The best and the worst of men

THE DEADLY GAME of cat and mouse which had characterised the Western Front during the previous fortnight persisted. Ruined villages passed to and fro. Lombartzyde was back in German hands by 7th November, but not Klein-Zillebeke, for all the ferocity of the attack launched upon it the day before. Towards the end of the week, however, Allied commanders might have begun to believe events were running their way. While battle along the line of Diksmuide–Ypres–La Bassée–Arras line remained unchecked, German attacks were being repulsed.

All sides knew the stakes. One German corps commander promised Iron Crosses on 3rd November to those regimental bandsmen whose tub-thumping battle marches continued to ring out, even during the fiercest artillery assaults, as the Germans attempted to break the French line north of Langemarck. By the end of that day, Army Group Fabeck had totted up 17,500 casualties in the previous three days and Fabeck’s Chief of Staff urged that the Front in Flanders be closed down and all energies be diverted to the East. Falkenhayn and the Kaiser would not hear of it. On 5th November, Falkenhayn oversaw a new wave of assaults at the northern and southern ends of the Ypres Salient, almost suicidal in their intensity. When, the next day, the German infantry turned on Klein-Zillebecke, the British responded with a depth of defensive fire which proved too much for some Germans who, traumatised, fled the scene of battle.

They were not alone. It took a bayonet charge by the Household Cavalry the following day to hold the line, whose right flank had been exposed after the Irish Guards and the French, in the heat of battle, had broken. Haig was appalled by what he considered the feeble performance of certain regiments and ordered a series of courts martial for those he considered egregious offenders. Alexander Johnston, at brigade HQ, shared the distaste of the commander. “It makes one feel almost ill,” he wrote, “to see so many Englishmen being such cowards.”

Today, such moral certitudes, such unquestioning patriotism, leave us queasy. It would be easier if one could ridicule Johnston’s high dudgeon as emanating from someone sitting comfortably behind the lines. But it is not true, and to humour the conceit would be to confuse the world of Blackadder with the immensely complex realities of the time. Some men broke under fire and some, extraordinarily, did not. Extended training and familiarity with the military mindset, the stuff of months and years, undoubtedly helped men to endure but such luxuries now belonged overwhelmingly to peacetime. Haig’s responsibility was to hold the allied line at Ypres, and – truly a man of his time – he regarded compassion for those who could not serve him in this task as a tiresome irrelevance. Something of this was divined back in Britain which heaped bile upon those shirking their patriotic duty in Britain’s hour of need. The Daily Express commented, tetchily, on 4th November (in a piece entitled “The Men Who Will Not Serve”) that it was “grossly unfair that the intelligent, the patriotic, and the unselfish should bear the whole national burden, while the middle-class wastrels and the working-class laggards are left to drive their motors and loaf at football matches”.

By the end of the week, the Germans were struggling to maintain momentum. On 7th November, a group of bandsmen playing “Deutschland uber Alles” were shelled while marching down the Menin Road. In the ensuing confusion, they were ordered to lay down their instruments and were tasked as stretcher-bearers – a moment rich in metaphor. Combat troops of both sides were now convinced of the impossibility of opening up a decisive assault at Ypres but commanders were obdurate. On 9th November, a new wave of German assaults was launched.

In the East, by contrast, a war of movement had opened up. The grand strategy of the Central Powers had focused on completing an encirclement of the enemy, but it had so badly failed that on 3rd November the Russians defeated Austro-German forces at Kyeltsi in Poland, and followed this up the next day with a rout at Jaroslau in Galicia. This occasioned the capture of 19,000 Austrian prisoners and 40 guns in the course of twelve days. Habsburg misery was intensified by their hopeless incarceration in the outsize fortress of Przemysl. Helena Jablonska’s diary for 4th November recorded that as civilians were ordered to leave, horrors happened: “Children are separated from their families. Everyone has become heartless. A mother with two children boarded the train and her three-year-old child was left behind when it moved off. She wanted to jump off, but it was too late.”

By 6th November, the line of the San was once more in Russian hands and the Austrians were in retreat towards Cracow. As the week neared its end, Russians had re-entered Eydtkuhnen and Stalluponen in East Prussia and advanced into the Imperial forest of Rominten. On 9th November, their cavalry were in Silesia and had cut the railway line at Pleschen. One might assume the week’s disasters had proved sufficient to rouse the Habsburg commanders from their world of Ruritanian make-believe, but it was not so. This was the week they launched yet another invasion of Serbia, perhaps in an effort to reassure themselves that there was somewhere at least they might win.

