Meeting the Enemy (38 page)

In a sap located in a quarry, and directly in the line of the enemy advance, were five signallers of the 16th Manchester Regiment. Their job was to send messages, but, with the fog appearing to hamper enemy troop movement, there had been nothing definite to report. One man was left on top of the sap to keep a lookout and, as the fog began to lift, he reported what he could see, as Lance Corporal Harry Hopthrow recalled: ‘He came down and said, “My word we’re doing well today, there’s a lot of prisoners gone by!” This didn’t quite ring true, so one of us went up to look and we found that the “prisoners” were all carrying bayonets, in other words they were the German main force.’

Hopthrow and his mates remained undetected until a white dog, which had appeared out of nowhere, ran towards them, drawing the attention of two or three Germans who followed suit. A quick decision had to be made to destroy all the signalling equipment before the Germans arrived. Surrender was a formality.

The Germans came and took over, came down the sap and sat down with us – very little communication, because we hadn’t each other’s language. There was no question of resistance; there were five of us and battalions of Germans going by. We offered them some spare food and cigarettes. Those three chaps were on to a very good thing – they were getting out of the war, they’d got a bunch of prisoners, they could always say that was why they were down there!

Both friend and foe remained in the dugout for much of the day, being joined by other isolated British soldiers. The ground shook and reverberated with shellfire, Hopthrow suggesting the fire was German, the Germans that it was British. When a small counter-attack organised by some men of the 17th Manchester Regiment brought British troops back to the quarry, the tables appeared to have been turned. ‘As soon as they realised our troops were on top the Germans threw their arms on the table. We didn’t bother about them, it was getting dusk and I decided it was time we were getting out. I led the four of us, none of the others came; we made a dash for it.’ Hopthrow and his mates escaped, but most men were not so lucky.

Nineteen-year-old stretcher-bearer Private Bill Easton was an experienced soldier for his age. He had enlisted in 1915 at sixteen and went to France the following year, serving eighteen months on the Western Front. On 21 March he was sent forward from his unit, the 77th Field Ambulance, to an aid post to help with expected casualties; in the confusion he got mixed up with around forty infantrymen uncertain what to do and short of food. At one point Bill had gone off to an abandoned trench in search of rations, returning almost as the Germans arrived. He was taken prisoner and joined the throng of men being sent to the rear.

We marched from four that afternoon until late that evening and it rained like the devil. It was cold, dark, and as we walked along, there were hundreds of us, I suppose, and if one man fell down you had to leave him, they wouldn’t let you pick him up. Eventually we were taken to a field, where some workers came and put barbed wire around us and we lay down.

At four in the morning, I heard a voice ask, ‘Any Field Ambulance men who would like to do their comrades a good turn, come to the wire.’ I went, and this German said, ‘We have got a lot of wounded in the church and we can’t look after them because we haven’t got enough men and we’ve got our own people to look at.’ I went with a friendly sergeant who could speak English. He took me to the church in which there were a few candles flickering, and a couple of poor hurricane lamps burning. He said, ‘You’ll find a good supply of water here, and I’ll see you in the morning’ . . .

In the morning, the main doors of the church flew open and a German came in. He’d got an escort of four soldiers who passed, about turned, banged their rifles on the floor, then shouldered them. After a lot of ritual stamping, the man saluted me. I thought, ‘That’s a funny thing, saluting a prisoner’. Then he said, ‘I’m speaking on behalf of my colonel, who wishes to thank you very much. With our job we can’t afford to be bitter enemies. Do you feel my bitter enemy?’ I told him that I had no personal animosity against him. We shook hands and he told me not to think of him as an enemy; he couldn’t have been nicer.

Over the next few days, Bill Easton helped evacuate the wounded on lorries.

I was given permission to accompany the last of the wounded down to the railhead, but when I got there and the wounded were unloaded, I was ignored. Everyone carried on and I was left standing there until a German came up and I was taken to a canteen for some food. After a while, I was approached by a German sergeant named Charley Feldner. ‘I have a request. If you agree, we are allowed to keep POWs close to the front to help with the wounded.’ The German medical service’s motto was ‘The wounded always come first’, they used to quote it to me, and they needed as much help as they could get. There was a hospital being opened about four miles from the line, and I consented to stop and help. On the 25 March I wrote in Sergeant Feldner’s diary: ‘This is to certify that I, William Easton, do quite voluntarily proceed within thirty kilometres of the front with the 625th Sanitäts Komp.’

Given the earlier furore over the employment of prisoners close to the front line, the decision to ask Bill Easton formally to stay and help with the wounded was administratively correct if a little surprising.

There were no ambulances so a miniature train was brought up to take the wounded away. It was driven by a little petrol motor and manned by what were known as Freiwillige, under-age boys who could volunteer for service but were not allowed closer than 10 miles from the front. I’d wanted some other prisoners to help me load the wounded onto the train but Sergeant Feldner came back to say he’d spoken to four men who came from the Midlands and that they were not willing to help. Two of them said they might but this other fellow, a big chap, he swore and told them they would be shot for helping. I was asked if I would have a word with them.

I went and asked what they had against helping to evacuate the wounded. However, this big fellow said, ‘We’re not all German lovers, you can go and help them but you won’t get any help from us.’ There was a hell of a row, and he swore at me, calling me everything but a Christian. I told them that the job I had got was really nothing to do with Germans and that I only wanted a bit of help to get those fellows away. I told them I would come back in half an hour. When I returned two of them were wavering and I mentioned that the Germans were picking men out for labour camps and if they didn’t help me ‘you’ll go and lord help you if you do’. In the end I bulldozed them into helping.

