Myths and Legends of the Second World War (15 page)

In addition, Germany was greatly handicapped by the paucity of factual incidents which could be suitably spun. The shooting of a dozen survivors of the crew of
U27
by marines from the British Q-ship
Baralong
on August 19th 1915 was probably as close as it came. The episode became public after crew members from an American vessel voiced their misgivings to the State Department. After being re-named
Wiarda
, the
Baralong
repeated this performance five days later upon the
U41
, running down two crewmen who had crawled into a lifeboat. Germany's predictable response was to demand that Britain ‘take proceedings for murder' against
Baralong
's commander and crew. Britain noted with irony the sudden concern by her enemy for the principles of civilized warfare, while at the same time observing that the charges were negligible compared with other crimes ‘deliberately committed by German officers … against combatants and non-combatants'. In fact this ignominious episode had been carried out in accordance with standing Admiralty instructions, drafted by Winston Churchill, by which German submarine crews were to be treated as ‘felons' without any of the rights accorded to prisoners of war. ‘Survivors,' wrote the ebullient First Lord, ‘should be taken prisoner or shot – whichever is most convenient.'

After the crew of Zeppelin
L19
were left to drown in the North Sea by the crew of the Grimsby trawler
King Stephen
in February 1916, similar German efforts to build a propaganda sensation were stillborn. Germany also tried to counter Allied propaganda by providing neutral papers with stories and photographs of favourable German activity in occupied territory, or of the warm welcome offered to the Kaiser's army by Belgian civilians. By these accounts, German soldiers were forever rescuing Belgian children from flooded streams and deep canals. However, positive reports were far less newsworthy than the sensationalist fare served up by the Allies, which reached a peak in the wake of Bryce. There was no better illustration of German mishandling and naiveté than the case of Edith Cavell in October 1915. The ‘martyrdom' of Cavell caught the imagination of artists and newspapers alike, although a great deal of factual information was withheld from the public. As a matron running a training hospital in Brussels, she had, since early in the war, been involved in running an underground network which helped Allied prisoners escape across the Dutch frontier. She knew well enough that her penalty if caught would be death, espionage being a capital offence within the laws and usages of war. Indeed by the time Cavell was shot by firing squad the French had already executed one German woman, Marguerite Schmidt, for precisely the same offence, and by the end of the war had executed several more, Mata Hari included. Nevertheless, the execution of Cavell caused an outcry, typified by the words of the Bishop of London to a crowd in Trafalgar Square:

The cold-blooded murder of Miss Cavell, a poor English girl, deliberately shot by the Germans for housing refugees, will run the sinking of the
Lusitania
close in the civilized world as the greatest crime in history.

A similar double standard applied to the shocked publicity surrounding a photograph of an Austrian trench club, exhibited as representing ‘culture at the stage of cannibalism', while making no mention of the fact that similar weapons were used by Allied troops, and even manufactured on a commercial basis by British firms. Later on in the war some alleged atrocity victims also turned their (remaining) hands to commerce of a macabre kind. An American artillery lieutenant with the AEF's 32nd Division recalled an unpleasant scene as his men disembarked at Brest in March 1918:

One Belgian youngster, about twelve, made a good thing by exciting the pity of the Americans by showing his wounds, which he said were from German atrocities. He had an inch-long scar in his tongue, caused, he said, by a German soldier piercing it with a bayonet. On his back was a mass of scar tissue and blackened skin, about six inches across, which must have been caused by a severe burn. There had been so much publicity in the States about German atrocities, real or alleged, that most of us accepted the Belgian stories as truth at the time.

