Meeting the Enemy

by Richard van Emden

  He had two letters with him, which he [Mole] handed to me. These letters I am sending you with this. Whether they ever will reach you I do not know. Mr Genahr will know how to deal with these letters, which I presume are written to your son . . . We could not make ourselves understood, he talking English and we German. He tried also to speak some French. From what I understand, he had been lying there for two days. As the place was some distance from the main road, no one had noticed him. So I went again to see my poor friend late in the night and found him still lying there . . . I was glad to find him still alive. I had some tea and water with me and allowed him to choose what he preferred and tucked him up as well and as warm as I could. Before I left him I knelt down at his side and prayed with him. Though he may not have understood me he well knew that I was praying with him and for him. I was moved to tears to see how grateful your son looked at my little services.

  The next morning Weingartner returned but Private Mole was already in a field hospital. ‘My sincere and fervent wish is that this letter will safely reach you, especially in case your son should succumb to his wounds and no news about him should ever reach you.’ Nineteen-year-old Charles Mole died a day after reaching hospital and a day before Weingartner wrote his letter. He was buried in Cambrai East Military Cemetery, a plot begun by the Germans for war dead irrespective of nationality. It was designed with great care and attention, and included monuments to German, French, British and Empire dead and in the centre a memorial stone with the words inscribed: ‘The Sword divides, but the cross unites’. In September 1918, Cambrai was captured by the Allies, when the cemetery too fell into Allied hands.

  Weingartner’s letter reached Charles and Emily Mole probably before confirmation of their son’s death. While the letter must have offered hope that he had survived, the knowledge that someone had cared for him, and had shown him extraordinary humanity, must have been of enormous comfort in the difficult years to come. The fact, too, that Weingartner had been instrumental in helping their son find a known resting place instead of joining the ranks of the missing must also have been of consolation.

  In May 1915, the parents of Lieutenant James ‘Jack’ Brewster were desperately worried about their son, serving with the 3rd Royal Fusiliers. He had gone missing during an attack in the Ypres Salient and soon afterwards the Brewsters received a letter from Captain James Laird, an officer in the battalion. He apologised for not writing: he was ‘trying to find out definitely’ what had happened to their son but had ‘no news of him’. Laird described the situation further.

  Lieutenant Brewster was ordered to support an attack which was being made. The regiment on his right had attacked and had been repulsed, and one of their men, seeing his own bad plight, yelled out ‘Fusiliers, attack’. Poor Jack, who was waiting for his orders to attack at any minute, did not stay to question who the order was from, got up and rushed forward with his men before the Fusiliers were quite ready. He consequently got no support and was last seen rushing towards the German trenches.

  Captain Laird asked Lieutenant Brewster’s parents whether they had heard anything of their son. He was Laird’s ‘greatest friend’ and he was ‘desperately anxious to know something definite about him’.

  The prognosis was not good and the likelihood high that nothing more would be heard of Lieutenant Brewster. Then, out of the blue, a letter arrived from Denmark. Jack Brewster had been found, not by his own men, but by a German soldier, Sergeant Egbert Wagner.

  Brewster was extremely fortunate to be alive. He had got within fifteen yards of the enemy trench when a bullet passed through his thigh, splintering his femur. Pulling himself into a small pond to avoid enemy fire, he lay there binding his broken leg to the good one, using bayonets taken from the dead to act as splints. He then proceeded to drag himself back across the shell holes, past the wounded and dead. By the following morning he had covered around 200 yards when he fell into a narrow ditch. Exhausted, and caught between the fire of both sides, he fell into a deep sleep, so deep that he was unaware that the Germans had attacked and taken the British trenches so that, when he awoke, he found himself behind German lines. The next day he was discovered by Sergeant Wagner, serving with the 25th Jaeger Regiment.

  Sergeant Wagner’s letter to Brewster’s parents was written nine days after the fateful attack.

