Soldier's attitudes

[Desmond7]

Quote - 'Let there be no doubt about it, the cosy, politically correct pictureof the British soldier identifying in sympathy with his field gray counterpart across no man's land as a man equally imprisoned by the war into a circumtance not of his making, is an image which is not supported by contemporary evidence, however much it plays as a part in post-war novels or films.

Peter H. Liddle

I have read and re-read this paragraph - part of a lengthier essay - and have no basis on which to argue with this opinion. Only once in the years up to January 1917 have I found a local soldier saying anything remotely positive about a German - he was a prisoner, they treated him decently.

I used to kid myself that men at the front were cogs in an industrial slaughterwheel - but they really did HATE and they really wanted to WIN. God it must have been a fearsome environment - mentally and physically.

If I get ny deeper into this stuff ...... aaargh

[john w.]

For the ordinary private... survival and kil or be killed.. simple

John

[Jim Gordon]

I think John w. gives an accurate answer in a nut shell.

When not trying to kill each other friend and foe could become friend and friend. It was the possibility of paying the ultimate price that generated the hatred on both sides.

After the War my family lived next door to a German engineer who had been interned throughout the conflict but he and my father, who had endured 3 years in the trenches, were the best of friends. With the constant fear of annihilation no longer a factor normality was restored and normal life resumed.

Regards

Jim Gordon

[armourersergeant]

I would think for the great majority the hate comes directly from the fear, it is i would imagine very easy to hate someone who has just killed your mate or who keeps chucking tons of munitions down upon you day after day. As John says Kill or be Killed is not an over simplification. I wonder how difficult it is to kill someone you like?

Did someome not say the fighting is the easy bit,its peace thats the hard part.

Arm

[Paul Nixon]

I'm not so sure on this question. Peter Liddle has enough 'contemporary evidence' that he has amassed, to say what he does and I wouldn't necessarily disagree with that. From my own experience of interviewing old soldiers, they were there to do a job, and it was a case of 'it's him or me'. None of the men I spoke to expressed pure hatred (albeit I was interviewing them some 60+ years after the events they were recalling). For them, the enemy was 'Jerry', or 'old Jerry'. If memory serves, there is some interesting thought on this topic in Paul Fussell's 'The Great War and Modern Memory' which to my mind is a must-have in any WW1 book collection.

[Tim Birch]

My Grandfather hated the Hun (as he called them) and blamed them for the tragedy of the the Great War, but he had great respect for them as fighting soldiers.

For a contemporary view read "Sagitarious Rising" by Cecil Lewis. For the pilots of the RFC it was very much a matter of kill or be killed. There is little evidence of the romanic concept of the chivarly allured to by some post war writers.

Tim

[Robert Dunlop]

There is another interesting psychological aspect to this. In a fascinating and complex series of experiments, a group of psychologists in Arizona demonstrated that people faced with death and dying become significantly more intolerant of people who are different. It appears to be a deep-rooted unconscious protective mechanism that applies in many circumstances other than just war. The converse reaction is to be become more attached to the familiar, which would contribute to the sense of camaraderie shared by soldiers in battle.

Robert

[Tim Birch]

I think it is important to remember that there was no typical Great War soldier, but there were four distinct groups.

First there was the professional army of 1914/15 - those that took part in the Christmas Truce. The mark of the professional soldier is that he is doing his job. The enemy is an impersonal element in this. He feelings towards them are likely to be devoid of emotion, but will respect them if they fight well and he will feel an empathy with them.

The second group, which overlapped with the first and third, was the Territorial Army. Although civilians, they were semi-professional and many had had years of similar training to the Regulars. Again their apprach to soldiering was professional.

The third group was the New Army. They were civilians and had a more emotional approach to their soldiering, and were more likely to regard the Germans as being an evil force to be conquered. They were inexperience yet bursting with enthusiasm to send Jerry packing. It was this group which felt the greatest disallusionment, which was compounded by the lack of understanding from those still at home. This was the generation which is supposed to have more empathy with the enemy than the civilians at home. This mood was captured and developed by the War Poets, particularly Sassoon and Owen. I suspect that the image allured to by Liddle grew in the post war years as a result of these poets' writings.

The fourth and final group was the Conscript Army of 1917/18. These were pressed civilians, many of whom would not have volunteered. They didn't want to be there, but accepted the fact that they were, with grim resigation. Such men were unlikely to feel any empathy with the enemy as they saw him as the reason for their being there. They hated him, and wanted to get the war over and done with. The final year of the war saw some of the most vicious fghting with little quarter given by either side. This was also the group from which there were the greatest number of surviving veterans at the end of the war which tends to support Liddle's statement.

Tim

[Desmond7]

I can only speak for myself. I was a subscriber to the 'if only they could have got together and found how much they had in common theory' - before, I got 'into' the Great War as a 'subject'.

Now I feel Liddle is closer to a true picture of attitudes in his essay. The men of 14-18 were sure of the rightness of their cause and this was reinforced by the ultra-nationalistic press of the time.

When I started doing this 'thing' my main aim was to copy down a lot of names - now I'm reading books on First World War psychology! It is truly weird the way this war can grip ... and once upon a time I just thought it was mud, blood and barbed wire!

[Tom Morgan]

Many years ago an old friend (old enough to be my father) and I used to organise annual reunions for Great War veterans from the Birmingham and West Midlands area. This was in the 1970s. We used to get about 500 ex-servicemen each year. They were wonderful men, friendly, kind, always grateful for any attention shown them and truly noble.

