Making friends with the enemy: what stories of soldiers’ unexpected battlefield meetings reveal about the trauma of war

Holly Furneaux, Professor of English Literature, Cardiff University

James Brady, serving with the Royal Army Medical Corps in the first world war, struggled to narrate the moment he was taken captive by German soldiers while serving on the western front. In the draft of his memoir, he crossed out and rewrote this section repeatedly.

Central to his account is what he called a “bizarre human incident” in which a “baby-faced Jerry”, speaking perfect Cockney English, approached him and gave him a photograph of himself, asking Brady to keep it “as a souvenir”:

A young German standing near suddenly nudged me and with a wink said: ‘Hello kid, how old are you then?’ Taken aback, I whispered: ‘Twenty – how old are you?’ There didn’t seem much else I could say. ‘Nineteen,’ replied the baby-faced Jerry. ‘Lived in Balham till I was 15.’

Brady, from Rochdale in Lancashire, had been rejected by army recruiters for being underage and lacking the physical requirements. He managed to enlist in the Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC) and joined a field ambulance unit on the Somme in August 1916, aged 17.

Spring offensive

He was taken prisoner at Essigny in northern France on March 21 1918, the first morning of the German spring offensive, when the enemy captured his dugout. He described the imminent threat of a senior German officer, “puce with rage, threatening to shoot everybody in sight” unless he was told the position of the British cannon.

As the altercation continued, the British machine gun battery opened fire and a British ambulance man was shot. Brady was unsure about the chain of events, querying in one draft whether the man was killed by the German officer or by the crossfire from British guns.

I came across Brady’s memoir, which was never published, in the archives of the Imperial War Museums (IWM) as part of a project exploring battlefield encounters throughout the past century, in which enemies have met and sometimes reassessed one another as human beings. Brady had been interviewed for the IWM’s first world war oral history project in 1990.

Every one of his attempts to describe that traumatic capture included an account of his extraordinary meeting with the young Cockney-speaking German soldier – an encounter which punctuated his fear and “etched itself on my memory”:

With a quick glance at his belligerent ober-lieutenant, he took a snapshot from his tunic pocket and showed me a photograph of a group of three young soldiers. ‘That is me in the middle. Here, keep it as a souvenir.’ I was flabbergasted … I took the picture and stuffed it in my tunic pocket.

The photograph became a treasured possession. Drafting his memoir 60 years later, Brady wrote: “That snapshot is still among my souvenirs.” The meeting appears to have altered his perception of the brutal war in which he fought. He referred to the German as “my friendly enemy” and “my German-Cockney friend”.

Over the past five years, I’ve researched truces, treatment of the wounded, and the taking of prisoners in many different war settings. In particular, I’ve sought out those rare moments of enemy intimacy such as Brady experienced, and would remember for the rest of his life.

On the eve of Armistice Day, I share these soldiers’ experiences – from the first world war to more recent accounts of serving in Northern Ireland and Libya – as a counterpoint to the insularity, suspicion and “othering” that is often prevalent in today’s conflicted world. These stories, in contrast, are about the power of unlikely friendships.

‘How could you be my enemy?’

A museum archivist cast doubt on parts of Brady’s story, noting there was “some indication that parts of the memoir may have been exaggerated”. But the incident of the gifted photograph appears essential to Brady’s telling of his capture – it was the part of his memoir he found most difficult to write, as evidenced by the number of times he crossed it out and started again.

My research shows Brady’s experience was far from unusual. Enemy encounters were often enabled by the exchange of gifts, including foodstuffs (even chewed biltong in the South African war), alcohol, tobacco, addresses, personal letters, newspapers, crucifixes, watches, clothes and Christmas gifts.

Key texts in the canon of war literature, including Leo Tolstoy’s War And Peace, Erich Remarque’s All Quiet On The Western Front, as well as poetry by Wilfred Owen, Robert Service and Keith Douglas, all use the exchange of personal effects between enemies to explore the feelings of what Owen called a “strange meeting”. Remarque’s novel details his German narrator’s discovery of letters and photographs in the pockets of the enemy he has killed:

Now I can see your wife and your face, and realise what we have in common. Forgive me, comrade. We always see it too late. Why do they never tell us that you are poor devils like us, that your mothers are just as anxious as ours, and that we have the same fear of death, and the same dying and the same agony. Forgive me, comrade; how could you be my enemy?

In his 1916 poem My Prisoner, Service – who, like Brady, was serving with a RAMC ambulance unit – describes a German soldier presenting a locket with a picture of his three-year-old daughter to his British (Cockney) captor, who responds by showing a picture of his own little daughter:

And we talks as friendly as can be;

Then I ‘elps ‘im on ‘is way,

‘Opes ‘e’s safe at ‘ome today,

Wonders: ‘Ow would ‘e ‘ave treated me?

