In Europe

by Geert Mak

  The fog makes everything quiet and introverted. The snow melting off the roof drips on and on into the gutters, and that is the only sound.

  Chapter Ten

  Versailles

  LOUIS BARTHAS, EARLY AUGUST 1916, AT THE FRONT IN CHAMPAGNE: ‘Two days later, our 6th Group went to occupy Guard Post Number Ten. It was only a normal barricade in an old corridor connecting the German lines. Six metres from our barricade, the Germans had set up one of their own. Barbed wire had been scattered between the two, but only four leaps separated the two peoples, two races bent on exterminating each other. How amazed, how perturbed patriotic civilians would have been to see how calm and peaceful it was there. One soldier would be smoking, the other would be reading or writing. Some were arguing without lowering their voices. Their amazement would turn to dismay if they saw the French and German sentries sitting on their breastworks, calmly smoking a pipe and, from time to time, taking a breath of fresh air and sharing a little small talk, like good neighbours.’

  What our corporal describes here is a situation that in no way fits the commonly accepted view of suffering and heroism. It does not correspond to the military historians’ dissertations on strategy, or with the official accounts of battles and bloodshed. Little research has been done into such ‘live and let live’ situations. Still, they must have presented themselves rather often, between battles and along the endless stretches of front line where nothing ever happened.

  There was always a certain sense of understanding between the enemies: foot soldiers, whether German, British, French or Belgian, all die in the same way, and they knew that. They had, after a certain fashion, respect for each other. And they came to their enemy's defence when the home front characterised them as ‘cowardly’ or ‘stupid’.

  In his autobiographical novel Le feu, Henri Barbusse speaks of two different worlds: the front, ‘where there are too many of the unfortunate’, and the hinterland, ‘where too much good fortune exists’. In the former world, mutual understanding occasionally led to outbursts of fraternisation. At the spot where the Yser Tower now stands, at Diksmuide in Belgium, the Belgian and German soldiers famously celebrated Christmas Eve together in 1914. The Germans plied the Belgians with schnapps. A German officer returned a stolen monstrance. Elsewhere during those days there were also large-scale displays of brotherhood. In one sector, nine British divisions had organised a ceasefire along a front almost fifty kilometres in length. ‘On New Year's Eve we counted off the minutes back and forth, and agreed to fire volleys at midnight,’ a German student wrote to his parents. ‘We sang, they applauded (we were sixty or seventy metres apart) … Then I shouted to ask them whether they had any musical instruments over there, upon which they produced a pair of bagpipes (it was a Scottish regiment, barelegged in short skirts). They played their poetic Scottish songs and sang.’

  One German soldier was not at all amused: the enigmatic, fanatical corporal Adolf Hitler. ‘This should not be allowed to happen during a war,’ the Gefreiter fulminated.

  One year later, in the soaking wet December of 1915, ad hoc cease-fires were once again held along the front in northern France. On the dreary morning of 12 December, with trenches on both sides filled with water, Ernst Jünger saw the dreary no-man's-land suddenly transformed into ‘a county fair’. Between the rolls of barbed wire, ‘lively bartering had begun for schnapps, cigarettes, uniform buttons and other things.’ Jünger quickly put an end to it. After a brief gentlemen's consultation with a British officer on the other side, it was decided to resume the war in exactly three minutes.

  In Barthas’ sector, where the same thing happened, the fraternisation lasted for days: ‘We smiled at each other, began talking, shaking hands, trading tobacco, coffee and wine. If only we had spoken the same language!’ The Socialist International, betrayed and forgotten in 1914, seemed to have been revived by the war. Barthas:‘One day, a huge German fellow climbed up onto a hillock and delivered a speech, the words of which only the Germans understood, but the meaning of which we understood very well indeed, for he took his rifle and broke it in two against a tree trunk. Applause sounded from both sides, and both sides raised the Internationale.’