One day I suggested that we should invite some German ex-servicemen to the next reunion.

Wow...... that was a bad mistake. I beat a hasty retreat to avoid all the venom that was flying around for the next half-minute.

Tom

[P.B.]

Hello All

A few random thoughts on this question. I think Tim has hit the nail on the head with regard to there being no such thing as the "typical" Great War soldier, and I agree with his assessments of the four "armies" that made up the British Army of WWI.

My great-grandfather was a frontline infantryman of the 1915-18 period, serving in a New Army battalion. After the war, a German veteran by the name of Thomas Rohr settled in the small Durham village my great-grandfather lived in, together with his family. I would imagine that there was some hostility towards them at first, but by the 1930's -the period my grandmother can recall- her father and Rohr were great friends, indeed Rohr was an accepted part of the community and counted the majority of people in the village (most of the men at this time, of course, being WWI veterans) as not just friends but also customers -he ran a grocery store. My great-grandfather used to talk to him about the war often -something his wife couldn't understand!- as did many other ex-soldiers in the village. Perhaps they had discovered someone they had something in common with, albeit in a slightly different way....either way, my great-grandfathers often repeated comment to his wife was this, "He was a soldier fighting for his country as I fought for mine."

Before anyone thinks this is getting too cosy, the point I want to make is that it was perhaps only in situations like this -when there was no danger at all, and some of the bitterness had passed- that people on either side could see each other as human beings and recognise their common humanity. I'm sure that had Private Clark and Musketier Rohr come face to face at Third Ypres in 1917, neither one would have hesitated to shoot the other. As several contributors to this thread have already noted, war -at the level of infantry combat- is a matter of kill-or-be-killed survival....whether you hate the enemy or not. Many veterans accounts make it clear that once a German became a prisoner (with the exception, of course, of those prisoners killed in the heat of battle...) that some degree of empathy could occur -Gunner Hiram Sturdy saw a sympathetic British infantryman mutter "poor *******" as a column of German prisoners passed by during the Somme offensive. In actual combat, where the risk of death or injury to yourself or your comrades was very real, few soldiers of either side would have been inclined to think of their opponants in anything but the strict military definition of "the enemy", to be killed at all costs unless they could show themselves to be definitely harmless.

It can be no coincidence that case of fratenization tend to occur when circumstances are such that it's convenient for both sides that there should be a lessening of hostilities. Sometimes it's more to do with being able to drain your trenches or repair your breastworks unmolested than it is about having warm feelings towards the enemy. For every soldier who took part in the Christmas Truce of 1914, there were also those like the often mentioned Scottish soldier who remained in his own lines, hand on fighting knife and muttering "I just don't trust those ********..."

Equally, live-and-let live seems to have been more common in static areas -or those held by less than thrusting units- and could also be a matter of self-preservation (i.e. don't bother the enemy, so they won't retalliate -thereby reducing the risk of suffering casualties on your own side) rather than out of a feeling of kinship with the other side.

The point about the individuality of soldier's responses can also be illustrated by their reactions to the propaganda fed to them about the enemy. Some men embraced it -one soldier quoted in Dennis Winter's "Death's Men" though about the Belgian atrocities and the Lusitania as he killed Germans- others, Like Brigadier Crozier, doubted the veracity of many of the stories, but thought they provided a useful tool for motivating soldiers and increasing their aggression. Equally, some soldiers seem to have been motivated by genuine -and personal- reasons of revenge when killing the enemy....two infantrymen who killed some German prisoners were reputed to have done so because one of them had lost his girlfriend when Scarborough was shelled.

Many of the less rosy accounts of WWI make it abundantly clear that most Tommies entertained no warm feelings towards the enemy -Coppard especially is strong on this point in "With a Machine Gun to Cambrai"- but most also mention the respect they had for the German soldier, his professionalism, toughness, courage, even the quality of his weapons, equipment and trenches.

To sum up, although we can generalise, we must remember that the majority of WWI combatants were citizen soldiers, and as such reflected the individual nature of the backgrounds they came from. Their opinions of the enemy, both during and after the war, were probably as individual as they themselves were.

Sorry for such a wordy posting, hope it's been of some interest.

All the best

Paul.

[Max]

I can't comment on the attitudes of the men involved in WW1 and how they felt about their adverseries, but I think Tim has it about right.

I can comment about my Grandfathers view of the Germans in WW2 however because he took me to one side one day and told me. What he said shocked me to the core because my grandad, although he was a face worker down the pit, was the most kind and gentlest of men. He said he joined up specifically to kill as many Germans as possible, they had killed his father and he was going to take retribution in any way that he could and he had carried out his pledge to the best of his ability. It was only years after the war when he visited the places where he had fought and Germany itself did he start to feel shame and this shame lasted for the rest of his life.

Andy

[sandyford]

This postcard sent by my father to my mother just before he went overseas shows something of the spirit in which he set out for war.

Of course he had never been overseas, nor, I think, out of his hometown prior to this.

Also I don't think he had met many people from other countries.

He also sounds quite impatient to go.

He was 20 when he wrote this and my mother was seventeen.

Just 7 days later, he was wounded at St. Julien sent back to England and that was the end of the war for him.

Kate

[john w.]

Recently there was a programme about the psychology of killing and what made people able to pull the trigger in order to kill someone.

I feel that the reactions as said before are a defence mechanism revolving around this process.

It is understandable as well how old soldiers feel about those remembered on Remembrance Sunday. I also can see the different type of soldier, but let's not forget the war was personal and each individual reacts in a different way and so there can be no consistency in reaction and attitude

John