The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred (27 page)

Private Frank Richards of the Royal Welch Fusiliers recalled seeing another man in his regiment walk off down the Menin Road with six prisoners only to return some minutes later having ‘done the trick’ with ‘two bombs’. Richards attributed his action to the fact that ‘the loss of his pal had upset him very much’. Though sometimes spontaneous, this kind of behaviour seems to have been encouraged by some commissioned officers, who believed that the order ‘Take no prisoners’ enhanced the aggression and therefore the combat effectiveness of their men. A verbal order to finish off French prisoners was issued to some German troops as early as September 1914. But there was nothing peculiarly German about this kind of thing. One British brigadier was heard by a soldier in the Suffolks to say on the eve of the Battle of the Somme: ‘You may take prisoners, but I don’t want to see them.’ Another man, in the 17th Highland Light Infantry, recalled the order ‘that no quarter was to be shown to the enemy and no prisoners taken’. Private Arthur Hubbard of the London Scottish Regiment also received strict orders not to take prisoners, ‘no matter if wounded’. His ‘first job’, he recalled, ‘was when I had finished cutting some of the wire away, to empty my magazine on 3 Germans that came out of their deep dugouts, bleeding badly, and put them out of their misery, they cried for mercy, but I had my orders, they had no feelings whatever for us poor chaps’. In his notes ‘from recent fighting’ by II Corps, dated August 17, 1916, General Sir Claud Jacob urged that no prisoners should be taken, as they hindered mopping up. According to Arthur Wrench, battalion orders before an attack at Third Ypres included the words: ‘
NO PRISONERS
’ which ‘with the line scored through meant “do as you please”’.

Sometimes the order was given to kill prisoners simply to avoid the inconvenience of escorting them back to captivity. As Brigadier General F. P. Crozier observed: ‘The British soldier is a kindly fellow and it is safe to say, despite the dope [propaganda], seldom oversteps the mark of propriety in France,
save occasionally to kill prisoners he
cannot be bothered to escort back to his lines
.’ John Eugene Crombie of the Gordon Highlanders was ordered in April 1917 to bayonet surrendering Germans in a captured trench because it was ‘expedient from a military point of view’. Other more spuriously practical arguments were also used. Private Frank Bass of the 1st Battalion, Cambridgeshire Regiment, was told by an instructor at Étaples: ‘Remember, boys… every prisoner means a day’s rations gone.’ Jimmy O’Brien of the 10th Dublin Fusiliers recalled being told by his chaplain (an English clergyman named Thornton):

Well now boys, we’re going into action tomorrow morning and if you take any prisoners your rations will be cut by half. So don’t take prisoners. Kill them! If you take prisoners they’ve got to be fed by your rations. So you’ll get half rations. The answer is – don’t take prisoners.

On June 16, 1915, Charles Tames, a private in the Honourable Artillery Company, described an incident following an attack at Bellewaarde near Ypres:

We were under shell fire for eight hours, it was more like a dream to me, we must have been absolutely mad at the time, some of the chaps looked quite insane after the charge was over, as we entered the German trenches hundreds of Germans were found cut up by our artillery fire, a great number came out and asked for mercy, needless to say they were shot right off which was the best mercy we could give them. The Royal Scots took about 300 prisoners, their officers told them to share their rations with the prisoners and to consider the officers were not with them, the Scots immediately shot the whole lot, and shouted ‘Death and Hell to everyone of ye s—’ and in five minutes the ground was ankle deep with German blood…

In its most extreme form, however, prisoner killing was justified on the basis that the only good German was a dead German. When the 12th Battalion of the Middlesex Regiment attacked Thiepval on September 26, 1916, Colonel Frank Maxwell VC ordered his men not to take any prisoners, on the ground that ‘all Germans should be exterminated’. On October 21 Maxwell left his battalion a farewell message. In it he praised his men for having ‘begun to learn that the only way to treat the German is to kill him’. In the words of Private Stephen Graham, ‘The opinion cultivated in the army regarding the
Germans was that they were a sort of vermin like plague-rats that had to be exterminated.’ A Major Campbell allegedly told new recruits: ‘If a fat, juicy Hun cries “Mercy” and speaks of his wife and nine children, give him the point – two inches is enough – and finish him. He is the kind of man to have another nine “Hate” children if you let him off. So run no risks.’

The fact that these attitudes could take root on the Western Front, where the ethnic differences between the two sides were in fact quite minimal, was an indication of how easily hatred could flourish in the brutalizing conditions of total war. In other theatres of war, where the differences were deeper, the potential for unconstrained violence was greater still.

Exactly how often such prisoner killings occurred is impossible to establish. Clearly, only a small minority of men who surrendered were killed in this way. Equally clearly, not all of those who received such orders approved of them or felt able to carry them out. Hundreds of thousands of German soldiers were taken prisoner, especially in the final phase of the war, without suffering ill treatment. But the numbers involved mattered less than the perception that surrender was risky. Men magnified these episodes: they passed into trench mythology. The German trench newspaper
Kriegsflugblätter
devoted its front page on January 29, 1915, to a cartoon depicting just such an incident. ‘G’meinhuber Michel’ advances on a Tommy; the Tommy puts his hands up; the Tommy then shoots at the advancing Michel; Michel then gets the Tommy by the throat; he proceeds to beat him to a pulp with his rifle butt, crying ‘I’ll turn ye into an English beef steak’ (
Doass muass a englisches Boeffsteck wer’n’
); and is duly rewarded with the Iron Cross. In real life, such incidents were more often than not the result of uncoordinated surrendering rather than duplicity; it only needed one man to keep shooting, unaware that his comrades had laid down their arms. But trench lore favoured the notion of trickery. And units that felt they had lost men this way were less likely to take prisoners in future. When Private Jack Ashley was captured at the Somme, his German captor told him that the British shot all their prisoners and that the Germans ‘ought to do the same’.

The First World War confirmed the truth of the nineteenth-century military theorist Carl von Clausewitz’s dictum that it is capturing not killing the enemy that is the key to victory in war. Despite the huge death toll inflicted on the Allies by the Germans and their allies, outright victory failed to materialize: demography meant that there were more or less enough new French and British conscripts each year to plug the gaps created by attrition. However, it did prove possible, first on the Eastern Front and then on the Western, to get the enemy to surrender in such large numbers that his ability to fight was fatally weakened. Large-scale surrenders (and desertions) in 1917 were the key to Russia’s military defeat. Overall, more than half of all Russian casualties took the form of men who were taken prisoner – nearly 16 per cent of all Russian troops mobilized. Austria and Italy also lost a large proportion of men in this way: respectively a third and quarter of all casualties. One in four Austrians mobilized ended up a prisoner. The large-scale surrender of Italian troops at Caporetto came close to putting Italy out of the war. The low point of British fortunes – from around November 1917 to May 1918 – saw large increases in the numbers of Britons in captivity: in March 1918 alone, around 100,000 were taken, more than in all the previous years of fighting combined. In August 1918, however, it was German soldiers who began to give themselves up in large numbers. Between July 30 and October 21 the total number of Germans in British hands rose by a factor of nearly four. This was the real sign that the war was ending. Significantly, foreign exchange dealers in the unregulated Swiss market took the same view. They bought marks when the Germans bagged large numbers of prisoners in the spring of 1918 and dumped them when the tables were turned in August.

Why did German soldiers, who had hitherto been so reluctant to give themselves up, suddenly begin to surrender in their tens of thousands in August 1918? The best explanation – again following Clause-witz – is that there was a collapse of morale. This was primarily due to the realization among both officers and men that the war could not be won. General Erich Ludendorff’s spring offensives had worked
tactically but failed strategically, and in the process had cost the Germans dear, whereas the Allied offensive of August 7–8 outside Amiens was, as Ludendorff admitted, ‘the greatest defeat the German Army has suffered since the beginning of the war’. Unrestricted submarine warfare had failed to bring Britain to her knees; occupation of Russian territory after Brest-Litovsk was wasting scarce manpower; Germany’s allies were beginning to crumble; the Americans were massing in France, inexperienced but well fed and numerous; perhaps most importantly, the British Expeditionary Force had finally learned to combine infantry, artillery, armour and air operations. Simply in terms of numbers of tanks and trucks, the Germans were by now at a hopeless disadvantage in the war of movement they had initiated in the spring. A German victory was now impossible, and it was the rapid spread of this view down through the ranks that turned non-victory into defeat, rather than the draw Ludendorff appears to have had in mind. In this light, the mass surrenders described above were only part of a general crisis of morale, which also manifested itself in sickness, indiscipline and desertion.

