Free Meeting the Enemy by Richard van Emden

another that British soldiers were ‘paid murderers’. In fact, Germans were ignorant of the reason many British soldiers joined up. Had they known, ‘you fight for food and shelter’ might have been more accurate.
    It was all right, in German eyes, for a man to be called upon to defend his country. In this regard, French soldiers were deemed relatively blameless; Germany had, after all, declared war on France, and France, since the days of Napoleon, had also relied on conscription. RAMC Corporal Samuel Fielding and his comrades were to suffer the impact of this considerable difference when they were transported to Germany.
     
As soon as they knew we were English they tried to slash us with their whips. They ignored the French . . . At one station a hefty big German Unter Officer got into our truck, he appeared to be half drunk. He brushed by the French troops shouting ‘Englander’. We were all at one end of the truck. He came up to a chap next to me, shook him and banged his head against the side of the truck and flung him to the floor. He then came up to me, looked me up and down, got hold of my arm and saw the Red Cross which I was still wearing. He then passed on to some more of our fellows, hitting them left and right with his fists.
     
    Time and again during interviews given by exchanged British prisoners of war, officers and men gave a similar story, that prisoners had faced verbal or physical abuse at railway stations between the German frontier and prisoner-of-war camps. Captain Thomas Sotheron-Estcourt of the 2nd Dragoons (Royal Scots Greys), captured on 12 September 1914, contended that ‘the whole way along, until we reached Magdeburg, there seemed to be an organised demonstration against us. People stood on the footboard and shook their fists at me, cries of dum-dum etc almost at every station.’ Another officer, Captain Peskett, captured on 2 September, recorded that ‘Someone had thoughtfully written in German on our cattle truck “English Prisoners”, this at once brought the mob up who cursed us, our King and Country and our parents and consigned us to the nethermost regions in German and English.’
    Public indignation was further stoked by the deliberate misinterpretation of enemy weapons. The German bête noire , as reported widely in their press, was the pointed marlinspike (used for splicing rope) which formed part of the clasp-knife carried by all British soldiers and marines. Despite its innocuous role, it looked sinister. Rifleman George Winkworth, captured just after the Battle of Mons, recalled how a German sentry had got hold of one of the knives ‘and at every station exhibited it, saying that we used it to cut out the eyes of the wounded. At all the stations the civilians came to the doors [of the train] and spat at us and howled.’
    The British press was not beyond such tactics either. The British were ‘horrified’ at the German saw-bayonet, a pioneer’s bayonet with a vicious but practical serrated edge. Journalists did not know or deigned to forget that it was the British who had invented the saw-bayonet during the Crimean War. The enemy were endlessly castigated for its use until, in 1917, the Germans acceded to international pressure and ground down the teeth. The British also made a fuss over what appeared to be a cat-o’-nine-tails carried by German officers. This, it was claimed, was used to whip their own (German) men but was in fact used by officers to flick mud off their own uniforms. On both sides there was nothing to be gained by letting the truth get in the way of a good story.
    All prisoners felt relieved to escape the battlefield in one piece but, being unarmed, they also felt vulnerable, being at the behest and mercy of the enemy. In years to come, lurid stories were told by returning British POWs, tales of threats and maltreatment, too many for there not to have been considerable truth in the accusations.
    As Fielding finally reached the German city of