Between Hatred and Empathy: Perceptions of the Enemy at Peace and War

Did the First World War brutalize the combatants that suffered its horrors? Was hatred of the men crouching in the trenches opposite a necessary part of their war culture? How did British soldiers perceive their enemy? Questions such as these have occupied historians for many years. This paper will explore British soldiers’ perception of Germany and German soldiers during the war and after the Armistice. It will reveal how their ideas about both changed and diverged. There is little evidence that they maintained an active hatred of the men facing them, but Britons did nurture a simmering revulsion towards the German (or, more precisely, the Prussian) state. One soldier tried to vocalize this in a letter home, explaining that ‘[w]e want to exterminate, not so much the Germans as individuals for they are harmless enough, but their methods and principles.’ It was the German nation, its institutions, and ideas, that the men of the British Army were fighting to defeat. Such a world view was important to the mobilisation (and demobilisation) of Allied nations. Such ideas were not only amplified by propaganda; they were repeated in soldiers’ diaries, letters, and newspapers. Even the postcards that they sent home described the Germans as ‘ghouls’ and ‘vampires,’ while the destruction on the Western Front became evidence of Germany’s militarism. German soldiers, however, were also seen as victims and cohabitants of Belgium and France’s hellscapes. As such, a ‘live-and-let-live’ system proliferated in parts of the frontlines and British soldiers voiced empathy for their enemy (though, in the heat of battle, they might just as likely shoot a captured soldier out of hand). Revealing the ways in which these two outlooks were interwoven helps to explain the experience of the war and of peace.