A Soldier's Story, 1914–1919 (Not entirely fictional)
"He was not a large man, Herschel Konig — five foot seven in his army boots, with dark, quick eyes and the long-fingered hands of a tailor's son. But he was stubborn as London cobblestone, and he outlasted almost everyone." — imagined epigraph
Prologue: Whitechapel, August 1914
The summer of 1914 smelled of horse dung, coal smoke, and fried fish. On the streets of Whitechapel in London's East End, Yiddish competed with cockney, and the butcher's signs ran in Hebrew alongside English. It was a world unto itself — crammed tenements, garment workshops, synagogues sandwiched between public houses, the rumble of carts over the Whitechapel Road.
Herschel Konig was twenty-two years old. His family had come from Łódź, in Russian Poland, in 1903 — fleeing the pogroms that followed the Kishinev massacres, his father Mendel carrying a sewing machine and his mother Rivka carrying Herschel's infant sister Devorah. They had settled in a two-room flat off Commercial Street, and Mendel had found work as a trouser-presser in a Stepney garment factory. Herschel, after leaving the Jews' Free School at fourteen, had become an apprentice compositor at a Yiddish printing press on Brick Lane, setting type for Di Tsayt — The Times — a penny newspaper that kept the East End's immigrant Jewish world informed, argued, and occasionally inflamed.
When war was declared on 4 August 1914, Herschel was standing in front of the newspaper's window on Brick Lane, watching a crowd of young men pass singing Rule, Britannia. He thought of himself as a loyal Englishman — more so, perhaps, than many born here, because loyalty to Britain meant something to a family that had fled tyranny. His friend Barney Solomons, a bootmaker's apprentice, grabbed his arm.
"Come on, Herschel. They're enlisting at the Town Hall."
By the end of the week, Herschel Konig was Private Konig, 4th Battalion, Royal Fusiliers (City of London Regiment).
Part One: The Old Contemptibles — France and Flanders, 1914–1915
"We Are Going to Smash Them"
The Royal Fusiliers — the City of London Regiment — were one of the oldest and most distinguished infantry regiments in the British Army, raised in the Tower of London in 1685. By August 1914 they were part of the 4th Division of the British Expeditionary Force, among the first formations to cross the Channel. Herschel had barely completed his basic training at the regimental depot in Hounslow before he was handed 150 rounds of .303 ammunition, a water bottle, and an entrenching tool, and bundled onto a troop train to Southampton.
He landed at Boulogne on 23 August 1914 — the same day the BEF fought its first major engagement of the war.
The Battle of Mons (23 August 1914)
The 4th Division was not yet at Mons when the battle opened, but as the BEF's II Corps fell back on 23 August under the crushing weight of General von Kluck's First Army, the Fusiliers moved up to cover the retreat. Herschel marched through the night with blistered feet and a rifle he had never fired in anger, past columns of Belgian refugees pushing carts piled with mattresses and birdcages. Shells were falling in the distance — a sound he later described as "like God slamming a door, over and over."
The BEF was massively outnumbered but its soldiers were the best-trained riflemen in Europe. The famous "15 rounds rapid" — fifteen aimed shots per minute from a bolt-action Lee-Enfield — was so fast that German commanders initially believed they faced machine guns. At Mons and in the days that followed, the British fought a fighting retreat south toward the Marne.
Herschel's first taste of real combat came near the village of Le Cateau, on 26 August, when his battalion was ordered to hold a ridge while the division disengaged. He lay in a shallow trench behind a stone wall, firing until his shoulder was black and blue, watching the grey mass of German infantry advancing across the fields below. They held. And then they ran.
"There is no shame in a good retreat," his platoon sergeant, a regular soldier named Corporal Ferris, told him afterward. "The shame is in a bad one."
The BEF retreated nearly 200 miles in 13 days — the Great Retreat — before the line stabilized on the Marne in September, and Allenby's cavalry and the French armies combined to launch the Battle of the Marne (5–12 September 1914), pushing the Germans back north to the Aisne. For three desperate weeks in October and November, British and German forces clawed at each other in a race to outflank one another, ending in the apocalyptic First Battle of Ypres (19 October – 22 November 1914).