  Dear Sir

  On 11th of this month, through God’s gracious guiding hand, I was led to discover your son, Lieutenant JA Brender [sic], 3rd Royal Fusiliers, in a shell hole, where he had been lying for two [three] days with a gun shot wound in the upper part of his thigh. Acting on the command of our Lord Jesus ‘Love your Enemies’ I bandaged him with the permission of our officer, and provided him with bread and wine. I had a lot of conversation with your dear son, whose condition visibly improved by evening. With eight of our brave Riflemen I arranged to get him conveyed, with the assistance of some medical staff, back from our front line position to the collecting centre for wounded. There I handed over your dear son to the care of best and competent hands, and now carry out my promise given to your son, when we were lying so happily together in the shell-hole, in spite of the rain of bullets, that I would communicate his deliverance to his dear father. I offer you my earnest wish for peace and await your reply via Denmark.

  Sergeant Egbert Wagner

  The letter was sent to Wagner’s friend Axel Backhausen for forwarding to England with the request that his friend send any reply back to him in the trenches. Three weeks later a letter arrived in Denmark. The family assured Backhausen of their ‘great relief’. Sergeant Wagner ‘must be a very good man’, wrote Lieutenant Brewster’s father, asking Backhausen to send or convey the contents of his reply to Wagner. ‘We trust he may live to do other good work in the world for such men are badly needed in these terrible times.’ The Brewsters’ letter thanked Sergeant Wagner profoundly, telling him that friends had requested the contents of his correspondence. ‘I hope you will forgive me for granting their requests. I believe, in some cases, it will be used as a text for sermons next Sunday,’ wrote Mr Brewster in closing.

  Lieutenant Brewster was taken to hospital and into captivity. His injury was severe enough to ensure that he would not see active service again and the Germans agreed to send him into internment in Switzerland. In September 1917, he returned to Britain and gave an account to the military authorities of the incidents that had led to his capture. In his declaration he wrote of Sergeant Wagner, of the bread and wine brought to his shell hole, and of his rescue. Sergeant Wagner’s letter to John and Eliza Brewster ‘is still in the possession of my father’, he added.

  A bond of sincere friendship was cemented. In 1918, the tables would be turned when Sergeant Wagner’s brother was badly wounded and captured by the British.

  The future for pilots such as Captains Rushworth and Don, and Lieutenants O’Brien and Grinnell-Milne, was both obvious and yet unclear. Obvious, in that they would languish in a POW camp, unclear as to how long they might have to remain there before hostilities ceased. Some officers were content to see the war out, others not. Many Royal Flying Corps pilots, imbued with the thrill of flying, would not wait, and focused instead on a new set of thrilling challenges provided by their desire to escape. In seeking to get away, they improvised, relying on anything they could lay their hands on and adapting it to their advantage.

  Weilburg camp was located forty miles east of the Rhine and occupied mainly by Russian and French prisoners with a smattering of British officers including Lieutenant Grinnell-Milne. These British officers had conspired to escape from the start of their incarceration, digging a shallow fifteen-yard tunnel that was discovered after a German guard, stumbling, stamped down hard on the ground, causing a collapse. The British officers were paraded before the commandant and told that if they tried to escape again they would be shot. It was back to the drawing board for the prisoners.

  In his memoirs, Grinnell-Milne maintained that owing to chronic shortages in Germany there was ‘i
n practically every camp at least one German whom one could bribe with such luxuries as chocolate or white bread’. He conceded that there was ‘great risk attached to this proceeding’, but that through the guards, civilian clothing, maps and even a compass were obtained, if at exorbitant cost.

  Officers were periodically allowed to leave camp for one or two hours’ exercise. Brokered by neutral countries, this privilege was granted to those who gave their word they would not try to escape. Although escorted by guards, officers were still able to pick up items, natural or otherwise, that could be used in a later escape, while walks also kept men physically fitter than might otherwise have been the case.