The point being that a bayonet wound through the tongue alone seems highly unlikely. Although Germany bore the brunt of these charges, she was not alone. All the Central Powers were the target of Allied hate propaganda, which posited a ‘league of scientific savagery' between the Teuton and the Turk. The same kind of allegations were made about the war on the Eastern Front as at Sabac in Serbia, where civilians were massacred by invading Austrian forces. In contrast with the unreliable stories from Belgium and France, there appears to have been no shortage of photographic evidence, if the report published in 1916 is anything to go by. Falsehoods remained a commonplace, however, for example a story from May 1915 that Austrians had killed thousands of Serbian civilians with clouds of poison gas. Nevertheless, the genocidal Turkish massacre of more than a million Armenians between 1915 and 1917 received nothing like the same level of coverage as events in the west, and triggered little by way of moral indignation.

Belief in the falsehood of the more extreme atrocity myths became widespread only in the years after 1918. In his study
The Great War and Modern Memory
, Paul Fussell claimed that an incalculable number of Jews died in the Holocaust ‘because of the ridicule during the twenties and thirties … about Belgian nuns violated and children sadistically used'. Due to the scepticism engendered by Allied propaganda, Fussell concludes, most people refused to fully credit reports about the death camps until hard evidence emerged in 1945, by which time it was too late. While it is impossible to gauge the truth of this suggestion, it is certainly the case that the extent to which both the troops and the public were duped during the First World War caused a considerable degree of anger, best summed up by Arthur Ponsonby in 1928:

Finding now that elaborately and carefully staged deceptions were practised on them, they feel a resentment which has not only served to open their eyes but may induce them to make their children keep their eyes open when the next bugle sounds.

In 2001 the Rape of Belgium sounded a curious echo, after a senior German minister offered the first public apology for the massacre at Dinant. During a visit to the town on May 7th the German Secretary of State for Defence, Walter Kolbow, abandoned all allegations of
franc-tireur
provocation, and instead announced with no little humility:

Eighty-seven years have passed since German soldiers indulged in murder, desecrated churches and torched your residential areas. I would like to ask you all for your forgiveness.

A wreath was then laid by Herr Kolbow at the memorial to the 674 civilian victims, but many locals boycotted the sombre ceremony, including the mayor of Sambreville, whose ward includes the massacre sites at Tamines and Auvelais. The nearby town of Andenne afterwards responded with a demand for payment of £40,000 in respect of each of its victims, 256 in all, to be paid to their surviving descendants. Under Belgian law, it was argued, an apology is akin to an admission of guilt. However, the request was politely turned down by Berlin.

5

Trench Myths

The principal trench and battlefield myths examined in this chapter are those of the Crucified Canadian in 1915, and the German corpse conversion plant, which first gained widespread currency two years later. However, a number of less celebrated legends are worthy of mention in passing.

The first, from August 1914, was that the BEF had suffered extinction-level casualties in France. The story spread almost as soon as British troops started to disembark in France on the 8th, and rapidly gained currency on the Home Front to include fearful losses and packed hospital ships, as well as German victories and insurrection in Paris. On August 14th, London diarist Michael McDonagh noted that ‘the most disquieting stories' had been circulating for several days, including the secret nocturnal return of ‘thousands' of British casualties to hospitals in London, where the staff had been sworn to ‘keep their mouths shut'. Also current were stories of a great naval battle off the coast of Holland, said by some to have resulted in catastrophic losses for the Royal Navy and the death of Admiral Jellicoe. The dockyards at Portsmouth and Chatham were said to be crowded with disabled war vessels. None of this was true, but on August 15th the Press Bureau felt obliged to circulate a statement:

The public are warned against placing the slightest reliance on the many rumours that are current daily regarding alleged victories and defeats, and the arrival of wounded men or disabled ships in this country. They are without exception baseless.

But still the rumours grew. The Reverend Andrew Clark recorded a variant at the end of the month:

August 31st: The morning postman recorded a great scare in Chelmsford on Sunday. An Ichabod telegram had been received there (founded on the reports with which
The Times
Sunday issue had been hoaxed, as I judged) telling that the British army had perished and that France was beaten. The ‘wire' was so full of despair that Chelmsford people could not take their tea.