With Turkey now formally and fully engaged in hostilities, a more vigorous narrative opened up in Southern Europe and the Near East. The Dardanelles Forts were bombarded by British and French fleets on 3rd November, and the Turks retorted by doing something similar to the Russian Black Sea ports four days later. The same day, the Albanians bombarded Cattaro, prelude to launching an invasion of Montenegro. Today this incursion seems rather unnecessary and certainly the Montenegrins thought so, kicking the Albanians firmly into touch within a couple of days. Serbia broke off relations with Turkey the same day while Bulgaria, in a show of independence not destined to last, declared her intention to remain neutral. The Russians took the opportunity also to advance into the Caucasus – the start of another chapter of suffering for Armenia. During the week, Bayazid and Diadin were both occupied and on 9th November, they faced the Russians in the Battle of Kroprukeui.

War was undeniably an opportunity as well as a catastrophe. Taegliche Rundschan reported on 4th November that they had “authoritative information which leaves no room for doubt that a new triple alliance, represented by Turkey, Persia and Afghanistan, is in course of formation – an Islamic ‘Dreibund’ to be directed in the first instance, against Britain, the spoliator of the Moslem world”. A century later, the historical ironies abound. The paper was already out of date. Britain treated the entry of Turkey into the war as a remarkable opportunity to foment Arab dissent against their unloved Ottoman overlord and, that same day, Persia declared its refusal to join Turkey in its fight against the Entente.

The following day Britain declared war on Turkey and annexed Cyprus. Two days later their forces landed in the Persian Gulf – a speed of response which suggests the operation was in an advanced planning stage well before the Sultan formally joined his fate with that of the Kaiser. On 6th November, they occupied Fao in the Persian Gulf. Oil was less on anyone’s mind than securing passage between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean – an old nineteenth century preoccupation which itself owed much to British fears of Russia trying to muscle its way into India. Also in the mood for easy pickings were the Japanese. Both they and the Chinese had decided that their interests lay in siding with the Entente, but this had not prevented the Japanese from staging a siege of Tsing-Tau for several weeks. This climaxed on 8th November with its capture and the taking of 2,300 prisoners.

At sea, both Britain and Germany experienced tumultuous changes of fortune. Yarmouth was bombarded by German minelayers and a navy submarine blown up – this was seen as an act of astonishing effrontery against Albion, and had the undoubted merit of stoking anti-German sentiment. The following day, the Daily Express noted that “People on the beach could hear the battle through the mist.” Thereafter that week, the naval war went steadily in the Allies’ favour. The German cruiser Yorck was destroyed by a mine near Wilhelmshaven the following day, and the Russians sank four Turkish transports in the Black Sea on 8th November.

But the best scalp by far, so far as the British were concerned, was that the SS Emden, the unbelievably costly destroyer, was at last destroyed in a tussle with HMAS Sydney in the Cocos Islands off Western Australia on 9th November – at much the same time as Geier, a German cruiser was interned by the Americans in Honolulu. During her two-month-long campaign the Emden had sunk or captured 25 civilian vessels, shelled Madras and destroyed the warships Zhemchug and Mousquet, a tally which had been achieved without losing a single crew member. She had, in fact, become a symbol of fascination and reluctant admiration for the British public, and a serious embarrassment for the Admiralty.

An urgent hunt to track her down had got underway, involving sixteen warships from five Allied nations. Emden’s commander Karl von Muller had decided to raid Direction Island, part of the Cocos archipelago, in order to knock out a communication station and thus frustrate the Allied search for his ship. His shore party landed on the night of 8th–9th November and disabled the wireless and cable transmission station – but not before a distress call had been picked up by warships escorting 36 merchant ships carrying Anzac troops to Europe. HMAS Sydney, a light cruiser under the command of John Glossop, was despatched to find the Emden.

In the ensuing battle on the morning of 9th November, thanks to her more powerful guns, the Sydney inflicted great damage on the Emden which, to avoid further loss of life, was then beached on North Keeling Island. Such bald facts do justice to none of the protagonists, however. An eyewitness account from Able Seaman Richard Horne, manning a starboard gun on the Sydney, reminds us of the physical implications of such a reckoning:

We had 4 or 5 charges of cordite near the gun and that ignited and sent up a great flame and giving 2 or 3 of us very bad burns, my gunlayer, a petty officer, was hit and burned very badly and died very soon after, another, a young loading number, was killed instantly by a piece striking him in the head.

Fearing a threat from the Konigsberg, Glossop left the stranded Emden to chase its supporting collier Buresk (which then scuttled itself). On return, more salvoes were fired at the Emden which had ignored all signals and left its battle ensign flying. Eventually, however, the white sheet was raised. Glossop then sent a message that he would return to provide medical assistance but had been ordered to first check on the Direction Island station. He found that the 50-strong German shore party had escaped by commandeering a schooner. These men embarked on an astonishing trek via Constantinople and overland to Germany, a journey of months which became the stuff of legend.

