One of the enduring legends of the Great War, the singing attacks of German students at the First Ypres, is a curious mixture of fact and self-serving fiction--a cover-up that became a cornerstone of Nazi mythology.
By Robert Cowley
At Ypres in 1914, Germany botched its last chance to win the upper hand on the Western Front--and its last chance, perhaps, to win the Great War. From the middle of October to the middle of November, practically without letup, parts of two German armies, the Fourth and the Sixth, battered the British and French divisions clinging to a narrowing salient. Their immediate objective was Ypres, once the center of the medieval cloth trade in northern Europe; but beyond lay the last real strategic prizes of the fall, the Channel ports of Dunkirk, Calais, and Boulogne, where the British buildup was centered.
Villages, even crossroad features, with hitherto forgettable names like Bixschoote, Zonnebeke, Kortekeer Caberet, and Langemarck, gained sudden notoriety. Time and again the Germans threatened to break through, only to lose momentum or to run up against a determined improvised defense at the last moment. The "last": The repetition applies in every sense but one. Though nobody imagined it at the time, this would not be the "last" Ypres but the "First."
The losses, hideous for all concerned, were worst for the Germans. They had nothing to show for them. There would be no more turning of flanks, no more opportunity to maneuver, no occupation of the Channel ports. The war in the West had hardened into a trench stalemate. How could Germany's military and political leaders rationalize the disaster at home? How could they put the best heroic gloss--a favorable spin, as we might say--on the shambles of their hopes? Out of this public relations dilemma, apparently, grew one of the enduring legends of the Great War: the massacre of the singing innocents at Ypres.
Few caught the essence of the story better, if with less regard for the truth, than Adolf Hitler, then a private in the 16th Bavarian Reserve Regiment. In Mein Kampf, he describes his baptism by fire--or, as he put it, the "iron salute" he received near Gheluvelt on October 29:
With feverish eyes each one of us was drawn forward faster and faster over turnip fields and hedges till suddenly the fight began, the fight of man against man. But from the distance the sounds of a song met our ears, coming nearer and nearer, passing from company to company, and then, while Death busily plunged his hand into our rows, the song reached also us, and now we passed it on: "Deutschland, Deutschland Über alles, über alles in der Welt!"
By the time Hitler wrote those lines in 1924, while incarcerated for his part in the failed Munich putsch, the invention of myth and not the establishment of fact was uppermost in his mind. In this instance, Hitler was busy pushing what would become one of the most persistent semi-fictions of the interwar period and a cornerstone of the Nazi experience, a vision of manly young patriots sacrificing their lives for the greater good of the Fatherland. This was the story of Der Kindermord bei Ypern--the so-called massacre of the innocents at Ypres. The "innocents" were the student volunteers in the German reserve corps, who were slaughtered in droves but who went to their deaths singing. In German Bibles, the word kindermord was also applied to the children Herod killed after the visit of the Magi, and it had, in both cases, the connotation of "holy innocents."
The story even has its own special locus, the village of Langemarck on the north face of the Salient, and date, November 10, 1914--in both location and day some distance from Hitler. According to the next day's official army bulletin, which appeared on the front pages of many German newspapers, "West of Langemarck youthful regiments stormed the first lines of the enemy trenches and took them, singing 'Deutschland, Deutschland über alles.'" They took approximately 2,000 prisoners, the dispatch concluded, French regulars all. The carefully crafted story, notably repeated in accounts published during the Third Reich, is basically this: The student volunteers, called the children's corps "by mocking veterans," advance silently in the fog, "a wide sea of white air," as one memoirist puts it. There is no preliminary artillery barrage that might tip off the enemy. The volunteers are discovered anyway, and fire from a source they cannot see chops down their close-packed rows. They continue to throw themselves "into this hell with childlike trust." But nothing avails. They lie in the open, unable to advance or retreat. "In this hour, they have become men."
Then the miracle happens. A voice rises in song, then another and another takes up "the holy words." The young soldiers rise up as one and storm forward; they sing as they run. Some are helmetless, their heads wrapped in bloody bandages. With their "burning eyes" they are like "unreal figures from an old saga." In some versions, the volunteers sweep over the enemy trenches; in others, the song dies as they die, and silent grey heaps litter the damp fields in front of Langemarck.
There are all manner of things wrong with the story, beginning with that official dispatch. The singing volunteers took no Allied trenches at Langemarck on November 10. The one incident that comes close to matching the words of the dispatch took place a day earlier. It is recorded in the daily diary of the 206th Reserve Infantry Regiment, published as part of the history of the regiment in 1931. Regimental histories can be the meat and potatoes of military history, but seventeen years had passed since the event, time enough for the author, one Werner Maywald, to stupid into, and insert, some of the more improbable details of the story--including the singing of the most patriotic German song, a tune that is not easy to carry under normal circumstances. (Imagine American troops under fire trying to mouth the words of "The Star Spangled Banner.")
At six in the morning on the 9th, the diary reports, soldiers with unloaded rifles and fixed bayonets leave their lines "almost noiselessly." But French troops detect their advance and begin to fire. At that moment the singing starts. It "reaches heaven like a cry for help: first one man, then a small group, then more and more, until the entire advance sings, "'Deutschland, Deutschland über alles!' Even the wounded sing. The words are on the last breaths of the dying." The attack sweeps over the French lines, taking fourteen officers and 1,154 men prisoner, mostly older soldiers from territorial regiments--the equivalent of our National Guard--but not regulars, whose capture by green German troops would have added luster to the exploit.
