Wie es Kam (How It Came About)

A memoir of a German upbringing as a member of the generation caught in the First

and Second World Wars.

By Walther Franke-Ruta
Translated by Suzanne Ruta, with an introduction by Suzanne Ruta and Garance
Franke-Ruta

* * *

Walther Franke-Ruta was born Max Walther Franke in 1890 in Leipzig, Germany, and
died in Basel, Switzerland, in 1958. During the years in which he was allowed to work
in the German-speaking world he was a novelist, poet, and writer of radio plays. This
chapter of his unpublished memoir deals with his German World War I military
experiences in 1913 and 1914.

Of note as you read this is the fact that, while he fought for the Germans in World War
I, by the outbreak of the Second World War he was living in Italy, having moved his
family south in late 1923 in a fit of disgust at the Hitlerputsch and hyperinflation in
Germany. Franke added Ruta to his name during the early 1930s, while living in Ruta,
in Liguria, Italy, turning what had been his dateline for dispatches into his byline and
family name and continuing the process of distancing his family from Germany that
would lead his sons to seek refuge in America in 1936 and 1937.

His life was defined by the wars: In April 1943, still living in Italy, he had his German
citizenship revoked for refusing to divorce his ancestrally Jewish wife Else, who had
converted to Catholicism in 1939, and then been deprived of her German citizenship in
1940. Their apartment was confiscated after the fall of Mussolini, eventually becoming
a German lookout point, and after months of hiding in the Apennine mountains, they
were captured by Italian police forces, from whom they miraculously escaped while
awaiting transfer to the German authorities and certain death. Ferreted through the
Catholic underground into Switzerland, they spent six months in an internment camp
for refugees before being allowed to move to Basel, where they remained the rest of
their lives.

Franke joined the Kaisers army in 1913 as an Einjahr freiwilliger, a one-year
volunteer. This was the military service you had to perform to be regarded as a loyal
member of the middle class. To qualify as a one-year volunteer with the freedom to
choose when and where you servedyou had to pass an exam in subjects like Latin
and math, which peasants and factory workers obviously couldnt take. It was part of
the rigid social divisions he talks about elsewhere in the book, but it had little to do
with real military preparation.

When it came to choosing which kind of service to do, he volunteered for the infantry,
foot soldiers, the most exposed in combat. But he wasnt thinking about combat at all.
His reasoning was as follows: the artillery (cannons) is too noisy; the cavalry is too
expensive, my father would have to buy me a horse (not true of course). That left the
infantry. So he went into the infantry, choosing the regiment with barracks easiest to
get to from home by trolley car. It was only for a year, he figured. It turned out to be six
years until he was completely demobilized.

* * *

If anyone had asked us what we were doing in the army, wed have said, defending
our Fatherland. A vague notion, as we hadnt the slightest idea of anyone wanting to
attack the Fatherland. At least, no one had done so for the last 43 years. But we
thought only of defense. Generals and politicians may have had other thoughts. Our
only explanation for the disturbance of this boring year of service was defense.

There had been no war for 42 years. What would a war these days look like? The
recent Balkan wars had given experts a chance to study the question. A war between
great powers would be something else of course. It would have been logical to base
our training on the requirements of modern warfarebut this was not to be. Our
training was totally pointless.

We got training at the barracks, the parade grounds, and for combat.

Barracks training included keeping uniforms clean. They were of delicate red and
blue fabrics, with brass buttons that had to be mirror polished. Our belts were of
ordinary leather that had to be polished too. We spent about two hours a day
cleaning our uniforms. Our cartridge belts were of leather with brass trim. Cleaning
the brass you stained the leather. Cleaning the leather, you stained the brass. The
cartridge pouches themselves were empty.

The collar of the uniform was high and stiff, a instrument of torture in warm
weather. If you left it open you could be punished. If you persisted, you could be
arrested, and it went on your record, equivalent to a criminal offense in civilian life,
and ruined your career forever.

Military instruction took the form of question and answers; the answers to be
shouted loud and rapidly. What is a soldiers duty on waking in the morning? To
strip and wash under his arms. For a while I was able to cut out on these lessons
and attend lectures at the university in Kants Critique of Pure Reason. But then they
caught me and I had to stick around.

Three to four hours a day were dedicated to physical exercises and drill.
For example, we had to roll our heads from side to side and front and back, three
hundred times in succession.... The steps for parade march dated from the late
middle ages. These exercises annihilated the intelligence and initiative, so that for
example, if an order to march had been given and then the officer was distracted by
other business, the company would march till they hit a wall and stood around
helpless, a terrifying sight.

As for shooting, the main function of infantry soldiers, we practiced taking aim,
three hundred times each day, in two hours of practice, but rarely did any shooting.
In our whole year of training we got to actually shoot eight times, three shots each.
The German infantry soldier shot 24 bullets in a year.

And the kind of situations we practiced forshooting from a standing or kneeling
position, at a stationary target, had no application in a modern war.

Instead we practiced for 18th century situations. We were tortured for weeks with
drill in shooting as a group, divided into two parts. The first group was to shoot from
a kneeling position, those behind them standing. Kneeling itself was taught in detail.
I can still tell today, watching a man kneel, whether he has been a soldier. The whole
exercise of simultaneous and different movements, like a delicate mechanism, must
have been a delight to behold. But from a practical point of viewa viewpoint any
idiot could have drawn from the recent Balkan warsit was nonsense. The old-
fashioned machine gun of an enemy would have mowed down this ballet troupe in a
matter of seconds.

