Meeting the Enemy

by Richard van Emden

  Because the FEC focused on helping enemy aliens, the organisation retained a high public profile, certainly in comparison with other charities. For that reason it was never free from press ridicule. The Daily Express ran a headline, ‘Aid for the Enemy Only’ and the Evening News called the FEC ‘Hun Coddlers’. But although a threat was made to shoot the FEC’s Secretary ‘at sight’, there appear to have been few, if any, physical attacks on Committee members.

  In fairness, one of the biggest ‘Hun Coddlers’ was the British Army itself. Within its ranks it fed, clothed and accommodated thousands of sons born to German parents, and paid them. The soldiers’ Anglo-German ancestry had proved an irritant to the authorities, unsure of what to do with men whose loyalty was in question. Now, eight months after being bundled together into the Middlesex Regiment, these sons of enemy alien parentage were trained and ready for active service.

  The idea of sending them overseas did not thrill all MPs, although not necessarily for the same reasons. One who raised the issue was the nonconformist Liberal MP for North Somerset, Joseph King. As a young man, he had studied theology at the University of Giessen in Germany. Unlike most MPs, he appeared to have sympathy for the plight (as he saw it) of Anglo-German soldiers in the Middlesex Regiment. On 21 March 1917, he complained to the House that a pledge made by Lord Kitchener not to send such men overseas was being broken. Replying, the Under Secretary of State for War pointed out that the units had not been raised until after Kitchener’s death. King rose again. These battalions, he said, were composed ‘. . . very largely of men who think in German more than in English, and I am told that their conversation is largely carried on in German. They all have German names, they sing together German songs, and though I believe they are loyal subjects of the King and of our cause, undoubtedly they have strong German associations.’

  If these men were entirely loyal, then why would they act in such a way as to appear anything but British and loyal? And why should they not serve their country overseas? Surviving records indicate that between 15 and 20 per cent had British surnames, such as Davenport, Greenwood and Williams, and there is no evidence that anything King suggested was much more than rumour or gossip. King argued that these men were considered German by the Germans and would, on capture, be shot after court martial, but his arguments were unfounded and scatter-gun in their approach. It hardly mattered anyway; these men were going to the Western Front.

  Eight Infantry Labour Companies (ILCs) were created from men of the 30th and 31st Middlesex Regiment. In late February and early March, six companies were informed of their imminent departure for France, causing mixed emotions among recruits about to take an active part in the war against Germany, not least those whose German fathers were languishing in internment. The decision by two unnamed men serving with 1st ILC to desert on the eve of the company’s departure from Reading for France suggests that not all were enthusiastic. Surviving evidence is patchy, but the action of these two does appear to be exceptional, and, while it would be surprising if every man’s allegiance to King and Country was unwavering, the vast majority would show admirable loyalty.

  Unlike men of the army’s Labour Corps, which was made up predominantly of soldiers unfit for front-line service, the ILCs consisted of individuals in generally good physical health. Their commanding officers were of unquestionably British stock but, by contrast to those under their command, of a lower medical grade. Of the officers belonging to 3rd ILC, the Commanding Officer, Major William Renwick, had been severely shell-shocked and deafened by the explosion of a heavy gas shell in March 1916, and invalided home. A medical board considered him permanently disabled and unfit for overseas service, although that had not prevented his return. A second officer in the 3rd ILC, Second Lieutenant Frederick Ruscoe, was an old soldier. An ex-Regimental Sergeant Major of the Royal Welsh Fusiliers, he enlisted in the army in 1883 and had been in France since December 1915, returning to England for a commission in 1916. His health was also poor and he would be sent home from France in 1918 and died in 1920. In command of 2nd ILC was Captain David Burles, a man in his early fifties. In August 1916, the Board recommended that he should serve at home, or as an officer in a labour battalion overseas. In England, he had been sent to help train men of the 30th Middlesex Regiment and then, in March, ordered to take 2nd ILC overseas.

