1915: The Death of Innocence

by Lyn Macdonald

  The British soldiers had also received a royal gift (a useful metal box from Princess Mary, containing cigarettes, or pipe tobacco, or chocolate for non-smokers); they had plum puddings sent by the Daily Mail, chocolate from Cadbury, butterscotch from Callard & Bowser, gifts from the wives of officers of a dozen different regiments, and a mountain of private parcels bulging with homemade cake, sweetmeats, and comforts galore. There was more than enough to spare, and plenty to share with temporary friends over the way. The men drew the line at presenting an enemy soldier with socks or mufflers knitted by the home fireside, but kind donors in Britain, as in Germany, would have been astonished had they known how much plum pudding and Christmas cake would end up in Fritz’s stomach, swapped for a lump of German sausage or a drop of beer or Rheinwein shared matily in No Man’s Land.

  The Germans had quantities of candied fruits, gingerbread, lavish supplies of beer and schnapps and, as if that weren’t enough, cognac lozenges (guaranteed by the German manufacturers to contain enough real alcohol to banish winter chill) and tablets that would dissolve in water to make genuine rum-grog. And if they did not quite fulfil their promise, and the ‘real alcohol’ had lost something of its potency in the manufacturing process, at least the flavour was a pleasant reminder of Christmas festivities at home.

  The truce had begun on those parts of the front where the easygoing Saxons and Bavarians held the German line but, even there, by no means all British and German officers had allowed their men to fraternise or even to relax and let the war take care of itself over the Christmas season. In other places the truce had continued for days. Both sides had taken advantage of it to mend and straighten their barbed wire, to improve their trenches, to shore up the slithering walls of mud, to lay duckboards and bale out the water that lay boot-high along the bottom and rose higher with every rainstorm. Now commanding officers, who had cast a benevolent eye on the friendly gatherings in No Man’s Land and been glad of the chance to bury the dead in places where there had been an attack, spent the days after Christmas miserably composing the written explanations for these lapses of discipline which had enraged higher authority and for which higher authority was holding them personally responsible. The job of a Battalion Commander, they were acerbically reminded, was not to allow their men to strike up friendships with the enemy – it was to encourage the offensive spirit and to win the war in 1915.

  An hour before midnight on 31 December the fusillade of fire that blazed from the German trenches was all that the most ardent advocate of the offensive spirit could desire. These did not include the Tommies, enjoying a quiet life in the trenches opposite. They regarded this sudden resumption of the war with some annoyance until it struck them that, by Berlin time, the Germans were celebrating the New Year and that they were taking pains to fire well above the Tommies’ heads so that there should be no misunderstanding. This courtesy was not greatly appreciated by the Adjutant of the London Rifle Brigade. Strolling serenely to his billet a safe quarter-mile behind the trenches in Ploegsteert Wood, he received a smart blow from a spent bullet landing abruptly on his head.

  An hour later, at midnight London time, the Tommies marked the arrival of 1915 by treating the Germans to a fraternal volley from the British trenches. Despite specific orders to shoot to kill they were not in the mood to cause damage. In the present circumstances there was no special reason to celebrate the coming of a new year, but no one was sorry to see the back of the old one.

  The five months since the outbreak of war were littered with a mish-mash of plans that had gone awry. There had been triumphs on all sides, but they were triumphs only in the sense that stalemate had been snatched out of defeat. The Russians’ bold march into East Prussia had foundered at Tannenberg. Austria, raising an imperious jackboot to stamp Serbia into submission, had been tripped up by fierce resistance. The French, dashing impetuously eastward towards the Rhine to thwart the German invasion and seize back their lost territories of Alsace and Lorraine, were appalled to find that the main German force had struck in the west, marching through Belgium and into France by the back door. But the Germans too had been cheated of outright victory, and the great strategic encirclement by which they had meant to conquer France had been baulked on the very doorstep of Paris. The see-sawing fortunes of the tiny British Expeditionary Force had encompassed a masterly withdrawal that had kept the Germans guessing from Mons to the Marne, a fighting pursuit that had driven them back to the Aisne, a race to the north that denied the northern seaports to the enemy and kept open the vital lifeline to England, and a great battle to hold the last unoccupied fragment of Belgium. Now the Germans were dug in within whistling distance of Ypres but the allies still kept a toehold in Flanders and held the city itself.

  As the old year died and warring nations from the Balkans to the English Channel took stock and braced themselves for the new, it was only natural that all the adversaries should dwell on their victories and gloss over the defeats. In a thousand ringing phrases in New Year’s messages from emperors, kings, and commanders, soldiers were lauded for feats of valour and, with confident assurances of Almighty aid, exhorted to make the further effort that would lead to sure and certain victory in the New Year. Even given the infinite resources of celestial impartiality, the Almighty was going to have his hands full.

  In Britain, as in Germany, such sentiments were approved by the civilian population whose enthusiasm for the war had not abated, despite the irritating setbacks of the last few months. In some circles, and particularly in London, the war was positively fashionable. The Lord Mayor’s Juvenile Fancy Dress Party had gone ahead as usual, but this year the frivolous columbines and harlequins, the troops of elves and fairies, so popular in peacetime, had been ousted by fleets of juvenile sailors, contingents of small red-caped nurses, battalions of miniature soldiers shouldering toy rifles – even a six-year-old admiral, wearing a small cocked hat and sporting a little sword.

