Dunkirk: The Men They Left Behind Part 9

In the year that followed they became forgotten men. Not until early 1941, nine months after the defeat of the BEF, were the Red Cross able to visit some of the 294 men employed at the frontstalags. Many had remained in the areas where they had been captured. In some areas the prisoners were in small groups, such as the eight officers and ten other ranks working at Peronne. Elsewhere some unfortunate POWs were held alone, working for the enemy without the comfort and support of their fellow prisoners. Slowly, reports trickled back to London, painting a bleak picture. At Le Mans fifteen British soldiers were held in conditions that shocked Red Cross inspectors: 'The disorder here is complete. The huts are falling to pieces. Food is poor and insufficient. The men sleep on the ground without any blankets. Conditions of hygiene are deplorable.'12 The story was the same across northern France. The fifteen prisoners at Saveny received just two loaves of bread between them each day and on just four days a week they shared a small portion of horsemeat. Prussian guards at Laval were accused of brutalizing their prisoners who, without even a blanket, slept on a bare concrete floor. Red Cross inspectors went on to report how the British in the frontstalags were undernourished, treated most severely and often shot on the slightest provocation. The threat of lethal violence was most vividly shown when the 500 British prisoners at Mulhouse revolted following the outbreak of an epidemic. As a result of the revolt, twenty prisoners were picked out at random and executed.

The unfortunate prisoners at the frontstalags were not the only men put to work that year. Almost immediately after their arrival at their designated stalags, the thousands of POWs began to filter out into workcamps known as AKs or arbeitskommandos that spread rapidly across the Reich. Under the Geneva Convention all prisoners beneath the rank of sergeant could be put to work. There were definite rules about their employment that were designed to protect them from exploitation. They should not be employed in dangerous jobs, nor in any form of war work. They should be given rations equal with those allowed for civilian workers and be housed in clean and heated surroundings. During the following five years, few of the prisoners were treated according to the rules. Initially those in London had little idea of the working conditions endured by the men on working parties. In August 1940 the General Secretary of the British Red Cross wrote to the Foreign Office: 'Several relatives of prisoners of war have been in here during the last few days to enquire about a rumour that is apparently going about, that their husbands, sons etc. have been put to work in the salt mines of Poland. I presume we can contradict this.'13 His presumption was misplaced. As he wrote, hundreds of men were beginning life as enforced salt miners in Upper Silesia.

Initially, and understandably, most prisoners were wary about working for the enemy after all they had gone to war to stop the n.a.z.i war machine, not become part of it. However, most soon realized there was little choice in the matter if the Germans told them to work, they would have to work. Furthermore, there was one attractive thing about working parties: they allowed the men out of the stalags and gave them contact with civilians. The first groups of prisoners, who were sent out to work from the stalags each morning, returned in the evening carrying the spoils of illicit deals they were able to conduct. Furtively, the prisoners made contact with civilians and traded whatever they had available. Watches and wedding rings were exchanged for bread and sausage. Desperation led the prisoners to develop an entrepreneurial spirit. If a prisoner knew he could get two loaves for one watch, he would make deals with fellow prisoners, agreeing to take their watches out to sell. He could then offer the seller a portion of what he had received, effectively acting as a broker for those unable to leave the stalag to make their own deals.

With conditions within the camp failing to improve, large numbers of prisoners began to fall sick. There were increasing numbers of TB cases, epidemics of boils, outbreaks of typhoid and a constant array of men suffering from festering sores caused by the constant scratching of insect bites. Despite the dedication of those members of the Royal Army Medical Corps who had been taken prisoner, there was a limit to how much they could do. For Ernie Grainger the desire to help his fellow inmates at Lamsdorf was undermined by one basic problem: 'We had no equipment. There was an awful lot of dry pleurisy. It is not a fatal condition but it's very painful. But we had nothing to treat it with. Bronchitis and asthma were a problem in the winter. Lots of people went down with frostbite and lung diseases. The Germans didn't give us any medicines.'

It was a situation that was painfully obvious to Fred Gilbert. Having been shot three times in his final battle, Gilbert received little in the way of meaningful treatment for his wounds: 'You were just supposed to get better. It slowly started to heal up. But whilst I was in Lamsdorf, I think it was bandaged up a couple of times in three months.'

Remaining at Thorn, Graham King was initially sent to work as an orderly for the dentist looking after the prisoners. He was only able to work two days a week since it was an eight-kilometre round trip to the surgery each day. He was just too weak to contemplate making the trip more than twice a week. Later in the year he began working at the Medical Inspection Room in Fort 15. With medical supplies so limited, their greatest fear was of major outbreaks of disease. Of particular concern was typhoid, since none of the water that arrived in the fort's crumbling underground brick-built water tanks had been treated. Furthermore, water from the cesspits was found to be leaking into the main water tanks. As a result they were forced to carry out ma.s.s inoculations, injecting 1,500 men three times over a period of three weeks. In the weeks that followed they had to give a further 3,000 injections to inoculate against diphtheria. The problem was that the hospital had just two syringes and twenty-five needles. As a result, the medics had to regularly sharpen the needles between injections just to keep working.

We worked hard in the MI Room. Following on from the dysentery and malnutrition we now had multiple boils, suppurating wounds from lice and fleabites, respiratory complaints and the threat of diphtheria. All the men had to have throat swabs taken and then inoculations were carried out, compulsorily. The lice and fleabite wounds were most time-consuming because there were so many on each patient which took a considerable amount of time to clean and dress. As there was a shortage of dressings, we had to reuse the bandages by giving the slack to the patient to hold and the orderly rewound the bandage. I was dressing the multiple septic lice bite sores of an ancient warrior claimed to have dropped twenty years off his age to join up, but was a pensioner when I noticed an army of lice walking up the bandage towards me. A quick shake and they fell to the floor where, with much stamping of booted feet we hoped the majority perished. It took about an hour to dress this guy's wounds so he came every other day.

One of those whose health suffered while at Thorn was Seaforth Highlander David Mowatt. Such was his rapidly worsening condition, it seemed he had survived battle and the march into captivity for nothing: I was in Fort 17. But I got gastroenteritis twice. My stomach was in a terrible state. The first time I was roped to the b.l.o.o.d.y bed, for five days. There was no medical attention. I recovered. Then suddenly a week later I had another attack. As I came around the second time I looked into a face of an officer. He had this little tin mug of water and was dabbing my lips. I said to him, 'I thought I was in heaven!' He said to me, 'No, thank G.o.d. You're still in the land of the living.' He told me he was going to get me out of the hospital or else they'd end up carrying me out. He suggested I go on a working party. I said, 'Sir. I can't even stand up let alone work!' But he knew he needed to get me out of the camp because the walls were running with water and were green with fungus. So he got me out on a small working party.