  One man who unwittingly helped these officers escape was none other than the Reverend Henry Williams. In his desire to minister to POWs, he travelled the length and breadth of the country visiting as many camps as he could gain access to, including Weilburg. The success of any breakout plan was dependent on forging passports and travel permits. The only hitch was that no one had any idea what these looked like until, to Grinnell-Milne’s delight, the Reverend Williams turned up.

  Some of us, I am afraid, needed personal freedom more than the consolations of the Church and when the parson came to Weilburg, we turned his visit to a more practical end. While he was holding a short service, we examined a small black bag he had incautiously left in our room. The first thing we saw was a brand new railway timetable, containing a small-scale map of Germany and the various frontiers. Furthermore, on looking through a bundle of papers, we found a large number of passes signed by various highly placed German military officers. These passes, authorizing the holder to travel from one end of Germany to the other, were just what we needed. We had obviously no right to touch any of the parson’s belongings, but, after debating the matter for some minutes, we decided that for once the end would justify the means. Replacing the majority of the passes, we retained three or four as well as the timetable. The parson left shortly afterwards without apparently noticing anything.

  I still feel that I owe him an apology, but as a matter of fact his papers were of inestimable value to us and formed the basis of a large number of forged passes, many of which were successfully used by escaping prisoners.

  The Reverend Henry Williams was not quite the innocent he appeared. To gain the high-level consent required to visit POW camps freely, Williams used the good offices of the American Embassy to negotiate with the Germans. John Jackson, an American official in Berlin, acted as intermediary with the German War Ministry and obtained the necessary permission. In return, Williams promised that he would not aid or abet any escape attempts.

  Now remember, padre, I trust you not to abuse this privilege in any way. Should you, for instance, even smuggle any letter or paper into or out of a camp, and it comes to my knowledge, I will accept no excuses but will immediately report it to the German authorities, and then you must be prepared to take the consequences.

  This warning Williams took to mean playing an active rather than a passive part, as he revealed post-war in his memoirs.

  A few of those who wished to make such [escape] attempts may have found my visits of some slight use to them. The most indispensible thing that I always carried about with me on my journeys was a Reichkursbuch [a railway timetable]. This I naturally left in my bag while conducting a service, and it did occasionally happen that after the service I would silently notice that my railways-guide was missing. Then of course my feeling would be ‘Gone again? Well, good luck!’

  Many years ago, when I was listening to an ex-prisoner of war in Germany describing some of his experiences there on the wireless, I heard him say: ‘The English padre who visited us little knew how useful some of his belongings sometimes were . . .’ Well, perhaps I ‘little knew’, but I sometimes guessed.

  Only once did Williams break the promise made to Jackson. Visiting a camp in early 1917, he was given a letter smuggled from the Russian Front containing the names, addresses and other particulars of thirty-five men taken from the camp to Libau/Mitau. The position of these men ‘was so desperate that their lives were actually in danger [and] on this occasion I did feel justified in putting that letter in my pocket . . .’

  At Weilburg, the prisoners’ plans to escape were augmented by sometimes risible security. One idea to escape in laundry baskets was scotched only because the baskets were too small. This discovery was made when one of the British officers had the ‘good fortune’ to get hold of the key, allowing a midnight inspection of facilities. On another occasion, when disguise was deemed necessary for a successful getaway, a bottle of hair dye was simply pocketed from the canteen.