As in this case, it is typically prisoners who give up personal objects to broker relationships, buy time, or diffuse an immediate threat to their safety. They are often forced to hand over valuables such as military decorations, wallets and pocket-watches. The historian Brian Feltman has argued that the plundering of prisoners is part of the enactment of power over them, increasing captives’ feelings of shame and emasculation.

But Brady’s experience bucked this trend, with one of his German captors giving him, their prisoner, a photograph. The action of that “baby-faced Jerry” points to a sense of shame that captors can sometimes experience. He took action to humanise himself, conveying goodwill through an object that could reassure both Brady and himself of his difference to his “belligerent ober-lieutenant”.

Though he never saw the German Cockney again, Brady wrote of how other instances of German sympathy helped alleviate his time as a prisoner of war. On the march to prison after his capture, he recalled how the British sang to maintain morale:

Our young Bavarian guards, most of them little more than boys, quickened their pace with ours and smiled at us wanly, pityingly. Once or twice, I caught some of them picking up the tune and humming quietly along with us.

Brady also described how their guards turned away French women who were trying to bring food to the British prisoners – but only “rather reluctantly, I thought”. And his experience of confinement was improved by a young Prussian officer who taught him to play chess: “Fritz (his real name) was a delightful character, spoke perfect English and was endowed with unlimited patience.” Brady finally returned to Britain on December 2 1919, his 21st birthday.

While violence to prisoners – illegal under the international laws of war established in the mid-19th century – is common in many conflicts, I’ve also found recurrent instances of captor shame. The taking of prisoners can provoke in some a form of existential crisis: about the humanity of one’s own side as well as the enemy, and the legitimacy of military violence and even war itself.

Informal practices of ‘live and let live’

The most famous friendly encounters between enemies in British culture are the mythologised game of football and exchange of gifts during the Christmas Day truce of 1914. In fact, there were many Christmas ceasefires along the western front that year, and truces continued to emerge on this and other fronts, including between Anzac and Ottoman soldiers at Gallipoli.

Such truces were nothing new for older soldiers who had served in the South African war of 1899-1902, when Sunday ceasefires were widely adopted in response to the Boer reluctance to fight on the Sabbath. And they were often formally agreed for collections of the dead and wounded, with enemies interacting cordially in these aftermaths of battle.

But more informal practices of “live and let live” also characterised the western front during the first world war, as military historian Tony Ashworth has documented. These included respecting mealtimes and toilet sites, and exchanging provisions and small luxuries across enemy lines – as Corporal Louis Barthas, a French infantryman, recalled in his diary during the summer of 1916:

Exchanges of gifts like packets of tobacco from the Régie Française went to fill the big German pipes, [while] delicious German cigarettes came over to the French side. We also exchanged lighters, buttons, newspapers, bread. Here was a crazy business of commerce and intelligence which would have stirred up the indignation of patriots and superpatriots.

But even when soldiers reached out to their enemy, they tended to do so along class and racial lines. Commonalities of rank or race could reinforce existing power hierarchies on both sides. The recognition of fellowship between foes often operated to exclude others, especially women and black soldiers.

In the South African war, fraternisation between Boer and British forces confirmed ideologies of superiority of two colonial powers, maintaining the fiction of this “white man’s war” by ignoring the major contributions of black scouts and forces on both sides.

This echoes the racialised patterns of fraternisation seen during the American civil war (1861-5). As historian Lauren Thompson describes in her book Friendly Enemies, moments of brotherhood between Union and Confederate troops were “denied to black men, and would be indicative of race relations in postwar America”.

The stolen pocket watch

A photograph was at the heart of another encounter between a British first world war soldier and the young German he took prisoner. Years later, Donald Price admitted stealing the German’s pocket watch – which is now in the IWM archive – during their encounter in a shell crater in 1918, recalling with regret how he took the watch from this “little German fella” who was “only about 16”.

I was very sorry for him really. We had a chinwag, I gave him a cigarette … He was a nice little chap, but I just took [the watch], you know – it was the normal thing. They’d take ours so we used to rob them … He was a prisoner, he couldn’t object.

Inside the watch, a photograph shows this very young German soldier in uniform sitting with his girlfriend – both smiling as they make eye contact with future viewers of the image. Over the soldier’s shoulder, some white trellis work makes the shape of a cross.

The personal nature of this watch-locket made Price pause for thought – in contrast with other watches he had robbed from enemy soldiers:

I often thought I made a mistake in not sending the photograph back to Germany as soon as the war had finished – to see if he was still alive and what happened to his family.

