Meeting the Enemy (41 page)

They were all fed up with the war. The newspapers said that the new Government would bring peace by Christmas and the people seemed to have faith in it. The people seemed interested in me and not hostile. They looked thin and pale, though the children did not seem very thin. One lady asked me if I would give her a piece of soap. She was very friendly. She said that when I got home I was to ask England to hurry up and finish the war. The people treated me with great respect. They were as nice to me as anything. Very different to what it was when I was there in 1916 when people spat at me and called me swine. They said that the war was now left with Lloyd George, who was carrying it on for the capitalists.

At Berlin there was nothing in the shops, and lines of people waiting outside the shops and stalls. The soldier guard told me that he did not want to go to the front, but if he did go, he would make his home in France or England.

I saw notices posted in Berlin with instructions what to do in case of air raids. Also some big posters showing Zeppelins and aeroplanes setting English towns on fire. These had been put up quite recently. There are also illustrations showing the amount of shipping sunk by submarines. The Berlin people, and also the guards at the camps, thought the submarine campaign a washout. They cannot understand how we can get so much food if so many ships have been sunk. What surprises them is to see the contents of the [Red Cross] parcels, especially tins bearing American labels, as they are told that the Atlantic trade is stopped.

The German offensive was thoroughly spent by mid-July, and for a few weeks that summer all sides took time to recuperate. The Germans were exhausted; the great optimism of March had been shattered, to be replaced by a deepening malaise. The last German attacks were spasmodic and little short of a disaster, as Rudolf Binding witnessed. ‘I know that we are finished. My thoughts oppress me,’ he wrote on 19 July. All Germans could hope for was to hold firm, to maintain their positions, but to what end? A negotiated peace would be ideal, but the Allies were in no mood to sit down and talk. On 8 August the Allies, utilising tanks, aircraft, artillery and infantry in an all-arms assault, made spectacular gains. The enemy reeled and fell back. It was the beginning of a hundred-day campaign in which German troops were harried and chased across the old battlefields and into hitherto untouched countryside.

Frederick Hodges was a nineteen-year-old sergeant involved in mopping-up operations with the Australians on the day after the initial Allied assault.

We were amazed and thrilled at the depth of penetration, five miles deep in the German line. This had previously been unheard of. When eventually we came to some German field guns, we swarmed round them, laughing and talking excitedly to one another. Scrawled on them in chalk were the words ‘captured by the 1st AIF’ [Australian Imperial Force]. We were delighted and said ‘Good old Aussies!’

Ernst Jünger, a twenty-three-year-old German officer fortified with courage and resilience and four years’ war service, knew the war was lost. The advances showed the Allies’ strength, ‘supplemented by drafts from every corner of the earth’, he wrote in his memoirs.

‘We had fewer men to set against them, many were little more than boys, and we were short of equipment and training. It was all we could do to plug gaps with our bodies as the tide flooded in.’ There was no longer the wherewithal for the heavy counter-attacks of the past. With every enemy attack, Jünger acknowledged, their ‘blows were swifter and more devastating’.

In early September, Jünger led his men in one final and localised counter-attack. The men moved off in two lines, but Jünger was struck early on and fell into a trench. Unconscious at first, he came round to hear the ebb and flow of battle. He listened to the noise with rising alarm and the realisation that it was the enemy who were advancing: shouts indicated that British soldiers had broken through on the left. Struggling to his feet, he became aware of German soldiers with their hands raised in surrender.

There were now loud yells: ‘It’s no use! Put your guns down! Don’t shoot comrades!’

I looked at the two officers who were standing in the trench with me. They smiled back, shrugged, and dropped their belts on the ground.

There was only the choice between captivity and a bullet. I crept out of the trench . . . The only thing in my favour was perhaps the utter confusion, in which some were already exchanging cigarettes, while others were still butchering each other. Two Englishmen, who were leading back a troop of prisoners from the 99th, confronted me. I aimed my pistol at the nearer of the two, and pulled the trigger. The other blazed his rifle at me and missed.

Ernst Jünger and one or two others escaped, but for Jünger himself, badly wounded as he was, there would be no opportunity to fight another day. He was the old guard, an enthusiast of 1914, and one of the few left from the battles of 1915 and 1916, such was the level of attrition when 40 per cent of a battalion’s strength could be lost in a single attack.

More than 200,000 German prisoners were captured by British forces in 1918, of whom nearly 187,000 were taken in the three months prior to the Armistice. Corporal Fred Hodges marvelled at the British barrages that autumn, believing them ‘the most intense and concentrated I experienced; the crash and thud of multiple explosions was continuous’. In the last dozen days of September, when the Hindenburg Line was broken, as many Germans surrendered as during the entire five-month Somme campaign two years before.

And when the barrage ceased, ‘something almost miraculous happened’, wrote Hodges. ‘We saw grey clad figures emerging from the long pall of black smoke in front of us and as they got nearer we could hear them coughing as they groped their way through the acrid smoke. They stumbled towards us with their hands up; some wounded and all of them completely dazed. How had they possibly survived?’

Captain Arthur Pick, serving with the 1/4th Leicestershire Regiment, was present at the taking of the Hindenburg Line.