  And it was not just security at Weilburg that was found wanting. In what seems the most extraordinary example, an iron-bound box was stolen from a commandant’s office in a camp known as Fort 9 near Ingolstadt in Bavaria. This box contained useful items such as cameras, compasses and maps, all of which had been confiscated from prisoners after previous failed escapes. German efficiency was such that every prisoner was given a receipt for his property and the item ticketed with the owner’s name. The box was kept at a depot outside the camp but when a prisoner was transferred, the box was brought into the commandant’s office. Any belongings of the prisoner were checked out and handed over to the senior NCO in charge of the escort. He would pass on the confiscated items at the next camp. Knowing that two Russian prisoners were to be sent away and that the box would make an appearance, a party of French prisoners agreed to parade in the commandant’s office to orchestrate a distracting row. Captain Alfred Evans takes up the story:

  As the row became more and more heated, other Frenchmen and Russians crowded into the bureau. A fearful scrimmage and a great deal of shouting ensued, in the midst of which a party specially detailed for the purpose carried the box unobserved out of the bureau and into our ‘reading room,’ which was only a few doors away. There men were waiting with hammers and other instruments. The lid was wrenched off and the contents turned out on to the floor.

  Once the items had been carefully hidden in pre-prepared hiding places, the box was smashed. ‘The Germans discovered their loss. The bells went and we were all ordered to our rooms. Then, amid shouts of laughter from every room, two rather sullen and shamefaced Germans searched vainly for an enormous box which had only been stolen five minutes before and for which there was no possible hiding-place in any of the rooms.’

  Such spectacular opportunism did not provide would-be escapees with the means to escape the camp itself but, rather, items useful for the subsequent journey. To while away time, prisoners thought of endless and often unrealistic plans, but it was usually the tunnel that offered the best means of getting away, though not always.

  Fort Zorndorf was an ugly and forbidding complex, more secure than other camps, to which officers who had attempted to escape were sent as punishment. Lieutenant Grinnell-Milne was transferred there at the end of 1916 and met several British officers, some of whom had undertaken multiple escapes. The Germans told Grinnell-Milne that escape was impossible, which, as he discovered, was not strictly true as two Russian officers were still on the loose after using the camp laundry baskets to get away (baskets evidently larger than those at Weilburg). Another ambitious escape attempt had only just been foiled when Grinnell-Milne arrived at Zorndorf. It was a tunnel and a great feat of engineering, for its proposed length of 150 metres was more than two-thirds completed when it was detected.

  The camp commandant at Zorndorf, described as a fat, benevolent-looking Prussian, lived outside the camp in a cottage on the fringe of a wood. According to Grinnell-Milne, this man was extremely lazy and if he wished to see any prisoners he did not bother to go into the camp but sent for the men to be brought to his cottage. Guards taking the prisoners numbered no more than two and by early 1917 this escort had dwindled to one, carrying a bayonet. When the prisoner reached the house, the guard knocked, entered, leaving his charge outside. Fifteen yards away was the wood, and five seconds was all a man requ
ired to run, jump over a fence and dash into the undergrowth. A sprint followed by a steady jog for several miles would take him, Grinnell-Milne calculated, ‘clear from all immediate pursuit’.

  What need for elaborate tunnels when prisoners could make a dash for freedom? Grinnell-Milne and two other officers, Lieutenant John Breen, a fellow RFC pilot, and Lieutenant Jocelyn Hardy, decided that such an opportunity was too good to pass up. Hardy was a veteran of multiple escape attempts. He had been one of two travelling companions of the late Major Charles Yate when all three officers were taken to Torgau, in August 1914, shortly before Yate’s own failed bid for freedom and his shocking suicide.

  Of the three men, Hardy and Grinnell-Milne spoke excellent German. Grinnell-Milne was yet another officer who had studied in Germany, in this case thirteen months at a language school in Freiburg under the direct tuition of a Professor Bauer. He was being prepared as a candidate for the Foreign Office’s Diplomatic Service and was, according to Bauer, an exceptional student. Grinnell-Milne could plausibly pass as German.

  On the pretence of enquiring whether a camp cinema might be permitted, Grinnell-Milne, Breen and Hardy were given an audience with the commandant. Dressed in civilian clothes beneath their prisoner uniforms, and with pockets stuffed with biscuits and chocolate, maps and compasses, the three men were marched under escort to the house. No one noticed that the prisoners looked decidedly chubby.