Perhaps in an alternative form of reparation, Price donated the watch to the IWM. In a subsequent interview, his voice cracked as he described his regret that it was “one of those things I just forgot to do – little chap, he was”.

His audible discomfort resonates with my findings of captor shame. This overlooked emotion recurs in many recollections, and fictional accounts, of the capture of prisoners of war throughout the 20th century.

Julian Grenfell, for example, found his usually straightforward, aggressive attitude to the enemy was challenged when taking prisoners. The British first world war officer cheerfully recorded killing Germans – keeping a “game book” in which he listed human kills alongside the partridges he had bagged. Yet in letters to his mother, he described how meeting captive enemies made him feel “ashamed”:

We took a German officer and some men prisoners in a wood the other day. I felt hatred for them after our dead, and as the officer came by me, I scowled at him … [He] looked me in the face and saluted me as he passed; and I’ve never seen a man look so proud and resolute and smart and confident, in his hour of bitterness. He made me feel terribly ashamed of myself.

War And Peace (1869) – a novel informed by Tolstoy’s experiences as an officer in the Caucasus and Crimean wars, as well as soldiers’ memoirs from the Napoleonic wars – captures this unease brilliantly. Nikolai Rostov, formerly a bellicose Russian officer, is discomforted by proximity to the French enemy he takes prisoner:

This pale, mud-stained face of a fair-haired young man with a dimple on his chin and bright blue eyes had no business with battlefields. It was not the face of an enemy; it was a domestic, indoor face.

Tolstoy presents Rostov’s feelings on taking this prisoner as hard to define, but they certainly aren’t triumph or pride. Rather, he experiences an unanchored “nasty feeling inside, an aching round his heart … something vague and confused that he couldn’t account for”.

‘I was holding his family in my hands’

Encounters with the enemy during conflict have changed due to new technologies that enable killing at greater distance. But these have not completely displaced direct contact between ground troops, as some incidents during the Russia-Ukraine war have shown. Intimate ways of engaging with the enemy – whether through exchange of personal possessions, treatment of the wounded, or care for prisoners – persist even in these very different contexts.

In the 1980s during the Iran-Iraq war, Iranian soldier Zahed Haftlung had a total reversal of mindset on seeing a wounded Iraqi enemy’s photograph of their wife and young child. Haftlung had been ordered to take no prisoners during the 1982 battle of Khorramshahr. Then he came across a severely wounded enemy soldier sheltering in a bunker.

Haflung would later describe aiming his rifle at the soldier, who held up his Koran in a plea to be spared. Inside the book, Haftlung discovered a photograph of the man’s family:

The baby’s face was in profile, but it was so young that its skin was still bright red. The woman’s dark eyes cast a spell, like she could look straight into my secrets. There was something about her gaze, a sadness that made me want to hold her hand and tell her that everything was going to be OK. I knew I was holding his family in my hands. These were the people who loved him, who would die inside if I killed him.

The transformative power of this photograph forms part of the memoir Haftlung later co-authored with Najah Aboud – the wounded enemy he had saved. The story of their remarkable post-war reunion and friendship is also the subject of Ann Shin’s documentary, My Enemy My Brother.

Another unlikely friendship, between a Guantanamo detainee and his American guard, is documented in the Guardian film My Brother’s Keeper. Steve Wood’s worldview was reshaped by his friendship with Mauritainian detainee Mohamedou Ould Slahi, who was held at Guantánamo Bay for 14 years without charge on suspicion of involvement in the September 11 attacks.

Wood’s admiration of Slahi’s resilience under torture and indefinite detention inspired his conversion to Islam. He described the gap between the vicious enemy he’d been led to expect and the man he found in Slahi as “my matrix moment in life … I just didn’t know what to believe”.

Wood and Slahi promote their friendship in a project to change minds and policies. Slahi’s 2015 book, Guantánamo Diary, and the feature film on which it is based are all part of their effort to close Guantánamo and end indefinite detention. Their story, and many others, counteract the over-simplified narrative that war is growing increasingly impersonal.

Veterans’ stories of moral injury

I looked on everyone as a human being … They were suffering, so I wanted to help.

Graham, a British veteran, is reflecting on his treatment of wounded prisoners following a riot at the Northern Ireland prison in which he was stationed in the 1970s. Through my work with the veterans’ section of arts charity Re-Live, I could compare historical accounts of enemy encounters with Graham’s experiences during the Troubles. He describes himself as having been just a “spotty teenager” at the time.

These conversations with Graham and other veterans, and broader life-story work, helped to shape Coming Home (2022), a comic made by the Re-Live group in partnership with editor Steve Sullivan and professional illustrators. Coming Home recounts four of these veterans’ experiences of enemies internal and external.