Once out at work he began to slowly recover, courtesy of the extra food that he received each day. It was clear to Mowatt that joining a working party had been a small price to pay to escape from the conditions that had reduced him to such an appalling physical state.

Sent initially on a working party to build a road that was soon washed away during a storm d.i.c.k Taylor was also glad to be working: 'On a working party you were fully employed. You were pretty tired when you came back at night, there was no time for thinking.' His fellow Northumberland Fusilier, Jim Charters, said the same thing: 'It was a relief to go to work. If I hadn't have been working I'd have gone round the bend.'

With time, some workcamps would become well established, offering a basic standard of living to the prisoners. However, in 1940 this was not the case. Early working parties endured living and working conditions far below the internationally agreed standards for POWs. The food was invariably awful, offering little in the way of sustenance for the working prisoners. One man, who had already lost two front teeth after being beaten by the guards, recorded his daily rations as black bread and coffee for breakfast, a pint of weak broth for lunch and a cup of coffee for his evening meal. He was only saved by the kindness of Polish prisoners who managed to get extra food for him. On an early working party, Bob Davies recalled the daily rations: 'We were weak. We mainly had watery soup with black bread. We shared a ten-inch loaf between five people or, when food was short, it was one between six. It was once a day and that was your lot no b.u.t.ter, marmalade or jam. We got hungry but the old stomach settles down, shrinks, and eventually you realize you don't need so much food.'

Eric Reeves, who took part in the building work to expand the stalag at Schubin, was soon aware that the food shortages had undermined their ability to carry out even the most menial duties: They got loads of bricks and we formed a human chain to move them. One bloke said, 'Here, that ain't how you do it. You take two at a time . . .' So someone else shouted, 'Oi! We're working for the Germans now. We're not on piecework!' So we pa.s.sed them slowly from hand to hand. But even at that rate, after an hour or so, we'd had enough we were shattered. Another time I was a lumberjack. We were out in the wood cutting trees to make pit props. They gave me a double-headed axe but I couldn't even pick it up. It was too heavy. We were suffering from hunger.

As early as July 1940 some men arrived at Stalag 9C to discover that other prisoners had already been sent to workcamps. The first seventy-six British prisoners sent to work were employed on local building projects. Forty-two of the men slept in a single attic room while the remainder slept in a large room above a garage. The kitchen and laundry facilities were insufficient for the numbers living there and all seventy-six of them shared just five toilets. The men worked for nearly twelve hours each day but did not receive any work clothes. As a result their uniforms were soon ruined. It was little wonder the prisoners considered they were being made into slaves.

The story was repeated throughout the system of arbeitskommandos. Sleeping accommodation was always basic, with men sleeping in spartan huts often without even bunks, straw mattresses or blankets. Some of the luckier prisoners found themselves employed as builders and were pleased to discover they were actually constructing huts for themselves to live in. The huts may have been basic but at least they knew they would soon be sleeping in purpose-built accommodation rather than living 200 to a room in three-tier bunks contained within a former Polish Army stables.

Toilets at workcamps were seldom more than holes in the ground, which were regularly emptied to spread upon the fields, and was.h.i.+ng facilities consisted of a single cold tap if they were lucky. For Jim Pearce, whose duties that winter included shovelling snow from Luftwaffe runways, there was a tin in the corner of the hut that was used as a toilet during the night: 'I can still remember my mate Bubbles calling out, "Mind the toilet tin! Mind the rats!" 'Cause the rats were always in the huts. It was horrible the rats lived with us. They'd crawl over you in the bunk. No one wanted to sleep in the bottom bunk at night.'

Though the conditions at most of the workcamps left much to be desired, one thing was certain work meant food, food meant life and thus work meant survival. It was a simple equation.

Despite that, there were some employments that were reviled by the prisoners. Worst of all were the mines of Silesia, into which many of the prisoners from Stalag 8B were sent. There were coal, salt, copper and lignite mines. Conditions within, in particular the unfamiliar sense of claustrophobia, made the mines a place of fear. One of those who soon found himself at a coal mine was Cyril Holness. It was a far cry from his pre-war days at a suburban railway station: It was frightening. I had no idea what mines would be like. Before that I'd only read about it up in Geordie land! We just had these tiny lamps that went out all the time. We didn't have any protective clothing, just rough old clothes. Just an old vest with rags tied around your boots. Going down in the cage was terrible it was dripping wet, water was running down the walls. I reached a low point in that pit. One time my lamp went out. I was stuck in the pitch black. I was calling out but no one could hear me, because of the noise of the machinery. So I had to crawl along the rock to find my way out. That was the worst time.

For some prisoners the horrors of war seemed to have followed them from the battlefields of France all the way to Poland. Jim Reed recalled his experiences on a working party from Stalag 21B: 'My first workcamp was when they sent us to dig up the Jews from the local cemetery. They made ten different men go on this every day. It was an awful job. But we had no choice. You might not want to go but if you get a few strokes off the guard's rifle-b.u.t.t you soon change your mind. It was a terrible job.'

It was little wonder men began to attempt to escape. Some were successful but others were caught and returned to the camp. Reed and his mates heard the punishment handed out to the returning men: 'The guards lived at the end of our hut. We knew someone was getting some stick from the shouting that was going on. We could hear them thumping and banging. They turned us out and the guards were waiting. They lined up and made the escapers run the gauntlet. You wouldn't believe men could be so savage. They beat them all the way hit them everywhere and kicked them down into the potato store.'

The following day the prisoners were lined up ready for work, but few were in the mood to work for the people they had watched beating their comrades. The sergeant in charge of the prisoners then put on a display of courage that made a lasting impression on Reed: He said to the Germans, 'We want those men out of the cellar to have a look at them. Or we're not going to work today.' The guards came amongst us. .h.i.tting us with rifle-b.u.t.ts. But no one was going to work. The Germans backed Sgt Williams against a wall but he said, 'I've told my men they are not working.' The German went mad, he shouted, 'They are not your men they are my men!' I've seen one or two brave men but that was something special. The German pointed his rifle at him and said, 'I am going to shoot you.' So Sgt Williams shouted to us, 'No one is going out of these gates without my permission!' In the end the Germans backed down. They let the men out of the cellar. I thought we were all going to be shot! So we went to work, but we didn't do a lot that day.

