Before I became naturalized I went into the question of military
service with especial care. An old friend of mine had for many years
been at the head of a Recruiting Department. I went to him and laid
the case before him, and he assured me categorically that in no event
should I ever be called upon to serve in a war against England. Other
people I consulted confirmed what he had said, and their testimonies
removed the chief obstacle in my mind to naturalization. When the war
broke out, no one ever dreamed that untrained men of my age, even
Germans, would be called up. People remembered the days of 1870, which
seemed such a tremendous war, when not even all the men available were
sent to the front. But as the winter of 1914 deepened and the strain
on Germany’s resources of man-power grew more and more severe, it
became evident that no one of military age would escape service. At
the beginning of March, 1915, all the able-bodied men of Germany were
called up for medical inspection. I was examined and declared fit for
the infantry. So, indeed, was every one else who was sound on his
legs, including one-eyed men. A friend of mine who could not see across
the room without his glasses was sent into the infantry, his eyes not
even being looked at. Most of the other men were sent to the artillery,
and one very bandy-legged man to the airship division. There was a
general laugh at this; the man’s legs were curved like a barrel, and it
was certain that to walk the length of a Zeppelin would be the limit
of his powers. The number of absolute rejections was infinitesimal.
Afterwards, however, a few obtained a respite of some months. The
municipalities seemed to find it easy to get exemption for their
cases. For instance, one man was released because he was the janitor
to the new municipal Girls’ School. Even an English tribunal could
scarcely have found a more trivial reason than that. Heads of large and
important businesses managed to get off, but there was no exemption
for the small man, even though military service meant for him absolute
ruin. Bribery was frequent, and I knew of many cases where a timely
present secured the transference of a soldier from the much-dreaded
infantry to an artillery regiment. The German non-commissioned office
staff are generally to be bought, except where an educated man happens
to be appointed.
[SN: ALSATIANS]
As soon as I was declared fit for the infantry, I took what steps I
could to avoid military service. I protested to the Oberkommando at
Coblenz, giving them the full details of my history. The Rector of
the University supported my protest with a very vigorous letter. As
a result I was ordered to a regiment at Cassel, where Alsatians were
being trained, who were destined like myself for the Russian front. If
the Alsatians we had are typical of their race, then Germany’s cause
is hopeless in the two provinces. Our Alsatians could be divided into
two classes--the talkative, who were few, and the reserved, who were
many. The talkative oozed patriotism, they were bubbling over with
it, and were so obviously insincere that the Germans thought of them
only with contempt. By far the greater part were taciturn, gloomy, and
hard. No exception could be taken to anything they did or said, but
they were obviously with us but not of us. They never joined in singing
our songs, except “O Strassburg,” and that they used to sing with
wonderful pathos. One little Alsatian was the butt of all our N.C.O.s.
He was only half-witted, and had been sent into the interior of Germany
because he was considered dangerous in Alsace. He was so stupid that
he could never learn the simplest thing, and he was always going off
to sleep wherever he might happen to be. Our instructors, with the
brutality of the peasant, used to find in him a source of endless
jokes. It was interesting to watch the other Alsatians while this was
going on. They would go white and tremble with suppressed emotion,
and their eyes would flash dangerous fire. Afterwards, when they were
sure that they were alone, they would gather round their unfortunate
countryman and do their best to comfort him. When the poor man arrived
at the front, he was at once sent back to the garrison as unfit for
service in the field. Soldiers who fought in France in August, 1914,
told me that their reception in Alsace was quite different from what
it was in Germany. All along the railway line down to the boundary
of Alsace they had been welcomed by cheering crowds, and gifts had
been showered upon them at every station. But the moment they entered
Alsace, everything was changed. They were met with cold looks and a
dogged, sullen silence. The Alsatian regiments at the very beginning of
the war were thrown across to the Russian front. The general testimony
was that they did brilliant service there, and I could only gather one
instance of desertion _en masse_.