Graham’s “Stretcher-bearer Stan” returns to the site of a particularly traumatic incident. The narrative of a young bandsman named Stan, working the gate at Long Kesh prison in Northern Ireland – which held Republican and Loyalist internees from 1971-1974 – is intercut with the veteran’s return decades later, as he processes his experiences. The focus is on a prison riot in which Stan treats wounded “enemies”, and is therefore accused of lacking loyalty.

This story echoes Tolstoy’s earlier exploration of Rostov’s disconcertment on coming face to face with his enemy. In both narratives, cognitive and moral dissonance results from the gap between the enemy the soldiers had been prepared to meet by their training and culture, and the actual individuals they encountered.

Robbie’s story, “Safe Haven”, is set in the Gulf War in 1991. Tasked with providing displaced Kurdish civilians at risk of genocide with “safe passage back to their homes and ongoing security”, the marine is left wondering: “So this is a humanitarian mission?”

Safe Haven details the hospitality of the Kurdish people, and the marine’s growing intimacy with Ahmed, who declares: “My adopted son, you are part of my family” – just before the order comes for British forces to move out. This story recalls a traumatic experience of attachment, shifted allegiance and betrayal.

Our conversations with these veterans suggest that historical expressions of strangeness and uneasiness during unexpected enemy encounters were early examples of what is now understood as “moral injury”. There is growing attention to this distinct form of trauma, which can create different mental health challenges and require specific therapeutic approaches.

In a standalone artwork for the comic, illustrator Casey Raymond presents the work of repairing the heart as a form of kintsugi, a Japanese process by which broken ceramics are re-pieced with gold.

Research led by Victoria Williamson identified moral injury in veterans who had “experienced an event or events that challenged their view of who they are, the world they live in, or their sense of right and wrong”. This built on a study of potentially morally injurious events described by UK military veterans, which highlighted concerns around mistreating the other side – both civilians and enemy combatants.

In War and Peace, Rostov’s feelings about his behaviour towards his enemy are described as “a kind of remorse” – he “still felt embarrassed and somehow ashamed”. In Williamson’s study, a core identifier of moral injury was this kind of response, “where the primary emotion expressed was of guilt or shame”.

‘The enemy narrative has changed’

There is a pattern among our historical research – also visible in Graham’s Stretcher-bearer Stan – whereby a bewildering change in status or power occurs when people previously viewed as enemies begin to be understood as suffering, wounded humans in need of care. This shift can lead to a long and painful process of reassessment in which former certainties, identities and allegiances are no longer reliable.

During an event at the Museum of Military Medicine in Surrey, Graham spoke about the profoundly life-changing experience of providing care to both sides after the riot at Long Kesh:

In the course of that night, I changed from a spotty teenager into someone who’d experienced some awful things in life.

This resonated with the experiences of volunteer nurse-turned-peace activist Asma Khalifa, when she was treating enemy soldiers in Libya in the summer of 2011. Working as a field nurse for the opposition to Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s regime, Asma put herself forward to care for Gaddafi soldiers who had been neglected in a military hospital.

Having lost her best friend in the conflict and with a brother and uncles fighting for the opposition, she maintained a strict demeanour on the wards, avoiding talking and eye-contact. But on an early-morning antibiotics round, a soldier met her eyes and said: “You make me feel inhuman.” Asma later described this as “one of the most impactful moments of my life”:

When I looked at him, he seemed exactly the same as me … the same pain, the same vulnerability, the same fear, the same understanding of this devastation we were going through.

Asma and this soldier prisoner cried together, a moment she described as causing “a fundamental shift” in her. “Ever since, I don’t think of anyone as an enemy … My conditioning for accepting the enemy narrative has changed.”

The conversation between Graham and Asma, who has received awards for her peace activism, considered the dehumanisation and rehumanisation of both the enemy and the self during conflict. Such discussions have made a powerful difference to my scholarship – encouraging me to read both War and Peace and the first world war soldiers’ stories afresh, and to recognise the connections between captor shame and moral injury.

I believe the study of these transformative relationships with the enemy can help us better understand the emotional and mental complexities of warfare today – when, as Asma put it, “my conditioning for accepting the enemy narrative has changed”. Meanwhile Graham, in working with Re-Live to tell his story and have it heard, concluded:

This therapeutic process is enabling me to understand who I am – and how this story affected me. Importantly, the change is that I can talk now without shaking or anything. I probably wouldn’t have been able to do that this time last year.

Holly Furneaux will co-host an event discussing the history of enemy encounters at the Temple of Peace, Cardiff on Thursday, November 14 from 5-7pm.