Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War

by Max Hastings

  Boredom and immobility prompted trench-dwellers to pursue whatever diversions they could contrive within the confines of unit positions. Frank Richards wrote: ‘A pukka old soldier’s Bible was his pack of cards.’ He and his mates played incessant games of Kitty Nap, Pontoon, Brag and Crown & Anchor. Sgt. Alf Brisley spent a week carving the regimental crest of the Hampshire Regiment into the chalk face of a quarry below the Chemin des Dames – French and German soldiers later made their own artistic contributions alongside his own. Edouard Cœurdevey marvelled at the spectacle of a dozen men engrossed in a makeshift game of bagatelle, professing indifference to spasmodic shells landing in the vicinity. At last a near-miss caused them to raise their heads, and one exclaimed irritably, ‘Those imbeciles are trying to wreck our game.’

  Static warfare created a market for new skills. A well-known French painter named Guirand de Scévola, serving as an army telephonist, conceived the notion of camouflaging artillery with material designed explicitly to blend in with local terrain features – rocks, grass, trees. After the Marne he secured the support of Poincaré and Joffre for implementing his ideas. ‘I used the same methods as the cubists,’ he wrote later. He mobilised the assistance of fellow painters: Forain, Dunoyer de Segonzac, Albert Laurens, Abel Truchet, Devambez, Boussingault, Dufresne, Camoin, Jaulmes, Braque and Roger de la Fresnayne, together with the sculptors Despiau, Bouchard, Landowski. Camouflage became ubiquitous. André Mare taught the technique to the British, and kept notebooks in which he depicted his own masterpieces in watercolour: observation posts sited in artificial trees and faked ruins.

  ‘We no longer take heed of the dead – we care only for the living,’ wrote François Mayer on 28 November. ‘That is what debases this human sacrifice. No one has seen anything who has not seen war, eaten beside corpses on which the crows are preying, laughing and chatting with our comrades as we do so. It is utterly terrifying.’ Edouard Cœurdevey also noted this callousness: he came upon a German sitting upright against his rucksack, who had bled to death slowly enough to put a groundsheet over his head against the rain. ‘He had also had time to take from his overcoat a photograph of his young wife and two chubby little daughters.’ Cœurdevey was shocked that his own compatriots not merely declined to bother burying the German, but mocked his condition by drawing moustaches on the figures in the photograph that his dead hands clutched. A French sergeant wrote to his wife in December: ‘during the pause at the front the stretcher-bearers went past carrying a dead man a few metres from us and while some looked to see who it was, others remained calmly playing cards as if nothing had happened’.

  Sgt. Gustav Sack gazed out from his trench at Hardecourt on a vista of French corpses, a fortnight unburied, whose only merit was that night patrols could scavenge rations from their haversacks. ‘One opens the tins half-carelessly, half-shaking with disgust, then eats. Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. Dreadful, very dreadful. If only one could get drunk, mindlessly drunk!’ Trench walls, dug with such hard labour, collapsed in the relentless wet. When it rained long enough, dugout roofs likewise fell in, ‘so we can wallow like pigs’. Thoughtful men expressed unremitting revulsion at all that they saw around them. German gunner Lt. Adolf Spemann wrote from the Somme front on 1 November:

  In this beautiful autumn light, the view across the plain is really pleasant, despite its uniformity. But everything is messed up, the landscape seamed for miles by ribbons of trenches and dugouts; one thinks of it as a single trench line stretching from Dunkirk to Verdun. The whole plain looks dead and empty … a few cows graze the fields; over there on enemy territory, you can see peasants ploughing and an occasional vehicle.

  Tomorrow Thiepval church steeple is to be demolished. It is a longstanding aiming-point for French gunners, and thus endangers the whole position. Steeples are favoured observation posts, and thus special artillery targets. Charges are being laid in Pozières tower, too, to be detonated immediately in the event of an enemy barrage. Amid all the devastation before our eyes, we give hourly thanks that we brought this war into the enemy’s territory. If this was our homeland, how would those beasts treat it?

