ENGLISH GERMAN OFFICER

Press, Volume LXXIII, Issue 22004, 30 January 1937, Page 15

ENGLISH GERMAN OFFICER

A WAR DIARY

Mother Country, Fatherland. By Lt.Col. A. G. Martin. Macmillan. 391 pp. (15/- net.)

During the Great War many soldiers must have fought against the country of their birth, and not as traitors. Few have told their stories, and from the viewpoint of his feelings towards his mother country, England, Colonel Martin’s account of his experiences in the German Army does not reveal much conflict of emotion or conviction. There were two special reasons for this. He calls himself, and with reason, “Harry Lorrequer redivivus”; any country would have been home to him, provided that he held a commission in its army. Also, in the latter stages of the war at least. Colonel Martin was sent to serve on fronts where he would not be engaged against a British force. He regards the opposition of England and Germany as a great misfortune, a stroke of fate which was accidental and almost unimportant compared with the real, strong bonds which joined the two countries. In this apparently sincere belief Colonel Martin has not found it difficult to forget or minimise real causes of enmity and evidence of bitter hostility. His references to England are at times too conscientiously fair, but the end of the war which left Germany shattered and England constitutionally and spiritually sound probably encouragedhim in his faith that what was strongest in the common national characters could not be destroyed, and that it was well that Germany should have a pattern of firm institutions held by a people of the same blood. It is not surprising that Colonel Martin regards reverently the present regime; to such a man any strong national organisation must be preferable to the uncertainty of an evolving socialist state. If, philosophically, this book is disappointing, it should be remembered that from a Harry Lorrequer neither philosophical reflections nor psychological reports are to be expected. Martin was a man of action and a good officer, and it is as the diary of a German officer that “Mother Country, Fatherland” is interesting. After a happy childhood in England—his mother was an Englishwoman—he accompanied his father to Germany and could not be restrained from joining the army. In 1893 his military career began, and these early years of a young officer are admirably described. The young men trained hard and played hard, and Martin was a leader in work and play. He was ambitious, and in 1900 in being appointed attache to the German Minister at Tangier, who vas about to proceed on a special mission to the Sheriffian Court at Marrakesh. Not the least remarkable of the party’s experiences was the encounter with Kaid Sir Harry Maclean, who, less energetic than T. E. Lawrence, was one of those remarkable Britons who, by resolution and understanding, learn to sway an Eastern potentate. There followed for Martin 13 happy years, marked by the distinction of serving in the Kaiser’s bodyguard. In the summer of 1914 Colonel Martin, with his wife and children, was spending the holidays with his English relations on the Suffolk coast. He hastened to rejoin his regiment at Frankfurt, and fought in the Battle of the Frontiers, on the Marne, and in the retreat to the Aisne. Here he was unable to avoid seeing the mistakes of the German High Command and the lapses of foresight and energy that caused delay. In April, 1915, he was invalided home through illness, but in August he was, at his own urgent wjsh, sent out to Galicia in command of a draft of young officers. This Hungarian enterprise was a nightmare for an officer trained for regular field work: columns were lost, straggling bands of friends were mistaken for foes, blind skirmishes were- fought in which the enemy were as elusive as a cloud of butterflies, supplies were outstripped, men lost heart, and the whole campaign seemed futile and hare-brained. Both sides lost many men. taken prisoner in the hurlyburly conflict. Martin was surrounded by a party of Russian skirmishers, he tried to blow his brains out, but the pistol misfired and a long captivity began. Four hundred officers and 800 men travelled 3000 miles across Siberia in a lightly guarded train. Escape was hopeless, and the bare necessaries of life depended upon the prisoners’ own purses or their skill as thieves. When he arrived at Chabarovsk, near - Vladisvostok, Martin fell ill, and, considering the lack of care and shelter, was lucky to survive. He crawled forth to life again six months later. A fever epidemic had raged and been overcome, Russian strictness was greatly increased, and without visiting American Red Cross officials the prisoners could scarcely have lived through the rigours of cold, starvation, and illness. Even in this remote and friendless place bold spirits tried to escape, and others, living in fear of reprisals, organised their fellows in trades and entertainments. Martin was lucky. Thousands of German and Austrian prisoners of war perished in the building of railways, or were invalided for life as the result of ordinary prison conditions. Such was the neglect that railway vans in which prisoners were locked were lost or forgotten till all the inmates were dead. After 16 months’ captivity, Martin was repatriated on exchange. His journey across Russia to the Swedish frontier is the most interesting part of his tale: in morale and in military organisation Russia was disintegrating, and to a German officer the confusion was incredible. His release coincided with the Russian revolution and America’s entry into the World War. His first duty, obtained by his own request, was to visit the prison camps where British officers were interned to satisfy himself that none endured the severities of his own captivity. In July, 1917, he joined Crown Prince Wilhelm’s headquarters and returned to the trenches.

*ong before the breakdown of the German Army there were plain signs of inefficiency: lack of cooperation between units, jealousy among officers, carelessness in trench-fighting, and, above all, lack of supplies. No one will blame Colonel Martin for hurrying over the last months of the war. He held his own regiment together during and he was in Riga when the end came. Soldiers’ councils re-

lieved him of influence and responsibility: and it was during these weeks that he contracted that hatred of Bolshevism which made him so ready to acclaim “the man of destiny, Adolf Hitler.” To Colonel Martin’s own strength as a German officer came the tribute of his regiment, which disbanded in an

orderly fashion and took a friendly leave of him. At that moment came a rare searching of his own heart.

How largely my conception of the meaning of “Fatherland” really centred in the Prussian Army I discovered only when the disintegration of the latter left me feeling an outcast-

This long story is told clearly and without hypocritical understatement or the exaggerations of horror. He might well be an English officer, rather more cultured than usual, who is writing his reminiscences.