Free Meeting the Enemy by Richard van Emden Page A

Münster, he and the other prisoners were ordered to leave the train. ‘Here were two women dressed in deep mourning. One of them, as soon as she saw the wounded, burst into tears. The other who was more hard-hearted called us Englander Swinehunds. When I got near them, still carrying a wounded fellow on my back, she spat a mouthful of phlegm in his face.’ It was hardly edifying but at least prisoners believed that they had certain rights guaranteed under international law. Whether these rights would be respected was another story altogether.
     
    That autumn the Reverend Williams had watched with interest as captured British artillery was paraded through the Brandenburg Gate and down the Unter den Linden: bands were playing, drums were beating to the accompaniment of stamping horses’ hooves and the clatter of wagon wheels. An excited civilian throng lined the entire route. Russian and French guns had arrived a week earlier to far less pomp; ‘special honour, it seemed, was to be paid to the trophies representing the British army’, which were given centre stage in front of the Royal Palace. Chalked along one gun barrel was the inscription, ‘This Gun belonged to the Regiment of the English Crown Prince – Hurrah!’
    British guns were singled out for special attention, in much the same way as captured British troops, although, on this occasion, German press reports that British prisoners would be made to walk alongside the guns had not materialised.
    The object of German propaganda, according to the Reverend Williams, was to vilify England in the eyes of the people.
     
In the window of practically every bookshop I saw in every town, I saw the same sort of books displayed. Most conspicuous among them was one bearing on its cover a lurid picture of Kitchener in a Scotch kilt grasping a bag of gold in his hands and wading through a sea of blood in which floated the corpses of women and children. Wherever I went, I found myself confronted by a huge poster showing a leering, drunken-looking British soldier, also in a kilt, with a pipe between his protruding teeth and a bull-dog between his bandy-legs. Above him were the words ‘Who is guilty?’ And beneath ‘He is guilty’.
     
    It had not taken long for the British press to influence government policy towards enemy aliens. Within weeks, headlines appeared reporting that stronger action [25 August] was to be taken against German and Austrian civilians. Fleet Street set the agenda, with news reporting and editorial opinion worryingly uniform. ‘The public even now seem scarcely to realise the great gravity of this matter,’ wrote one Times journalist of the perceived menace from espionage. The journalist quoted official figures of 50,000 enemies at liberty in the United Kingdom, 34,000 within the Metropolitan Police District, including 7,000 German and Austrian men of military age. He continued:
     
Thousands of resident Germans – waiters, barbers, and the like – have lost their employment since the outbreak of war; the adage concerning work for idle hands naturally occurs to the mind. Many of the East-end Germans are known to the authorities as ex-criminals; some of them are regarded as dangerous men . . . It has been remarked by the observant that German tradesmen’s shops are frequently to be found in close proximity to vulnerable points in the chain of London’s communications, such as railway bridges. Some such alien tradesmen have already been moved on. The German barber seems to have little time for sabotage. He is chiefly engaged in removing the ‘Kaiser’ moustaches of his compatriots. They cannot, however, part with the evidences of their nationality altogether, for the tell-tale hair of the Teuton will show the world that new Smith is but old Schmidt writ small.
     
    Could this be the same East End German community described in such glowing terms by the East London Observer not three weeks before? The paper had commended that community as honest