  A field service uniform, complete in every detail but scaled down to fit children from six to twelve, could be bought at Gamages store for as little as five shillings and eleven pence. Hundreds were sold, over the counter and by mail order, and the sight of khaki-clad tots trailing at the heels of self-satisfied adults became as common in the streets and parks as the sight of youngsters in sailor suits.

  Having been brought up in the belief that the security of the British Empire could safely be left in the hands of its army – trained, drilled and disciplined to the highest standards of competence – confident that the shores of their islands were protected by a navy that ruled the oceans of the world, the British public was inclined to take a complacent view of the war. A whole century had gone by since a European power had seriously threatened Britain’s shores, and it had been a century of unprecedented prosperity and expansion. It had also been a century of progress, and it was popularly believed by every Briton, from the monarch to the man in the street, that the British system of democratic government, wise administration and spreading enlightenment was an example to the world. It was a century in which full-scale wars had been far-off affairs, and warring tribes and upstart nations had been easily swatted down. It was hard to break the habit of believing that this state of affairs was based on a natural law of superiority and would continue forever. True, there had been some unfortunate setbacks in the progress of the war so far, but even Waterloo had been described by the victorious Duke of Wellington as ‘a damned close run thing’. The centenary of the Battle of Waterloo would fall in June 1915; by a happy chance, Wellington’s own pistol had come up for sale and a group of well-wishers had bought it as a New Year’s gift for his successor, Sir John French, now in command of Britain’s army in the field. Few people doubted that 1915 would be another annus mirabilis, that Sir John French and his allies would soon have the Kaiser on the run and would defeat him as decisively as the great duke and his allies had defeated Napoleon a hundred years before.

  But to those who took a long, hard and realistic look at matters as
they stood it was clear that on the western front there was deadlock. The great autumn battles had brought the Germans to a standstill and the armies now faced each other in a long line of trenches that began among the sand dunes of the Belgian coast, snaked across the

  face of France and ended within sight of the mountains of Switzerland. And there, it seemed, the German invaders intended to stay. They were assiduously digging in – not just a single line of entrenchments, but a second behind the first, and behind that another. With well-sited machine-guns and well-disciplined rifle fire their positions were virtually impregnable and in the No Man’s Land beyond their line, the bodies of the men who had tried to breach it had been lying since November. They were the proof, if proof were needed, that the war that had been anticipated and prepared for had been fought and was over. Nobody had won. Slowly the realisation began to dawn that the armies must now prepare for a war that no one had anticipated and for which they were ill equipped. All that anyone could be sure of was that this war would be different from any that had ever been fought before. The machine-guns would see to that. The Germans were outnumbered in places by as many as three to one but, thanks to machine-guns liberally sited along their trenches, they could repel attack after attack. Not for nothing was the machine-gun called Queen of the Battlefield. Soon, they would be calling it the Grim Reaper.

  The machine-gun was hardly a new-fangled ‘wonder-weapon’. It was not even a new invention. The first hand-cranked versions had been used more than half a century earlier during the American Civil War and the pioneers of the expanding British Empire were quick to realise its usefulness. It could inflict such carnage on an army of native warriors armed with shield and spear that their chiefs could be speedily persuaded to part with land and mineral concessions. A single Gatling could bring a whole troop of horsemen to book. Against primitive weapons, a couple of them could win a small-scale war. One anti-imperialist spokesman summed it up in an ironical verse:

  Onward Christian Soldiers, on to heathen lands,

  Prayerbooks in your pockets, rifles in your hands,

  Take the glorious tidings where trade can be done,

  Spread the peaceful gospel – with a Maxim gun.

  But, as a weapon of conventional warfare, the machine-gun had not found favour with the hierarchy of the British Army. Some people in Germany had been quicker to appreciate its possibilities – and almost the first had been the Kaiser himself.

  The Kaiser’s passion for his Army was equalled only by his obsession with his Navy, and his dearest desire was that both should match the Army and Navy of Great Britain, and even surpass them in strength and magnificence. Military matters occupied a large part of the Kaiser’s attention. Soon after he came to the throne in 1888 he had decreed that court dress would henceforth be military uniform, and heaven help the officer, even the long-retired officer approaching his dotage, who appeared in the Imperial Presence wearing mufti. Unless he was hunting, the Kaiser himself seldom wore civilian clothes, and he had once gone so far as to order that the officers of a Guards regiment should be confined to barracks for two weeks on hearing that they had dared to attend a private party in civilian evening dress.

  The Kaiser himself had uniforms for every occasion, many designed by himself, and it was even whispered that he had a special uniform, based on that of an Admiral of the Fleet, for attending performances of The Flying Dutchman. The joke had a ring of truth. In the first seventeen years of his reign he had introduced no fewer than thirty-seven alterations to the uniform of the army until it was brought discreetly to his notice that, although military tailors were prospering, some officers were having serious difficulty keeping up with the expense.