  During March and April, the first six companies embarked for France, to be followed in July and December by the remaining two. The first companies arrived on the Western Front during the bitter winter of 1916-17, beginning work that was severely hampered by snowstorms and a lack of available transport. The issue of transport greatly concerned Captain Burles, who noted down in the unit’s War Diary his repeated requests for vehicles of any kind. His unit was under the command of the Deputy Assistant Director of Labour, VII Corps, who promised to rectify the situation, although nothing materialised. On 14 April, four days after the company arrived to undertake work near the French town of Doullens, Burles wrote: ‘The Company is still without any transport whatsoever, and great difficulty is experienced hereby in procuring rations.’ Two days later he was griping again: ‘The supply dump is 15 kilometres distant. [We] have to depend on the kindness of other units to loan motor lorries. Secured one for today and drew three days’ rations. All iron rations.’ Burles’s transport problems did not improve for another ten days.

  Is it possible that the issue over transport was an example of institutional prejudice against men of German extraction? These companies had arrived in France just as Britain unleashed its spring offensive near the town of Arras and, inevitably, the great preponderance of resources was sucked towards the battle. VII Corps was part of the Third Army, which was heavily engaged in the opening phases of the battle and, with the Western Front gripped by intense cold, causing both horse-drawn and petrol-driven vehicles to founder in snow and mud, serviceable transport was at a premium. Half a dozen labour companies, new to the front and regardless of their composition or characteristics, were never going to be made a priority at that moment. In the admittedly scant records concerning these ILCs, there is no evidence that they were treated appreciably better or worse than other units of the British Army.

  The fact remained, however, that these men were not entirely trusted. They would not be employed at or near a base port nor, in theory, within sixteen kilometres of the trenches. They were unarmed and not supposed to handle ammunition and they were to be kept away from densely populated areas. Sensitive to issues of security, General Headquarters directed that they were not to be employed as mess cooks, barbers, waiters, clerks or orderlies. They were also barred from working in officers’ clubs or cinemas, although over time such restrictions were relaxed.

  There are only two known incidents in which a soldier’s loyalty was questioned, and, ironically, both men had British as opposed to German surnames. The first occurred at the end of April 1917 when an intelligence officer was sent to visit 2nd ILC to investigate a letter written to Private Herman Cook. The letter had been damaged in transit, the contents apparently falling out of the envelope. It was found to contain, wrote the Commanding Officer, ‘many coarse insulting phrases and [was] evidently pro German’. The letter had been addressed to Reading and forwarded to France. There is no record that Cook approved of or in any way solicited the contents of the letter. The second incident occurred a few months later when Private Harold Guest, serving with the 1st ILC, was sent back to England as a result of proceedings taken against him by his Commanding Officer on account of his ‘pro German agitation’. How many more felt the same way can never be known, although General Edward Wace, in a Report on Labour, estimated that less than 5 per cent had pro-German sympathies and that these men were known to the Commanding Officers.

  The men of the ILCs were used piecemeal, rarely if ever working as a complete unit. By and large they were broken up into small groups and sent wherever they were needed and to whoever asked for help, being employed on what was known as the ‘task system’,
giving men a distinct challenge to complete.

  In the first six weeks overseas, 3rd ILC helped lay over fifty miles of light railway track behind the lines, as well as maintaining the existing line in running order. The officer commanding the Second Army’s Light Railways was undoubtedly pleased with the work, sending a memo to be read to all ranks employed: ‘I wish to express my personal thanks to each of your officers and men for the work which they have done and are still doing . . . throughout the worst conditions of shell fire. Every man’s best efforts are wanted, and I am sure that we shall have them.’