[SN: LUSITANIA]
My military career was rather abnormal, because at the very beginning
I sprained my leg badly and had to go to hospital for six weeks. It
was an interesting experience, because here I met soldiers from all
fronts and learned a great deal about the war. We were miserably fed,
and but for supplies from home would have starved. There was a curious
comradeship among us. The working men used to come and say to me, “It
isn’t so bad for us, this starvation, but it must be awful for you.
You are not used to it.” While I was there, the news of the sinking
of the _Lusitania_ came. A scene ensued that I shall never forget.
Some one was reading all about it from a newspaper. First the bare
news, at which there was some excitement, not much; then an account
of the ammunition destroyed, at which there were cheers; and then the
announcement of the deaths of women and children. The whole room went
mad with delight; cheers, mingled with roars of laughter as at a good
joke, were loud and long. The very horror of the massacre increased
their satisfaction at it. A few French prisoners of war were being
treated in the same hospital. We were forbidden to speak to them, and
they always took their walks when we were indoors. But at some risk
I managed to smuggle in French newspapers to them, especially one
containing the announcement that Italy had declared war. They were
obviously more cheerful after receiving these papers, and wanted to
express their thanks, but I had to make them signs not to take any
notice of me. The Germans at that time were said to be mollycoddling
their French prisoners and trying to make them hate the English.
At Freiburg a French prisoner of war used to give lectures at the
University. He was conducted to his lecture-room by sentries with fixed
bayonets, who waited outside the door, and then took him back again at
the conclusion of the lecture.
I was kept far too long at the hospital. I enjoyed the opportunity
of taking walks in the beautiful parks of Cassel, and, as I was not
seriously ill, I could go to the theatre as often as I liked. From time
to time the doctor asked me if my foot still troubled me. To a question
so _naif_ there could be only one answer. One early learns to play the
old soldier. Finally, however, he sent me back to the regiment with
a recommendation that I should have an easy time of it for a week or
so. For a whole fortnight I was employed on “Innendienst,” that is to
say, I worked in the barracks itself. Every morning we would go up to
the lumber-room and fold blankets. When we had folded all that there
were to be folded, the sergeant would come along, kick them all to the
ground, and we had to do it over again. It was not malice on his part,
but necessity. He had to find work for us, and that was all he could
do. My companions were working-men, and they were very much amused
because I wanted to work and objected to doing nothing all day. They
were always quoting a proverb--
“Wer Arbeit hat und sich nicht drückt,
Der ist verrückt.”
(“Who has got work and does not shirk,
He is a fool.”)
The whole art of life, not only of these working-men but of all other
German working-men I met, could be summed up in that proverb. The mere
fact of being idle afforded an exquisite pleasure to these people. The
sergeant in time took pity on me and dispensed me from the necessity
of coming at all. And so my poor feet, which were supposed to be too
weak for marching, used to carry me over hill and dale, by forest and
meadow, through all the surroundings of Cassel. By the time I had
finished, I was “some” malingerer.
[SN: TRAINING]
It would take me too long to detail all the delightful accidents that
befell me. Suffice it to say that it was not till the middle of July
that I began my full training, and on the 17th August I was sent to
the front. At that time I had never been on patrol, or dug a trench,
or seen a bomb. I had fired about ten rounds of live ammunition, and I
scarcely knew one end of the bayonet from another. It is true that when
I came out of hospital I had to go to a bayonet class. I had never been
there before, and of course could not handle a bayonet properly. The
instructor shouted, “Here, you there, you know nothing about bayonets,
go back to the ranks.” He was only a country policeman, and it did not
seem to strike him that the less I knew the more he had to teach me.
Once the lieutenant in his tour of inspection invited me to have a
fencing match with him. I suppose he thought that as an educated man
I would have learnt my drill, and that we should give the company a
high-class exhibition of fencing with the bayonet. Instead of which,
I went for him like a wild cat and chased him round the quad. He came
back, panting and tired, but quite good-natured, and he seemed rather
to have enjoyed the experience.
