Not So Secret Dirty Little Secret

I don't know how many memoirs there are from the First World War written by Germans. But I'd be interested to see what they have to say about killing prisoners. I've just finished a book, first published in 1929, in which a variety of British servicemen recounted their experiences during the war. What stuck me was that more than half of accounts mentioning the murder of surrendered or surrendering Germans  were from former members of Highland regiments.
One account detailed how during the Battle of Loos in 1915 a platoon of Highlanders found about 20 Germans at their mercy in a captured trench. The Germans, who wounded some of the Highlanders as they stormed the trench, begged for mercy. Then one of the Scots shouted “Remember the Lusitania” and the Germans were slaughtered. The deaths of almost 1,200 civilians when a German submarine torpedoed the ocean liner was widely regarded at the time as a war crime. Another member of a Highland regiment told how that no German was left alive after his unit took a German trench at Ypres in 1917. In another book, a private in the 7th Camerons also recalled the murder of prisoners at Loos. 
Now, it could be that Scottish soldiers were more honest about whether they killed surrendered Germans. Or it could be that they were more likely to kill prisoners than most other British soldiers. The Canadians and  Australians were also notorious for killing Germans who could have been easily captured.

About a year ago, while working on a companion volume to Scottish Military Disasters, I was going through some battalion histories from the First World War. Most did not explicitly mention the killing of surrendering Germans but simply noted with satisfaction that there were no survivors from such-and -such a German machinegun post after had been over-run. But the history of the Glasgow Highlanders was not so coy. The history tells the story of  an officer of the Worcestershire Regiment who asked a sergeant from the unit how many German prisoners he’d taken during a recent battle. “Prisoners,” replied the sergeant. “None, my ammunitions no done yet.”
Winston Churchill would have understood. During his days as a war correspondent during the Boer War he quoted a British soldier complaining about his officers stopping his unit finishing off some captured enemy troops. “I never saw such cowards in my life,” the disgruntled soldier said of the Boer prisoners. “Shoot at you until ‘til you come up to them and then beg for mercy. I’d teach ‘em.”  In the Second World War this feeling was often translated to the pithy phrase “too late chum”. There's also the question of scared men being unable to flick a switch in their heads which turned them from frenzied killers, careless of their own safety, back into caring compassionate human beings. During the First World War these men were described as “battle drunk”.   

Now, soldiers who don't take prisoners can hardly expect to be taken prisoner. Something like one in four Scots who enlisted for military service in the First World War were killed. I wonder if there's a connection. As well as German retaliation for the murder of prisoners by the Scots, Germans who knew surrender was pointless would fight to the death and take as many Jocks with them as possible.One English soldier reported with “dismay” that the Scots were against taking prisoners because they claimed the Germans didn't take any.
The writer and poet Robert Graves wrote that a “division of Lowland territorials” was notorious for killing German wounded. A private from the London Scottish had a nervous breakdown after being ordered to take no prisoners during the Somme Offensive in 1916.
The Scots didn't have a monoply when it came  in killing prisoners - far from it.. However, I'd be interested to see what the Germans had to say about the Scots and prisoners. Oh by the way, it's an accepted fact that the Germans were the first to kill prisoners as a matter of policy, in late August 1914.

Level Playing Field Plea

I heard a pretty sad thing on the radio a couple of months back. It was on the BBC World Service. There was an item about some middle-class English teenager who was managing a carpet factory in one of the former Soviet-stans. His sole qualification for the job seemed to be that he was a middle-class English teenager on what is now called a “gap year”. This is when a youngster whose family have piles of cash goes travelling for a year before going to University. As far as I can gather nearly all British children who attend private school do this. Often at least part of year is spent doing some humanitarian project run by a Non-Governmental Organisation. The bulk of people working for British NGOs seem to have attended private schools.
Now what to me was sad was that there were probably plenty of unemployed carpet factory workers in the United Kingdom who could have run this factory. But they never got the chance.
When I started work what they call “interns” were rare. These are youngsters who can basically afford to work for free. They hope that if they do a good job they will be taken on as permanent employees. At worst the work experience looks good on their resume/CV. What this means is that in many fields of employment, the media for sure, the only people getting hired are rich kids. That seems a terrible, terrible, waste of the talent pool available. What happens to the talented kids who can't afford to work for free? They don't work.
There was a time when Scotland led the world in medicine and engineering. The list of Scottish inventions is long. This was because there was a time when Scotland was a world leader in offering free education to the masses. Now, it's a myth that this meant that any poor kid with brains could become a doctor or an engineer. Too often, poor kids had to go out and work to help support their families. But some, a lucky few, were plucked from poverty and allowed to fulfil their potential. The kid won, and society won by having the best medical or engineering talent in the country put to work. Now, thanks to intern system the best we can hope for is a mediocre middle-class kid. Yay!