  Much of the ILC’s work was repetitive and physically demanding. There was work in forestry, cutting down trees and, in quarries, digging sand. Parties of men worked on farms and in brickworks. They were sent to load lorries at Royal Engineer stores, or to help construct Nissan huts, even, on one occasion, to build a compound for German POWs. At least some of the 3rd ILC’s time was spent in the menial but important job of salvage from abandoned or overrun battlefields, scouring the ground and disused trenches for everything that could be reused or melted down, including rum jars, biscuit tins, oil drums, petrol cans, rubber and shrapnel helmets, all of which would be taken to the Company Dump. Salvage work was dangerous. Private Albert Wenninger, of the 3rd ILC, a butcher from Shepherds Bush in London, was accidentally killed when a 4½-inch shell exploded while he was helping to dump old ammunition into craters. The explosion set off dozens of other shells, wounding a further eighteen men.

  In May, Private Woolf Adler, aged twenty-eight, died at the 10th Casualty Clearing Station (CCS) of shrapnel wounds to his back and left hip after the Company’s billets were shelled. One other man was wounded. Adler, the son of German parents, and a former stockbroker from West Hampstead, had volunteered in December 1915 and was working in munitions when posted in February 1917 to the 31st Middlesex Regiment. He had been in France just ten weeks and was one of four men serving with the 3rd ILC who died overseas. His widowed mother, Regine, was notified that her son had died for his country.

  Woolf Adler was buried in Lijssenthoek Military Cemetery, seven miles west of Ypres. He is one of 9,901 British and Empire troops almost all of whom died as a result of their wounds at a nearby CCS. For this reason, more than 99 per cent have known graves. Inadvertently, the cemetery creates the impression that the majority of men did not simply disappear, never to be seen again. Tragically, however, around half of those killed in the Great War have no known grave.

  Receiving news of a loved one’s disappearance released a trapdoor through which families fell into a pit of instantaneous fear and despair, leaving the majority of those affected with nothing to do but wait. The army would forward further details, if any were ever received.

  Hope was not extinguished altogether; there was a reasonable chance that a loved one had been taken prisoner, but as time passed the silence on all fronts became too much to bear. If the Germans did not notify the Red Cross within a month that a man was a prisoner then, in all likelihood, that man was still on the battlefield. With shellfire churning up the ground over which attacks were made, the chances were poor that a body would remain identifiable for long. Families might get word from a comrade of the missing man, but all too often it was to confirm their darkest fears; it was not a kindness to hold out flickering hope.

  ‘The missing’ were an egalitarian group among whom there was no distinction between rich and poor. In desperation, those who could afford it could pay for additional private searches that invariably confirmed what the family already knew, that the man was untraceable. Pre-war contacts were called upon: German governesses who had returned home at the outbreak of war were asked through third parties to place appeals for information in the press and to circulate names of missing officers. But to what end? Leaving no stone unturned may have proved ultimately cathartic for some but searching could also lead to a pointless fixation on the missing, and the purgatory of forlorn hope. Hard as it may have seemed, stoically waiting for news was probably the best option for families and, just occasionally, it was enemy soldiers who provided the answers.

  On 25 July 1915 the 1/6th Sherwood Foresters were holding front-line trenches near Sanctuary Wood, just outside Ypres. The battalion War Diary’s otherwise sparse entries that day noted one item of interest: a German aeroplane had been shot down, and the observer had fallen ‘in rear of our trenches’. A great many men on the ground witnessed the incident. The German plane, raked by machine-gun fire, had burst into flames. Eyewitnesses reported that the observer fell as the plane turned upside down, others that he jumped; either way, a man was seen to fall well before the plane crashed. In the history of the 1/5th Sherwood Foresters, a neighbouring battalion in the line that day, this account was given. ‘It was an interesting sight for those who saw the event – the first burst of smoke, the observer throwing himself out, falling the greater part of the way like a partly deflated balloon (his trench coat held the air), the bump when he struck the ground.’

  The ‘observer’ was identified as thirty-nine-year-old Captain Hans Roser, and from his body were taken various ‘decorations’ including a ‘flight badge’. The 1/6th Sherwood Foresters’ Commanding Officer, Lieutenant Colonel Godfrey Goodman, felt the belongings were of enough sentimental value to be returned to Roser’s family. After some understandable delay, these were sent to Danzig in November after which a reply was received from Mrs Roser thanking Colonel Goodman for his kindness.