I had never been taught any of those thousand and one things which are
so necessary in the field. I could not roll my mantle, the N.C.O. had
to do that for me, when I set out for the front. I had only once taken
a rifle to pieces and cleaned it. All this means little to the layman,
perhaps, but the soldier will read it with a grim smile. The fact was
all the corporals said, “You’ll not go out with us, you are too far
behind. You must wait and get trained with the next lot.”
I had tried to get transferred to a stretcher-bearer corps, but the
sergeant-major said I must first finish my training, and that would
take me three months yet. The same day he reported me as fit to go to
the front. I protested to the captain that I was quite untrained, and
he only answered, “You have been reported to me as fit to go to the
front, and to the front you must go.”
Much has been written about the severe discipline of the German
Army, but I noticed very little of it. The feeling which ruled among
the officers was, here are people who are about to face death and
unheard-of privations for the Fatherland, we must treat them well while
they are still at home. Punishments were rarely given, except for
gross disobedience. All sorts of things were winked at, which in times
of peace would have brought us days of arrest. We had one fiery little
lieutenant, who was continually losing his temper and inflicting on us
extra drill, but we always ignored him, and so did the corporals, whose
business it would have been to stay behind and superintend the drill.
Some of the sergeants were abominably lazy. They would march us into
the forest, select a likely place, tell us to lie down, and then wander
about picking wild raspberries, first placing a sentry to see what the
captain was doing. Suddenly a hoarse stage-whisper would be heard,
“Herr Feldwebel, der Herr Hauptmann kommt!” (Sergeant, the Captain is
coming), and the Feldwebel would roar in his best “command-voice,”
“Sprung, auf, marsch, marsch,” and we would disappear into the depths
of the forest. Once when we were idling like this by the side of a
grassy lane, the General Commanding the Corps rode by. The silence
became electric, we expected a great storm, and our expectations were
heightened when he suddenly stopped his horse and ordered one of the
men to rise and come to him. But the Great Man only pointed out that a
strap was wrongly buckled, and then rode on.
Mr. Wells has made much in “Mr. Britling” of the stupid mistakes
committed by the officers training English troops. Ours were no
better. Nearly all our sham fights went wrong. One night we had orders
to attack a certain party, but not finding them, marched away home.
The “enemy,” meanwhile, had received no orders of any sort, so they
remained on the “field of battle” for hours. Finally they took their
courage in both their hands and marched home too. Such mistakes were
always being committed. I do not say that our officers were especially
stupid. It is only that blunders are inseparable from any form of human
activity. Those made by English officers, which so much excite Mr.
Wells, could be paralleled in any European country during the war. In
one thing the English War Office did _not_ blunder--that is, when they
refused the offer of Mr. Wells’s services as a soldier, until they had
got the younger men trained.
The spirit of the men was excellent. They were keen to learn what it
was necessary to know; but as our curriculum was so meagre that it
could be mastered in a month, they did not see why they should bother
too much about repeating things they could do already. One aspect
of military life bored us intolerably. With the idea of enlivening
our existence, games were introduced, such as blind-man’s buff,
hunt-the-slipper, and similar drawing-room fooleries. The men got so
tired of these that they preferred to go to the front to do a man’s
work. I need hardly say that such games as football were never heard
of. We had, of course, all kinds of gymnastics, which would have
been very good if carried out properly. But here discipline was at
its slackest. One of the exercises, for example, was to climb a steep
boarding fifteen feet high and then drop down on the other side as best
one could. Those who were afraid were allowed to indulge their luxury
of fear, no constraint being put on them whatever. A rage of disgust
and contempt used to fill me at times when I saw how perfunctorily we
were trained. The men were still intensely patriotic and confident
of a quick and crushing victory. Drink and drabbing were looked down
upon as unsoldierly by the majority of the men, but in this I think
we were exceptional. From all that I could hear of other recruiting
depôts, the war served with the majority of soldiers as an excuse for
throwing restraint to the winds. The Government was on its guard, and
in certain towns--for instance, Cologne--sentries were posted at the
entrances to disreputable streets, and no soldier was allowed to pass.