First Ypres: "The Graveyard of the Old Army"
The ancient Flemish cloth town of Ypres sat in a shallow salient — a bulge in the British line — and the Germans were determined to take it. The fighting around Ypres in the autumn of 1914 came close to ending the BEF as a fighting force. Whole battalions were ground down to a few dozen men. The professional soldiers of the old regular army — the "Old Contemptibles," as they called themselves after the Kaiser supposedly dismissed them as a "contemptible little army" — died by thousands in the Flemish mud.
Herschel fought at Gheluvelt on 31 October, a day the regimental histories describe as among the bleakest of the war. The line was broken; a single battalion of the Worcestershire Regiment launched a desperate counterattack that sealed the breach. He sheltered in a shelled farmhouse with four other men for two days, surrounded, eating raw turnips from a field. When the line solidified again, he emerged to find that his entire original section — the men he had enlisted with in Whitechapel — had been reduced by half.
He was awarded a mention in despatches for carrying a wounded officer, Lieutenant Ashworth, three hundred yards under fire. He did not consider this particularly heroic. "The man was screaming," he wrote to his mother, in careful Yiddish. "What was I supposed to do, leave him?"
By Christmas 1914, the line had frozen solid from the Channel to Switzerland. The trenches of the Western Front had become home.
1915: Loos and the Wearing-Out Battles
The spring of 1915 brought the horrors of Second Ypres (April–May 1915), when the Germans introduced poison gas for the first time on the Western Front — clouds of yellow-green chlorine drifting toward the Allied lines north of Ypres on 22 April. Herschel's battalion was not in the immediate path of the gas clouds, but he watched men stumble back from the front line retching and blinded, their lips turning blue. The battalion's medical officer improvised by urinating on handkerchiefs and holding them to men's faces as makeshift filters — a detail Herschel never forgot.
In September 1915 came the Battle of Loos, the largest British offensive to date, launched amid high hopes and a brief release of British gas that — owing to the wind changing — drifted back into British trenches. The Royal Fusiliers attacked across the open coalfields of northern France. Herschel was wounded for the first time here — a shell fragment cut a deep groove across his left forearm. He was evacuated to a casualty clearing station, then to a base hospital at Étaples, where he spent six weeks recovering. He later said these were the best-rested weeks of his war — a clean bed, no mud, and a Scottish nurse named Mary who brought him extra bread.
He was promoted to Lance Corporal on his return to the battalion.
Part Two: The Somme, 1916
"The Ground Ate Them"
The Battle of the Somme opened on 1 July 1916 — the blackest day in British military history. On that single day, the British Army suffered 57,470 casualties, including nearly 20,000 dead. The Royal Fusiliers were heavily engaged throughout the five-month Somme campaign, fighting at Delville Wood, High Wood, and Thiepval Ridge — names that became synonymous with industrial-scale slaughter.
Herschel survived Delville Wood — "Devil's Wood," the men called it — a devastated tangle of shattered trunks and decomposing bodies, fought over for six weeks. He later wrote of it to his sister Devorah, now fifteen and working in a Stepney shirtwaist factory:
"The wood is gone. There are no trees, only splinters. The ground is full of men. I do not mean dead men in graves — I mean the ground itself. You step on something soft and you know. You do not look down."
By September 1916, he had been promoted again — to full Corporal — and was one of the few men in his company who had been with the battalion since 1914. He was what the army called a "battle-hardened man" — quiet, efficient, and possessed of an absolute economy of emotion that is either the product of courage or its substitute.
He was wounded again in October 1916 — this time a bullet through the meaty part of his right thigh, clean in and out, missing the femur by an inch. He returned to the line in December.
Part Three: Arras and Passchendaele, 1917
The Battle of Arras (April–May 1917) began with a stunning British success — the Canadians captured Vimy Ridge on 9 April in one of the finest set-piece assaults of the war — but degenerated into the familiar stalemate. The Royal Fusiliers attacked toward Monchy-le-Preux, a village on a commanding ridge east of Arras, fighting in a late snowstorm that turned the chalk-white ground to grey slush.
