The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred (26 page)

Sex is inevitably the least easily attainable pleasure of the flesh. One of Barbusse’s characters is haunted by a pretty peasant girl, but is able to lay hands on her only when he stumbles across her corpse. On the other side the men fantasize with the same vain relish about bedding a ‘big bouncy kitchen wench with plenty to get your hands round’.
Yet in all four novels, real emotional fulfilment takes the form of what would now be called male bonding. It has often been argued that this is the real key to military cohesion: not patriotism, not even ‘cap-badge’ loyalty to regiment (‘They can say what they bloody well like… but we’re a fuckin’ fine mob’), but ‘mateship’ – loyalty to one’s friends within the smallest fighting unit. ‘Good comradeship takes the place of friendship,’ Bourne declares. ‘It is different: it has its own loyalties and affections; and I am not so sure that it does not rise on occasion to an intensity of feeling which friendship never touches.’ As Manning shows, the reality seldom lived up to this billing. Relationships struck up in front-line units were necessarily vulnerable, not only to sudden death but also to promotion or transfer. ‘That’s the worst o’ the bloody army,’ observes Martlow, ‘as soon as you get a bit pally with a chap summat ’appens.’ Even Bourne’s temporary absence doing secretarial work in the orderly room undermines his friendships with Martlow and Shem. Still, mateship almost certainly contributed more to maintaining morale than the hierarchy of command. None of Manning’s characters feels sympathy for Miller the deserter, because he has committed the cardinal sin of letting his mates down:

‘What will you do if he tries to do a bunk again?’ Bourne asked.

‘Shoot the bugger,’ said Marshall, whitening to the lips.

As their morose mate Weeper puts it: ‘We’re ’ere, there’s no gettin’ away from that, Corporal. ‘Ere we are, an since we’re ’ere, we’re just fightin’ for ourselves; we’re just fightin’ for ourselves, an’ for each other.’ More or less exactly the same sentiments are expressed by Barbusse’s
poilus
and Remarque’s
Frontschweine
. Hearing his friends’ voices, Paul Bäumer feels a ‘surprising warmth’:

Those voices… tear me with a jolt away from the terrible feeling of isolation that goes with the fear of death, to which I nearly succumbed… Those voices mean more than my life, more than smothering a fear, they are the strongest and most protective thing that there is: they are the voices of my pals… I belong to them and they to me, we all share the same fear and the same life, and we are bound to each other in a strong and simple way. I want to press my face into them, those voices, those few words that saved me, and which will be my support.

That sense of ‘brotherhood on a large scale’, of comradeship ephemeral in reality but eternal in spirit, was truly universal.

In all these respects, the armies on the Western Front were like mirror images of one another. Indeed, towards the end of
Under Fire
, a wounded French aviator relates a striking vision of the trenches from the air which makes precisely this point:

… I could make out two similar gatherings among the Boche and ourselves, in these parallel lines that seem to touch one another: a crowd, a hub of movement and, around it, what looked like black grains of sand scattered on grey ones. They weren’t moving; it didn’t seem like an alarm!… Then I understood. It was Sunday and these were two services being held in front of my eyes: the altars, the priests and the congregations. The nearer I got the more I could see that these two gatherings were similar – so exactly similar that it seemed ridiculous. One of the ceremonies – whichever you liked – was a reflection of the other. I felt as though I was seeing double.

All the resemblances between the combatants have led many writers before and since to wonder why the opposing armies did not fraternize more with one another. Famously, some British and German soldiers did just that on Christmas Day of 1914 when they played football together in no man’s land as part of an unofficial truce. Less well known is the fact that over a longer period a kind of ‘live and let live’ system evolved in certain relatively quiet sectors of the line. Yet the hopes of socialists that soldiers would ultimately repudiate their national loyalties for the sake of international brotherhood were never realized on the Western Front. Why was this?