The violence of their guards was not the only issue the prisoners had to deal with. There was also the question of exhausted men attempting to work as they survived on just the most basic rations. The general weakness of the working prisoners resulted in large numbers having accidents or falling sick as a beleaguered medical staff attempted to look after them. By late 1940, Fred Gilbert, barely recovered from the bullet wounds he had sustained during the retreat through Belgium, found himself working at a granite quarry in Poland. It was a far cry from his pre-war days of training to be a commercial artist: I was on this wagon moving stones and some bright bloke picked up a stone and went to throw it on. I said, 'Hold it! Don't let it go!' I was trying to pull it out of the way and the stone dropped and landed on the top of my finger. I was taken to a German doctor who lopped off the top of my finger and st.i.tched it up. So I was sent back to Lamsdorf for the winter. I had to get it dressed most days. This doctor looked at it it was all wet and soggy he said, 'That wants drying up.' So he cleaned it up and signed me off to go back to work. I could have strangled him!

The working prisoners were lucky if they found any qualified medical staff to treat their wounds. During the early period of captivity large numbers of medics were still preoccupied with caring for those who had been seriously wounded in the battles of May and June. Furthermore, many captured in the fall of France were not initially allowed to work in a medical capacity. Some spent more than a year before being detailed to a.s.sist with medical care. Others, like Les Allan, were never recognized as medics and spent the entire war as labourers on working parties. The majority of available medics found themselves remaining behind in the main camps, where they operated hospitals for those suffering from disease or serious injury. As a result, the medics sent to working parties found they had little with which to treat those who suffered day-to-day injuries.

Captured near the Mont des Cats and initially imprisoned in Lamsdorf, Norman Barnett was sent out on an early working party where he attempted to look after the welfare of his fellow prisoners: There were 125 POWs there. I didn't have any bandages or any medicines. The Germans asked me if everything was in order but I said, 'No, I need ointment.' We needed it for frostbite. The POWs were cleaning the coal silt from a ca.n.a.l. I did get a few aspirin and quinine tablets and some black tar that came in a tube. When the men got blistered with frostbite we had to use this cream. You had to cut away all the dead skin when you cut it though, G.o.d the stink! b.l.o.o.d.y h.e.l.l! Then rub the cream on it. But you couldn't do much for the blokes. Just help their morale if you gave them a bit of string to hold their b.l.o.o.d.y trousers up, it was something good!

As the year progressed, most of the prisoners began slowly to recover their health. It was not that they had suddenly begun to live in luxury but quite simply they were no longer starving. Once they had gone to work, found opportunities to trade, and also to beg, steal or borrow food, they began the slow process of recovery.

More than anything, during 1940 there was just one thing that saved the prisoners from wasting away Red Cross parcels. As some later commented, it always seemed so strange that a simple cardboard box no bigger than a s...o...b..x could bring so much joy to their lives. In the words of Ernie Grainger, struggling to survive at Lamsdorf: 'To be honest, if it wasn't for the Red Cross and the Gold Flake cigarettes they sent us, I wouldn't be alive now. Because those cigarettes were currency. I could buy a loaf for five cigarettes.' d.i.c.k Taylor, on working parties from Stalag 20A, agreed: 'If we hadn't have got the parcels we wouldn't have survived. That's fairly sure. On the forestry kommando we got what was called "heavy workers' rations", but it was only another half ounce of margarine and a bit of sausage that was all. Not enough to keep us going. In the end the Germans were no better off than we were.'

At first the parcels were shared between large groups of men. In some cases they held lotteries to decide who should get what. Ken Willats celebrated his good fortune when he received a small bar of soap from a Red Cross parcel. Initially he was disappointed not to get any food, but he soon realized he had actually been fortunate. The following day all those who had received food having consumed it immediately were just as hungry as ever, while he was still able to keep clean. Corporal Allan, who later escaped home via the Soviet Union, reported his share of the first Red Cross parcels: 'We received one parcel on 28th August, which was divided between forty-one men; my portion being twelve cigarettes and half a tin of kippers.'14 Graham King later recalled the excitement that accompanied the sharing out of cigarettes and tins of condensed milk: 'We grabbed the tin, raced to our room, punched two opposing holes in the top, lay on our bunks and sucked at one of the holes, a complete reversion to babyhood. Quite soon the tins were emptied and we lay back with full bellies, belching like contented Arabs. Suddenly, there was a ma.s.s exodus to the latrines where the sounds of violent vomiting could be heard and sighs of "Never again." Much too rich for our starving guts.' Although the prisoners celebrated the arrival of these parcels, they were not all so lucky. For Eric Reeves, weighing just six stones, the joy of receiving a Red Cross parcel shared between seven men did not come until March 1941. As he recalled: 'By that time we were virtually skeletons.'

If their health began to recover, the same could not be said of their emotions. The improvements in health coincided with the arrival of winter. As the days got shorter and the first snows of winter began to bite, it was difficult to maintain morale. Nothing had prepared them for this. The experience of shovelling snow in minus 20 often without gloves or overcoats drained the men. Jim Pearce recalled getting 'down in the dumps' since he was living on foul horsemeat stew and working outside in freezing conditions that meant he was unable to do his flies up after urinating.

Though they tried to put a brave face on, beneath the veneer of self-confidence that was displayed for their guards, the reality was that most of the prisoners were sick, tired and frustrated. They were scared for themselves and for their families. They may have been able to switch their minds off as their senses were dulled by long hours of hard labour but, at the end of each day, as they lay down to sleep, their thoughts were awash with emotions. As Bill Holmes remembered: When I thought about things was just before I went to sleep. You were exhausted but you'd think about what had happened that day or about what people had said. It might be a tale about home and you'd wonder if it was true. Then I'd wonder if I was ever going home. On one occasion I had a dream about my parents. And in it my mother was standing beside a grave in our local churchyard. When I woke up I thought about whether it was my grave and the dream was trying to tell me something. It was an emotional time. I kept thinking about that for a long time.

As the year drew to a close, all the prisoners had to cling to was the notion that one day sometime in the future they might finally go home. And so, the end of that first year was a landmark. After months of the ceaseless routine of forced labour or the stupefying tedium of stalag life, Christmas and the New Year were a sign that time had not stood still.

Yet as the prisoners made light of their situation and attempted to celebrate the season, there was plenty to remind them that, for those imprisoned by the n.a.z.is, this was not the season of goodwill. On a working party from Stalag 8B, Bill Holmes and his mates did their utmost to wrest some enjoyment from their first Christmas in captivity: Everybody said, 'We'll be home for next Christmas, that's for sure.' There we were, sleeping on hay in an old barn, and we could hear the Germans singing carols it was 'Silent Night'. Even now, when I hear that it brings a tear to my eye. There we were with nothing we were full office. On Christmas morning we got up and thought we might as well have a laugh. There was this Scots lad with us, he was having a laugh but the guard thought he was laughing at them. So the guard shot him dead. His corpse lay there in the snow for three days. The guard said, 'If any of you laugh at us the same will happen to you.' That was my first Christmas in captivity.

Looking out into the snow, all thoughts of the Christmas season were swept away. All they could do was look at the frozen corpse and dream that some day they might survive to go home. However, there would be four more Christmases before the men who had escaped via Dunkirk would return as their liberators. It would be a long and arduous wait.

CHAPTER ELEVEN.

Five Years There was no opportunity for individuals to be alone. Everywhere they went, everything they did, was among a group who observed and commented . . . Baths, eating, was.h.i.+ng, reading, writing and latrine visits were all carried out in the company of others.

Graham King, RAMC, on his five years in Stalag 20A

All who have been in captivity for a considerable period are more or less abnormal.

War Office report on the psychological impact of life in a POW camp1 If the trials and tribulations of 1940 had not been enough, the remnants of the BEF faced five long years of misery in the stalags of Germany. The rosy picture of POW life that emerged in the post-war years was a fantasy, born of the public's reluctance to read stories that did not focus on prisoners spending their days attempting to escape. Though a brilliant piece of film-making, the 1963 film The Great Escape helped to create a public image of POWs that was essentially a myth and yet it is one that has survived to the present day. Quite simply, it bore little or no resemblance to the day-to-day lives of the vast ma.s.ses of prisoners of war, whose lives revolved around forced labour, inadequate food, disease, violence and death.

There were three categories of prisoners. The first were the officers, who lived in separate quarters to the men they had led in battle. The second group were the NCOs, above the rank of corporal, who were excused from work by the conditions of the Geneva Convention. The third group making up the vast majority of POWs were the men employed at the workcamps. The lives of men in these different groups were entirely different. The existence of a typical POW lifestyle was the creation of the post-war media, presenting images that revolved around escape committees, wooden horses and tunnel-digging.

At Laufen, home to large numbers of officers captured in 1940, the prisoners were housed in a country palace, formerly the residence of the Archbishops of Salzburg. Others were imprisoned in a former girls' school at Rotenburg, or the hill-top castle at Spangenburg. Most famously, a number of the officers captured in 1940 eventually found themselves housed in the notorious Colditz Castle.

Unlike the men in the main stalags, who had soon discovered the advantages of going out to work and being able to trade with the local workforce, the officer prisoners had no such benefits. In the early years of the war some were allowed to give their parole, taking walks in the countryside on the agreement they would not escape. One Red Cross inspector even arrived at an oflag to be told he would not be able to meet the prisoners since they were out skiing. In most camps where officers were allowed out, there existed an unwritten agreement among the prisoners that they would not breach the conditions of parole. They agreed it was not fair for those who wished to escape to endanger the few freedoms enjoyed by the majority. After all, deep down, most escapers knew they themselves would soon be recaptured and be returning to the stalag.

As well as being able to give their parole and go for walks, the officers benefited from a number of other ranks allotted to each camp to act as batmen effectively servants for officer prisoners. Such measures did not meet with everyone's approval. Despite the desperate need for trained medical staff to look after the sick, some were diverted from their duties. In 1941 Fort 15 at Thorn became a camp for officers. Although a medic, Graham King was detailed to act as batman to a group of four senior officers: My job was to look after these four, as a general skivvy, tidying up after them and fetching and cleaning. As a medic I took a dim view of this, as there were many sick among the other officers and there were no more medics to spare. Two days later a senior British Medical Officer arrived, Lt-Col. Morris, MC, RAMC, actually the CO of the unlucky 13th CCS. He was an outspoken man and shortly explained to the Brigadier the rights of protected personnel and I was returned to the sick bay forthwith.

While many working-cla.s.s men had little more than their work clothes and one suit 'for best', officers tended to have more clothing that could be sent to them from home. Many regular officers requested their best service uniforms be sent from home, allowing them to dress presentably after having lost so much when they were captured. Other privileges were the result of the cla.s.s differences between officers and their men. Officers usually had bank accounts, something few of the other ranks had access to, and were able to use their savings to continue to spend money at home. They could request purchases from shops and for items to be posted out to them. Or they could arrange to buy presents for their loved ones, with some women recalling how their husbands managed to arrange a weekly delivery of flowers and ensure birthday presents reached their children. Such continuing connections with the outside world allowed officers to remember there was a world outside the barbed wire of a POW camp. However, those officers enjoying these privileges found that, although it made their lives more comfortable, there were certain disadvantages. Having a servant meant they had less to do each day to fill the long, boring hours of captivity. Rather than filling their hours with menial labour they had to find something else to do as they waited between roll-calls and mealtimes.

Despite the supposed glamour shown in the post-war POW films, most officers spent their five years of captivity in stupefying boredom. Their accommodation may have been better than that of the other ranks having fewer men per room but it was not a life of luxury. The benefits might have seemed obvious to some, but for others the notion of spending years cooped up in rooms with the same men day after day did not appeal.

Peter Wagstaff explained the effect of prolonged captivity: I think there is a psychological point for the prisoner of war when you come across some extraordinary basis of living you can't understand it, it's a new form of life. Gradually, as you continue to live that life, the extraordinary becomes ordinary. You think, 'Oh G.o.d, how will I pick myself up?' Normally you live a normal life and you compare yourself to that mode of living. But if you lose that way of living, because you are existing in this extraordinary state, you think 'Am I mentally that stable?' A lot of us felt that. We suffered in trying to readjust ourselves.

Stressing how difficult it is fully to explain the changes undergone by a twenty-year-old as a result of the violence of POW surroundings, he went on to discuss his reaction to witnessing deaths: There was no particular impact. You are used to it. It was part and parcel of your life. Life comes and goes. The Kommandant, a German we called 'The Purple Emperor', told us, 'If you look out of the window you are going to be shot.' One officer said he was still going to do it and he was shot. But you took it, because it was part of life. You accept it. This was happening all the time. But I was not depressed because you were fighting for your physical and mental existence the whole time. You didn't have time to a.n.a.lyse yourself. You are fighting to keep alive. You've got to keep mentally strong. So you develop a peculiar sense of humour.

The prisoners eventually had the satisfaction of seeing the Purple Emperor tried for war crimes.

The officers shared much of the same mental turmoil and yearning for freedom as was seen within the main stalags. The NCOs and other ranks who pa.s.sed the years within the barbed-wire enclosures were also cut off from the rest of the world, interacting with outsiders solely by letter. As a result, the two groups of men found a commonality of experience that was reflected in much of the behaviour displayed by POWs.

Incarcerated within the main camps were the permanent staffs of senior NCOs who did not have to go out to work. Although out of boredom some chose to go out on working parties, those who remained in camp took on a myriad of duties in support of the working prisoners. They managed the stocks of clothing and Red Cross parcels. There was both incoming and outgoing mail to be sorted and parcels from home to be sent out to men on working parties. The prisoners also ran cobblers' shops where teams of men could use whatever was available to repair boots and clogs. At Thorn, Fred Coster worked in the tailor's shop, using skills he had learned between leaving school and starting in the city. He used worn-out clothing to make patches to sew on to threadbare uniforms. Whenever possible they took damaged uniforms to pieces, removing torn sleeves and replacing them with good ones. They even took apart pairs of trousers, using two worn-out ones to create one good pair.

With the pa.s.sing of the years, some of the prisoners who remained within the stalags settled into the life. Men captured later in the war were shocked when they arrived in the camps and witnessed men who had created their own little worlds. Within the forts at Thorn some prisoners curtained off their own areas, as if to construct their own small living rooms. This amazed outsiders, as did the strangely civilized conversations about the latest novels they had read, plays they had seen back home or records they had heard. Books and gramophone records were jealously guarded to protect them within the world they had created. To the outsiders there was a sense of one-upmans.h.i.+p more expected in the middle-cla.s.s drawing rooms of England than the damp bowels of a Polish fort.

Large numbers of those who formed the permanent staff at the stalags were pre-war regular soldiers NCOs with many years of service under their belts. It was easier for them to settle into this life than it was for many of their fellow prisoners. In many ways the stalags were not that far removed from army barracks only they had even less freedom. As a result, many NCOs found it easier to settle into stalag life than those men who, until just months before, had known the freedoms of civilian life.

The senior NCOs had a degree of power and cooperated with the Germans in maintaining a sense of discipline among the ma.s.s of prisoners. However, maintaining discipline was a fine balancing act. There were plenty of men who had no desire to be ordered around by NCOs now that they were prisoners. Instead they felt they had 'done their bit', then been let down by the army. Now they wanted to be left in peace until they could walk out of the stalag as free men. For these men, the sight of senior sergeants strutting around, as if on a parade ground back home, was too much to bear. So they preferred to be on working parties where at least everyone seemed to exist at the same level. Such emotions had to be balanced by an awareness of the benefits brought by a measure of order. Many realized they had been saved in the early months of captivity by NCOs forcing them to get active, making them wash and shave rather than just lazing around the camp doing nothing. The problem was that the balance was not easy to find, as one NCO discovered when he was confronted by Gordon Barber: 'They sent me to a lumber camp. I didn't last three weeks there. I saw too many blokes with broken arms and legs. I smacked the bloke in charge one of our blokes in the mouth. He was too far up the Germans' a.r.s.es. He had a nice billet and we had the s.h.i.+t. One day he started giving me a lot of mouth so I hit him.'

Although most senior NCOs were scrupulously fair in how they looked after the other prisoners, there were some who abused their positions and whose maintenance of discipline overstepped their responsibility. At Thorn RSM Davidson and Private Puttinger who wore the rank insignia of a sergeant major were both accused of currying favour with the Germans. Prisoners were annoyed to see NCOs handing out punishments to fellow POWs, even getting the German guards to administer the punishment duties for them. Some were accused of collaboration since they were responsible for keeping the best food for themselves and did not provide enough good-quality clothing to the men on working parties, keeping it instead for their cronies. Working prisoners felt any man who deprived them of the clothes they desperately needed was as bad as any German guards who made their lives a misery.

Despite the majority of prisoners being employed on arbeitskommandos, most still spent some periods within the main camps. Bill Holmes recalled why he did not like these return trips to Stalag 8B: 'I didn't like it there. Once you've emptied latrines with a bucket you want to be back at work. There was also a lot of violence between the prisoners. One morning when the frost melted we saw a severed human hand stuck to this metal fire hydrant. It must have been in the ice all winter. It was a prisoner who'd been murdered. They'd cut his hands off. He'd been an informer so our lads hung him. You couldn't blame them for doing it.'

He also witnessed how the experience of captivity had a deadly effect on some prisoners: 'One chap I'll never forget. One night we heard shots go off. He was weary of life in the Stalag and he tried to escape. He hadn't got a hope in h.e.l.l. They'd riddled him with bullets. We found what was left of him hanging on the barbed wire. He was practically shattered all his bones were sticking out. It was horrible to see. Then they left him there for three days as a warning to us. Humans can be worse than animals.' In such circ.u.mstances, it was unsurprising that many prisoners preferred employment to inactivity. Quite simply, they preferred the arduous toil that seemed to help make captivity pa.s.s more swiftly, despite the knowledge that their sweat was aiding the survival of the regime that had enslaved them. Their poor food and living conditions, their lack of freedom, the harsh regime of punishments, the violent behaviour of their guards all served to convince the prisoners that they were slaves. As Jim Pearce remembered: 'We'd go to the villages to be chosen to work on the small farms. The Jerry farmers would come along, look at us, point to men and say, "I'll have that one and that one" it was like a slave market. When you look back that's exactly what it was!'

This state of enforced misery and servitude, under the threat of death, followed the prisoners through their working lives in the Third Reich. Some jobs were better than others, but all working prisoners knew what it was like to toil from dawn until dusk, in all weathers, with little or no concern taken for their welfare. In the summer of 1941 Sapper Thomas Pearson wrote home: 'I am now working at a swine of a place. It is always a hurry and working on nothing but a small bread ration and potatoes. It is nothing to see a man being sick while working because the food is rotten. The guard thinks we are horses although he calls us swine. Working in rain, no parcels, no smokes, threats of shooting now make our lot.'2 Les Allan, who should have spent the war years helping the sick and wounded, found himself forced to work in a brewery. One day he found himself face to face with a guard while holding a hammer he needed for his work. Seemingly fearing that Allan might attack him, the guard reacted quickly. He swung his rifle at the prisoner, smas.h.i.+ng the b.u.t.t into Allan's jaw. The young British soldier crashed to the ground, his jaw broken. For the second time in his military career he found himself wounded, helpless and reliant on the enemy's mercy for survival.

Such attacks showed how some Germans simply ignored many of the clauses of the Geneva Convention. At Stalag 20B the commandant, Oberst Bollman, forced senior NCOs to go out on working parties, but he sent the Red Cross inspectors and representatives of the protecting powers to specially selected workcamps to ensure any cases of illegal working would not be discovered. During the period in which Oberst Bollman was in command at Marienburg, eighteen prisoners were shot and killed, with a further twelve wounded, at workcamps supplied from his stalag. It seemed the guards had little concern for the men in their charge. At one farm a drunken guard shot a prisoner in the leg, then when the prisoner shouted for a.s.sistance the guard fired again, blowing half his head away. Other guards were reported to have lain in wait for soldiers attempting to escape and then opened fire without giving the men a chance to surrender. A Private Mackenzie was even shot and killed for daring to argue about whether a saw was sharp enough to work with. In the case of one of those killed during Bollman's command, it seemed that the guards revelled in the suffering they had inflicted. An announcement was made to the a.s.sembled prisoners that Sergeant Fraser had been killed for being the ringleader of a mutiny. The announcer also revealed that the guard who had shot Sergeant Fraser had been promoted for his actions.

Men who had seen the hideous violence and suffering of the battlefield found it difficult to understand why their guards could treat them with such disregard. Bill Holmes was angered to see that some guards seemed to delight in the pain they could cause: 'The brutality was awful. One chap had piles I'd never seen piles before and I've never seen them since they were bleeding. It was like a huge bunch of bleeding grapes hanging down. One day he pleaded to be excused from work because of the pain. And the guard came along and kicked him up the backside. There was blood everywhere the agony must have been terrible.'

It is hardly surprising that many shared one overriding emotion the desire to be free. Although only a relatively small number of prisoners ever successfully escaped from German POW camps, the exploits of the escapers became fabled during the post-war period. The courageous exploits highlighted in books and films like The Wooden Horse, The Colditz Story and The Great Escape showed a world in which escape was both possible and was the desire of all prisoners. Nothing could have been further from the truth. A vast majority of escape attempts were failures. Prisoners dug tunnels that were discovered or collapsed upon them. They tried cutting through the wire, only to be spotted by the guards, or tried sneaking out of camps hidden in sewage trucks or rubbish bins. Legend even has one prisoner attempting to escape by dressing up as the guard dog used by the Germans.

The reality was that escape never entered the minds of most prisoners. Working prisoners couldn't be bothered digging escape tunnels since they had little energy left by the end of their s.h.i.+fts. Prisoners on work details on farms or in forests could have just walked away without anyone noticing, but knew they had little chance of getting away to safety. One group of men simply walked away from a working party on a farm after all no one watched over them as they worked and made their way to Danzig in hope of stowing away on board a s.h.i.+p heading to Sweden. When they arrived they found other prisoners working on the docks under guard. Realizing there was no way out, the escapers left Danzig and walked back to their workcamp. When Les Allan escaped from a workcamp he spent three days on the run and soon found himself utterly lost in the Polish countryside. When he was recaptured he discovered that, despite being on the run for three days, he had been going around in circles and was no more than a handful of miles away from the camp.

There was another good reason not to bother escaping. Lance-Corporal Green, who had been captured at La Ba.s.see in May 1940, reported the treatment after he was discovered escaping from a working party: 'Having been escorted back to the camp, I was taken down to the punishment cells, stripped and beaten with a rubber truncheon into insensibility. I was kept there for twenty-six days with one meal a day of bread and water. For the first twelve days I lost my memory.'3 Despite the dangers, and the knowledge that failure was seemingly inevitable, escape activity continued throughout the war. After days, weeks, months then years of seeing the same faces day upon day sharing the same stale air, the same stale old conversations and trapped in a timewarp in which every day still seemed to be 1940 it became imperative for some men to escape. Yes, it was their duty to break free but it became increasingly important as a means of mental escape. Many turned to tunnelling or devising plans for getting out of the oflags in the knowledge that they would soon be captured, but admitted that every day outside the wire would be their own personal victory.

Some of the most famous wartime escapers were men who had been captured in France with the BEF. Airey Neave, who later became a Conservative MP and was a.s.sa.s.sinated by the INLA, was wounded at Calais in May 1940 while serving a searchlight battery who had been detailed to help defend the port. Captured when the town fell, Neave was transferred to Germany, where he became a serial escaper. In January 1942 he became the first British soldier to escape from the fabled Colditz Castle via a trap door in the floor of the castle's theatre, then made his way across Germany, through France and Spain, finally arriving in Gibraltar.

Another BEF officer who escaped from Colditz was Captain Patrick Reid, who was captured in France on 27 May 1940. He was initially held at Oflag 7C at Laufen but was transferred to Colditz following an unsuccessful escape attempt. While in the castle he served as the escape officer and himself eventually made a successful escape to Switzerland in October 1942. He later became the most famous of the Colditz escapers after penning the book The Colditz Story and acting as an adviser on both film and television adaptations of his work. In the 1970s he even helped design the popular board game 'Escape from Colditz'.

Although the escape routes that became most publicized were to Switzerland or to Gibraltar via France and Spain, some escapers took a different strategy. Despite the ma.s.sing of German troops in the east in advance of Operation Barbarossa the invasion of the Soviet Union some POWs escaped eastwards. In July 1941 Sir Stafford Cripps, the British amba.s.sador to Moscow, reported that fourteen escaped British POWs had been handed over to his care by the Soviet authorities. One of the reasons that these escape routes never received great attention was because the British and the Russians decided that no publicity should be given to the matter, with Cripps requesting that the censor did not allow any mention of the subject in the British press.

The pa.s.sage of troops into the Soviet Union did not always go smoothly and one Briton was shot and wounded by border guards. Another Briton spent months in detention in Moscow. Corporal James Allan was a military policeman who had been taken prisoner while in a military hospital in Boulogne, having been wounded in the head near Lille on 18 May 1940. He escaped from Thorn after joining a working party in the company of his mates Gunner Clark and Lance-Corporal Green. In September 1940 the working party had been digging up unexploded bombs when the three men made their escape. After separation from his two comrades, Allan made his way into the Soviet Union with the a.s.sistance of the Polish underground. Clark and Green were first to cross into Soviet territory, soon being arrested and sent to a Moscow prison.

James Allan later described his adventures: I crossed the river Bug in a boat, while Polish scouts kept a watch for any German patrol. I climbed over the barbed-wire fence into Russia and handed myself over to the authorities within five minutes of crossing the frontier. I was searched very thoroughly and everything was taken away from me. I was put in a small cell for one night. I was then taken to another place and stayed there for ten days in company with Polish prisoners. Then I was sent to Bialystock prison where I stayed for about a month together with several Polish soldiers. The food was terrible and the conditions were extremely bad. There was no room to lie down in the cell at night. I then went to Minsk where conditions were just as bad.4 From Minsk, Corporal Allan was transferred to a prison in Moscow where conditions were better and he was in the company of four other British escapers. Although they were all pleased to be together with fellow Britons, they had to go on a hunger strike for five days to win permission to speak to the prison governor about conditions. However, when the others were transferred to an internment camp near Smolensk, Allan was left behind. A group of French escapers who later arrived at the internment camp contacted the British emba.s.sy and reported that Allan was still being held in cell 97 at Butirka prison. While there he was beaten up by guards and interrogated on suspicion of being a spy. Although he had no information of use to the Soviets they kept pressing him for information on the British Secret Service. During some interrogations he was forced, at gunpoint, to sign doc.u.ments which he was unable to read. He remained in solitary confinement for nine weeks, facing more beatings from the guards.

Following the German invasion of the Soviet Union, Allan was transferred to another prison and began to receive improved treatment. He was given cigarettes, was allowed all the food he could eat and his clothes were laundered. Just as he thought life was getting better he was sent back to his original prison and put back into solitary confinement for a further three weeks. Eventually, after more interrogations, he was given a haircut, allowed to bathe, and was told he was free to go. The men who released him simply said he should go to the British emba.s.sy. When he told them he had no idea how to find the emba.s.sy, the men agreed to give him a lift.

While some prisoners were attempting to continue the war by escaping, there was a handful who turned their attention to a.s.sisting the Germans. Some were men who were genuinely politically inspired and believed in the n.a.z.i cause. Others were men who had been compromised by the Germans, agreeing to betray their comrades after being given extra rations. These traitors played a dangerous game, knowing that if they were discovered they would be lucky to survive. While held at Thorn, Fred Coster became aware of the existence of traitors among the prisoners: The SS raided the camp and they found everything we had hidden the tunnel, the escape kit. So we knew we had a mole and wanted to find out who. We thought it was someone on the escape committee. So the chaps running the committee gave every man a different piece of information. Then we had another raid and the Germans went to a particular place. So that showed who had given them the information. That bloke didn't survive, he was b.u.mped off. I quite agreed with it. When the latrines were drained they found his body in there. I don't know who actually killed the traitor and don't want to know but I'm glad they did it.

The Germans attempted to capitalize on the hopelessness felt by prisoners. Attempts were even made to create an SS unit of British soldiers. Originally called the Legion of St George and later known as the British Free Corps, recruitment to this organization was attempted by sending renegade Englishmen into POW camps to encourage POWs to join the n.a.z.is in their crusade against Bolshevism. Their attempts were largely unsuccessful, as Fred Coster remembered: 'We had one incident where we were told to line up. Out in front came this Englishman, but he was marching like a German. He was wearing a German uniform. He was there to tell us to join the German army. He said if anybody wanted to join they should step forward. I remember one chap stepped forward! I looked round and he was yanked back into line by the blokes around him. I don't think he knew what he was doing he probably just thought he'd get extra food.'

Those few who did betray their country and join the SS tended to be pre-war members of Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists. These included Francis MacLardy, a pharmacist from Liverpool, who was captured at Wormhoudt in Belgium while serving with the Royal Army Medical Corps. From there he had spent time in Thorn and also in Stalag 21D where he worked in the camp hospital. While there he volunteered to join the SS. Others were less enthused by the politics of the n.a.z.i regime and were trapped into joining. One of the favoured methods was s.e.xual entrapment, which was used against Private John Welch of the Durham Light Infantry who had been captured in Belgium in 1940. After he was caught having s.e.x with a German woman on a working party at a sawmill, he was told he would have to join the Germans or face execution. Welch agreed and later worked to convert other British soldiers to the n.a.z.i cause. Another convert was Hugh Cowie, a private in the Gordon Highlanders who had been captured at St Valery. He elected to join the Free Corps after being caught with a clandestine radio set while at a working party on a Silesian farm. By turning traitor he was able to avoid a court martial.

As the prisoners began to settle down into a life of captivity, not all of the prisoners who befriended Germans were behaving treacherously. The soldiers on arbeitskommandos were inevitably drawn into relations.h.i.+ps with German civilians. In the workplace this could involve civilian workers sharing food and cigarettes with the men they worked alongside. However, in the small rural communities where some prisoners were employed, the relations.h.i.+ps went much deeper. The remote villages seemed cut off from the rest of the world and consequently many prisoners slipped into village life. Once the guards had accepted they were not planning to run away, many prisoners discovered an unexpected freedom. They used this freedom to do much more than just go walking in the countryside or swimming in rivers. With so many German men away at the front, their wives yearned for the company of young men. In such circ.u.mstances it was inevitable that relations.h.i.+ps would blossom. Despite the dangers to both prisoners and the women, who could face imprisonment for their actions, after three years of enforced male company the lure of a willing female was difficult to resist. Almost three years after the defeat at St Valery, Gordon Barber was eager to develop his friends.h.i.+p with a local woman: Some of us used to get our ends away . . . I'd got in with a married woman, Frieda, she was about thirty-five or forty . . . You've got to remember we'd been out there for over three years. We were working and we were fit. We were all about twenty-three or twenty-four and the young women in their thirties and forties liked us. The governor of this big state farm used to make us go and help with their smallholdings. One Sunday I had to take the boar down to her sow. That was a bit funny. I remember watching the boar have a little bit. I could speak quite a lot of German by that time. I said, 'Good job we're not like that!' She said, 'What are you like?' That was the opening. She wasn't a bad-looking woman. But nothing happened that day. But then on my birthday, February 26th 1943, she promised me some cake. I was doing the painting in her bedroom, then she came in and put her arms around my neck. And that was the start of a beautiful friends.h.i.+p.

The Red Cross parcels that began to arrive from late 1940 onwards became the most important thing in stalag life. Every time there was news that parcels had arrived, a buzz would go round a camp. Men who had done little but mope and moan for weeks on end would suddenly start chatting excitedly about the delights that awaited them. Men who had hardly raised themselves from their bunks were discovered playing endless card games, gambling over the precious boiled sweets that came in the parcels. Everything in the parcels was like a treat, whether it was raisins, soap or cigarettes. Even mustard offered the bonus of adding flavour to the dishwater-dull soups. Fruit jam with real pips replaced German jam that seemed to be thickened with sawdust. The smell of bacon emanated from huts where previously only the smell of dirty laundry and old socks had filled the air. Biscuits made a welcome change from the heavy black bread issued each day by the Germans. What a difference it made to consume sticky rich tinned treacle or savour the aroma of real coffee after weeks of surviving on thin vegetable stews and ersatz coffee made from acorns. The rations offered by the Germans were perhaps enough to keep them alive just but they were insufficient to offer any quality of life. Quite simply the Red Cross foodstuffs were a mental and physical lifesaver.

As the war progressed, the supply of Red Cross parcels grew to have another importance. With the German war effort faltering, shortages began to appear across the Reich, leaving the guards desperate for commodities such as soap, coffee and cigarettes. Luckily for the prisoners these were three commodities they did have some access to. Those prisoners who received Red Cross parcels were able to trade these items for whatever they desired. Graham King described how the system operated: Schiller was a staunch member of the n.a.z.i Party and was a Browns.h.i.+rt. For all that, he was very friendly and I soon had him operating a black-market enterprise with me. He was addicted to English cigarettes (verboten). English Red Cross parcels were coming through regularly and certain types of parcels addressed to individuals could be sent. All food was a bulk issue but clothing, books, records, tobacco and cigarette parcels could be sent to individuals. I even had a portable, wind-up gramophone sent out. Cigarettes, tea, chocolate (used to make up weight of 5 Kgms of clothing parcels) were the Euros of the POW camps. German Reichgeld and Lagergeld had very little purchasing power. However, chocolate, coffee, tea and soap were useful items of barter but cigarettes were at the top because they could be used singly or in multiples. The good Doktor could obtain a flash type of cigarette lighter, which became a 'must have' among the POW community. The Herr Doktor swapped one lighter, which cost 7.50Rms, for a tin of fifty cigarettes and I sold them on at fifty per cent profit.

Of course, trade was not the only method the prisoners used for improving their lifestyle. Theft from the enemy became an everyday part of stalag life, as Graham King later recalled: Many of the POWs worked on local smallholdings, many poultry farms. During the egg-laying season the Germans were surprised to experience an immense shortage of fresh eggs. Of course, they were being smuggled into the camps where we experienced a glut. Eggs were so plentiful they became an embarra.s.sment and were used in all kinds of ways. Fresh raw egg stirred up in tea with sugar and KLIM milk were a guarantee of erotic dreams and, like Ambrosia cream rice, was much in demand . . . Eggs were smuggled into the camp by using the excellent design of the British battledress, which was a baggy blouse and trousers. The trousers were secured at the ankles by either gaiters or puttees. The eggs were gently packed into the air gaps and the smuggler marched into camp. The record number of eggs smuggled into the camp in this manner by one man, on one trip, was two hundred.

At Stalag 8B Ernie Grainger saw the effects of the diet on prisoners: 'The main problem was stomach disorders. People were so starving, when they got Red Cross parcels they just ate the lot. Then they got perforated stomachs and duodenal ulcers. It caused us to get lots of haemorrhage cases.'

The lack of medical care led to all manner of unexpected infections and strange deaths. At one stalag hospital a post-mortem was carried out on a soldier who had died of a mysterious condition. A pus-filled tumour was found on his brain. There were signs of inflammation leading down from the tumour to the source of the infection a decayed tooth. He had been killed by tooth decay.

While such extremes were fortunately rare, disease still became a constant companion for the POWs. During the first year of captivity the medical staff at the stalags had done their utmost to prevent the spread of disease and infection. Despite their efforts there was little they could do with the sickest of the prisoners. During 1940 the Germans put nothing in place for the treatment of men who contracted tuberculosis. Instead the men just lay in their beds at the stalag hospitals, hoping to recover. At Stalags 20A and 20B there were deaths among the TB patients, resulting in some being transferred to Stalag 3A. However, although some treatment was available, the food was inadequate and men continued to die for lack of care.

Fortunately for the ailing prisoners, someone did care about their fate. In early 1941 the Swiss intervened and insisted that 150 TB patients be transferred to the hospital at Stalag 4A. There they were housed four to a room, had access to hot and cold running water and could stroll in a park. To cope with the numbers of TB patients a second facility was opened for them at Winterberg. Then, when the hospital at Stalag 4A was closed to patients, 130 men from the BEF were transferred to a sanatorium at Knigswartha that had previously been a hospital for infectious diseases. Despite its history, the facilities were of a poor standard. Some men were in stone buildings, others in wooden huts, and once again they were sleeping in two-tier bunks with no flus.h.i.+ng toilets, just latrines over cesspits. The conditions resulted in the death rate rising again. Treatment of TB only improved in 1942 when ma.s.s radiography for suspected cases became available. Even then it could take up to nine months to find a hospital bed for a TB patient.

Quite often, prisoners with TB were offered no treatment at all. Some just continued working, day after day, until they became too sick to continue. On a working detail from Stalag 8B, Bill Holmes witnessed the demise of a fellow prisoner: We were working at this sawmill and food was tight. There was one chap who had TB. He was only twenty but he was dying. We couldn't do anything with him. We only got a portion of bread two slices for the day, but we tried to fill him up to keep him going. But one night he died. The Germans said he'd just have to be buried in the churchyard without a coffin. We argued that we were working in a sawmill so with all the wood, couldn't they spare some. So we had these rough boards and made a coffin. And we got a sc.r.a.p of tin, hammered it into a cross and put that on the lid. We made a paper wreath. It may seem crazy, but we were just happy he was in a box. What his poor parents would have thought, G.o.d only knows.

Stalag hospitals were often depressing places for the patients. Men who had dreamed of getting a break from work were usually desperate to get back to their working parties rather than remain in hospital. One of those who experienced this turmoil was d.i.c.k Taylor. A Territorial soldier who had been captured at St Valery, Taylor found himself in hospital after he suffered the swelling of a gland behind his left ear. He needed an operation urgently since the swelling prevented him from eating. As a result he had lost a lot of weight from his already malnourished body. He was sent to a depressing military hospital in Danzig where he witnessed a madman rampaging round the wards waving a cut-throat razor and discovered patients who had lost limbs as a result of scratching insect bites. The bites had got infected and the infection had spread until blood