he arrived in the trenches he discovered ‘a very advanced situation’, and one ‘which I did my best to regularize by having a definite agreement as to how long the situation was to last’. Despite his protestations, Sir Iain was found guilty.
In the end the sentence was light. Sir Iain was to be ‘reprimanded’, but although General Headquarters chose to quash this sentence, the conviction remained. The court martial sent a warning shot across the collective bow, underlining to all, if they were not already aware, just how seriously the army viewed and would in future view fraternisation with the enemy. As the war became more embittered, the chances of such an instantaneous meeting diminished with each passing year. Incidents of fraternisation continued to occur, but nothing like the truce of 1914 and the much smaller truce of 1915 was ever seen again.
5
Fronting Up
Over on the Western Front something strange was going on in the trenches near Souchez. Gifts were being exchanged with the enemy, but this time it was not a case of illicit fraternisation. On the contrary: orders were being followed, as the War Diary of the 1st Royal Berkshire Regiment made clear.
24 April, 1916
Weather fine. The Brigade sent up three English newspapers with orders that these were to be thrown into the German trenches. This was done by Private Barnes who threw them onto the enemy parapet and retired. A German crawled out and took the papers acknowledging them with a salute . . .
Six days later, at about five in the afternoon, the War Diary recorded that the enemy blew a mine under the British front line, just to the right of the Berkshires’ position. No details were given as to casualties but the Germans had followed up the explosion with a ‘very heavy bombardment’ causing serious damage to the trenches. Fortunately, there was no accompanying infantry attack, allowing the men to make good the destruction. In addition to the clear-up, some small improvements were made to the drainage under the supervision of the Royal Engineers. Then, as though this was perfectly normal, the diary continued: ‘By order of the Brigade we sent over several English newspapers and were given 3 copies of the Hamburger Fremdenblatt.’
War Diaries vary greatly in detail, and those of three other battalions in the 99th Brigade make no mention of communication with the Germans at this time, nor does the Brigade Diary. However, an intelligence report was sent to Headquarters, 2nd Division, and this does add a few interesting if inconsequential details to the story.
‘They [the newspapers] were evidently a popular gift as three German officers were seen standing up this morning, smiling and endeavouring to fraternize – an elderly officer came along and strafed them. When the elderly officer had departed, however, they were again seen smiling across towards our trenches.’
The Germans were clearly expecting these newspapers and Private Barnes must have been confident that he would not be shot on approaching the enemy trenches; he could not have been ordered to attempt an otherwise suicidal task. Similarly, the Germans were ready for the next round of newspapers delivered on 30 April, sending German copies in response. But why did Brigade give such an order and to what end? How were such friendly intentions transmitted to the enemy and why, after a mine explosion and a ‘very heavy’ bombardment, were newspapers sent across at all?
There appeared to be an ‘understanding’ of sorts around Souchez at that time. Throughout March, the Germans were observed undertaking trench repairs and building. A close watch had been kept and information logged and passed up the chain of command. ‘The Germans can be plainly seen . . . it looks as though a man is pumping or working an air bellows . . . Germans have been seen carrying timber . . . At 6.45 p.m. a peculiar clanging noise – lasting for about ten minutes – was heard.’ The enemy’s uniforms were noted: ‘(1) Cap with black band and red piping – figure 9 on shoulder strap. (2) Cap with grey band and red piping – figure 76 on shoulder strap.’ These observations were not exceptional; they were carried on up and down the line. What was unusual was that there was never any effort to interrupt activities.
Throughout March when the 1st Royal Berkshire Regiment was in the line, the enemy felt confident enough to appear in full view of British trenches, and, at dusk and dawn, Germans had ‘endeavoured to open friendly conversation’, wrote the battalion’s Adjutant. ‘We were not in a position to alter this state of affairs,’ he wrote on 11 March. A week later, the same conditions prevailed.
The inability to respond to such carelessness was due to the wretched state of the British parapet and the fact that both German and British trenches could be subjected to enfilade fire, so, the Adjutant continued, it had been ‘essential to remain quiet also’. In other words, there appeared to be a mutually agreed stand-off, even though the War Diary continues to record occasional spats.
Had a lull, born out of the inclement conditions, grown into something more interesting and reciprocal? Had officers as high as the Divisional Commander sanctioned the ‘truce’? Something was deemed to be of sufficient mutual appeal to permit the trading of newspapers. There was always curiosity in seeing how the enemy’s press reported the war, but surely there were easier ways to gain access to enemy newspapers than to risk an exchange across no-man’s-land? It is possible that depositing British newspapers in enemy trenches was intended to counter the one-sided view of the war given by the German press to its own soldiers. That might explain British motivation, but not the active German cooperation and not the cordiality between the men of the Royal Berkshire Regiment and the enemy opposite them, the precise reason for which remains opaque.
