At first it is not safe to go alone so we have a guide (one of the guards) who carries firearms for his and our protection and if he meets any person not wearing the red in the buttonhole he takes the law into his own hands. After several visits to Kiel and various places, we find it quite safe to go alone . . . the people treat us with every respect and we can obtain plenty of beer and other drinks at their expense.
Officers’ camps were no less susceptible to the revolutionary spirit, as Brigadier General Rees saw.
A rather miserable looking committee wearing red armlets labelled Worker and Soldiers Organisation (Arbeiter-Soldaten Rat) invaded the camp, kicked out the Commandant, pulled down the German flag and substituted two red handkerchiefs which one of the camp orderlies had given to a Fraulein who had made them into underclothes. As no other red bunting was available, she was made to sacrifice her knickers for the good of the cause.
The camp interpreter became commandant and the prisoners were all paraded to hear a speech from him (and see the aforesaid flag go up) in which he eulogized the revolution and said that the war being now over, Englishmen and Germans could live in friendship forever.
As prisoners were about to leave, a short letter printed and distributed by the new German government was handed out. It was brazen in its appeal to let bygones be bygones, and many prisoners discarded the leaflet; their suffering had been great, that was acknowledged, but it was now time to be friends again especially with this new republican state. That was all well and good, but the Germans had lost and it was now for them to be obsequious in defeat.
The war is over! A little while – and you will see your native land again, your homes, your loved ones, your friends. You will once more take up your accustomed work . . . Your situation has been a difficult one. Our own has been desperate . . . Under the circumstances we did our best to lessen the hardships of your lot, to ensure your comfort, to provide you with pastime, employment, mental and bodily recreation . . . We know that errors have been committed and that there have been hardships for which the former system was to blame. There have been wrongs and evils on both sides. We hope that you will always think of that – and be just.
You entered the old empire of Germany; you leave the new Republic . . . We are sorry that you saw so little of what we were proud of in the former Germany . . . But these things will remain part of New Germany . . . A barbed wire enclosure is not the proper point of view from which to survey or judge a great nation.
The war has blinded all nations. But if a true and just peace will result in opening the eyes of the peoples to the fact, that their interests are common – that no difference in flags, governments, speech or nationality can alter the great truth of the fraternity of all men, this war will not have been fought in vain. If the peoples at last realize that it is not each other who are their enemies, but the ruthless forces of Imperialism and Capitalism, of Militarism of all sorts, of jingo journalism that sows falsehoods, hatred and suspicion, then this war will not have been fought in vain.
We hope that every one of you will go home carrying a message of good will, of conciliation, of enlightenment . . . we bid you farewell.
Few prisoners were ready to be soft-soaped by an appeal to understanding and justice. More significantly, the British government was unlikely to share any lingering sympathies these prisoners might have had for the German people. Politicians had spent the war and would now spend the immediate peace bowing to political realities by threatening tough retribution against the German state. It mattered little that the German government had changed and that the Kaiser had gone. The Germans had hardly shown such benevolence to France after the war of 1870, and, if nothing else, the French would make sure that a hardline stance would be taken in peace negotiations. A great swathe of northern France and Belgium had been laid waste by war and Germany had been barely touched. No one was going to forget that fact.
It was eminently sensible for prisoners held in camps east of the Rhine to wait until trains were sent to extricate them. Prisoners held in France and Belgium could march west, if they were able, until they bumped into the Allied advance guard; prisoners held in German camps near towns or cities such as Aachen or Cologne could try to get across the Dutch, Belgian or French border.
Private Ernie Stevens of the 20th Middlesex Regiment had spent the week following the Armistice waiting around. He had been working at a soda factory twenty miles from the Dutch frontier and had once attempted to escape, only to be recaptured. As the men waited for repatriation, the board of the factory gave them some marks to spend. Then, suddenly, they were ordered to prepare to join a train that would take them to - but not across - the border. On reaching the frontier, the men disembarked and walked into Holland where they were picked up by private cars and taken to the town of Roermond. After a night’s rest they would be taken by train to Rotterdam.
The next morning the men assembled at the station.
At Roermond Station we were told to wait at the rear of the train, just forty of us, when an officer of the Dutch army who spoke excellent English came up and called us to attention. He told us to be quiet and to listen carefully, as very soon a number of high-ranking German officers would be coming on to the platform towards the far end of the train and that on no account were we to make any noise whatsoever. We mustn’t whistle, mustn’t sing, shout, comment, nothing. After a few minutes we saw some German officers looking like Christmas trees, all plastered with colours and shiny boots. Then almost at the end of the group came a guy I’d seen caricatures of in magazines and newspapers in Britain. It was Prince Wilhelm, the Crown Prince of Germany. Ugly looking guy. They weren’t interested in us at all but this crowd travelled on the same train as ourselves, although I never saw them get off.