The answer is that as the war went on, mutual hatred grew, expunging the common origins and predicament of the combatants. ‘The German officers,’ reflects Barbusse’s Tiroir, ‘oh, no, no, no, they’re not men, they’re monsters. They really are a special, nasty breed of vermin, old man. You could call them the microbes of war. You’ve got to see them close to, those horrible great stiff things, thin as nails,
but with calves’ heads on them.’ In the harrowing attack that is the climax of
Under Fire
, the enemy become simply ‘the bastards’:

‘You bet, mate, instead of listening to him, I stuck me bayonet in his belly so far I couldn’t pull it out.’

‘Well, I found four of them at the bottom of the trench, I called to them to come out and each one, as he came, I bumped him off. I was red right up to my elbows. My sleeves are sticky with it.’…

‘I had three of them to deal with. I hit out like a maniac. Oh, we were all like beasts when we reached here.’

Likewise, when they go over the top, the soldiers in
Middle Parts of Fortune
hate the enemy. ‘Fear remained,’ Manning writes, ‘an implacable and restless fear, but that, too, seemed to have been beaten and forged into a point of exquisite sensibility and to have become indistinguishable from hate.’ Almost deranged by Martlow’s death, Bourne runs amok in the German lines:

Three men ran towards them, holding their hands up and screaming; and he lifted his rifle to his shoulder and fired; and the ache in him became a consuming hate that filled him with exultant cruelty, and he fired again, and again… And Bourne struggled forward again, panting, and muttering in a suffocated voice.

‘Kill the buggers! Kill the bloody fucking swine! Kill them!’

As Manning admits, this blood lust has a pleasurable quality: he even talks of ‘the ecstasy of battle’, by comparison with which even ‘the physical ecstasy of love… is less poignant’. A certain type of soldier, he notes, ‘comes to grips, kills, and grunts with pleasure in killing’. Bourne himself is ‘thrust forward’ by:

a triumphant frenzy… [He] was at once the most abject and the most exalted of God’s creatures. The effort and rage in him… made him pant and sob, but there was some strange intoxication of joy in it, and again all his mind seemed focused into one hard bright point of action. The extremities of pain and pleasure had met and coincided too.

This is very close to Remarque’s account of combat in
All Quiet
, in which Paul Bäumer and his comrades ‘turn into dangerous animals’:

We are not fighting, we are defending ourselves from annihilation… W e are maddened with fury… we can destroy and we can kill to save ourselves, to save ourselves and to take revenge… We have lost all feelings for others, we barely recognize each other when somebody else comes into our line of vision… We are dead men with no feelings, who are able by some trick, some dangerous magic, to keep on running and keep on killing.

The Frenchmen whose positions they overrun are killed horribly, their faces split in two by entrenching tools, or smashed with the butt of a rifle. Attackers and attacked are simultaneously reduced to the level of animals.

Nothing illustrates the intensification of front-line animosity more strikingly than the change that occurred during the First World War in attitudes towards enemy prisoners. The laws of war made it clear that men who surrendered had to be properly treated; it was a crime under the Hague Conventions to kill prisoners. Contemporaries also clearly understood the practical benefits of taking prisoners alive, not only for the purposes of gathering intelligence through interrogation but also for the sake of propaganda. A substantial proportion of the British film
The Battle of the Somme
consists of footage of captured Germans. Sergeant York’s capture of 132 Germans was one of the highlights of American war propaganda in 1918. The humane treatment of prisoners also came to play an important part in the propaganda directed at the enemy. Towards the end of the war, a sustained effort was made to convey the idea that Germans would be well treated if they surrendered; indeed, would be better off than they were in their own lines. Thousands of leaflets were dropped on German positions, some of them little more than advertisements for conditions in Allied prisoner-of-war camps. Official British photographers were encouraged to snap ‘wounded and nerve-shattered German prisoners’ being given drink and cigarettes. The Americans even devised cheerful cards for surrendering Germans to sign and send to their relatives: ‘Do not worry about me. The war is over for me. I have good food. The American army gives its prisoners the same food it gives its own soldiers: beef, white bread, potatoes, beans, prunes, coffee, butter, tobacco etc.’

Nevertheless, many men on both sides of the Western Front were
deterred from surrendering by the growth of a culture of ‘take no prisoners’, part of the cycle of violence that grew spontaneously out of the war of attrition. The rationales offered by men for killing prisoners shed startling light on the primitive impulses that the war unleashed.

