CHAPTER NINE

‘I was right out in front, ahead of everyone’

Before the war arrived, Flanders looked much as it had for centuries: a bleak, rain-drenched land of gentle hills and ridges, pocked with woods of ash, chestnut and oak, set in heavy, blue ‘Ypres clay’. It was a land of monotony and mist, ‘with an air of melancholic sadness melting almost imperceptibly into the grey waters of the North Sea’.¹ General Ferdinand Foch, the future Supreme Allied Commander, gazed down from the tower of Ypres Cloth Hall on ‘a sea of green, with little white islands marking the location of the rich villages with their fine churches and graceful steeples. To see open country in any direction was impossible.’²

The pastures were strewn with poppies that flowered in soil churned by plough and, soon, shellfire. Within days, this dreary farmland would be pounded beneath the guns and boots of four national armies. Within weeks, Flanders fields would be flattened to a lifeless moonscape. Within four years, the German and Allied armies would repeat the carnage, several times, culminating in the unspeakable horror of the Third Battle of Ypres, at Passchendaele, 1917, in which more than 500,000 would be killed or wounded in one of the bloodiest struggles of the war. Hitler would participate in several of these battles.

The town of Ypres had a long history of warfare and besiegement. The Romans had attacked it. So had successive forces of French, Dutch and English in the bloody parade of power through time. In 1383, Henry le Despenser, the Bishop of Norwich, led an English army to occupy Ypres, ‘a nice old town, with narrow, cobbled-stoned streets’, and besieged it for four months until French relief arrived.³ After a French army captured the city in 1678, the engineer Sébastien le Prestre de Vauban installed a series of ramparts to deter further invaders.

In October 1914, the German and British armies eyeballed each other across no-man’s-land, locked into trench lines that extended for hundreds of miles on either side, some as little as 50 yards apart. After the Germans had narrowly failed to conquer France within their six-week deadline, there followed a great ‘Race to the Sea’ – the frantic rush to outflank the enemy that threw a ribbon of trenches all the way to the Belgian coast. A scar of black earth zig-zagged from the Swiss Alps to the English Channel, along which, on this ‘Western Front’, the contest of the world would now be decided. In the Flanders sector, the town of Ypres took on strategic importance: for the Germans, possessing it would mean a base from which to block British reinforcements across the Channel; for the Allies, it would provide a jumping-off point into Belgium to disrupt the German supply line through Flanders.

And so, by October, British and French forces were concentrating here, to defend the blister of Allied-controlled territory to the east of the beautiful medieval town. On the map, this ‘salient’ in the front line resembled a half-oval that bulged into the German lines. In the minds of the men, it would become the ‘Bloody Salient’, a land of screaming shells and hissing gas, waterlogged trenches and scuttling rats. It quickly earned its reputation as the most loathsome place on the Western Front.

Already Ypres had had the bloodiest introduction to the war. On 3 October, overwhelming German numbers had forced the British back to the fringes of the town. On the 18th, the British reclaimed control. On the 20th, the Germans unleashed a fresh offensive all along the front, from Nieuport in the north to Armentières in the south. On both sides, the condition of the troops had severely deteriorated since the start of the campaign. Short of food, especially bread, with nothing hot to eat and only green, polluted water to drink, the German Army had been reduced, according to a diary found on an officer’s corpse, ‘to the state of beasts’.⁴

Towards the end of October, as Hitler’s List Regiment prepared to attack, three corps of the British Expeditionary Force occupied the ancient ramparts of Ypres in an arc running a few miles to the east near the villages of Passchendaele, Broodseinde, Messines and Gheluvelt. In the previous ten days, the Germans had been reinforced. The German Fourth and Sixth Armies, under their respective commanders Albrecht, Duke of Württemberg, and Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria, prepared a fresh offensive, to throw every man who could fire a rifle at the stubborn British defence of the town.

Unknown to Sir John French, commander of the British Expeditionary Force, the Tommies were hugely outnumbered: fourteen German infantry divisions had pulled up in Flanders, against seven British and French (three of which were cavalry fighting as infantry). The Germans had twice as many guns and, later, ten times as many heavy artillery pieces. Both sides fielded two machine guns per battalion. Yet the professional British Army bettered the conscripted Germans in a critical area: their superb riflemen were capable of firing the famous ‘15 aimed rounds a minute’⁵ – a far higher rate than their opponents and with greater accuracy.