There was propaganda value in leaving newspapers for the enemy’s discomfort. On 9–10 July 1916, parties from the 8th Royal Dublin Fusiliers and 7th Royal Irish Rifles crossed over to leave newspapers in or close to the enemy’s trench. The Royal Irish Rifles were first given the task of examining the enemy’s wire and then of placing the ‘latest war news in German and an English [news]paper on the enemy’s wire for his information’. Nearby, a party of Royal Dublin Fusiliers took three newspapers ‘including
The Times with Sir John Jellicoe’s Despatch’, which was left in the enemy’s trench with an empty bottle of whisky, while more men from the same battalion delivered ‘war news attached to a de-detonated grenade’.
Published in The Times on 7 July, Jellicoe’s Despatch gave the Admiral’s full account of the naval battle at Jutland a month earlier, a battle in the aftermath of which both sides claimed victory. With headlines such as ‘Enemy Severely Punished’ and ‘Enemy Vessels Constantly Hit’ the Despatch ended with a list of enemy ships sunk or disabled. It gave a very favourable spin to what was, in reality, an inconclusive battle. Whether newspaper reports of this nature undermined morale on either side of the trenches is questionable.
News that could not be given in print form could be posted on notice boards and placed either on the enemy’s wire or in no-man’s-land. Boards could be used as another form of fraternisation or friendly banter. ‘Today is BANK HOLIDAY – TOMMIES. Do not fire – give us a rest’ was an appeal stuck up on the German parapet.
Nor was a notice necessarily one-way correspondence. The 48th Infantry Brigade Diary records a patrol of the 9th Royal Munster Fusiliers bringing in a board that had been observed in front of the enemy wire. ‘The notice’, wrote the Munsters’ Adjutant, ‘seems to refer to some previous board displayed in our trenches before we took over the line. This would tend to show that the enemy had been unaware that a relief had taken place.’ The inscription read ‘Request for clearer explication [sic] by written or personally’. The following day, patrols and wiring parties from the 9th Royal Munster Fusiliers were sent out, one retrieving a notice board from the German trenches ‘which had evidently been taken by them from our lines before the Battalion took over . . . it was to this notice that the “Explication” of yesterday referred.’ The Munsters had relieved the 7th Royal Irish Rifles on the evening of 20 May.
Each side was adept at crowing at the other’s strategic misfortune, and notices frequently carried news of some recent catastrophe. The first months of 1916 proved a low point for the British, giving the Germans plenty to write about. ‘Interesting war-news of April 29th 1916. Kut-el-Amara has been taken by the Turks, and whole English army therein – 13,000 men – maken prisoners.’ And: ‘The English Ministre of War and the general kommandre Lord Kitchener is on the trip to Russia with all his generals officers trowened in the east see by a german submerin. Nobody is sowed [saved].’
Most signs were in English, and of variable literacy. One drawing, made by Acting Sergeant Herbert Gibson and sent to his sweetheart in Newcastle upon Tyne depicted a board near Mount Sorrel. The Germans had erected it in early March 1916 ‘to tell us of a big victory at Verdun against the French’, wrote Gibson on the back of the card. On this occasion the message was in German and boasted of the prisoners taken so far in the campaign, numbering 228 officers and 17,370 other ranks.
‘Did I ever tell you how eager the Germans are to supply us with news – of their own successes of course?’ wrote Lieutenant Melville Hastings in a letter to his family. ‘Yesterday a screen raised above the parapet informed us marooned Tommies of the fall of Kut, and last year we were similarly told of the fall of Warsaw’ [4 August 1915].
The notice board was a curiosity, and therein lay an obvious trap. ‘The Germans stick up a board with writing on such as “What about the Lusitania, how many dead?”’ wrote one soldier, ‘and God help anybody that looks over the parapet at it’, the inference being that a sniper was ready for the over-inquisitive. A board was also a provocation and bait. Second Lieutenant Stephen Hewett (14th Warwickshire Regiment), writing to his mother, described why.
I was out wiring the other night with four men for about an hour and a half, and I was tempted to go further out on a little expedition of my own – to destroy a great notice board which the Hun has put out in No Man’s Land, announcing the fall of Kut-el Amara: but certainly there must have been a machine gun trained on to it, and probably by touching it one would have exploded a bomb, - so it was safer left alone.
It was a sensible decision. Lieutenant Hugh Munro, an impetuous twenty-two-year-old officer of the 1/8th Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, did not resist and went after a German flag draped on the enemy barbed wire. According to his batman, Munro knew that the Germans had probably booby-trapped the flag but nevertheless sought to remove it. As he pulled the flag, a bomb exploded, instantly killing him.
Among the setbacks in early 1916, the situation in Ireland was of grave concern to the British government. The Easter Rising on 24 April and the bitter fighting that erupted in Dublin was a cause for German satisfaction. Their attempt to encourage an Irish Brigade was an abject failure but they could still enjoy posting barbed messages designed to upset Irishmen fighting for Britain. On 10 May, just over a week after the Uprising was quelled and the ringleaders arrested, the Germans raised a notice board above the parapet that was recovered by an officer of the 8th Royal Munster Fusiliers.