But in our depôt the soldiers were nearly all over thirty, and they
were mostly married men. There was among them an exalted feeling of
devotion to the Fatherland and of comradeship. When the call came to go
to the front, many volunteered who could successfully have pleaded some
physical ailment as an excuse for staying at home. I am proud to recall
my association with these troops. We were a real band of brothers.
Rich and poor, high and low, educated and uneducated, all mingled
together on terms of simple and unaffected equality. I did not find it
so afterwards. At the front and in captivity social distinctions played
a great part in embittering the relations between the “kameraden.” It
is true that in order to take your place in this society, you had to
employ rather drastic methods. I remember once having a quarrel with
the two soldiers who shared my locker with me. They were going off on
a week’s holiday, and insisted on taking the key with them. It is no
good being a gentleman in cases like this. I simply called them every
bad name I could lay my tongue to, and in the army you learn some bad
names. After I had finished (which was not soon), they handed me the
key with every appearance of respect, and whenever afterwards trouble
appeared to be brewing for me, they used to say, “Here, you leave that
man alone: he is our friend.”
[SN: BARRACKS]
Their patriotism is the more to be wondered at, because there is no
doubt they were made to endure much hardness. For the first ten days
of our training we all had to live in barracks. I shall never forget
this time; not even the squalor of a Russian prison has left such an
impression on my mind. There were far more soldiers than beds, so some
of us had to sleep on mattresses on the floor. At the beginning there
were many men with infectious diseases. The man who slept next to me
was in an advanced state of tuberculosis, and he coughed all night. On
the other side of this man was a soldier suffering from syphilis. We
complained about his being put with us, and the doctor only shrugged
his shoulders and answered that his was not a very infectious case.
However, he was at last taken to hospital for treatment. We were never
certain of getting the same bedding every night, and we were supposed
to share washhand-basins. My first serious quarrel came when I insisted
on washing myself under the tap. This was felt as a reflection on my
partners in the washhand-basin.
The food was miserably insufficient for an active open-air life, and
most of the men had to get supplies from home. Tea and coffee were
dark slops scarcely to be distinguished from one another. On the other
hand, the bread and sausage supplied were excellent--the best to be
got in Germany at that time. We used to receive two loaves of bread a
week, and when I took mine home the servant-girls all along the streets
used to offer to buy them from me. We were paid about sixpence a day,
but out of this we had to buy blacking, brushes, polishing materials,
and several other odds and ends. We had two meals a day--dinner about
twelve, and supper, a very light meal, at seven. Besides, coffee was
supplied first thing in the morning. I am certain that no soldier
who confined himself to the rations supplied could have held out for
a week. After the first ten days those who could afford it received
permission to live out.
[SN: TRAINING]
We used to get up every morning at five or six o’clock. Then there
would be a march to the drill-ground, some four miles away, and we
would do our exercises and be home by eleven or twelve. We never
practised any attacks in massed formation, we were always sent forward
in open lines. One of our officers had captured a Russian position by
making the men crawl towards the enemy one at a time. He had taken
the position with the loss of only eight wounded. We used to curse
this officer from the bottom of our hearts. Crawling is terribly hard
work, especially when you are in full kit, and still more so when you
have to go through whatever mud, dirt, or puddles lie in your way. So
many lives had been lost at the front by people being afraid to dirty
their uniforms, that we were told to get ours very dirty. And to have
a foul-mouthed peasant of a corporal shouting insults at you while you
are wriggling in the mud, makes you feel a very worm.
From eleven to two we were free. From two to three we had
“instruktion,” that is to say, some portion of the Infantryman’s Manual
was explained to us. Four times out of five the subject was the duty
of patrols. We were supposed to know all this off by heart. Patrols
were considered so important that everything else was subordinated
to them in “instruktion.” Generally the instructor was so tired of
the subject that he used to amuse us by stories of the war, or of the
pranks he used to play when he was a young recruit twenty years before.