I was nicknamed the Kleiner Englander, the little Englishman, and I worked at this hospital under Sergeant Feldner. He was very good to me and called me William and spoke to me in beautiful English, having lived in America for some time. A lot of the men in the company came from Hamburg and pre-war there had been a sea link between Hamburg and Kings Lynn, my home. Several had visited my town and could speak English well. A lot of Germans had the idea that we were fighting the wrong country and that we should have turned on the French instead.

There was a sergeant major, Sub-Lieutenant Lindemann, and he was a brute to his own men but he treated me marvellously. Every morning, about 11 o’clock, he’d shout at the top of his voice, ‘Wilhelm, Kommen Sie mit,’ so we’d go to the canteen and he’d order a flagon of beer. After a drink he’d get up and throw a note on the counter and he’d say, ‘Wilhelm, pfennige’, and the change would rattle on the counter and that was a sign for me to pick them up.

There was a fine line between helping the Germans in a humanitarian capacity and being seen to be pro-German. As noted earlier, plenty of accusations were made in interviews given by repatriated prisoners that a small number of British soldiers had gone beyond the boundaries of civility and actively sided with the enemy. One or two had even received honorary German ranks, which roused the indignation of fellow prisoners. Such POWs were never called to justify their actions or to give their side of the story. Bill Easton, charged by another POW of being a ‘German lover’, was in a rather different position from other accused. He remained within range of artillery fire to help the wounded and, because of his knowledge drawn from serving eighteen months on the Western Front, he was valued by his captors above other inexperienced German soldiers.

Honestly, we were friends and I worked among the Germans quite willingly. I had been working there for a while when Sergeant Feldner, he seemed to run the show, came up and said, ‘I have an invitation for you. It’s not right that you should be here giving orders to men and you’re not a sergeant, so while you’re with us you’ll be an acting sergeant.’ This meant I could ask one of these German orderlies to do something and they’d do it. He then told me, ‘As a mark of respect, you’ll be the guest of honour at our party.’ The party was held in what seemed to be an old schoolroom. The Germans managed to get together free casks of beer, and I was asked along where this whole company toasted my health. I was offered a beer but I never drank, because I was a teetotaller, but they wanted to have a photo taken so there I was with a pint of beer in my hand – just for show – and with Sergeant Charley Feldner with his arm on my shoulder.

I worked like a free man. I went into the Mess as a sergeant, and slept in the same room as them. By that time I’d come to respect the Germans, individually I mean, because they were so friendly. Eventually I got dysentery, and that put an end to my work near the front line. The Germans were frightened of anything infectious and so I was put on a lorry straight away – no argument – and that was the last time I saw them.

It might have been the last Bill saw of the German company, but he heard at least once more from Charley Feldner. In May 1919, Feldner wrote a letter from Hamburg which he handed to a British officer whose ship had docked in the port. The officer promised to forward the letter. Sergeant Feldner praised Bill Easton as a ‘courageous and brave boy’, and he hoped he had been reunited with his dear ones at home. He hoped, too, that Bill would write back and ended the letter, ‘In the meantime a warm handshake and the heartiest greetings from your Charley Feldner’. Bill did write back but the two men never met again.

The process of being taken prisoner was frightening because a soldier gave up all his weapons to throw himself on the mercy of a well-armed and excited enemy. If their surrender was accepted, captives felt an initial euphoria, quickly followed by a tidal wave of depression. With no knowledge of where and in what conditions he would be kept, the prisoner faced the knowledge that his confinement was entirely open-ended. Yet in one respect the prisoners taken in the spring and early summer of 1918 had an advantage. They were buoyed up by the obviously dilapidated state of the German army.

Private George Gadsby was captured on the morning of 23 March after a two-day fighting retreat from Cambrai with the 1/18th London Regiment. After Gadsby’s platoon officer had failed to appreciate the need to withdraw once again, his men were surrounded and forced to surrender, Gadsby receiving a friendly whack on the back from a German who said in French, ‘Ah oui, la victoire’. It was a victory of sorts but George Gadbsy saw that it was one built on sand.

We had not been on the march long when we realized what a terrible state Germany was in. The roads were blocked with transport, two and three motor cars were lashed together and pulled by the power of the front one, and vehicles (not much better than orange boxes on wheels) were packed so heavily that they creaked under the weight. The Germans’ transport reminded us of a travelling circus. Behind each cart generally followed a cow, whilst on the top of the loads could be seen a box of rabbits or fowls. What a pandemonium! Now and then a troop of dusky cavalry mounted on bony ponies passed us on the way, whilst battalions of infantry led by martial music (which did not sound much better than the noise made by a youngster kicking a tin along the road) advanced to the front with stooping heads looking particularly fed up and worn out. Although we realized what privations confronted us, we could not but raise a smile as we marched along.

The seeds of German failure were being sown. They could see, as one of their men noted wryly, ‘how magnificently equipped’ British soldiers were, with leather jerkins, quality puttees and boots. The contrast with the Germans’ own threadbare existence was pronounced, and soldiers began wearing items of captured British kit.

‘Our men are hardly to be distinguished from English soldiers,’ wrote German officer Rudolph Binding.

Everyone wears at least a leather jerkin, a waterproof [cape] either short or long, English boots or some other beautiful thing . . . Today [27 March] I was mildly hit, so mildly that it only raised a weal. A rifle bullet went through two coats which I was wearing in the early morning on account of the cold and struck my thigh like a blow from a hammer. I was wearing a pair of riding-breeches of English cloth, against which the English bullet stopped respectfully, and fell to earth. I picked it up almost like a friendly greeting . . .

The Germans overran field canteens and depots in which astonishing quantities of food and other provisions were piled high. As men filled their empty stomachs, halted to scoop up cigarettes, or knelt down to smother their boots with British dubbin, it became increasingly difficult for officers to stop a serious and concomitant loss of momentum.