"Hold your fire Smitty. they're unarmed. Damn, looks like the whole Hun army is surrendering!" Nevertheless, Corporal Jack Butler and Private Rob Smith kept their rifles trained on the men scrambling through the wire to their front. They didn't look dangerous at all, in fact, they all looked rather pathetic.
Truth be told, over the past day or so, German troops were eager to quit. They told of meager rations, unsanitary conditions, and a general malaise permeating their side of the front. Now that the rumors had been confirmed that the Kaiser had abdicated, the flow increased. No one wanted to die for a country with no leadership.
"I tell you, I saw him, it was the Kaiser in the back of that car!"
"But why would they take the Kaiser to the Netherlands," Kurt Wiemer spoke up, Wiemer was a Silesian peasant boy who always seemed a step behind everyone else.
"I tell you, the Kaiser's quit the country. He's running because he knows that the Frenchies and the English want to hang him. This war is over. We should head home!"
At that point their sergeant came into the squad room. This regiment was in reserve, well behind the lines, the plan was for them to move up to the front that very night.
"What's this Klein? Talking treason again?" The sergeant didn't like the short corporal from Berlin, he suspected that the man was an agitator.
"What about it Sergeant? Why should we fight anymore? The Kaiser quit, why can't we?"
"You'll follow orders Klein. Or you'll be shot!"
Klein said nothing, but he would be damned if he would return to the front. He knew a few of the others felt like he did. They'd wait and see.
The war was definitely ending. The Kaiser had fled to exile in the Netherlands. The German High Seas Fleet in Kiel had mutinied, most of that port city was controlled by mobs demanding an end to the war.
There was unrest in many cities, some military units were refusing to move to the front. Others, retiring to the rear, shouted at units moving to the front that they were traitors, serving the war mongers.
Revolution loomed in Germany.
A short post with my apologies, I am feeling rather under the weather this weekend. Damned viruses!
Rest up and hydrate Sarge, we're not going anywhere.
ReplyDeleteRoger that.
DeleteTake care and rest.
ReplyDeletePretty much all I've done since Wednesday.
DeleteWould the chap to the right of the fence post be described as a Sour Kraut?
ReplyDeleteOne might describe him that way.
DeleteThe guy to the left looks like has had had a miserable four years. I am glad it was.over for all of them, and hope they were able to salvage their lives.
ReplyDeleteSo much more "interesting" times lay in their future. I'm quite sure they lost much in the conflagration to come.
Delete"I am glad it was.over for all of them, and hope they were able to salvage their lives."
ReplyDeleteScott: I'm afraid that that was a severe case of ' cheer up, things could be worse... '.
Paul L. Quandt
And they did...
DeleteOAFS: ( and, no AW, I am not calling him an oaf )
ReplyDeleteThank you for another installment of your tale.
Thanks for the post.
Paul
OAFS is acceptable, and truth be told, I can be an oaf at times.
Delete;)
Well, PLQ, I was taught to be respectful of my elders, and since OldAFSarge served with Rickenbacher...
Delete"...I was taught to be respectful of my elders..."
DeleteSo, how is that you don't show me such respect?
PLQ
But I do! Trust me!
DeleteOuch.
DeleteAlas, I know that for most of them, the nightmare continued,post-war. The Versailles Treaty saw to that, with the French spirit of revanche making sure that the next 21 years were just the intermission.
ReplyDeleteIndeed.
DeleteFeel better!
ReplyDeleteThanks Skip.
DeleteI love that you readers always check the fine print!
There were many forces working on the German people. Some of them even socialistic in nature, kind of a backhanded pay-back for German support of Revolution in Russia.
ReplyDeleteCan't imagine what it was like for some of those men, fighting for 2-4 years far away from home, to come home to find everything they were fighting for gone forever. Not just the little things one would expect.
Yes, exactly. Everything they knew, swept away.
DeleteWhich would have made the nightmare in 70mm, with 16 track Dolby. With what the Germans went through, during, and after the War, what happened became almost inevitable.
DeleteThat's one way of looking at it.
DeleteOne thing often missed is how close Germany and Austria (and if not for America, Britain and France, too) were to economic collapse. Or rather, a total collapse. Nearly all production lines that could be moved to war production had been moved to war production. Railways were short-changed, especially locomotive parts. Coal production was in free-fall because of shortages of manpower, but also of tools and spare parts for machinery. There wasn't a single part of the economy that wasn't blasted from the guns more thoroughly than the Kaiser was (at least he maintained bodily integrity). I go back and forth on whether or not it would've been worse if the Reds had overrun Germany (shortly after Poland). Mass deaths would've happened either way, but which would be worse? I could imagine everything to the east of the Rhine going Red by 1921-22. Would England and France have succumbed, as well? Given our own Socialist movement, what here? Inquiring minds want to know.
DeleteGermany and Austria were starting to see deaths from malnutrition. As to the Soviets overrunning anything in that time period, wasn't going to happen, they were still fighting their own civil war. They tried to take Poland, and the Reds got their asses kicked. But a scary scenario nonetheless.
DeleteThe whole revolutionary ferment eventually was sold to German public as "stab in the back" to the supposedly undefeated German army...
ReplyDeleteHochseeflotte rebelled en masse when suicidal sortie to defeat Grand Fleet or die trying was about to commence.
Those at the front knew they'd been bested.
DeleteHaving just suffered through a couple of weeks of some crud going around, my sympathies to you - hope you feel better quickly!
ReplyDeleteI think I'm on the mend.
DeleteThanks Tom.