Field exercises, war games, were also carried out on the same principle:
that the soldier must receive an order for every move he makes, that every
independent movement of the soldier must be forbidden. These exercises too, were
regulated like clockwork.

* * *

On August 2, 1914, we went into combat. On September 9th, 37 days later, the
company of 250 men had been reduced to 27, including three noncommissioned
officers. On the 100th day, November 10 ,1914, one of these three was killed and the
last two, I and another, were wounded. My wound was serious enough to keep me
out of action for the rest of the war. The other mans wound was minor. He returned
to combat and was killed only in l9l5.

The course of the First World War from 1914-18 is generally known. It ended, as all
concede, with the defeat of Germany. You can read that in any history book printed
after 1918. I scarcely need to mention it.

One thing I would like to mention: I went into combat on August 2, 1914, in the
belief that we were at war with France. I learned of Englands declaration of war
only on August l5th. Sometime around the 20th of August we amused ourselves
with some effort and dangerin climbing a church tower to take down a Belgian
flag that waved there. The division commander reprimanded us severely and
ordered us to return the flag to the tower of that Belgian village church with these
exact words, We are totally at peace with Belgium. The words were precisely
these. The date was a day earlier or later perhaps. In any case, neither combat
troops nor division commanders, nor the highly cultivated flower of the nation in
soldiers dress had any idea, two weeks after the start of the war, with whom we
were fighting.

Our first death occurred through friendly fire. It must have been August 4th or 5th.
We were still in German territory, on the border with Luxembourg. There was no
enemy visible far and wide. We had posted sentries for the night, as we had been
taught in countless peacetime exercises.

We were terribly excited and inexperienced. I remember I myself was posted behind
a bush, as sentry, with loaded weapon and the order to shoot anyone who tried to
get by me. No one informed me or the rest of us from what direction someone might
be approaching, or whether enemy troops were in fact in the area, and what they
might look like, and what I should do if they launched a real attack. All the same, I
stood behind that little bush with a loaded weapon in my hand and peered at a little
path through the fields that disappeared behind a small hill. After an hour of
watching, a cow came down the path and with the cow, a peasant boy. Neither
looked particularly hostile.

Still, this was someone trying to get by, and I was supposed to shoot anyone trying
to pass. I stuck my rifle in the bush and shouted loudly three times, Who goes
there? The peasant boy was terribly frightened and the cow went crazy. In fact I
should have shot at this point, but apparently my ten semesters of philosophy and
practice in thinking, my doctoral degree and my entire unwarlike nature made
themselves felt, so that I shot neither the boy nor the cow, but allowed them both to
proceed to the stable, some ten meters beyond me. This was on the afternoon of the
4th or 5th of August. I cant pin down the date because that strange disorientation
with regard to time, the feeling of timelessness that makes life under combat
possible at all for soldiers, had already set in. In any case: I shot neither the German
cow nor the German peasant lad.

Im not trying to be funny. For on that same evening we had our first death in the
company. He was a private, hence a man already serving his second year. In the
barracks he had worked as a cobbler and in this high rank and soft job, had got into
the habit of treating the recent recruits with mockery and condescension. A more
recent recruit, neither a private nor a company cobbler, stood watch, he too behind
a bush, along a path that led over a small hill. The soldier had been instructed, as I
had: to shout orders to halt, three times, at any passerby, and if they failed to halt, to
shoot them. The private came from the field, the soldier shouted three times. It was
still fairly light out, it must have been possible to see he wore a German uniform.

But the soldier on guard was not a doctor of philosophy in his spare time, as I was.
He yelled at the private-cobbler, Who goes there? three times in quick succession. I
dont know what the private answered to this slurred questioning. Probably he said
something like Cut the crapor intended to. After the third Who goes there? the
soldier on guard discharged his rifle and shot him dead. The first shot fired by my
company in the World War of 1914-1918 hit its mark. It hit that private from our
company in the head and killed him within minutes.

The enemy whose identity we learned only after two weeks at war caught up with
us ten days later. Then we had something like thirty skirmishes in one month, until
the battle of the Marne, September 6th, in which our company of 250 soldiers lost
around 220.

Im just telling it as I experienced it, with no additions from hindsight or outside
sources. And so I report that although I took part in the battle of the Marne I only
learned in 1917, three years later, that something called the battle of the Marne
ultimately the decisive battle of the whole First World Wareven took place.

I learned this through a sarcastic editorial in a German newspaper in 1917, about
what a big role the so-called battle of the Marne played in the imagination of our
enemies. I knew our company of 27 remaining men had grouped. I knew we had
retreated some sixty kilometers from Vitry-le-Francois. But I shared the editorial
writers skeptical view of the battle of the Marne, a figment of our enemies
imagination. The true meaning of the battle of the Marne only became clear to me
an accidental participantin 1923, five years after the defeat.

Further, the German invasion of Belgium, the decisive moment for the whole
dragging out of the war, although I took part in this too, didnt seem worth
mentioning to me, or something to regret, until ten years later.