The autumn brought Third Ypres — Passchendaele (July–November 1917) — arguably the worst experience of the entire war. Herschel fought in the preliminary stages, in the waterlogged moonscape of the Ypres Salient, where the artillery bombardment had destroyed the Flemish drainage system and turned the battlefield into a swamp. Men and horses drowned in shell craters. The mud was not hyperbole — it was a physical, lethal presence that swallowed men whole.
"Tell me there is a God," his friend Private Moishe Feldman — also from the East End, also Jewish — said to him one night in the front line. "Not the God of Shabbos dinner. A God who knows about this place."
Herschel had no answer. He believed in God; he simply could not understand what God was doing here.
A Fork in the Road: Transfer to the 38th Royal Fusiliers, Late 1917
In the summer and autumn of 1917, word had begun to filter through the East End battalions of the Royal Fusiliers — and there were many Jews among them, sons of Whitechapel and Stepney and Hackney — that the British government was forming a specifically Jewish regiment to fight in Palestine. The idea had been championed for years by Vladimir Jabotinsky, the Zionist writer and activist, and by Joseph Trumpeldor, a one-armed veteran of the Russo-Japanese War. After years of rejection and bureaucratic obstruction, the War Office had finally agreed.
On 23 August 1917, the formation of a Jewish regiment was officially announced in the London Gazette. It would be designated the 38th Battalion, Royal Fusiliers — though its men would call it, proudly, "The Judeans."
Herschel read the notice in a dog-eared copy of a London newspaper that had made its way to his dugout near Ypres. He read it three times.
For three years he had fought as an Englishman — loyally, without question or complaint. He had bled in Flanders fields alongside Welsh miners and Scottish shepherds and London costermongers, and he did not regret a day of it. But here was something different: a chance to fight not only for Britain, but as a Jew — in the land that every Shabbos prayer pointed toward, the land his parents spoke of when they said "L'Shanah haba'ah b'Yerushalayim" — "Next year in Jerusalem."
He put in for a transfer.
His commanding officer, a Cheshire man named Major Holt, shook his hand when he signed the papers.
"Good man, Konig. You've earned it."
Part Four: The Judeans — Egypt and Palestine, 1918
The March Through Whitechapel
The 38th Battalion assembled throughout late 1917, drawing men from across the Jewish communities of Britain — East End tailors and cobblers, clerks and market traders, Russian-Jewish refugees who had been pressed into "alien battalions" and now demanded the right to fight as Jews. Sculptor Jacob Epstein was among them. So was Jabotinsky himself, commissioned as a lieutenant. The battalion was commanded by Lieutenant Colonel John Henry Patterson, an Anglo-Irish Protestant who had led the Zion Mule Corps at Gallipoli and was one of the most ardent non-Jewish supporters of the Jewish Legion.
On Monday, 4 February 1918, the 38th Battalion paraded through the streets of the City of London and then east along the Whitechapel Road — the heart of Jewish London — with fixed bayonets, a special privilege granted by the Lord Mayor of London. The Jewish Virtual Library records the scene:
"It was a momentous and iconic moment in Jewish history… the Jews of East London lined the streets in their thousands, cheering, weeping, reaching out to touch the men." — The March of the 38th Royal Fusiliers, Jewish Virtual Library [pro-israel]
Herschel marched past his own street. His mother Rivka was there, standing on the pavement in her best black coat, her face a knot of pride and terror. His sister Devorah waved a small Union Jack. He did not break ranks — that would never do — but he caught his mother's eye for a moment, and nodded.
The following morning, 5 February 1918, the 38th Battalion sailed from Southampton for Egypt.
Egypt: Training Under the Desert Sun
The battalion disembarked at Alexandria and moved to a training camp near Tel el-Kebir in the Egyptian desert — the same ground where a British force had defeated Egyptian nationalist forces in 1882. The heat was shocking after the grey cold of Flanders; the sand got into everything, the food was strange, and the scorpions were a constant hazard.
But the mood was remarkable. These were men with a purpose beyond the usual soldier's motives of duty, pay, and not wanting to let their mates down. Many of them — including Herschel — spoke Yiddish and Hebrew, could read the names on ancient sites, knew the Biblical geography of this landscape. Palestine was not foreign to them in the way it was to the British Tommies. It was the landscape of their deepest imagination.
In April, the 39th Battalion arrived — recruited largely from American and Canadian Jewish volunteers, over fifty percent of whom were from the United States. Many had crossed the Atlantic specifically to join. The two battalions together formed the core of what became known as the Jewish Legion, though officially they remained battalions of the Royal Fusiliers. A third battalion, the 40th, was recruited largely from Palestinian Jewish refugees and included among its volunteers two men who would shape the future: David Ben-Gurion and Levi Eshkol.
Into Palestine: June 1918
In June 1918, the 38th and 39th Battalions were transferred north into Palestine, assigned positions in the hills of Judea, roughly 20 miles north of Jerusalem, facing Ottoman Turkish lines across the valleys. The Jewish Virtual Library records:
"Transferred to Palestine in June 1918, the 38th Battalion was assigned front positions some 20 miles north of Jerusalem on the hills facing a Turkish encampment." — Jewish Legion, Jewish Virtual Library [pro-israel]
For Herschel — a man who had survived three years of the Western Front — the Palestine terrain was disorienting in its beauty. The Judean hills were ancient and bleached, dotted with olive trees and stone-terraced hillsides, the air carrying the scent of thyme and dust. He could see the towers of Jerusalem on clear days. He wrote to Devorah:
"I can see the walls of the city from here. I keep thinking of Papa, and of the Passover Haggadah. Here we are. I cannot quite believe it."
The summer months were spent in patrol activity, consolidating positions, and waiting. General Edmund Allenby — "the Bull," as his men called him — was planning the final offensive that would end the war in the Middle East. He was a cavalry general who understood the importance of ground and movement, and he had spent months preparing a masterstroke of deception.
Part Five: The Battle of Megiddo — September 1918
Armageddon
The Battle of Megiddo (19–25 September 1918) takes its name from the ancient fortress-town of Megiddo in the Jezreel Valley — the same site that gave the Book of Revelation its word Armageddon (Har Megiddo, "Mountain of Megiddo"). It was the decisive battle of the Palestine campaign, and it is still studied in military academies as one of the most brilliantly executed offensive operations in the history of warfare.
Allenby had spent the summer making the Ottomans believe he would attack eastward, across the Jordan, while he quietly massed the bulk of his force — infantry, cavalry, and RAF aircraft — opposite the coastal plain near the Mediterranean. On the night of 18–19 September, his forces struck. The RAF bombed the Ottoman command headquarters at Nablus, cutting telephone lines and killing horses. Then the artillery opened — 385 guns firing along a 15-mile front — and the infantry swept forward.
The Ottoman line collapsed within hours. Allenby's cavalry — the Desert Mounted Corps — poured through the gap and wheeled north and east, cutting off the entire Ottoman Seventh and Eighth Armies. It was cavalry warfare on a scale not seen since Napoleon. Within days, Haifa and Acre had fallen; within a week, the Ottoman armies in Palestine were destroyed or in full retreat.
The role of the 38th and 39th Battalions in this grand offensive was a specific and vital one: while the main blow fell on the coastal plain, the Jewish battalions were assigned to the Jordan Valley sector, tasked with crossing the Jordan River and securing the eastern flank of the advance.
"We were told we were to cross the Jordan," Herschel later recounted (as imagined in this telling). "I thought: after everything — the Somme, Passchendaele, four years of mud and blood — I am to cross the Jordan River. Like Moses. Except I intend to come out the other side."
Crossing the Jordan
The Jordan River crossings executed by the Jewish Legion in September-October 1918 were among the most symbolically charged military actions of the entire war. The 38th and 39th Battalions crossed at several points along the river — shallow, muddy, and unremarkable to look at, but weighted with the entire history of a people.
The Ottoman troops defending the eastern bank were demoralized and in retreat, the collapse of their main army to the west having destroyed any coherent resistance. Nevertheless, the crossing was contested in places, with rearguard actions fought among the reed beds and date palms of the Jordan Valley.
Herschel's company crossed before dawn on 23 September, wading waist-deep through the brown water with their rifles held over their heads, stumbling on the rocky riverbed. On the eastern bank — the land of Moab — he stopped for a moment, dripping, and looked back west toward the setting of the moon. He said the Shehecheyanu prayer quietly to himself — the Jewish blessing for reaching a new time or a new place: "Blessed are You, Lord our God, King of the Universe, who has kept us alive, and maintained us, and brought us to this season."
Then he picked up his rifle and moved forward with the advancing line.
The Jewish Legion went on to raid into the hills of Moab east of the Jordan, harassing the retreating Ottoman forces and securing the river crossings against any counterattack. On 30 October 1918, the Ottoman Empire signed the Armistice of Mudros, ending hostilities in the Middle East. The war in Palestine was over.
Part Six: Aftermath — Jerusalem, 1919
The months that followed were strange, suspended ones. The fighting was done, but demobilization moved with the ponderous slowness of armies at peace. The men of the Jewish Legion were stationed at various points across Palestine, performing garrison duties while the diplomats in Paris drew new maps of the world.
Herschel was stationed for a time near Jaffa, where the white buildings and orange groves and the smell of the Mediterranean sea were so different from everything he knew that he sometimes stood on the beach in the evening simply staring at the water. Jewish immigrants were beginning to arrive in the port — men and women from Eastern Europe, fleeing the renewed violence of the Russian Civil War and its attendant pogroms, coming to build something new in this ancient land.
He was promoted to Sergeant in November 1918, and spent his last months in uniform helping to train Palestinian Jewish volunteers who had joined the 40th Battalion. Among his recruits were young men of nineteen and twenty who would, within a few decades, become soldiers of a different army entirely — the army of the State of Israel.
He was formally discharged in August 1919, at a demobilization depot in Cairo, and given his railway warrant and his soldier's small-book and a gratuity of £12 10 shillings.
He was twenty-seven years old.
Epilogue: Back to Whitechapel
Herschel Konig returned to London on a troopship in September 1919, landing at Tilbury in the grey morning rain that he suddenly found extraordinarily beautiful. He made his way by train and underground railway to Whitechapel, walked through the familiar streets smelling of bread and salt herring and horse and familiar Yiddish shouting, and knocked on the door of his mother's flat on Commercial Street.
Rivka Konig opened the door, looked at her son for a long moment — older, thinner, with a scar on his forearm and a slight stiffness in his right leg — and burst into tears.
He had not come back unchanged. How could he have? But he had come back.
He went back to the printing press on Brick Lane — now setting type for a slightly more prosperous East End newspaper — and in 1921 he married a woman named Hannah Bernstein, whose father ran a hardware shop in Mile End. He became active in the Ex-Servicemen's Association and occasionally attended reunions of the Jewish Legion veterans, where old men who had crossed the Jordan together grew slowly older over glasses of lemon tea.
He never spoke very much about the war. When his children asked — he had three: two boys and a girl — he would say only: "We went. We did what was needed. We came home."
And then, usually, he would change the subject to something more interesting — the news, the football, what was for dinner.
Historical Notes and Sources
| Event | Date | Link |
|---|---|---|
| Battle of Mons | 23 August 1914 | Wikipedia — Battle of Mons |
| First Battle of Ypres | Oct–Nov 1914 | Wikipedia — First Ypres |
| Battle of Loos | September 1915 | Wikipedia — Battle of Loos |
| Battle of the Somme | July–November 1916 | Wikipedia — Battle of the Somme |
| Formation of the Jewish Legion | August 1917 | Jewish Virtual Library — Jewish Legion [pro-israel] |
| The March of the 38th Royal Fusiliers through Whitechapel | 4 February 1918 | Jewish Virtual Library — The March of the 38th [pro-israel] |
| Allenby captures Jerusalem | December 1917 | Jewish Virtual Library — Allenby in Jerusalem [pro-israel] |
| Battle of Megiddo | 19–25 September 1918 | Wikipedia — Battle of Megiddo (1918) |
| Armistice of Mudros | 30 October 1918 | Wikipedia — Armistice of Mudros |
Herschel Konig is a fictional character. His regiment — the Royal Fusiliers (City of London Regiment) and the 38th Battalion Royal Fusiliers ("The Judeans") — are real, as are all the battles, commanders, dates, and historical events described. The Jewish Legion's participation in the Palestine campaign and the crossing of the Jordan River are documented history. Vladimir Jabotinsky, Lieutenant Colonel Patterson, David Ben-Gurion, and others named are real historical figures.__
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