The audacity of the Emden was honoured by a show of superb chivalry on the part of Allied sailors. It took five hours to transfer the wounded across the rough sea to the Sydney. Medical staff from Direction Island and the Sydney worked from 6 p.m. until 4.30 a.m. dealing with the most seriously wounded, amongst whom was Horne, whose left foot had to be amputated. The total losses were: for Emden 134 killed, 69 wounded and 157 captured. Of Glossop’s men, four were killed and sixteen wounded. The effects of Emden’s destruction were far greater than mere public relations, especially as the Konigsberg, the only other German warship in the Indian Ocean, was trapped in the Rufiji river: troop convoys could travel unchallenged and ships from the Australian navy could be deployed elsewhere.

At the outbreak of war, the British commander in East Africa, Major General Aitken, had complacently announced his intention to “make short work of a lot of niggers” and “to thrash the Germans before Christmas”. He had not however yet encountered the extraordinary powers of resolution and toughness of Colonel Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck who, despite being outnumbered eight to one, succeeded in routing Aitken and his men at Tanga on 4th November. A convoluted war of sorts was also going on in the newly created Dominion of South Africa, presided over by Botha and Smuts. Both had been enemies of the British during the days of the Boer War but had now signed up wholeheartedly to an imperial destiny. They sought to contain a secessionist movement within the Union which, encouraged by the possibilities of Britain’s travails in Europe, now used German South West Africa as a deus ex machina. The contests which resulted were local in flavour and inconclusive. On 7th November, Union troops were defeated by a rebel leader, De Wet at Doornberg, but rebels were routed the next day at Sandfontein. It was essentially a new variant of an old anti-British Afrikaaner theme, tinged by evangelical fervour, and comprised many of the socially and politically disfranchised elements within the country.

Having been condemned to death the previous week on a charge of war treason, the German spy Karl Lody was executed on 6th November. He had been transferred from Wellington Barracks and taken to the Tower of London the previous evening – perhaps the only venue sufficiently rich in symbolism for the government to make its point that spies were everywhere. The Daily Express took up the theme three days later when it announced that the first woman spy had been sentenced in Paris. Disguised as a nurse, she had allegedly cried out when arrested: “The Germans will be here in a fortnight, and I’ll have you shot!”

Lody’s last hours were less histrionic – they were spent writing letters, including one thanking the British for their “kind and considered treatment”. He told his family “My hour has come and I must start on the journey through the Dark Valley like so many of my comrades in this terrible War of Nations.” Early next morning, he enquired of the Vice-Provost Marshal “I suppose you will not care to shake hands with a German spy?” “No,” came the reply, “but I will shake the hand of a brave man.” He then walked to his execution – past the padre, who was in tears, and before the firing party of clearly disturbed Grenadier Guardsmen, even refusing a blindfold. He was the first person to be executed at the Tower since 1747 and the first of eleven German spies to be executed during the war. Shortly afterwards he was described in the House of Commons as “a patriot who had died for his country as much as any soldier who fell in the field”. Attitudes would perhaps harden as the war dragged on, but the ability to frame such a thought speaks well of the British.

The extent to which the domestic Front described itself in quasi-military language was not mainly a newspaper fiction. The extent to which the word “front” had permeated seamlessly into the everyday tells a larger story. As has been earlier discussed, acres of newsprint was devoted to the denigration of the enemy – some oblique, some specific. It is very easy to enjoy the story in the Daily Express on 5th November – “Kaiser Swore Terribly in Flanders”. What a loser, we think, as we were intended to. But what is one supposed to make of an interview with a black American in Holland reported by the same paper on the following day? “People who don’t go there are all wrong about this war,” he was reported as saying. “Germany is fighting a battle for civilization. You talk about ‘caste’. Why in Berlin a genneman is as good as a white genneman.” The phonetic spelling of “gentleman” was as reported. The article was entitled “Dancing Nigger as Apostle of Kultur”.

Some perceptions are difficult to recreate and others, as discussed, sit unhappily today. In those moments when one feels most distant from our great-grandparents a hundred years ago, it is the appeal to the personal drama of family which reconciles us to nearly everything and everyone. The Daily Mirror on 5th November featured a photograph of a Mrs Hunt of Chertsey, holding a French medal, awarded to her son who had been killed in action. The medal, she had been assured, was France’s equivalent to the Victoria Cross. Her other son, also killed in action, was deemed to have deserved one too. She had been told, however, that “only one could be given to the same battalion”.