  Alois Löwenstein echoed Spemann’s thoughts: ‘Poor inhabitants! I always think: thank goodness the war is not being fought in our country.’ The German military authorities contemplated the vast destruction already evident in France and Belgium, and recognised that when the war ended there would be a row about who was to blame. In December, OHL gave orders that occupied towns and buildings should be photographed, to show them intact. If they were later destroyed, Germany could prove that the allies were responsible.

  Sigmund Freud, though a civilian, recognised the unprecedented savagery of the conflict: ‘It is not only more bloody and more murderous than any previous wars but also more cruel, more relentless, more pitiless … It discards all the parameters to which we defer in times of peace and which we called the rights of man. It does not recognise the privileges of the wounded man or of the doctor and it does not distinguish between non-combatants and the fighting part of the population.’ The International Committee of the Red Cross, based in Geneva, had a staff of just sixteen in September 1914, when the first list of French prisoners held in Germany was issued, which the ICRC was responsible for passing on to Paris. Thereafter, the organisation’s staff swelled with its responsibilities, to two hundred in October and 1,200 soon afterwards.

  The ICRC became responsible for arranging visits by neutral monitors to all the belligerents’ prison camps. These inspectors reported that the Germans, French and British were fulfilling their humanitarian commitments to military PoWs – as the Austrians and Russians did not. In German camps, the French and Russian inmates cohabited quite amiably, giving each other language lessons and discussing their respective cultures. André Warnod, a French PoW, wrote somewhat idealistically that the shared experience ‘achieves a fine sort of internationalism from which the Germans are excluded and in which we feel one single heart beat and pulsate’. Alois Löwenstein reported home that wounded French prisoners were more popular than English ones because they showed their appreciation to their German nurses. By contrast the English, he claimed, were ‘rude and ungrateful’.

  Civilians behind the lines endured varying gradations of hardship at the hands of the armies. For most of the war, artillery fire provided background orchestration for the townspeople and villagers of south-western Germany and eastern France. Many innocents were shot as alleged spies. Local people often asserted that their own army displayed as much contempt for property as did the enemy. Belgian Pte. Charles Stein had an altercation with a farmer, one of his fellow countrymen, who complained bitterly about soldiers stealing straw to sleep on. Stein suggested that if the Germans were in their place, they would give him a much harder time. Not so, said the farmer doggedly, ‘we had Germans here before you came and they were good people who paid for everything they took’.

  In enemy-occupied eastern France, however, two million civilians were subjected to a relentlessly harsh regime, which caused them to refer to the land beyond the lines as ‘Free France’. The Germans imposed their own time zone, one or two hours ahead of Paris according to the season. A few bold spirits contrived to escape westwards because, as a citizen of Fontaine au Pire wrote, ‘living at Fontaine was no longer France – we were living by German time’. Passes were required for all travel, public gatherings were banned. The occupiers devised a range of extortionate financial levies. Yves Congar, a boy living in Sedan, had to see his family’s dog killed to escape a German tax on pets.

  The occupiers ignored the provisions of the Hague Convention and conscripted tens of thousands of civilians for forced labour. One old man of seventy-four was obliged to sweep the streets of Lille in all weathers, ‘scarcely fed, exposed to both sides’ shellfire. He patiently endured a harsh form of slavery.’ A priest likewise described how all age groups and both sexes were set to work, ‘the children to mind their animals and pick apples, while young girls had to sweep the s
treets, the stables, houses occupied by Germans; others to work in the fields or stitch machine-gun belts. Meanwhile the young men were set to digging graves in which to bury the many dead brought back from the front.’

  Not all the occupiers behaved brutally to their unwilling French hosts. At Cannectancourt in October, medical officer Lorenz Treplin organised a boys’ race in the village which attracted a crowd of both soldiers and civilians – the winner was awarded a prize of peppermint candy. When a tearful woman came to protest about soldiers removing her cow, saying that she had to nurture both a one-year-old baby and a ninety-year-old grandfather, Treplin wrote: ‘After I convinced myself that both alleged milk-consumers were real, we returned the cow to her on the understanding that she would provide us with several litres of milk daily. With that, all parties were satisfied.’ During the long winter lulls between offensives, the medical officer opened his surgery to local people, who rewarded him with pears.

