Meeting the Enemy Read online

  To Mum

  Contents

  Introduction

  1 The Age of Unreason

  2 Best of Bad Friends

  3 The End of the Affair

  4 The Lives of Others

  5 Fronting Up

  6 Up Close and Personal

  7 Between a Rock and a Hard Place

  8 The Crying Game

  9 Biting the Bullet

  10 All Fall Down

  11 An Expedient Divorce

  Acknowledgements

  Image section 1

  Image section 2

  Sources

  A Note on the Author

  By the Same Author

  Introduction

  Captain Robert Campbell was at a low ebb. Badly wounded and captured during the fighting at Mons in August 1914, he had been incarcerated at Magdeburg prisoner-of-war camp for the best part of two years. During that time, he had undergone several very painful operations on his face and a shattered arm, and now, to cap it all, he had just received an upsetting letter from Gladys, his sister, at home in England: their mother, Louisa Campbell, was dying.

  The commandant at Magdeburg was a genial man, as far as any camp commandant could be, and Campbell had got to know him as well as circumstances permitted. On hearing Campbell’s bad news, the commandant’s sympathy went beyond mere words of consolation. He suggested that Campbell write to the Kaiser to ask whether he might be given special dispensation to return home to see his mother; the commandant would propel the letter up the chain of command with a recommendation that the application be granted.

  Against all rational expectations a reply did come, and from the highest authority, allowing Captain Campbell to leave the camp. He would travel through Germany to Holland and back to England for a fortnight’s leave. This would be permitted as long as he promised, on his honour, to return.

  Campbell travelled home from the continent, arriving at Gravesend on 7 December 1916. What Louisa made of her son’s miraculous appearance is not hard to imagine. Sadly she died the following February.

  While Robert was still at his mother’s bedside, a letter was passed to the Imperial Foreign Office in Germany. It was written by Friedrich Gastreich, a father and husband from the town of Kirchhundem, east of Cologne. His wife, Anna, was bedridden, suffering from tuberculosis and pneumonia: she was fading fast and her son was, like Captain Campbell, locked up in enemy territory. Twenty-five-year-old Peter Gastreich was held in Knockaloe internment camp on the Isle of Man. Would it be possible, his father asked, for his son to be given special licence to leave England for Germany?

  The Imperial Foreign Office asked Britain through American intermediaries. Referring to the parole being given to Campbell, the Germans tried to work on the British sense of fair play to parole Gastreich in turn. The British were not willing to comply. ‘Unable to agree to release of P. Gastreich. Capt. Campbell’s case cannot be quoted as a precedent,’ the Foreign Office official replied in a memo. Gastreich would remain where he was: his mother died just a week after the initial request, although this news had not been communicated to the British government when it made its decision.

  It can be safely assumed that this attempt at a ‘temporary exchange’ was unique, owing to the refusal of the British to reciprocate. In October 1917, when a similar situation arose, relatives of another captured officer, Captain Bushby Erskine, petitioned for a temporary parole for him. The government’s reply to the Erskine family was polite but negative. ‘In one case the Germans permitted a British officer to visit this country on parole, but without consulting us. This case has since been used to support applications for German officers to visit Germany, which could not possibly be entertained.’ The letter was forwarded to Captain Erskine’s father by his niece. She wrote to the Foreign Office: ‘I fear the result of the shock, as he [Erskine’s father] had been led to believe, by irresponsible people, that there was a good chance of his son being allowed to return “en parole”.’

  There is no doubt that Captain Campbell was extremely fortunate, although his extraordinary return home was not reported in the national press: the Kaiser’s seemingly spontaneous act of kindness was hardly the right sort of war news in 1916, and so only private communication could have brought the Campbell case to the attention of the Erskines.

  As for Captain Campbell, no one would have blamed him had he chosen to stay where he was, in England, and by his mother’s bedside. True to his word, however, he returned to the camp on time, where, released from his bond of honour, he set about trying to escape. He broke out of camp the following year only to be recaptured on the Dutch border. Thereafter, he remained in Germany until the end of the war.