  The Kaiser was interested in everything, had opinions on everything, particularly on military subjects, and he never tired of expounding his views. His mouth seemed as large as the waxed moustaches that bristled across his face, and it seemed to some of his long-suffering ministers that the Kaiser’s mouth often appeared to be functioning independently of his brain. They had thought so at the time of the Boxer Rebellion when Germany proposed the dispatch of an international force to China after the seizure of foreign embassies in Peking. The Kaiser travelled to Wilhelmshaven to give his personal farewell to the German contingent and the manner in which he harangued the troops on the quayside had caused even the most loyal of his ministers to quail. The Kaiser wanted revenge. He wanted blood. He wanted Peking razed to the ground. He commanded his troops to show no mercy and to take no prisoners. He reminded them (inaccurately) of their forebears who had fought under Attila the Hun and urged them to follow their example. They must stamp the name ‘German’ so indelibly on the face of China that no Chinese would ever again dare to look a German in the face.

  This bravura performance was unrehearsed and even though Germany had suffered a gross insult at the hands of the nationalists (the German ambassador had been murdered) the Kaiser’s language and demeanour caused his military entourage deep disquiet.*

  The episode was disturbing, even allowing for the fact that this first whiff of military adventure in his twelve years’ peaceful reign had gone slightly to the Kaiser’s head. Now he was set on a mammoth programme of costly shipbuilding to quadruple the navy, was planning a huge expansion of the army, and had recently assumed the rank of Field Marshal, asserting that he had been begged by senior officers to do so. Now that he held this high-ranking position, he airily announced, he might easily dispense with the services of a General Staff. No one was quite sure if the All-Highest was jesting. But his opinion of his General Staff officers was expressed in terms that left no room for doubt. They were a bunch of old donkeys, the Kaiser raged, who thought they knew better than he did just because they happened to be older than himself – and at forty-one he was hardly a child!

  The fact was that despite the military upbringing, obligatory for Hohenzollern princes, despite his pretension to military knowledge, the outwardly respectful members of the General Staff were deeply wary of their Kaiser and his meddlesome ways. Let him design dress uniforms for his regiments, let him order parades and reviews, let him play at manoeuvres – let him do anything at all with the Army that would keep him harmlessly amused, but prevent him at all costs from doing anything that would upset the long-established status quo.

  But there was a grain of justification for the Kaiser’s impatience with his senior Generals, for among the torrent of half-baked notions that poured with inexhaustible energy from his restless brain there was an occasional flash of insight or an idea worth considering. The machine-gun was one of them and, like so many things the Kaiser admired and envied, it had come from England. He had first seen one years before when he had attended the Golden Jubilee celebrations of his grandmother, Queen Victoria.

  It was the glorious summer of 1887 and for the whole of June it was ‘Queen’s Weather’ – day after day of cloudless skies and brilliant sunshine. There was a large gathering of European royalties, most of them related to each other and to the Queen. There were maharajahs from India, gorgeous in silk brocades and bedizened with jewels; there was the Queen of Hawaii, and the heirs to the exotic thrones of Japan, Persia, Siam, and when the Queen rode to Westminster Abbey in an open carriage drawn by six white horses, no fewer than five crowned heads and thirty-two princes rode in her procession. Silks shone, plumes nodded, jewels flashed, orders and medals glistened in the sun, harnesses burnished to blinding radiance gleamed and glinted on horses groomed to look hardly less magnificent than their riders. Even the Queen, though simply dressed, wore diamonds in her bonnet. London had never seen such a display and the crowds went wild.

  Queen Victoria’s children and grandchildren had married into every royal house, every dukedom and principality of united Germany, from the mighty ruling house of Prussia downwards, and a host of Hohenzollerns and Hesses, Hohenlohes, Coburgs and Battenbergs, with her British blood mingling with Albert’s German blood in their veins, were living proof of the ties of friendship and brotherhoo
d that bound the two nations. On this most glorious day of Queen Victoria’s glorious reign it was unthinkable that those ties could ever be severed.

  The Queen’s eldest daughter, the Crown Princess of Prussia, drove with the Queen in her carriage. In front rode her husband the Crown Prince and some distance behind, in strict order of precedence, rode the future Kaiser, their twenty-eight-year-old son, Prince William of Prussia. Prince William was vexed. He was not pleased with his position and while he was a little too much in awe of his grandmother the Queen-Empress to complain to her directly, he let it be known that in his opinion a Prince of Prussia, although at present only the son of a Crown Prince, deserved to rank before princes and even kings of duskier complexions who ruled over less eminent domains.

  William was always an awkward presence in the royal circle and the Queen, when confiding her dread of entertaining ‘the royal mob’ to her daughter, had made no bones about the fact that she would prefer him not to come: ‘I did not intend asking Willie for the Jubilee, first because Fritz and you come, and secondly because… we shall be awfully squeezed at Buckingham Palace… and I fear he may show his dislikes and be disagreeable.… I think Germany would understand his remaining in the country when you are away on account of the Emperor at his age.’