Boche and Bolshevik / Experiences of an Englishman in the German Army and in Russian Prisons

by Hereward Thimbleby Price

BRUTALITY

The thing which angered me most was the brutal treatment of prisoners. Those kept just behind the front were always hungry and in rags, and yet they were made to work at tasks of great severity. Thus I have seen Russian prisoners hauling huge trees along the road. We invariably greeted them with insult and jeers. One of the favourite taunts to hurl at them was, “Nikolaus entlaust” (“Nicholas has got rid of his lice”). The common soldier had not a trace of chivalry or generous feeling in him. The only one to protest against this sort of thing was the Alsatian, who tried in vain to bring his comrades round to a humaner point of view.

I have already mentioned that the relations between officers and men were good. In this connection it is as well to say that those stories one sometimes reads of German officers flogging their men are quite impossible. It is unthinkable that a German officer should hit a soldier. I have never heard of its being done, and redress is so quick and certain, that even if it had occurred by mischance in any regiment, it could never have become a regular practice. Brutality, however, had plenty of opportunities to manifest itself. I heard a story of two old school friends who had a quarrel in the trenches. One was a private, the other a corporal. Unfortunately the private forgot himself and used bad language to his friend the corporal. The latter immediately reports the affair, the private is court-martialled and sentenced to twelve years’ imprisonment. Before he is sent away, the battalion is drawn up on parade, the major in command lectures them on the heinousness of the crime, spits at the criminal, and then, turning his back on the men, says, “I now leave you to do what you like with him.” They take the hint and give him a good drubbing with the butt-ends of their rifles. I do not think that such a thing could have happened in our regiment, but there was nothing in the regulations of the army to prevent it.

Although the relations between officers and men were good, those between the various social classes among the common soldiers were very bad. In England the war seems to have drawn the classes together, they have come to understand and respect one another. In the German Army exactly the opposite has happened. Theoretically from the moment war was declared, all classes were equal in the army. Promotion was to be by merit alone. In practice, the educated men were marked out from the beginning for promotion, if only they showed any promise at all, and they were not only more quickly promoted, they could rise higher, they could receive a commission. The uneducated, no matter what his abilities, never got beyond a sergeant. On this account the “lower” classes bore the “upper” classes a grudge, and did what they could to make their life miserable. The educated men, on the other hand, were disgusted by the continual thieving of the working-man, his brutality, and his utter want of comradeship. I know of no educated man in the German Army whose thinking had not taken on an anti-Socialist and pro-Conservative tendency as the result of his experiences in the war. To know the German labourer was not to respect him. My experiences with the working-man were uniformly wretched until almost the last, when I made the acquaintance of some artisans at Irkutsk. These men one could respect, and it was possible to form such friendships with them as we read of in the English Army. But then they belonged to the aristocracy of labour, some of them had thriving businesses of their own, and I do not think they regarded themselves as ordinary labourers. Be that as it may, from all that I could hear and see, the war has greatly intensified the bitterness of class feeling in Germany, inasmuch as it has taught the different classes of society in the army to hate and distrust one another.

ON THE MARCH

For the rest, our life was like that of soldiers in the classic wars of older times. There was nothing in it of the terrors of modern battle which made the Western Front so dreadful. We marched and fought, pursuing an enemy that retreated further and further and avoided a decisive battle. It was warfare as Marlborough or Napoleon knew it. The strategy was simple, and the means of destruction were comparatively simple—the bayonet, the rifle, the field-gun. Our men affected to despise the Russians, but I noticed that the longer they had been at the front, the more they thought of the enemy. The Russians neither harried nor pressed us, they simply gave way. Provided only that they held Hindenburg in the north round Riga, they were content to let us take as much of the barren marshland of Central Russia as we chose. This continual expectation of a battle that never came strained our nerves more than actual fighting did. I remember once advancing on a Russian village, which was situated on the top of a hill. We toiled upwards in that tense and sultry mood which always precedes action, each of us too occupied with his own thoughts to speak. Further and further we trudged, and after some time the sergeant behind me began to point out where he thought the Russian artillery must be posted. On we went, every moment expecting the hail of shrapnel to begin. Finally the suspense became unbearable and the sergeant quite lost his temper. “Why to —— don’t those —— Russians begin shooting at us?” he screamed. “They ought to have begun long ago.” The ungrateful man soon knew, for in a few minutes we came upon the Russian trenches quite deserted. They were beautifully dug, and would have cost us half our strength to storm; and yet, in order to keep the line intact, the Russians had preferred to retreat.

Naturally such experiences had left their mark on the older men. The continual refrain of their talk was, “We should not mind if we knew that in the next action we were going to stop a bullet. It is the uncertainty that is so awful.” At home our corporal had told us that if we were wounded, we should be ready to jump a yard in the air with joy. And to get a “heimatschuss”—a wound serious enough to send you home—was the great desire of most soldiers. After the first action we had been in, we all crowded round the wounded, cheering and congratulating them on their good luck. I do not wish to be misunderstood. None of our men were slackers or malingerers at the front—except our only Jew. When a dangerous job was to be done, there were always plenty of volunteers. But the men hated their work, and they had an especial contempt for the man who could fall so low as to be a soldier by profession.

IN THE FOREST

There were, of course, [oases] in this life, moments of exquisite beauty, and other times when laughter ruled. There was the spectacle of Russian villages burning by night—enormous masses of smokeless flame leaping to the sky, vivid colour in its intensest and purest form. (Lest any one should think that I was a Nero to gloat over such sights, let me repeat that nothing of value was destroyed in these villages.) Then there were the days and nights we spent in the forest. In those thickets our eyes did not help us much; all we could do was to listen. Our ears grew so subtle that we could distinguish and interpret all the sounds of the forest, and we lived so close to nature that we seemed to become a part of it. So quiet were we that the wild deer used to trip along our line without taking any notice of us. Other German soldiers were not so fortunate in their encounters with the wild beasts of the forests. I have known men so upset by the stillness of the woods that the mere rustling of animals in the undergrowth has made them throw down their arms and take to their heels. A Prussian major was once leading his battalion to the attack, when a wild boar rushed out from his hiding-place and, scuttling between the major’s legs, floored him! The major is said to have cried out, “The enemy is upon us!” and run for his life. But I do not believe that so easily of a Prussian major.

A SURPRISE ATTACK