The German regiments mounted successive attacks on Ypres, in huge, closely packed masses – easy targets for British rifle fire, which spat round after round into the approaching sea of grey. So dense was this retaliatory fire, some German officers imagined they were advancing on machine guns. Yet despite their terrible casualties, the Germans used their huge numerical advantage to enclose the city in a slowly grinding vice.

On the morning of 29 October several German reserve regiments, containing thousands of young students – middle-class youths straight out of the opening scene of the film All Quiet on the Western Front – prepared to charge the British lines near Langemarck, Zonnebeke and Gheluvelt. Among them were older volunteers, such as the skinny twenty-five-year-old private wearing a drooping moustache and baggy uniform, Adolf Hitler.

 

In a richly self-dramatized passage of Mein Kampf, Hitler described what happened in that first attack:

… and when the day began to emerge from the mists, suddenly an iron greeting came whizzing at us over our heads, and with a sharp report sent the little pellets flying between our ranks, ripping up the wet ground; but even before the little cloud had passed, from two hundred throats the first hurrah rose to meet the first messenger of Death.

Then a crackling and a roaring, a singing and a howling began, and with feverish eyes each of us was drawn forward, faster and faster, until suddenly past turnip fields and hedges the fight began, the fight of man against man. And from the distance the strains of a song reached our ears, coming closer and closer, leaping from company to company, and just as Death plunged a busy hand into our ranks the song reached us too and we passed it along: ‘Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles, über Alles in der Welt’ [‘Germany, Germany above all else, above all else in the world’].⁶

According to witnesses, Hitler’s regiment were not in fact singing the ‘Deutschlandlied’, the tremendous Haydn melody that later became the national anthem; they were belting out ‘Die Wacht am Rhein’ in order to distinguish their positions in the morning mist in the hope of avoiding ‘friendly fire’ from their own rear gunners.⁷ ‘Four days later we came back,’ Hitler continued. ‘Even our step had changed. Seventeen-year-old boys now looked like men.’⁸

This was the start of a terrible series of battles at Gheluvelt and Langemarck. A witness saw Hitler preparing to attack: bent forward, near the front, with a smile on his lips, like an athlete at the start of a race.⁹ In his own account, he burst forth without a care for his life, straight into the British guns. In an extraordinary letter to his friend Hepp, Hitler portrayed himself as leading a fresh charge:

The whole thing was getting hotter and hotter … Five or six men brown as clay were being led along from the left, and we all broke into a cheer: six Englishmen with a machine gun! We shouted to our men marching proudly behind their prisoners. The rest of us just waited. We could scarcely see into the steaming, seething witches’ caldron [sic] which lay in front of us. At last there came the ringing command: ‘Forward!’

We swarmed out of our positions and raced across the fields to a small farm. Shrapnel was bursting left and right of us, and the English bullets came whistling through the shrapnel; but we paid no attention to them … I was right out in front, ahead of everyone in my platoon. Platoon-leader Stoever was hit. Good God! I had barely time to think; the fighting was beginning in earnest! … The first of our men had begun to fall. The English had set up machine guns. We threw ourselves down and crawled slowly along a ditch .. and then we were out in the open again.¹⁰

Hitler and his comrades dashed on, through a swamp and into a forest:

At this time there was only a second sergeant in command, a big tall splendid fellow called Schmidt. We crawled on our bellies to the edge of the forest, while the shells came whistling and whining above us; tearing tree trunks and branches to shreds … and enveloping everything in a disgusting, sickening, yellowy-green vapour. We can’t possibly lie here forever, we thought and, if we are going to be killed, it is better to die in the open …

I jumped up and ran as fast as I could across meadows and beet fields, jumping over trenches, hedgerows, and barbed-wire entanglements, and then I heard someone shouting ahead of me: ‘In here! Everyone in here!’ There was a long trench in front of me and, in an instant, I had jumped into it; and there were others in front of me, behind me, and left and right of me. Next to me were Württembergers, and under me were dead and wounded Englishmen …