  Maurice Delmotte, an elderly farmer in Fontaine, described how at first German officers billeted in French homes would eat with their weapons handy. But as both unwilling hosts and lodgers grew to understand that the war might last a long time, most families contrived accommodations with ‘their’ Germans. Paul Hub, a soldier billeted in the Belgian village of Pipaix, wrote to his wife Maria asking for a pocket French-German dictionary: ‘The people are very friendly and kind to us.’ Paul Kessler was stationed in Lille, where he worked in the army postal service. He recoiled in dismay from the harsh tone adopted in a German–French phrasebook issued to occupying troops. Men entering billets were invited to address their involuntary hosts with such lines as: ‘Show me to my room immediately’ … ‘This cruddy hole? How dare you!’ … ‘Open all the doors immediately’ … ‘I shall hold you liable for …’ The phrasebook had been compiled in Berlin long ago, for the enlightenment of soldiers serving with victorious occupation forces. Kessler found himself perusing the 33rd edition, issued in 1913. He wrote to his wife Elise: ‘Great – you can be happy if you do not belong to the other side. I have never adopted such a tone … It is possible to be both friendly and vigilant.’

  Georg Bantlin, a twenty-six-year-old staff surgeon who was also his regiment’s billeting officer, found himself wrestling with the problem of accommodating in the small Belgian town of Ronquières (pop. 7,000) two headquarters staffs, an infantry regiment, two ammunition trains, an artillery detachment, and two medical companies – in all, almost 5,000 men and seven hundred horses. Ordinary soldiers slept on straw, laid on the floor of almost every living space. Only officers were allocated beds, and ate in a local château. Bantlin wrote home: ‘We eat in the magnificent dining room overlooking gorgeous gardens … Carefully-prepared dinners and superb wines eaten off a nobleman’s service taste a little different from field-kitchen soup eaten with tin spoons off tin plates. We make rather a sharp contrast to our surroundings: nailed boots tread on beautiful Persian carpets. Our weather-worn uniforms clash strangely with silk-upholstered armchairs, Flemish leather wallpapers and old Gobelin tapestries.’

  Posters in the streets of every occupied community assured the inhabitants that they had nothing to fear so long as they respected German regulations; contrarily, if these were breached they would be shot. Initial attempts were made to persuade men voluntarily to enlist for labour service, which in 1916 became compulsory and brutally harsh. Local roll calls were held twice weekly in every community. Some Germans behaved entirely correctly to their French and Belgian hosts, and were usually repaid in kind. Others, however, seized whatever property took their fancy. One soldier wrote to a friend of an experience east of Laon: ‘We take from the French population all their lead, tin, copper, cork, oil, candlesticks, kitchen pots … which are sent off to Germany. I had a good haul the other day with one of my comrades. In a walled-up room we found fifteen copper musical instruments, a new bicycle, 150 pairs of sheets, some towels and six beaten-copper candlesticks. You can imagine the fuss made by the old hag who owned them. I just laughed. The commandant was very pleased.’

  Paranoia, not merely about francs-tireurs, but also about duplicitous pigeons bearing messages to the French lines, infected the entire German army. Adolf Spemann in Lorraine noted in his diary that fulfilling an order to shoot down all passing pigeons ‘has become quite a popular sport’. ‘A flock took wing in the village behind us and flew straight and fast towards the west. These poor minxes now cop it, too, but that’s better than Germans [dying].’ The occupiers inflicted savage communal punishments on communities they believed guilty of harbouring francs-tireurs. On 19 October Lt. Hans Rensch, a Leipziger serving in a rail-construction company, drove through the village of Orchies, which had been put to the torch ten days earlier: ‘It is a heap of ruins. I saw a sobbing woman with her small child standing in front of the remains of her house. It’s such a shame and misery. I nearly broke down as I saw some twenty women and children digging around in the ruins of their homes. But what’s the use? If the population acts bestially against wounded [Germans allegedly attacked by francs-tireurs] the whole locality has to be burnt. The guilty ones are hard to find, the 99% who are innocents must suffer. A nameless misery has come upon the French people. And what will [this place be like] in winter?’ Rensch’s scruples did not extend to property, however: when a friend from home offered to send some comforts for his men, the lieutenant dismissed the idea, saying that they were already spoilt for good things, for the French were obliged to supply them with anything they wanted. ‘We never find ourselves short of clothing or food. Our men “discover” those things France does not hand over. Our fellows have a flair for that. They ferret out the loveliest stuff even in wrecked villages.’