  Social, cultural and military ties between Britain and Germany were particularly strong before the outbreak of war. Germans made up the third largest immigrant population in Britain prior to 1914 (behind Russian Jews and the Irish); they set up businesses, commercial and industrial; Germans constituted by far the largest group of foreign students: forty-three matriculated from Oxford University in 1912 as compared with just three students from France; in London’s upmarket hotels and restaurants young Germans were conspicuous by their presence, working front of house (10 per cent of London’s waiting staff were German). They intermarried, settled and had families. Elsewhere, German academics, musicians and writers featured large in pre-war musical and literary circles.

  Within the armed forces, ties were particularly convivial. Kaiser Wilhelm was Colonel-in-Chief of a British regiment, the 1st (Royal) Dragoons, in whose dress uniform he was photographed while on a private visit to Aldershot in 1894. Through the German military attaché in London, he kept in touch with the regiment, while its Colonel, George Steele, regularly sent him greetings and regimental news. On 3 June 1914 the regiment took part in a garrison parade to celebrate the Kaiser’s birthday and each year the Kaiser sent a laurel wreath to ‘his’ regiment in commemoration of the Battle of Waterloo. In thanking the Kaiser for his ‘unfailing thoughtfulness’, Colonel Steele wrote, ‘I venture to express the hope of all ranks of the Regiment that next year [1915] being the centenary of the Battle, our Colonel in Chief would, on that occasion, still further extend his kindness to us and himself affix the wreath to our standard.’

  The Kaiser was one of many German military personnel invited to visit British counterparts. A month before the outbreak of war, the same London military attaché was a weekend guest at the barracks of the 4th (Royal Irish) Dragoon Guards. At the Cowes Regatta on the Isle of Wight at the end of July, Prince Henry of Prussia, a career naval officer and younger brother of the Kaiser, was due to stay with Commodore James Butler, 3rd Marquess of Ormonde. Reluctantly, he wired cancelling the visit owing to the spiralling international crisis. ‘Au revoir, I hope,’ he wrote to his friend.

  And just as Germans came to Britain, so Britons went to Germany. It was almost a prerequisite for would-be British businessmen to spend time in Germany, learning the language and the business ethos of such an important trading nation, while other young men spent time studying at respected German universities such as Göttingen and Münster. In 1911, Sir Ernest Cassel, a Cologne-born naturalised British businessman and close friend of the British monarch, founded the ‘King Edward VII British-German Foundation’ to help promote better understanding between the two nations through funding young British and German graduates to study for a year in each other’s country.

  At the highest echelons of society, there was much social interaction and intermarriage. The Emperor Kaiser Wilhelm II was the grandson of Queen Victoria, who was herself married to a German (Albert) and had a German mother (Victoria of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld). Visits from various German princes and dukes to Britain, to London’s theatres and to the oper
a, were regularly reported in the Court Circular column of The Times. The Kaiser visited Britain frequently between his accession to the throne in 1888 and the outbreak of war, and both King Edward VII and George V returned the courtesy, George V visiting Germany as late as May 1913.

  Yet familiarity bred a level of contempt. Economically, Germany had expanded rapidly since the 1870s under the careful guidance of Bismarck, the founding father of a unified German state. However, the Kaiser was an entirely different man. On coming to power, he sidelined the ageing Chancellor, and started to exert increasing influence over Germany’s civil powers, and most importantly over successive Chancellors, who, until the defeat of Germany in 1918, were ultimately responsible only to the Emperor.

  Bombastic, jealous and emotionally fragile, the Kaiser had a love-hate relationship with the English, envious and admiring in almost equal measure. He was, after all, the son of an English mother (Victoria, the Princess Royal), yet his main influences in life came from his father’s side and an overly disciplined upbringing among Prussian aristocracy that venerated the military. There were few English influences, and he blamed his mother (irrationally) for his physical disability, a withered left arm. To compensate for this, he developed an arrogance and an exaggerated self-confidence combined with an innate restlessness and desire to assert his will; these were not good character traits for a man bent, if not on outright war, then at least on confrontation. Always careful to hide his arm, he would appear in public with a pompous desire to swagger and show off, as Percy Johnson, a twelve-year-old boy, recalled of the German monarch’s visit to Britain in 1911. King George was riding down London’s Oxford Street but it was the man next to him who attracted Percy’s attention: ‘Who should be with King George but the Kaiser, stuck up there wearing a great big cape and a helmet and wonderful medals on his chest. Well, our own King George, he looked absolutely way out of his depth.’

  The Kaiser never sought to endear himself to the British public, and the press gradually turned against him as he contributed to his own unpopularity by reported blunders of foreign policy and diplomatic gaffes. These included an interview he gave to the Daily Telegraph in 1908. He had intended to give his views on Anglo-German friendship but, in the end, was quoted as saying, ‘You English are mad, mad, mad as March hares’: he also managed to insult France, Russia and Japan in the same interview.

  Yet it was the well-documented naval arms race in the fifteen years prior to the outbreak of war that underlined to the British people where the threat to peace in Europe lay. The British press was obsessed with international ship-building, especially German, with tables drawn up and published annually of newly built foreign vessels, with the name, type, displacement and shipyard all noted. By 1910, Germany was reckoned to be, after Britain, the second strongest sea power in the world: it posed a genuine threat to Britain’s maritime supremacy and by definition her ability to protect colonial interests of which the Kaiser was supremely envious.

  The naval arms race and the rising consternation this caused in Britain did not, however, fracture relations at the highest level of society, and civility was maintained. Ironically, Edward VII was an honorary admiral in the German navy and when, in June 1904, he visited Kiel, he was greeted not only with a display of German naval strength, and a twenty-one-gun salute, but by the Kaiser wearing his British naval uniform as an honorary Admiral of the Fleet, a status afforded him by Queen Victoria, along with his title of Colonel-in-Chief to the 1st (Royal) Dragoons. In welcoming his royal guest, the Kaiser made a speech in which he pointed out that the German fleet, while the ‘youngest in point of creation’ among the world’s navies, was nevertheless ‘an expression of the renewal in strength of the sea power of the German Empire . . .’ The writing was on the wall. That year the British concluded the Entente Cordiale with France, an act that Germany took as a clear indication of where British loyalties would lie in the event of war.

  There had been perennial tension between France and Germany since the war of 1870 and the ceding to Germany by treaty of the valuable French territories of Alsace (including the city of Strasbourg) and part of Lorraine. The loss of this territory was an open wound for the French, and renewed conflict between France and Germany was all but inevitable. Indeed, long before 1914, Britain’s General Staff anticipated a German invasion of France through neutral Belgium.

  Despite the day-to-day cordiality that existed between British and German military officers, there was a growing presumption among the General Staff that the Germans also wanted war with Britain and were only waiting for the right moment to usurp Britain’s position as the dominant world power.

  The General Staff in London predicted it would come in 1915 once the Germans had widened the Kiel Canal to take modern battleships. Even so, there were German-induced war scares in 1911 and 1913 and Der Tag – the day – when Germany would attack was on the lips of many, years before August 1914. When young Percy Johnson returned home from watching the parade on Oxford Street that summer morning in 1911, he told his father that he had seen the Kaiser in all his grandeur. ‘Oh,’ said his father, ‘there’s going to be a war, and not very long either. That bloke’s not here for nothing.’

  Meeting the Enemy tells the story of what happened when these two great economically and socially intertwined nations were sucked into war. Few foresaw, or cared to envisage, the consequences of embarking on a truly international war, from the inevitability of prodigious loss of life to the terrible long-term dislocation of civil society that would result. It is, in part, the social cost of war that this book will examine, on the Western and Home Fronts but always within the context of Anglo-German relations.