  Such open signs of brotherly feeling were relatively rare, however, and each one can be offset by countless tales of atrocity. ‘Mucking about with the enemy’ was taboo. Yet these were no isolated incidents. Life in the trenches was for many soldiers only tolerable because of a number of tacit agreements with their partners in adversity on the other side of the line. Despite its enormity, the First World War was, in that sense, old-fashioned; it was a war of proximity, of looking the enemy in the eye, a war in which the specialist, modern technology and push-button killing were already making their appearance, but were not yet totally decisive.

  In many areas along the front, for example, the rule was to leave each other alone as much as possible at meal times, during the retrieval of the wounded from no-man's-land, and during night patrols. Any number of diarists make mention of the ‘immunity’ of mobile field kitchens, in accordance with the same indisputable logic: if you blow up the enemy's kitchen, in five minutes’ time you yourself will be without dinner. Interesting too was the tacit agreement between the opposing military engineers, as witnessed by Barthas: the enemy's tunnels were only to be blown up between two at night and six in the morning; during those hours, therefore, no one ever worked on the tunnels. This rule saved the lives of a great many military engineers.

  Here and there, things were taken one step further. Vera Brittain relates the story of a Scottish sergeant who had been posted across from a Saxon regiment at Ypres. These two forces had agreed not to aim at each other when they fired. They made a great deal of noise, an outsider would have thought the men were fighting hard, but in practice no one was hit. The battle was reduced to a series of rituals, as with the Greeks and Trojans.

  Other letters and diaries make mention of this system as well. ‘They're quiet fellows, the Saxons, they don't want to fight any more than we do, so there is a kind of understanding between us,’ wrote one British officer. Another said: ‘On the front we were on, the Boche signals when the artillery is going to fire and shows us the no. of rounds by holding fingers up.’ Robert Graves witnessed letters arriving from the Germans, rolled up in old mortar shells: ‘Your little dog has run over to us and we are keeping it safe here.’ Newspapers were fired back and forth in the same fashion.

  Barthas spent some time in a sector where the Germans and the French fired only six mortar rounds a day, ‘out of courtesy’. That was all. The makeshift bridges across a nearby river were held under fire by enemy machine-gunners. Shots were rarely ever fired though, except when Barthas ventured out onto one of the bridges carrying a cane and a pair of binoculars, and the Germans mistook him for an officer. Then the bullets flew past his ears.

  This incident is indicative of the increasing social tension on both sides of the front. Almost everyone had abandoned the socialist class struggle back in 1914, but the frustration at the front gradually revived it with a vengeance. The British referred to their commander-in-chief, Haig, as ‘the Butcher of the Somme’. The pacifist movement was growing. Lieutenant Siegfried Sassoon publicly announced that he no longer wished to serve in the army: ‘I have seen and endured the suffering of the troops, and I can no longer be a party to prolong these sufferings for ends which I believe to be evil and unjust.’ German graffiti on trains going to the front read: ‘Wilhelm and Sons, Cannon Fodder’. In his diaries, Barthas reported an increasing number of incidents: German and French soldiers singing the ‘Internationale’ together from their respective trenches, orders being ignored, mutinous units which were then pounded to a pulp by their own artillery. Sometimes the men bleated like sheep as they marched to the slaughterhouse of the front lines.

  For French soldiers at the front, Verdun was an emotional turning point. On a village square in May 1916, Barthas heard a soldier bark at a major: ‘I'm telling you that we didn't see any of
you on Hill 304 [during the battle]. There will be no more saluting here.’ Shortly before this, medals had been passed out to the ‘heroes of the fatherland’, complete with a ‘patriotic kiss’ from the general. The poilus rolled on the ground in laughter. They had no more respect for anyone or anything.

  One year later, within the space of several months in spring 1917, more than 100,000 soldiers were senselessly killed on the Chemin des Dames, but still the French generals wanted to push on. Furloughs promised were postponed again and again. During those same months, more and more rumours began filtering in about Russian mutinies. In late May 1917, Barthas was at a meeting of hundreds of soldiers in the courtyard of an inn. The soldiers were in their cups, and a corporal began singing a protest song about the dismal life in the trenches. The entire crowd joined in on the refrain, ‘and when it was finished they applauded wildly, shouting slogans such as “Peace or Revolution!”, “Down with the war!” and “Furlough, furlough!”’ The next evening, ‘the “Internationale” rose up like a hurricane’.