An unending storm of iron came screaming over our trench. At last, at ten o’clock, our artillery opened up in the sector. One – two – three – five – and so it went on. Time and again shell after shell burst in the English trenches in front of us. The poor devils came swarming out like ants from an ant heap, and we hurled ourselves at them. In a flash we had crossed the fields in front of us, and after bloody hand-to-hand fighting in some places, we threw [the enemy] out of one trench after another. Most of them raised their hands over their heads. Anyone who refused to surrender was mown down. In this way we cleared trench after trench …¹¹

That day and night Hitler’s unit attacked four times, he claimed, ‘and each time we were forced to retreat. From my company, only one other man was left besides myself, and then he, too, fell. A shot tore off the entire left sleeve of my tunic but, by a miracle, I remained unharmed.’ The battle raged without end for four days, Hitler wrote. ‘But we were all so proud of having defeated the British!’¹²

Hitler’s letter home seems no different to that of any other young man, keen to display his courage. And there is no doubt that the German attacks at Gheluvelt and Langemarck in October 1914 were among the most ferocious offensives of the whole war. As Hitler suggests, a blind, unthinking courage appears to have possessed the Germans who stormed the British trenches. They charged with scarcely a care for their own necks, facing death with suicidal determination. Anything for the Fatherland! They smashed up villages, churches, farms – everything in their path. The skies were red and black with the flames of burning buildings, the fields littered with corpses. The German indoctrination of these young men had been ruthlessly efficient: they were programmed to march straight at the lines of British rifles.

Yet Hitler’s letter is unusual in this sense: in drawing attention to his front-line role, in relishing battle and close shaves with death, he writes with the boyish excitement of one of Karl May’s westerns. But nowhere does he claim to have killed the enemy or captured prisoners. If he had led from the front, as he claimed, he would certainly have clashed with the British at close range. Modesty cannot explain the omission – that would be at odds with the vainglorious self-portrait he paints elsewhere. The answer is that Hitler exaggerated his role. He was nowhere near the opening assaults of First Ypres.

Other regiments had attacked first and taken the heaviest casualties. At Langemarck those killed included thousands of student volunteers whose loss furnished the legend of the Kindermord bei Ypern (the Massacre of the Innocents at Ypres) and who are commemorated in small services today at battlefield cemeteries and at home in Germany. Many were as young as seventeen, boys straight out of school, student dreamers, believers in the glory of the Fatherland and easy prey to war propagandists. Many others were products of the German Burschenschaften (university fraternities)¹³ – patriotic, blue-eyed, blonde lads, boys of the sort who would later join the Führer’s Hitler Youth brigades. Their selfless heroism evoked a nineteenth-century romantic ideal of chivalry. They had no chance in the sights of British rifles.

Although they didn’t fight in the battle at Langemarck, the List Regiment’s experiences elsewhere in the field of First Ypres were no less bloody. In fact, Hitler could not have survived had he been leading from the front, given the regiment’s massive casualties. Nor was he right to claim that ‘the Britishers were licked’:¹⁴ the German offensive failed to penetrate their opponents’ lines further than the village of Gheluvelt, which a renewed British offensive soon recovered.

Notwithstanding the waves of German attacks, the British held Ypres and the eastern edge of the salient. It was an astonishing display of resilience. Their soldiers were, after all, professional, tough-as-nails Tommy Atkinses, as John Keegan writes: ‘… working class, long-service regulars, shilling-a-day men of no birth and scanty education’.¹⁵ They cared nothing for the mystical German patriotism of their young enemy. They were trained to kill, win the war and go home.