‘Irishmen! Heavy uproar in Ireland. English guns are firing at your wifes and children! 1st May 1916.’
The Germans knew who occupied the trenches opposite: three days earlier they hailed the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, asking not which regiment they were but more specifically which battalion, 8th or 9th. Now, armed with news from Ireland, the Germans were keen to pass on information that might cause unease among the Munsters’ ranks.
The German attitude towards Sir Roger Casement had darkened long before the Uprising. Casement’s failure to achieve anything worthwhile with the Irish Brigade aggravated the Germans, who looked to cut him adrift. They cared little for his fate when he was taken by German submarine to Ireland three days prior to the Uprising. Casement was quickly captured. In mid-May a patrol of the Munsters made an effigy labelled ‘Sir Roger Casement’ and suspended it by the neck from a tree in full view of the enemy. A few days later it was brought in riddled with bullets. ‘It appeared to annoy the enemy,’ wrote the Adjutant in the Munsters’ War Diary.
The Munsters’ overwhelmingly Catholic contingent must have known of Casement’s arrest, and of the Uprising and its suppression. It also seems likely that news had filtered through of the execution of the rebellion’s ringleaders, seven of whom were signatories to their Proclamation of Independence. It was widespread revulsion at the execution of fourteen rebels between 3 and 12 May that caused the British authorities the greatest loss of common support in Ireland rather than the suppression of the Uprising itself, which had proved unpopular among the civilian population. Hoisting Casement’s effigy from a tree, the Munsters’ attitude and the subsequent German response were very enlightening.
In January 1916, the British government introduced conscription; it really had no alternative. After the great civilian rush to enlist in 1914, the army had seen a remorseless decline in the number of men willing to volunteer, a decline coinciding with a rapidly growing physical and material commitment to the war overseas. The German attacks around Ypres in April and May 1915, followed by the Allies’ first combined offensive in September, accentuated the need for more men in steady, predictable numbers. In August 1915, a day of National Registration was held in which every citizen aged between fifteen and sixty-five was obliged by law to supply the government with personal details including nationality, age, marital status and occupation. Although originally intended as a means to utilise efficiently the services of all men and women for the war effort, this information would also be used as preparatory groundwork for military compulsion, ensuring every able-bodied man would play his part, irrespective of background.
Ironically, among one much-maligned group of subjects, the British-born sons of German parentage, loyalty and patriotism had often been demonstrated. Many of these lads decided that their allegiance was to the country of their birth, not the country of their ancestry, and had enlisted into the British Army.
Sergeant Herman Schultz from Liverpool, the son of German-born parents, John and Mary Schultz, served with the Loyal North Lancashire Regiment. He embarked for
France in December 1915 and later won both the Distinguished Conduct Medal and Military Medal. George Schumacher, aged seventeen, a lad from Leith in Scotland, was serving with the 1/7th Royal Scots and died in May 1915, in the Quintinshill train disaster on his way to the front. And then there was Alexander Fischer, an undergraduate at Cambridge University and son of a Prussian father. Alexander enlisted on the morning after the outbreak of war, aged eighteen, and was killed serving as a lieutenant in the Devonshire Regiment in May 1916.
Ten common German names, including Hoffmann, Meyer, Wagner and Fischer, contributed well over a thousand recruits to the British Army according to the army’s post-war Medal Roll. But how many more men with German ancestry had altered their names both before and during Registration? The Army Council entirely accepted that an unquantifiable number had done so.
It has been brought to the notice of the Council from time to time that a number of British born sons of enemy aliens assumed, when registering themselves, British surnames in lieu of their proper names and, when subsequently called up, were posted to combatant units owing to the fact of their enemy parentage being unknown. The Council can only conclude that the course followed by these men was deliberately undertaken with a view to the avoidance of any suspicion of enemy connection . . .
It is no coincidence that Fischer, one of the most common surnames and the easiest to anglicise, contributed only thirty-three men with the German spelling. It would have been uncomfortable for anyone to serve in the ranks with a German name, and altering or adapting names so as to appear British was the easy solution, allowing volunteers with names such as Lautenberg to become Lawton and Fritsch changing to Fitch.
Not all Germanic names were identifiably foreign. Julius Ring, of Dalston, north London, was forty-two and an internee on the Isle of Wight. He had moved with his wife to Britain in the 1890s and all four of their children were born in England. In October 1915, he received news that his son William had left work as a butcher’s boy and joined up, aged just fourteen. In a panic, Julius contacted the Westminster-based Emergency Society of Germans and Austrians in Distress for help. They informed him that his son Willy had been ‘overcome with patriotic fervour’ and was ‘serving his King in the Army’. William had given a false age and address and joined the 1st Royal Fusiliers. He had not been heard of since. Representations were made to the American ambassador in London who made contact with Sir Edward Grey. On 1 July 1916, Private 5024 William Ring was discharged as having ‘made a misstatement as to age’.
Meeting the Enemy Page 16