On September 1st the
Daily News
reported on a ‘riot of rumours' from France, including ‘weird' reports from a returning British holiday-maker named Angell:

Among the English troops there were rumours just as weird. A very widespread one was that the defence of the Liége forts was not made by Belgians at all, but by English soldiers dressed in Belgian uniforms who had been sent over some months ago.

Some rumours were witty, such as that which held that the British Government paid rent to the French for the use of their trenches, and that the men of the Machine Gun Corps routinely fired off belts of ammunition to boil water in the cooling jacket of the Vickers gun for making tea. The Reverend Clark notes another unlikely tale in 1914, this time regarding glistening silk ties worn by officers:

November 9th: The Colonel told Mrs Gale that the reason why so many officers were picked off by the Germans is because of their silk ties. These officers, to prevent them being conspicuous objects, were forbidden to wear belts in action. But while the mens' tunics were buttoned close up under the chin, the tunics of the officers had a slight collar opening at the neck, and behind that opening a silk tie. Although this tie was khaki-colour, the glistening of the silk stuff was noticeable, even at a distance.

More sinister was the legend of the elusive German officer-spy, said to appear in British trenches shortly before an attack was launched. The figure was often described as being dressed in the uniform of a major, but tended to arouse suspicion on account of some small but significant sartorial
faux pas
. From where he came, or to where he returned, was never established, and in some respects this mythic figure can be seen as an opposite to the benign Comrade in White, examined in Chapter Three. Edmund Blunden, in
Undertones of War
, recalled the following encounter:

A stranger in a soft cap and a trench coat approached, and asked me the way to the German lines. This visitor facing the east was white-faced as a ghost, and I liked neither his soft cap nor the mackintosh nor the right hand concealed under his coat. I, too, felt myself grow pale, and I thought it was as well to direct him down the communication trench … at that juncture deserted; he scanned me, deliberately, and quickly went on. Who he was, I have never explained to myself; but in two minutes the barrage was due, and his chances of doing us harm (I thought he must be a spy) were all gone.

A dubious major was encountered by machine gunner George Coppard during the Battle of Loos in 1915:

I remember during the Loos battle seeing a very military-looking major complete with a monocle, and wearing a white collar. He asked me the way to Hay Alley and spoke good English. I never suspected that anything was wrong, through I was puzzled about his collar, as all our officers were then wearing khaki collars. Shortly after there was a scare, and officers dashed about trying to find the gallant major, but he had vanished.

Some of these ‘officer spies' may well have been official war artists, whose general service insignia and propensity to sketch regularly landed them in trouble with fighting troops. Yet another suspicious major is retailed by Reginald Grant, a Canadian artillery sergeant, whose embroidered memoir
SOS Stand To!
was published in New York in 1918. As well as recording several tall spy stories, including the shooting of the station master at Poperinge for signalling to the German lines, and treachery by Belgian women with carrier pigeons, Grant tells of two officers who appeared at his battery position, some distance behind the front line:

It was during the stay of my battery on the Lens-Arras road, during the Vimy Ridge preparation, that I again personally encountered Fritz in the form of his spy system. One night after the guns had been oiled and prepared for their next job, and we were all busy cleaning up the ammunition for the work in hand, I was accosted by a couple of British officers, a Captain and a Major … There was something that told me all was not well with these men …

The very next morning after inspection, orders were read and in the instructions were explicit descriptions of two British officers who were German agents and who were making the rounds of the lines, picking up information wherever they could … The following night they were spotted in a French estaminet, by a bunch of sharp-eyed Tommies … Like a flash both men drew their revolvers, but before they had a chance to use them, the entire bunch was on top of them, and it was a somewhat mussed up Major and Captain that appeared before the OC at the headquarters of the Tommies who sleuthed them.

Another trench myth concerned the supposed existence of bands of lawless deserters in No Man's Land. According to Osbert Sitwell, the outlaws included French, Italian, German, Austrian, Australian, Canadian and English personnel: