St. Clair Jane - The road to St. Julien : the letters of a stretcher-bearer from the Great War

In terms of the Armistice the Germans were to withdraw all their forces over the Rhine and allied troops were to advance and occupy the German west bank of the Rhine. They were also to cross the Rhine and occupy bridgeheads at Coblenz, Mainz and Cologne. The British Army was to occupy the Cologne bridgehead. It was decided in the days after the Armistice that the 9th (Scottish) Division would have the honour of being the only New Army division to march via Waterloo to the Rhine and establish the British bridgehead. Willies 9th Division began the march to the Rhine on 14 November 1918. They arrived on 9 and 10 December and crossed by the Muhlheim Bridge of Boats at Cologne on 13 December 1918, with bagpipes playing All the blue bonnets are over the border the same tune that the most famous bagpiper of the war, Piper Laidlaw VC of the KOSB had played marching up and down the parapet at Loos.

Willie served in the British Army of Occupation of the Rhineland until his discharge in May 1919. The Army of Occupation stayed until 1929. Apart from the desperation to get home, life was easy with all sorts of entertainments laid on for the soldiers, including in his case a visit to the Cologne Opera to see Wagners The Valkyrie . He was deeply impressed with this aspect of German culture and wrote to Jane, It is quite beyond my powers of description to tell you how wonderful it was. I have never heard such beautiful music and singing, and the whole thing was superb and whacks home productions hollow. I will enclose you my Guide, which you must keep for me. The piece was from the Nibelungs Ring by Wagner.

On a grimmer note, Willie was an eye-witness to the starvation of the German population which was inflicted on them as a deliberate act of policy by the Allies in order to force them to accept the peace terms a policy which, according to Winston Churchill threw away the moral victory of the war and helped pave the way for Hitler. The starvation was caused by the continuation of the wartime Naval Blockade, bringing death to hundreds of thousands of Germans. On 3 March 1919 Winston Churchill, who by then was Secretary of State for War, told Parliament that his officers had reported that Germany was on the verge of complete social and national collapse through hunger and malnutrition. Germany was like a besieged town. Lloyd George told the Allied Conference at Spa in March that the British troops were indignant about the Allied refusal to revictual Germany and that General Plumer had advised him that he could not be responsible for his troops if children were allowed to wander about the streets half-starved.

Willie wrote in his diary, There is no doubt whatever but that the German is suffering from the Blockade. I have seen kids wait for hours on the off-chance of getting from a soldier what he usually throws in the swill, and also men have been forced to beg for permission to lift what we would give to pigs. He talked of restaurants accepting scraps on the plates as payment for cooking rations because food was unobtainable. Against the blind working of the official policy he mentioned individual acts of kindness to the Germans by the British soldiers, The Iron Cross I have is a real one given to me by the German who won it while fighting against our own Div at Kemmel Hill April 1918. I gave him a small luxury for his sick mother, and protested when he offered me his medal in payment. The medal is useless to me, he said, Germany is finished.