You Shouldn't Have Joined If You Couldn't Take A Joke

There's a bit of debate going on here as to whether deserters from the US military should be made welcome in Canada. Many commentators say that these deserters should be given the same welcome as was extended to draft dodgers during the Vietnam war. I don't think we're comparing apples with apples here. The draft dodgers were escaping from forced military service. The present crop of asylum seekers  were volunteers who are breaking their contract.
When you join the military, you give up the right to choose which wars you're going to fight in. If you take the Queen's Shilling, you do the Queen's business – or at least what the Ministers of Her Majesty's Britannic Government deem to be the Queen's business. If you don't want to be involved in a war you don't want to fight, don't volunteer for the military. These U.S. deserters made a deal, usually signing on in exchange of a free education, and now they're welching on it. Maybe they made a mistake joining, but we all make mistakes and most of us have to live with the consequences of our mistakes. “Suck it up” and “You shouldn't have joined if you couldn't take a joke” are two phrases that spring immediately to mind. Actually, I do have a little bit of sympathy for a couple of the deserters – the ones who fulfilled what they thought was their contract only to be told that they hadn't read the small print closely enough and the government had the option to extend it; whether they agreed or not.
Maybe I'm turning into an old grouch, but I can't help feeling that all too often these days there is a decided lack of consequences when it comes to bad behaviour. It can't be good when people are helped to break a deal just because they suddenly realise it wasn't as a good a deal as they thought it was.

Two Wrongs Don't Make a Right

I think it's a bit sad that during the World Cup Scots were wandering around with T-shirts bearing the letters ABE. ABE means Anyone But England. That's just hurtful and there's no doubt that many English people were hurt. During international football tournaments many English people throw their support behind Scotland, Wales or the Irelands if their own team is not playing or has already been knocked out. That is a far more generous attitude than that shown by wandering around in an ABE T-shirt.
Yes, the English can be insensitive when it comes to the feelings of their neighbours. As a kid I remember that the so-called “national” coverage of football matches between Scotland and England was so biased and inflamatory, thanks to the likes of dreadful English pundits such as Jimmy Hill, that it was a disgrace. And in athletics it was funny how when a Scottish runner was winning a race he was British but when he failed to cross the line first he became Scottish again. But two wrongs don't make a right.
Let's just tell the English that it's nothing personal. And that the T-shirts only against the English Football Association. It did after all cancel the world's oldest international football fixture because it claimed the Scots just weren't good enough to be worth playing. 

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Book Briefing

An Ordinary Soldier and Task Force Helmand
By Doug Beattie, with Philip Gomm

Looking in the bookshop at Heathrow Airport recently I got the impression that every soldier who has served in Afghanistan has written a book about their time there. If you can only read one, or maybe two, then this read something by Doug Beattie.
As a mentor and trainer to first the Afghan National Police, in the first book, and the Afghan National Army, in the second, Beattie went toe-to-toe with the Taliban nearly every day he was in the field. This stuff is from the heart and not second-hand, as told to a journalist or some flabby ex-soldier turned writer. Beattie insists that he's just an ordinary soldier and is full of praise for the small team of British squaddies, often not obvious hero material, who took the war to the Taliban. He doesn't pull many punches with his opinions and is often outspoken. It was only towards the end of An Ordinary Soldier that I realised that the first draft had been written as a form of self-therapy following his return home from his first deployment to Afghanistan.
This book comes from an  unusual viewpoint because Beattie rose through the ranks to Regimental Sergeant Major and then became one of the few late-entry officers not to be shunted off behind a desk as battalion family welfare officer but to actually see frontline action. Beattie is a character, a real scrapper, and brings perspective sadly too seldom seen in military books. He certainly didn't trigger my bullshit detector.