Yet no matter how hopeless their situation, German soldiers had to feel they could risk surrendering before the war could end. And that meant that Allied soldiers had to be ready to take prisoners, rather than kill those who surrendered. The testimony of Lt RNR Blaker of the 13th (S) Battalion, Rifle Brigade, illustrates how the process worked. On November 4, 1918, during a heavy barrage of German positions at Louvignies, Blaker went ahead of his men to scout for enemy machine-gun emplacements. Having surprised and shot two German sentries, he was able to persuade ‘five pretty scared looking Germans’ to emerge from their dugout. ‘I motioned them to go back through the barrage towards our lines,’ Blaker recalled, ‘and after a slight hesitation, they had to do so.’ He then repeated this process with a second machine-gun crew. At this point, with dawn breaking, Blaker was startled to see ‘all dotted about just round by the orchards and the open grass fields beyond, enemy heads occasionally peeping out’. Deciding that he had ‘better to try to get them out of their holes’, he went on. ‘They didn’t like coming out into the barrage and why they didn’t fire at me, goodness knows,’ but he succeeded in clearing out all he could see, disarming them and sending them back to the
British lines. Knowing that his men were not far behind him, the intrepid Blaker pressed on. A decisive moment was when he came upon a solitary house:

I came from the back of it and went round to the front, where there was no door, and peeped inside a room which opened into the road and saw there a crowd of Germans, some sitting down and some standing. I don’t know who was more surprised – they or I. Anyway I managed to pull myself together a bit quicker than they did and advanced just under the doorway holding a Mills bomb in my left hand and my revolver in my right, the only thing I could think of to say was ‘Kamerad’, and so I said it, at the same time menacing them with my revolver, they didn’t seem very willing to surrender, so I repeated ‘Kamerad’, and to my surprise and delight they ‘Kameraded’, 2 officers and 28 other ranks. My idea is that they were holding some sort of conference, as the barrage was not then reaching them in full force. Both officers and three of the other ranks had Iron Cross ribbons on!

Having made them all drop their weapons, Blaker induced these men also to march towards the British lines, despite the continuing British barrage. After this point, he was able to round up twenty-five or thirty more Germans, including the crews of two machine-guns and a trench mortar.

Five things about this account stand out. First, what began quite tentatively soon developed a momentum of its own. Clearly, the German units Blaker had stumbled upon had already been close to cracking; his appearance was the catalyst for a collapse, beginning with a few individuals and culminating in a large group. Secondly, at least some of those he captured were not raw recruits but seasoned troops, with five Iron Crosses between them. Thirdly, it is clear that for the Germans there was safety in numbers, because a single English officer simply could not gun down more than a handful. Fourthly, the role of the German officers was vital in legitimizing the decision to surrender and ensuring all complied. Once Blaker had them in the bag, the rest came quietly. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Blaker only shot Germans who reached for their guns; from the outset he spared those who reached for the sky. (Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that he delegated prisoner killing to the artillery by forcing his captives to march through the barrage to the British
lines. Not all of them survived.) Plainly, after a certain point Blaker lacked the means to kill those who surrendered to him. Had they wished to, the German officers could have ordered their men to kill or capture him; he could have shot only a few of them before being overwhelmed. But the Germans felt sufficiently confident that they would be well treated that they elected instead to surrender.

Blaker’s experience was typical of the way the First World War ended on the Western Front. By the last weeks, the German army had reached a point of what natural scientists call ‘self-sustaining criticality’. Quite simply, the arguments against surrender outlined above had been overwhelmed by the arguments in favour of it. Defeated, German officers led their men into captivity – further evidence, if it were needed, that Germany was fatally stabbed in the front, not the back.