  This should have been the end of the matter but news of Goodman’s actions reached Captain Roser’s nephew, an artillery officer by the name of Reinhardt, who, mindful that one good turn deserved another, penned this remarkable letter ‘in the field’, in May 1916.

  My family have received correspondence which passed between Lieutenant Colonel G D Goodman and the German Foreign Office through the intermediary of the American Embassy at Berlin. According to the statement of this officer, who commands the 6th Sherwood Foresters, Captain Roser, my mother’s younger brother, was shot down in his aeroplane behind the British lines east of Ypres on July 25th 1915, and was buried with full military honours by the orders of Colonel Goodman who saw the machine fall. The decorations found on his body have also been forwarded to us through the same channels together with detailed information about the position of his grave. It is through the exertions of Colonel Goodman that my family received the first certain news of my relative’s death, as he was previously certified as missing.

  Having been appraised by this means of the possibility of communicating with the relatives of enemy officers through the American Diplomatic Representatives, I am now anxious to convey news of a fallen English comrade in arms in a similar manner to his widow who has probably remained in complete ignorance of his fate since 1914. The officer in question is Captain [Henry Telford] Maffett of B Company, 2nd Leinster Regiment who fell in the field of honour on October 23rd 1914, under German artillery and machine gun fire together with the greater part of his battalion (he was with the centre company but seems to have been leading the battalion). His death was caused by a shell splinter and must have been quick and painless, as he still had a pencil and half written despatch in his hand. His grave, dug by my men, is 600 paces north-west of height 42, west of Lille, on the slope of a little fort, immediately at the corner of a ditch lined with willows which runs there. The grave was at the time marked with a cross and bore his cap and epaulettes. Some of his men and one or two officers were buried by his side or in the British trenches near by.

  I have this officer’s wrist compass and two despatches, one apparently addressed to his regiment, the other to a subordinate company commander. In the former he describes his position and asks for artillery support; in the second he gives brief fighting orders. I had in my possession also an empty envelope addressed to his wife, Mrs Maffett, but I have unfortunately lost it . . . I will forward the things I have to Mrs Maffett as soon as it is certain that this endeavour to get in touch with her is successful.

  I should be
glad if a translation of the contents of this letter could be communicated to Captain Maffett’s widow through diplomatic channels so that I may be able to make a return for the chivalrous service rendered to my family by Colonel Goodman.

  Reinhardt, Lieutenant, Battery Commander

  Reinhardt’s letter was sent to Captain Maffett’s sister, Emilie Harmsworth (sister-in-law of the great newspaper proprietors Viscounts Northcliffe and Rothermere), who asked that a message of appreciation be conveyed to Lieutenant Reinhardt.

  Viscount Grey will be much obliged if the US Ambassador at Berlin can be informed that the sister of the deceased officer is anxious that the expression of her grateful thanks may be conveyed to Lieutenant Reinhardt for the particulars which he has thus kindly communicated to the family, as well as for the details in regard to Captain Maffett’s burial and the care bestowed upon the preservation of his effects.

  Through the recovery of personal possessions belonging to Roser and Maffett, both families were informed of the circumstances in which their loved ones had died. In time they discovered where they were buried, too. Captain Roser’s grave is notable as the only German casualty buried in the CWGC cemetery at Sanctuary Wood, while Captain Henry Maffett lies in Houplines Communal Cemetery Extension.

  The family of Private Charles Mole was in a state of limbo, similar in circumstances to those experienced by the families of Roser and Maffett. Their son was missing near the town of Cambrai and nothing further was heard of him, until the family received a letter from a German missionary, Immanuel Genahr, and his English wife, Constance. Immanuel Genahr had received a letter from the battlefields from a German soldier and fellow Christian named Weingartner who had found Charles Mole lying in a shell hole with shrapnel wounds to his legs and hands. Weingartner had dressed Private Mole’s wounds and brought him a cup of tea, after which Mole was carried to the main road where he would be picked up and taken to hospital. Weingartner’s letter was detailed.