  On the following Sunday, the soldiers decided to seize control of the regiment and set up a ‘soviet’. Barthas was chosen to be its chairman. ‘I refused of course, for I had no desire to become acquainted with the firing squad simply for the sake of some childish imitation of the Russians.’ He agreed, however, to write a manifesto concerning the postponed leaves of absence. It never went any further than that.

  In other regiments, however, the soldiers went much further than that. They stopped fighting, set up soldiers’ councils, raised the red flag and even hijacked trains. Officers were intimidated, and when orders were disobeyed they looked the other way. At its peak the French mutiny involved 30–40,000 soldiers. The army was in a state of disorder for months, the British had to take over parts of the French front, and the French never completely recovered. The commanders no longer dared to issue orders for major attacks.

  Barthas’ regiment was placed under strict disciplinary constraint, but also received a breather. Some 350 mutineers were exiled to Devil's Island and 550 were condemned to death, of whom 49 were actually executed by order of the newly appointed commander-in-chief Philippe Pétain. On several occasions soldiers refused to take part in firing squads. In protest, they merely fired their shots over the condemned men's heads, leaving the commanding officer to perform the execution himself.

  The French command did have one bit of good luck, though: the Germans never found out how extensive the mutiny really was. The French authorities never brought up the matter again.

  In the long run, the war was decided not by events along the fronts, but by a slowly shifting balance of economic and technological power. What young Jean Monnet had predicted did indeed come to pass. All participants were weakened by the struggle. In France, infant mortality rose by one fifth. In England, cases of tuberculosis rose by twenty-five per cent. Yet Germany suffered even more.

  Due to the Allied blockade of all German shipping, the country received far too few staples. The first food riots took place in Berlin in April 1917. In January 1918, a strike by half a million workers closed down the metal and munitions industry. Food rations — 2,000 calories under normal conditions – had been reduced to 1,000. The German arms industry began breaking down, particularly when it came to modern weaponry. In 1918 the Germans had only one quarter of the number of trucks available to the Allies. The ‘land cruiser’, of which Winston Churchill had already dreamed in 1914, a vehicle that could roll right over the trenches ‘and everything in them’, this monstrous ‘tank’, had meanwhile been developed by the Allies into a serious weapon. They had 800 of them. The Germans had ten.

  Illustrative of the mood in Germany was the popular song by the young poet Bertolt Brecht about a soldier who had long since died ‘a hero's death’, but who was exhumed by the doctors and passed the physical ‘because this soldier died before his time’. Then he was made to drink ‘fiery schnapps’, smothered in incense to mask the smell of decay, received a nurse on each arm and ‘a half-naked dame’, the music blared and there the soldier went marching off, ‘with oompah-pah and hurrah’, on his way to another ‘hero's death’.

  In summer 1918, Brecht's soldier also came down with Spanish flu. In early July, Käthe Kollwitz reported that her husband's practice in Berlin was suddenly swamped with more than a hundred cases of influenza. This unknown illness was particularly virulent, and the exhausted continent was struck hard. The outbreak of Spanish flu probably took place all over the world at the same time, but it was in neutral Spain that medical publications first mentioned it; hence its name.

  Few events in the twentieth century were as disastrous for the people of Europe, and at the same time so quickly forgotten. Still, almost every village cemetery today contains the traces of this epidemic; my own father, as a student, caught Spanish flu and barely survived. It is estimated that between forty and a hundred million people died worldwide. It probably claimed more lives in Europe than the entire First World War. What is certain is that the wave of influenza was one of the factors that made the Germans break off their final offensive in July 1918, and then lose the war. It was against this background that the struggle took place during the last eighteen months of the conflict.