In some cases, prisoners were killed in revenge for attacks on civilians. The Germans had been the first to cross this threshold during the opening weeks of the war, when their troops carried out brutal reprisals for alleged attacks by
francs-tireurs
(snipers in civilian clothes). Entire villages in Belgium, Lorraine and the Vosges were razed and their male populations summarily shot, despite the fact that many of the ‘attacks’ were in fact friendly fire by other trigger-happy Germans, or legitimate actions by French regular forces. In all, around 5,500 Belgian civilians were killed, victims more of nervousness verging on paranoia on the part of the invaders than of a systematic policy of terrorizing the local populace. These ‘atrocities’ certainly happened. One soldier, a physician from Stuttgart named Pezold, recorded in his diary the fate of the inhabitants of the Belgian village of Arlon, more than 120 of whom were shot dead for alleged sniping and molestation of German wounded:

They were then dragged by the legs and thrown onto a pile, and the corporals shot with their revolvers all those who had not been killed by the infantry. The whole exceution was witnessed by the pastor, a woman and two young girls, who were the last to be shot…

Such incidents were, however, luridly embroidered in Entente propaganda; in addition to shooting civilians, the Germans were accused of rape and infanticide. As early as February 1915, B.C. Myatt, one of the ‘Old Contemptibles’ of the British Expeditionary Force, noted in his diary:

We know we are suffering these awful hardships to protect our beloved one’s [
sic
] at home from the torture and the rape of these German pigs [who] have done some awful deeds in France and Belgium cutting off childrens hands and cutting off womans breasts awful deeds [
sic
].

An Australian soldier described in August 1917 how an officer shot two Germans, one wounded, in a shell hole:

The German asked him to give his comrade a drink. ‘Yes,’ our officer said, ‘I’ll give the ——— a drink, take this,’ and he emptied his revolver on the two of them. This is the only way to treat a Hun. What we enlisted for was to kill Huns, those baby-killing ____.’

The Germans were also the first to bomb cities; the Zeppelins over Scarborough and London were harbingers of a new era in which death would rain down from the sky on defenceless town-dwellers. These attacks too incited reprisals. One British soldier recalled how a friend had to be restrained from killing a captured German pilot:

He tried to find out whether he had been over [London] dropping bombs. He said, ‘If he’s been over there, I’ll shoot him! He’ll never get away.’ He would have done too. Life meant nothing to you. Life was in jeopardy and when you’d got a load of Jerries stinking to high heaven, you hadn’t much sympathy with their Kamerad and all this cringing business.

But it was above all the Germans’ intermittent use of unrestricted submarine warfare against merchant and passenger ships that embittered men on the other side. ‘Some [surrendering Germans] would crawl on their knees,’ recalled one British soldier, ‘holding a picture of a woman or a child in their hands above their heads but everyone was killed. The excitement was gone. We killed in cold blood because it was our duty to kill as much as we could. I thought many a time of the Lusitania. I had actually prayed for that day [of revenge], and when I got it, I killed just as much as I had hoped fate would allow me to kill.’ In May 1915 the avant-garde sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska wrote from the Western Front to Ezra Pound, describing a recent skirmish with the Germans: ‘We also had a handful of prisoners – 10 – & as we had just learnt the loss of the “Lusitania” they were executed with the [rifle] butts after a 10 minutes dissertation [
sic
] among the N.C.[O.] and the men.’

More often, prisoners were killed in retaliation for more proximate enemy action. This pattern of behaviour manifested itself right at the start of the war, with German soldiers killing French prisoners on the ground that French soldiers had previously killed Germans who had surrendered. In his diary for June 16, 1915, A. Ashurt Moris recorded his own experience of killing a surrendering man:

At this point, I saw a Hun, fairly young, running down the trench, hands in air, looking terrified, yelling for mercy. I promptly shot him. It was a heavenly sight to see him fall forward. A Lincoln officer was furious with me, but the scores we owe wash out anything else.