After months, and in many cases years, of confinement, the desire to get home ran deep. Days turned into weeks as the Allies struggled to get serviceable ambulance trains on to the German rail network to pick up men from camps spread all over the country. Too often, prisoners fed up with waiting took it upon themselves to begin the long journey home. It was a risky policy and, although the civilian population appeared benign, not all returning German soldiers could be relied upon to be as easy-going.
Private Robert Nisbet of the Northumberland Fusiliers left his POW camp in Mainz with a party of men, intending to travel down the Rhine to Holland. The November nights were freezing and they had no blankets. On reaching Cologne, the men decided to get off the boat and take a room in the Dom Hotel, close to the river, paying with what little money they had. That evening Nisbet and his friends went for a stroll to look in the shop windows. ‘This was nearly our undoing. We were spotted by a crowd of German “Fritzes” most of them fighting drunk – they gave a blood curdling yell and drew their trench daggers and made to set on us.’ Nisbet and his comrades took off and sprinted for their hotel as fast as they could, and arrived just ahead of their pursuers.
Horrors! The great wood door was tight shut. We hammered on it for dear life. Thank God it was opened just before the crowd reached us – we were let in – the big door was bolted again and we had the satisfaction of hearing the angry rabble, baulked of their prey, hammering on the stout oak panels.
The next morning we rejoined our steamer. On the ‘Konig Wilhelm’ bridge above us the first contingents of the German Army were marching across – they looked indeed a broken army – only the officers marched in a soldierly manner. Hundreds of them broke ranks and hurled their rifles over the parapet into the Rhine.
That night we tied up at Wesel Quay. We could find no hotel but came across a German railway official who introduced us to the stationmaster, a typical Prussian with rolls of skin at the back of his neck. He not only made us up beds in the first class waiting room but treated us to a magnificent meal, and only after we had finished did he inform us that the steak we had enjoyed was elephant from Cologne zoo.
Since meeting the Kaiser on the battlefield, Brigadier General Rees had been held in Bad Co
burg camp. The officers received a regular supply of food parcels through the Swedish Red Cross but, after the Armistice and the breakdown of normal order, this food supply was cut off. After waiting three weeks for relief, Rees decided he would go to Berlin to see about getting the officers repatriated. One hundred marks, hidden as an escape slush fund, was given to a German NCO who organised a railway ticket to the capital.
I may remark that we were treated courteously all the time we were in Berlin and were often saluted by soldiers in the street. This seemed rather remarkable as all officers were being turned out of barracks and being replaced by red committees.
That the war was over and that they [the Germans] had lost it was axiomatic and the real question agitating Berlin was when the Allies would send them food . . . We arrived at the Esplanade practically starving and dined there. The dinner was instructive. The dining hall looked like any other first class restaurant at first sight. There was a good band playing, waiters in white shirts, etc. The glitter of silver and glass, the spotless white of the table cloths, the general air of a first class restaurant ready to provide two famished wayfarers with the world’s best . . .
The spotless ‘linen’ was made of paper, as were the waiters’ shirts. The meagre scraps of food served also failed to take the edge off Rees’s hunger.
Our dinner consisted of soup and one piece of black bread baked very thin in an oven. A couple of mouthfuls of goose with two small potatoes and some macaroni. Paté de fois the size of a half crown and not much thicker. A cup of coffee made I believe out of acorns. We staggered out still starving and badly shaken.
The Reverend Henry Williams was hungry too. He was astonished at the events unfolding about him and strolled around Berlin with an air of detached interest. So much had changed that it was as if he was in another country. Walking down the broad boulevard of the Siegesallee, in the heart of the capital, he approached the platform on which stood the wooden statue of Hindenburg, now completely abandoned.
It had long been my wish to have a closer view of this figure, not for the purpose of adding a nail or two to it but, if possible, of extracting some. Here and now, I thought, was my opportunity, while everybody was looking the other way. I approached the platform on which the colossal figure stood. For once it was completely deserted. I hastily mounted the stairs that led to it and found that the giant’s knees were still several feet above my head. That meant that all the silver and golden (or gilded) nails covering the choicer parts of the figure, like the face, hands and sword, were well out of my reach; and the ladders leading to them had been removed. But there were still heaps of the commoner steel-headed kind to have a go at. So edging round to the side of a leg where I was most likely to escape observation, I started digging at the nails with my walking-stick. There were no loose ones; they were all well hammered in and not easy to get out. But in a minute or two I had got half-a-dozen or more of them safely in my pocket.
I was trying to get more when suddenly there was a tremendous burst of heavy firing. It must have been from artillery by the ‘Reichstag’ just across the Platz. Instantly there was a wild commotion as the crowd began to scatter and run, mostly in my direction, men shouting and women screaming and some of them, as I noticed, leaving their hats behind them in the scramble to get away. I managed to slip down the stairs and join the scurrying fugitives without being challenged, and hurried home, delighted with my trophy.