The British were astonished at what came at them in those late October battles. Captain Harry Dillon, of the 2nd Oxford and Bucks Light Infantry, beheld ‘a great grey mass of humanity … charging, running for all God would let them straight on to us not 50 yards off’. He had warned his men what to expect, but no one had anticipated this. He had ‘never shot so much in such a short time’. He saw the Germans fall, veer off course, stagger to the ground, until only ‘a great moan’ rose in the night, and men ‘with their arms and legs off’ tried to crawl away.¹⁶

Private H. J. Milton similarly witnessed masses of Germans ‘running into death’: ‘… they gave great yells after they started but very few got back. The screams were terrible.’ Some British companies fired an average of 500 rounds per man per day: ‘This storming, we will never forget as long as we live.’¹⁷

Within four days the List Regiment had been virtually annihilated, as Hitler wrote in a letter to Popp: 611 of the regiment’s 3,600 men had survived the battle; the rest had been killed, wounded or captured, an 83 per cent casualty rate. ‘In the entire regiment there remained only thirty officers. Four companies had to be disbanded.’¹⁸ His regiment lost 349, dead, on 29 October alone, with about four times as many wounded, taken prisoner and missing that day. Hitler recounted all this ‘without a trace of mourning’:¹⁹ his regiment, he wrote, had been cut to 600, as though they were lambs to the slaughter. He would later ostentatiously mourn their loss, from a distance in years; at the time, he regarded them as a necessary sacrifice for the Fatherland.

Hitler’s comrades were better able to express the true sadness that struck the Listers. The British stand at First Ypres shocked the German survivors. ‘Only a few regiments have had to give such a heavy toll in blood on their first fight,’ wrote Adolf Meyer.²⁰ The carnage left an indelible scar on Oscar Daumiller, a chaplain with the 6th Bavarian Reserve Division. ‘It is horrible to see the torments, the indescribable injuries,’ he wrote, ‘it is horrible to see how the strife … has shattered the hearts [of the soldiers].’²¹

Hitler witnessed this horror on his comrades’ faces, as he wrote in Mein Kampf: ‘I remember well my comrades’ looks of astonishment when we faced the Tommies in person in Flanders’ – but he seemed not to share their fear.²² There was something boyish, unnatural, in the way he thrilled to the excitement of war, as though the dead and wounded were play-acting in a great human drama staged for his benefit.

The slaughter of the German Army at the First Battle of Ypres quickly acquired the aura of a heroic sacrifice. The Kindermord inspired the ‘Legend of Langemarck’. Though most of the action took place nearer Bixschoote, the more German-sounding name appealed to the folks back home. The legend has it that tens of thousands of these boys were slaughtered as they marched into battle while singing the ‘Deutschlandlied’ and other patriotic German songs – a story that would appear on the front page of every German newspaper and which, as we have seen, Hitler would appropriate in his version of the List Regiment’s attack at First Ypres in order to identify himself in his readers’ minds with this legendary sacrifice.

It later transpired that many of the young casualties had probably died of friendly fire, cut down by their own artillery. And they sang not out of blind patriotism, but – like the List Regiment when they went into action – in a desperate effort to warn the rear gunners of their location, according to General Horst von Metzsch, general staff officer of the XXVII Reserve Corps, who witnessed the ‘general panic’ as the lines fell apart under fire from the front and rear. The survivors would be ‘mentally shattered forever’.²³

The results of this carnage can be seen today, at the German cemetery near Langemarck, a desolate place where rows of flat black slabs designate the identifiable dead. The remains of 24,917 German troops lie in a mass grave, their names etched on the walls, including some 3,000 student casualties of the Kindermord.

Hitler would never forgive or forget the slaughter at First Ypres, particularly the battle at Langemarck. Though he didn’t directly participate in the latter, the legend became seared in his mind until he persuaded himself that he had fought there. It would haunt and goad him for the rest of his life. For Hitler, Langemarck would for ever be sacred ground, scene of the greatest sacrifice of the young heroes of the Reich.²⁴ It would hold a similar stature in the pantheon of German heroism as the Battle of Tannenberg, which had taken place two months earlier on the Eastern Front. In years to come, Nazi myth-makers would orchestrate extraordinary annual commemorations of the battle and recast the Führer as a ‘Hero of Langemarck’.²⁵

Many years later, as conqueror of France and Belgium, Hitler returned to Ypres to erect a memorial and lay wreaths on the graves of the ‘Innocents’. In the interim, before his rise to power, his fury at the massacre at Langemarck would stoke his hatred for those he held responsible for Germany’s defeat. A vast plan of revenge, as we shall see, took shape in his mind long before he executed it.