If everything else failed, the half-witted Alsatian was dragged out
and tortured to make a German holiday. After “instruktion” came two
hours more. These were employed either in the drawing-room games I have
already mentioned, or in gymnastics, or in sighting-exercises; that is
to say, for two hours on end we had to practise sighting our rifles in
the three positions--standing, kneeling, lying. I have seen the way the
Russian soldier was taught these things, and I should say the Russian
was beyond comparison better trained than the German. The Russian
targets were much better, much more like the real thing, and much more
care was taken. Sometimes the route-march and the exercises took place
at night, in which case we had a slack morning. All our marching was
made to assimilate as near as possible to war conditions. Our knapsacks
were filled with sand, and the weight of our equipment was about what
we had to bear in the field (75 lbs.). Our great lack was in service
rifles. Most of us had rifles captured from the Russians, and great big
heavy things they are, too. For some time, indeed, I had a rifle which
bore the date 1820, and had probably been made in England. The strain
of these exercises was severe, and I must confess that I was never so
tired at the front as I was sometimes at home.
In one respect they had the advantage of probably any army in the
world--in the songs they sang. Not only was the whole wealth of the
German “Volkslied” open to us, but the special soldiers’ songs, “O
Strassburg,” or “Ich hatt’ ein’ kameraden,” are all of good quality,
while one (“Die drei Lilien”) is superb. These songs provided me with
unforgettable experiences. I have already mentioned how the Alsatians
used to sing “O Strassburg.” It seemed as if they could express
themselves in no other way but by singing that. Although I had lived
in Germany for many years, I never understood what a “Volkslied” was
till I heard the soldiers sing. They were all peasants, and the impulse
which created the ballad never seems to have died out in their class.
They sang “Die drei Lilien,” a ballad of high imaginative power, with
the most intimate understanding. Indeed, every time they sang one of
the old songs it seemed like a fresh creation. And all the while new
songs are being composed, and the various joys and woes of a soldier’s
life are receiving an expression that is nearly always striking and
effective. The stuff composed during the war itself, however, was
beginning to show the influence of the music-hall and was getting to be
desperately vulgar.
[SN: SERGEANT-MAJOR]
I think we should all have been a very happy family if it had not
been for the company sergeant-major. This personage is the greatest
power in the company. He may be rude to the captain, but the captain
dare not be rude to him; for if he is, things begin to go wrong in
the company, headquarters get to know of it, and the reprimand falls,
not on the company sergeant-major, but on the captain. Our man took a
special pleasure in making us feel his power. His great sport was to
get men sent to the front. He would make the lives of the other N.C.O.s
such a hell to them that in wild desperation they would volunteer for
active service long before their time. His favourite trick with the
rank and file was to spoil their Sundays. The captain would sign our
leave-tickets for Sunday, but as soon as his back was turned, the
sergeant-major would take them all and throw them into the waste-paper
basket. If the captain was away, he would fix a parade for 2.30 on
Sunday afternoon. Punctually to time he would send some one to see if
we were all there; but the great man himself would not appear till an
hour or two later. Then we might be sent home, but far too late for
the married men to collect their wives and children and get to their
favourite coffee-garden in the suburbs. And all this was done with such
an insolent expression of mocking pity on his face, that I sometimes
wondered that we did not club him with our rifles. If he ever went to
the front at last, I am certain he was shot in the back by his own men
before he had been there long.
My experiences allowed me to test the real estimation in which a
soldier is held. On duty we all had to wear the same sort of uniform.
When we were off duty we could wear a better sort, if we chose, made
for us by our own tailor. Going home through the streets in my dirty
service uniform taught me a good deal. All well-dressed people gave
me a very wide berth. I got home, bathed and changed into my private
uniform. It would be ungallant to say what a difference it made. But in
time of war I would allow no flapper on the streets of a garrison town
except in a strait waistcoat and a muzzle.