  In the same month in which Louis Barthas narrowly missed being catapulted to chairman of a soviet of soldiers, the first American troops landed in France in May 1917. The American Congress had hesitated for a long time, but finally lost patience when the Germans torpedoed five American ships in March 1917; war was declared on Germany on 6 April. It remains unclear why President Woodrow Wilson abandoned his attempts to move the Allies and the Central Europeans towards a ‘peace without victory’. The ‘Zimmermann Telegram’, however, may have played a major role. In that telegram, sent to the German ambassador in Mexico on 16 January, 1917, the German minister of foreign affairs, Arthur Zimmermann, announced the launch of a full scale submarine war against the United States. He also proposed the idea of joining with Mexico in a war against America, which would allow the Mexicans, with profuse German support, to retake the territories they had lost in Texas, Arizona and New Mexico. The telegram was intercepted by the British, decoded and sent to the Americans. After several weeks of hesitation, Zimmermann confessed to an American correspondent that the telegram was not a fake.

  In the eyes of Vera Brittain, the American soldiers looked like ‘Tommies in heaven … so godlike, so magnificent, so splendidly unimpaired in comparison with the tired, nerve-racked men of the British Army’. The military strategists were less euphoric. It would, they expected, take at least a year to mobilise the four million Americans promised and ship them to Europe.

  At first, therefore, the German commanders were not too worried. They themselves had dragged America into the war with their ‘unlimited submarine war’, and they planned to apply those same submarines to make troop transports from the United States virtually impossible. In addition, the war on the Eastern Front was going swimmingly. From as early as autumn 1916, the Russian Army had been crippled by massive mutinies, the czar had abdicated in March 1917, and the soldiers remained restless. In November the revolutionaries had seized power, the Russian Front collapsed and, on 3 March, 1918, a peace treaty was signed at Brest-Livotsk. The Germans had achieved half of their original objectives, albeit three years later than planned.

  By then Germany held almost half of all the Russian territory west of Moscow. In the months that followed, the remaining divisions would push back the borders even further, all the way to the Caucasus. Never had Germany controlled territories to the East as extensive as those they held in summer 1918. Its troops freed, Austria had delivered the Italians a crushing defeat at Caporetto in October 1917, a traumatic event that left a profound scar on Italian history. Germany and Austria were confident of their success. On 20 March, 1918, the Austro-Hungarian Army opened a regular air connection between Vienna and Kiev, the first of its kind in Europe. In that same week, three giant cannons specially designed and manufactur
ed by Krupp fired their first rounds on Paris, from more than a hundred kilometres distant. More than 250 Parisians were killed. The kaiser gave German schoolchildren a ‘victory day’ off.

  Then began a race against the clock: the Germans had to move as many units as possible from east to west before the Americans finished building up their intervention force. During the first weeks of 1918, General Erich Ludendorff promised the kaiser that Paris would lie at his feet by early April. And indeed, the great German spring offensive of 1918 broke straight through the French lines. The battlefield was covered in a thick fog of chlorine gas, phosgene and tear gas. Flame-throwers were used. Of the men directly in the path of the flames, an English eyewitness wrote ‘nothing more was ever seen’.

  ‘We lived in great fear, like a miserable little bird waiting beneath a leaf for a huge thunderstorm to break loose,’ Barthas wrote of those days.

  The Germans were finally halted less than sixty kilometres from Paris. On 2 June, a young fighter pilot by the name of Hermann Göring received a medal for having shot down eighteen Allied planes. The German aircraft industry was now producing 300 planes a month. On 8 July, Wilhelm II dismissed his minister of foreign affairs for having had the nerve to speak of a peace that would be achieved by means other than military alone.

  Ludendorff launched his new offensive along the Marne on 14 July, using every division at his disposal. Berlin expected Paris to capitulate within days, and the Allies to sue for peace within months. But Ludendorff's attack was blocked by a French ruse: they had dug fake trenches, and lured the Germans into wasting munitions. What the Germans had failed to anticipate above all, however, was the fierceness of the newly arrived American troops. ‘Retreat?’ their legendary captain Lloyd Williams is reported to have said. ‘Hell, we just got here!’