  One day early in December, the regiment of Louis Barthas, the former barrel-maker from Aude, exulted on receiving orders for their relief, with departure at 4 a.m. for rest billets in Mazingharbe. But lips curled in cynicism when, as they marched joyfully to the rear, they halted four miles from Mazingharbe and were issued with two days’ rations. They understood that they were to fight once more. Their officers told them they would attack at dawn. Barthas wrote bitterly: ‘So this was to be our rest; yes – eternal rest for some … But why this ridiculous comedy, this hateful trickery. What do they fear, a mutiny perhaps? They value us so highly that they think us capable of some small gesture of protest as we are led to the abattoir. We were not citizens but a herd of beasts of burden.’ Their bitterness intensified when they learned that their own assault was designed merely as a diversion, to cover a British attack on La Bassée and a French operation against Arras. ‘Oh Patrie, what crimes are committed in your name!’ lamented Barthas.

  Carnage followed: the regiment became pinned down by fire as it advanced across a field of sugar beet, ‘providing mere target practice for the Germans’. Barthas found himself struggling vainly to staunch the wounds of a comrade whose cheeks, tongue and entire jaw had been torn open by shrapnel. After a night spent carrying the wounded to the rear in the absence of stretcher-bearers, Barthas’s unit renewed their assault next morning. Their officer, Lt. Rodière, became wildly excited and apparently drunk. He strutted along their trench under a barrage waving a German bayonet and promising to ‘skewer the Boche with his own steel’. A few minutes later he was dead, hit as he peered incautiously over the parapet.

  In several French units there were the first spasms not of mutiny, but of resistance to such mindless follies. ‘Some reservists,’ wrote François Mayer, ‘have lost the habit of discipline, and indicate to their leaders that they don’t care to advance under fire under their command – some speak of going to join another company, properly run.’ As Louis Barthas gazed upon the horrors before him, he thought savagely about ‘all those pictures of battle which adorn the walls of our museums or illustrate the pages of our history books, in which commanders are depicted on plumed horses, amid waving flags, bugles, drums, cannon sounding, illuminated by heroic frenzy and intoxication. Where are our great commanders and even our lesser
ones today? Holed up in some dugout with their ears to a telephone.’

  Robert Scott-Mcfie had left the British Army as a sergeant in 1907 after seven years’ service, then at the age of forty-six re-enlisted in the Liverpool Scottish on the outbreak of war, and went to France in November. His company’s early experiences of the trenches were as ghastly as most. ‘We are none of us particularly well,’ he wrote to his father on 23 December, ‘and the whole battalion is weakened by an epidemic of diarrhoea which has been going on for several weeks.’ Marching forward along broken and waterlogged roads, ‘a pitiable number of men dropped out, unable to keep up … my first misfortune was to fall into a deep ditch full of water, right up to the waist. A little later I tumbled on my face in the deep slime, and with a heavy pack on the back … had some difficulty extricating myself.’ On reaching the line, the battalion immediately became engaged in a brisk firefight which cost a stream of casualties. Beyond the losses, wrote Scott-Mcfie gloomily, nobody seemed to care ‘that all our clothes are soaked, that we shall not have an opportunity of drying them for weeks, that half our equipment is lost, our rifles clogged with mud, etc … There will not be much left of the Liverpool Scottish soon … It is amazing to me that I am among the survivors considering my age.’

  German soldier Kresten Andresen wrote, after seeing a town in Picardy looted by his comrades: ‘How brutal and ruthless war is! The finest values are trampled underfoot – Christianity, morality, home and hearth. And yet, in our time, there is so much talk about Civilisation. One is inclined to lose faith in civilisation and [other] values when they are not shown more respect than this.’ Rudolf Binding described the scene of desolation in Flanders, then reflected despairingly: ‘everything becomes senseless, a lunacy, a horrible bad joke of peoples and their history, an endless reproach to mankind, a negation of all civilisation, killing all belief in the capacity of mankind and men for progress, a desecration of what is holy, so that one feels that all human beings are doomed in this war’.