There was a dense fog hanging over the low-lying ground round the canal; some of it probably true fog and some of it smoke shells. One could not see many yards ahead and the company became split up. It took several minutes to collect together again before attempting to cross the canal. The fog lifted gradually. The canal here was in a fairly deep cutting. The bank down which we picked our way was a mass of undergrowth, which concealed barbed wire, and which was very difficult to negotiate. We were lucky enough to find a plank bridge to cross by. The far end had been destroyed but the water was only about knee deep. On the far side, on the towpath, three or four Staffords were drinking tea with an equal number of German prisoners. We met a Stafford major with quite a number of men. They had not reached their objective, but seemed determined not to advance any further. The Stafford major had the wind up badly – when two unarmed Germans advanced through the lifting fog, he ordered his troops to line the canal bank! Our morale would have been affected had we stayed near him, so we left him to capture the two willing prisoners. Actually, I doubt if any Staffords advanced any further than this in our immediate vicinity. On the slope up from the canal we saw in a trench a lot of arms waving above the parapet. On reaching the trench we found the occupants unarmed, all their belongings packed up and ready to be marched back. One ancient officer’s servant was deemed sufficient escort for them.

The Hindenburg Line was significant as it was the German army’s last prepared defensive position. Once it was crossed, the war continued in more or less open countryside, with Germans engaged in a fighting retreat, destroying bridges and crossroads, flooding ground to halt the progress of tanks, booby-trapping houses and barns. Determined and brave German snipers and machine-gunners fought lone battles to slow the Allies’ pace of advance. And, when required, the German infantry could still put up a tenacious defence, but the Allies’ predominance in almost every aspect of arms was marked, and in artillery the Germans were hopelessly outgunned.

Andrew Bowie, a lance corporal in the Cameron Highlanders, recalled one incident that brought home to him the tragic and, from the German perspective, futile nature of the last weeks of fighting.

We took a young prisoner. The Germans had pulled back and had had to leave him. I was assisting the intelligence officer, and they brought this boy to the officer; he was only about sixteen and the area just above his hip had been shot away by shrapnel. It was a bad wound, and bleeding a lot at the back. This poor child could speak a little English and said his mother had told him that at the first opportunity he was to give himself up to the English, they would look after him. He was a nice-looking boy, a healthy-looking lad with a big face. The fellows came in to have a look at him, about a dozen of us, and they were giving him chocolate. He could eat a little. They felt he was their own brother, there was an atmosphere of love, he wasn’t the enemy then.

The Allies continued to press the Germans psychologically as well as physically. Allied aircraft leafleted the retiring Germans, drawing their attention to the number of their comrades taken prisoner in recent fighting, at 100,000 an accurate enough figure. The leaflets also highlighted monthly reinforcements of 300,000 ‘fresh American troops’. Any German reading these leaflets could not scoff at such claims as in his heart he knew they were true.

The Germans leafleted in reply. Gone were bellicose claims, or taunts. If any Allied soldier needed proof that the Germans were on their knees, this was it.

We are of the firm conviction that all belligerents owe to mankind to examine in common whether it is not possible to put an end to this frightful struggle now, after so many years of costly but undecided fighting whose whole course points towards an understanding. The Imperial and Royal Government therefore propose to the Government of all the belligerent states to send delegates in the near future to a place of a neutral country . . . with a view to a confidential and most binding conference on the main principles of a treaty of peace.

The outcome was not in doubt: when and where the war would end, in France or on German soil, in 1918 or in 1919, were the only subjects under speculation. In early October, reports reached Sapper Jack Martin that the Germans were asking for an armistice and he passed these on to the men of his unit; some of them laughed in derision, accusing Martin of being over-optimistic.

I doubt if anything tangible will result from the request (even if it be true). I look on it more as a sign of the beginning of the end, but how long it will be before the end of the end arrives it is impossible to say. I only hope that Germany will realize her doom is sealed and accept the fact very quickly. The march today was twenty miles.

Twenty miles: this was not an advance of twenty miles, but, regardless of the winding route the men had been forced to take that day, it still gave some indication of the pressure German forces were under and evidence of the ground they were being forced to concede.

The Allied troops, out of the relative safety of trenches and exposed in the open, suffered dreadful casualties as a rolling offensive snapped at the heels of the German army. The decision to allow the enemy no respite was eminently sensible when their morale was at an all-time low and Allied morale correspondingly high, but inevitably there were incidents where a well-sited German machine gun on a crossroads or on the edge of a small copse caused brief, if localised, havoc.

Nevertheless, as enemy prisoners were marshalled, British soldiers saw how many Germans were marked out by their age: either very old or very young. Too many were intent on saving their lives, giving up without a fight and appearing docile, willing to allow those who were ready to fight to stand their ground.

In the last days of fighting, Corporal Fred Hodges was ordered to take a batch of prisoners back to a POW cage. The men were waiting at a farm as Hodges arrived.

As I led this untidy looking double line of prisoners out through the gateway, I could hear the Regimental Sergeant Major’s rasping voice counting them out, ‘Two-four-six-eight-ten—’. When I was about fifty yards from the farm, I stepped to one side, motioned them to keep going, and looked back to see what I had got. I estimated that I had about forty prisoners, and at the rear, one Lancashire Fusilier. Seeing, about sixty yards away, another Fusilier driving another half a dozen Germans before him, I shouted across to him to join us. A few minutes later we were also joined by another small group, which to my great surprise included a German officer.

With the aid of this English-speaker, Hodges turned the straggling group into a column of men marching in fours. The walk was a considerable distance and had to pass through an area saturated with German gas. It was soon evident that enemy gas masks were of a quality much inferior to the Allied ones, and the Germans coughed and spat their way through the affected area.

Several high-explosive shells burst uncomfortably close until the column reached the POW cage, where they met yet more troops going up to the front.