Having reached Berlin, Brigadier General Rees was uncertain as to what to do next. ‘It did not appear to be an easy thing to find anyone who could put us in touch with the authorities. I interviewed Mr Mayne of the Red Cross and Sir Edward Ewart who had just arrived but they were unable to give me much information.’
Eventually Rees was pointed in the direction of the Netherlands ambassador who told him he was arranging on behalf of the British government for the safe passage of British prisoners and that he would try to repatriate the officers at Bad Coburg within ten days. In the meantime, he would send food. Rees saw no point in returning to the camp and decided instead to walk around Berlin as a ‘free agent’ with another officer named Campbell. What he saw as he walked down the Unter den Linden was in stark contrast to the scene which the Reverend Henry Williams had witnessed four years before. Then, the Kaiser had driven through the excited civilian throng, and young men had walked arm in arm singing the national anthem.
We turned into the Unter den Linden where we found ourselves faced with a line of revolutionary troops armed with rifles who were clearing everyone off the street. Campbell, rather boldly, made his way through the crowd and told the commander that a British General wished to go to the Adlon Hotel. The commander after inspecting us waved us through his line and we set off up the empty street. We called in at the Adlon and then finding ourselves again in the Unter den Linden facing the Brandenburg Gate we marched straight ahead through the centre archway, which, prior to the revolution, had been reserved exclusively for the use of the Kaiser.
[Later that day] We found that crowds were beginning to line the streets and that the Prussian Guards were about to make their celebrated entry into Berlin. Having a vantage point where our uniforms would not be too conspicuous we watched the march. Much was subsequently written about their ‘victorious’ entry but the right word seemed to me to be pathetic. It was merely a home coming. Companies much under strength and composed of boys and men over age. Officers without swords, who were turned out into the street as soon as they reached their barracks. Weapons rusty and equipment stained. Machine gun limbers drawn by a motley collection of broken down horses. As a military spectacle it was lamentable.
That evening we went to see a ballet on skates which had in it a skit on the Hohenzollern family, which passed without comment from the audience. After the theatre we visited a bar in the building to get a drink. It was a long narrow room with the bar counter at one end and a solitary fiddler at the other. Between the counter and the fiddler were a number of chairs fairly well occupied, a large group of German officers being prominent. We got our drinks and found seats, but we had not been there long when something made me turn to look at the fiddler and found that he was facing me and playing ‘It’s a long way to Tipperary’. Not only that but after a few moments half the people in the bar joined in. The officers did not stand and as we had no wish to be mixed up in any demonstration we left.
The next day Rees was given his papers to leave Germany. They were signed by the new War Minister whose previous job, Rees was amused to hear (erroneously, as it appears) had been that of a bartender in New York.
It would be many months before German prisoners would begin their journey home. Until a peace treaty was signed and the war officially over, the Allies were not about to deliver hundreds of thousands of combat-hardened soldiers to the enemy. Those Germans taken prisoner in the last spasms of fighting in October and November, and who were still in France and Belgium, would be used as orderlies in hospitals or as labour out on the battlefields clearing up the mess that they had helped create.
At the end of November 1918 John and Eliza Brewster received a letter from Sergeant Egbert Wagner. In May 1915, Wagner had saved the life of their son, Lieutenant James Brewster, after heavy fighting at Ypres, and through correspondence a friendship was established. The Brewsters had fervently hoped that Sergeant Wagner would survive the war ‘to do other good work’ and that hope had been realised: Egbert had been transferred to the Russian Front and taken prisoner but was released after Russia sued for peace.
Sergeant Wagner, through his Danish intermediary, contacted the Brewsters once more. His brother, Lieutenant Theobald Wagner, serving with the 16th Infantry Regiment, 12th Company, had been badly wounded in the chest and captured at the end of August 1918. At the end of the war, Theobald Wagner, having been shipped to England, was still in a military hospital in Sutton Veny, in Wiltshire, but was soon to be removed to an officers’ camp.
Egbert Wagner wrote,
My request is as follows: would it
be in any way possible for you to adopt my brother on your estate in any capacity as ‘worker’, in order that under more favourable conditions he might have the opportunity to get his lung trouble mended?
The assistance I was able to render your son claims no recompense, but our hearts would be rejoiced by any possibility of the return of a like kindness.
Lieutenant James Brewster had been exchanged as unfit for active service, although by the Armistice he had recovered sufficiently to take up duty with a home squadron of the RAF in Norfolk. On receiving a letter from his father, he travelled to Taunton to the officers’ POW camp where Theobald Wagner had been taken, and although he was unable to see Lieutenant Wagner personally he managed to get a message through and with it an offer of help. It appears that the Brewster family could not employ Lieutenant Wagner after all, but they lent him some money and managed to get hold of a considerable number of clothes for him; with winter closing in, he had nothing to wear other than the hospital uniform he stood up in.
Meeting the Enemy Page 32
