1915_ The Death of Innocence - Lyn Macdonald [150]
Every German communiqué since the start of the war had trumpeted even the paltriest gain as a great victory and presented the slightest loss by the British as a resounding defeat. In the last fateful week the names of inconsequential Flemish villages and even of hamlets that were little more than crossroads – Langemarck, Pilckem, St Julien, Gravenstafel – had appeared in German communiqués as victories comparable to Austerlitz and Waterloo. If Ypres had to be abandoned it was excruciating to envisage how the enemy would crow!
The Germans were greatly given to crowing and, just as the British delighted in caricatures of sauerkraut-guzzling Germans, the effete Englishman was a figure of fun in Germany and this character was the leitmotiv of a smash-hit comedy that had been playing for months in a score of theatres in cities as far apart as Hamburg and Breslau, Munich and Stettin. In Frankfurt, where no theatre was large enough to contain the audiences clamouring to see it, it had transferred to the amphitheatre of the Circus Schumann which could seat four thousand people. It was packed out almost every night. With heavy irony the play was entitled Wir Barbaren (We Barbarians) and the comedy leaned heavily on ridiculing tales of atrocities committed by the German Army which had been widely published abroad and reprinted in the German press. No one in Germany believed them. This was, after all, the land of Schiller, Schumann, Goethe, home of all those Gemütlich homely virtues, so foreign to the natures of the cold English and dissolute French but dear to the hearts of the honest burghers of the Fatherland.
The piece opened on a typically domestic scene with mother, father, their daughter and her sweetheart, manservant and cook, all united in simple domestic bliss. Then a lusty postman arrives with the shocking news that the Fatherland’s foes have simultaneously and treacherously declared war on their beloved homeland. Cue for the strains of ‘Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles’ to come drifting through the window and the tramp of marching feet from the street. Mother, starting up in horror and, for some remarkable reason, speaking in English, exclaims: ‘Ze English gentlemens – can it be?’ The men on stage proceed to stamp and snarl, repeating her words many times in tones of scorn, ‘Ze gentlemens! Ze gentlemens!’ English, of necessity, then gives way to German for a series of impassioned speeches extolling the justice of the German cause, followed by a rousing rendition of The Watch on the Rhine’. The audience delightedly joins in, and the curtain falls to resounding cheers. But this is nothing by comparison to the scenes that follow. They drip with lofty sentiments and blatant sentimentality that reduces susceptible members of the audience to tears – not least in a trench scene depicting the sufferings of the noble and tender-hearted troops. For now a shivering prisoner is brought in, cowering in abject terror of the ‘barbarians’, grovelling and pleading for his life. He naturally receives a kindly, reassuring welcome – he is given food (he has not eaten for days!). He is showered with smiles and sympathy and wrapped in the overcoat of a noble German soldier who is only too happy to give it up and shiver in the prisoner’s stead in the freezing cold. Even this is tame stuff. Presently a postman arrives in the trench with a bundle of newspapers, eagerly handed round. It must contain a good few back numbers because the headlines bawled out in turn by the excited troops encapsulate the triumphs of many months. ‘Russians defeated by von Hindenburg!’ (Audience explodes, shrieking, ‘Hoch, Hindenburg! Napoleon Hindenburg! Hurrah!’) ‘Belgrade fallen!’ (More vociferous cheers, this time for Austria.) ‘Belgium crushed!’ (The cheering almost raises the roof.) ‘Line broken at Ypres. French and English in disarray. Our troops