  My previous book, The Quick and the Dead, explored the circumstances surrounding the death of soldiers in the Great War and the families who were left behind to mourn; Meeting the Enemy will look at what happened to those who, in the main, survived: survivors who were both the instigators and perpetrators of conflict as well as those who were required to bear the brunt of war’s vagaries and its vicious unfairness.

  It would be easy to infer from the title alone that this book is about direct contact with the foe, that it begins at the point of the bayonet and ends, in the normal state of affairs, in a soldier being killed, wounded or taken prisoner. Likewise, as friends to whom I have mentioned this book have suggested, it must include, surely, the famous Christmas Truce – it does, but not just that of 1914, but, rather, the lesser known Christmas Truce of 1915. Then throw in a few spies, the odd temporary battlefield armistice to collect the dead and deserters who chanced crossing no-man’s-land, and that would appear at first glance to cover the obvious eventualities.

  In fact, indirect contact was as important as direct contact. Letters written by soldiers to the families of the enemy, fallen or wounded, were more common than might be expected; exchanging effects of the dead required no meeting either. At a governmental level, communication between Britain and Germany, while necessarily formal and businesslike, continued throughout the war, using Dutch, Swiss and American intermediaries: enquiries or protests were made, replies sent, agreements brokered and concessions granted. Surviving correspondence makes for fascinating reading, for much of the official communication is about the minutiae of daily life. This includes anything from the requested return of a Heidelberg professor’s books, abandoned in Britain, to the proposed reciprocal supply of spectacles and trusses to prisoners of war.

  War is nothing if not contradictory, abnormal and downright chaotic. It throws up the peculiar and the unusual as a matter of course, and provides a platform for highly improbable scenarios. Captain Campbell’s parole to England from a German POW camp to visit his ailing mother is just such an example. Similarly, why, did a patriotic British professor, of British birth and descent, honorably enlist in the German army in 1915? The answer is strange and yet ridiculously plausible.

  And, just as war is extraordinary, so it is often banal and trite. What happened to the many thousands of British w
omen married to Germans living in Britain or abroad? What happened to those naturalised British subjects of German origin who lived in Britain, many for decades, in peaceful, lawful harmony with their neighbours? What was the position of their British-born children? With whom would their allegiance lie? The answers are as surprising as they are often mundane or simply sad.

  As with the majority of my books, I have, wherever possible, used a chronological approach rather than a thematic one, as I believe this to be of considerable advantage in showing the development of key characters and their context as the war progressed.

  This book includes many unpublished letters and diaries. It draws upon official government documents, largely untouched until now, to tell a new story of the Great War. The story slips back and forth from the Western Front to the Home Front; from prisoner-of-war camps to internment camps; from trench dugouts to terraced houses; from shell holes in no-man’s-land to the drawing rooms of middle-class Britain. I examine fraternisation with the enemy and temporary armistices, reprisals and murder. And, as in all wars, the story will feature the nadir of human behaviour counterbalanced by the zenith of human endeavour and compassion. I am less interested in tactics or generals, weapons or strategy, than I am in human beings, and, when it comes to humans in war, one thing has become abundantly clear to me: you simply couldn’t make it up.

  1

  The Age of Unreason

  The dry summer heat had given way to a cool, pleasing breeze as the Reverend Henry Williams strolled to his flat in a side street off Berlin’s famous Kurfürstendamm. It was Sunday evening, 26 July 1914, and the thirty-seven-year-old priest was on his way home from St George’s Church where he served as chaplain. Built in the royal gardens in 1885, this very English church was physical proof of the close ties between Britain and Germany. It had been given as a silver wedding present by the then Prince and Princess of Wales, later King Edward VII and his wife, Queen Alexandra, to Edward’s eldest sister, the Crown Princess of Germany and later Empress.