Unfortunately for the myth, the November 9th incident did not occur at Langemarck but three miles away at a village called Bixschoote. Beck-skota: that rough, turnip-eating name does not lend itself to myth in the same way that the vaguely Teutonic vibrations of Langemarck do. As one former student volunteer put it in 1933, the first year of Hitler's reign, "the name sounds like a heroic legend." That the actual village had, both in 1914 and in its postwar resurrection, a drably brickbound and distinctly unheroic look seemed beside the point.
But the single dispatch is only the beginning of the confusion that the myth-makers wrought. When we look at contemporary accounts and regimental histories, we come up against an inconvenient fact. There seem to have been not just one Langemarck but several, both in this sector and in others miles away. They occurred on various dates, as early as October 21 and as late as November 16. During that three-week period, singing attacks were reported everywhere from the Yser to the Langemarck sector to Neuve Chapelle, twenty-five miles to the south.
In his diary entry of October 27, for example, a junior staff officer named Rudolf Binding (who was several miles away from Langemarck, at the German-occupied village of Passchendaele) laments that against experienced defenders "these young fellows we have, only just trained, are too helpless, particularly when the officers have been killed." Binding, later to become a prominent man of letters, goes on to note that a battalion of light infantry, or Jäger, "almost all Marburg students . . . have suffered terribly from enemy shell-fire." And then: "In the next division, just such young souls, the intellectual flower of Germany, went singing into an attack on Langemarck, just as vain and just as costly." Binding gives no date, but since the Germans temporarily suspended their attacks in the Langemarck sector on October 24, the episode he refers to must have taken place earlier. But then, for all their curious similarity, accounts don't always agree on chronology. This includes Hitler's--if, indeed, he actually did hear singing. He was even farther from Langemarck than Binding.
Allied eyewitness reports only add to the confusion. The closest to Langemarck that a singing attack comes is in the village of Koekuit--no more than a narrowing of the road, actually, about a mile to the north. A battalion of the Gloucester Regiment reported it on the 21st, and the attack did force the British to retreat toward Langemarck. There are military historians who point to that episode. On the same day, at Zonnebeke, five miles away, one of the "old contemptibles" (as the British regulars called themselves) remembered how German volunteers spilled down the ridge from Passchendaele "singing and waving their rifles in the air." It was, you might say, 1917 in reverse. "As fast as we shot them down, others took their place. Even when their own artillery barrage caught them by mistake, they kept on advancing. They were incredibly, ridiculously brave."
The next day, October 22, at a place called Kortekeer Caberet (named after a crossroads estaminet), about a mile west of Langemarck, Einjährige--volunteers--of the 46th Reserve Division attacked other units of the perilously overstretched Gloucestershires. According to the regimental war narratives, it was "a particularly fine feat of arms. . . . These lads . . . advanced with the utmost determination, singing patriotic songs, and though suffering appalling casualties, actually succeeded in driving back their seasoned opponents." (The British would in turn drive the Einjährige back to their starting point.)
At least one British description--of an action in the same area on October 23--seems to stupid into the script for the legend, though it also raises questions. This time the attacking volunteers wear not the regulation spiked Pickelhauben but what appear to be student caps. (Did the British confuse them with Feldmützen, or field caps? It is not unlikely.) The defenders hear the distant sound of voices raised in song; the volunteers surge forward, arm-in-arm. (If that is true, how did they hold their rifles?) In the event, batteries firing over open sights, as well as the famously disciplined rifles of the British regulars, blow them away.
Word of the singing attacks got back to London. Sir Henry Wilson, the British deputy chief of staff, crowed in the October 24 entry of his diary about yet another killing extravaganza some miles from Langemarck: "The I Corps really took tea with the Germans. . . . These Germans attacked five times in close formations singing 'Die Wacht am Rhein' and the place became a shambles. They must have had 6,000 or 7,000 casualties"--surely a vast overestimation.
Perhaps the final recorded instances of the singing attacks in Ypres occurred on two days very late in the battle, November 14 and 16. Both were against the French (the badly mauled British were by then being pulled out of the Salient), and both happened near Bixschoote; they are noted in the journal of the commander of the French 26th Infantry Regiment, Lt. Col. Henri Colin. November 14 began with hailstorms and German assaults; the fighting continued, practically without letup, until dark. Reports began to filter back to Colin in his command post of close, desperate struggles over farm buildings, bits of tattered woodland, and shallow impromptu trenches that were already filling with water. A noncom ran up, out of breath, and blurted out that his company had been almost annihilated. He told Colin that his company commander had been killed, but not before dispatching a German officer with his revolver. Later, Colin's surviving company commanders would describe an even wilder sight in this "day of terrible distress." With fanatic élan, masses of fresh young German troops had thrown themselves at the thin French line, "singing and shouting insults at us. They were finally driven off, leaving a great number of corpses on the ground."
But how are we to take the odd, ghastly episode that Colin records two days later? There may be more to it than met the eye. The first snow had just fallen, and the weather, as much as the rapidly diminishing ardor of the combatants, was about to shut down serious fighting for the next few months.
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