We got up on the road and started walking towards the officer. When he addressed us he spoke quite good English, ‘You will proceed,’ and pointed. He was a big man, with a square jaw and a ruddy complexion and seemed very excitable. He was drunk. I could smell his breath even from where I was standing.
‘Carry on up the road and you will meet my company up there,’ he ordered. So we started to walk, three up front, with me and Pony hanging back because he couldn’t keep up.
Suddenly there was the crack of a pistol and some bullets whizzed past us. Pony screamed, ‘Chas, Chas, help!’ I turned and saw the drunken officer waving his pistol around and Pony clutching his hand with blood pouring down his arm. ‘Wait, wait! Don’t leave me!’ I saw what looked like the top half of his thumb hanging off by a piece of skin. I could actually see the bone underneath and the amount of blood was frightening. Poor chap was in awful pain, crying out and clutching his bloody hand.
‘I can’t leave him,’ I said to the Sergeant, so I stopped and turned back to help Pony. ‘Hold it up there,’ I said, putting his hand in the air, ‘I’ll get a bandage.’ Fortunately, my field dressing pack was where it was meant to be, in my trouser leg pocket. It was easy enough to find but a struggle to open and then to get the dressing out. ‘Here, Pony, you’ll have to help me,’ and he held a corner with his good hand while I ripped the pack open with my teeth and took out the pad and bandage. I did my best to stop the bleeding with the pad and unwound the bandage round and round his thumb.
‘It’ll be OK,’ trying to make light of it. ‘We’ll have you playing the spoons again.’ I used the whole bandage, wrapping it tighter and tighter until I got to the end and tied it off. The blood was seeping through but it was the best I could do. We carried on walking. I don’t think the officer intended shooting anyone. He was drunk and waving his gun around, just showing off. Pony happened to be in the way.
We carried on walking for about half a mile while the tanks and troops gradually passed through and on down the road. Now they were going the right way to Dunkirk.
It went quiet again except for the phut, phut of distant gunfire. Pony had his arm on my shoulder and I was guiding him along as he was still in a state of shock. We came to the outskirts of a small village and were ordered to stop, ‘Halt!’ We were outside a stone building set back from the road, surrounded by a low wall with iron railings on top. The word gendarmerie was carved in the lintel above the door. There were people everywhere, obviously casualties of the fighting and those trying to help. Stretcher bearers with wounded soldiers, men sitting and lying on the ground, people coming and going. Noise and confusion.
The village police station was being used as a temporary hospital in a desperate attempt to cope with the appalling and unexpected number of casualties. We were ordered, ‘Hinsetzen!’ – sit, and ‘Stehen bleiben’ – stay, as the officer pointed to the wall outside. I helped Pony to sit down and we sat with our backs to the wall listening and watching what was going on. Complete chaos.
Every few seconds we heard a terrible scream or someone yelling. Another German officer came towards us and beckoned us to stand. He spoke good English too and told us that anybody who was injured, and he pointed at Pony, was to go inside where they would be seen to and those who weren’t, meaning us, would be directed to ‘Lend assistance’ as he put it.
I thought that sounded better than sitting about worrying about what was going to happen next. If we could help some of these poor devils who were in terrible trouble that was a good thing: fetching water, carrying a stretcher or comforting a soldier. At least we would be out of the direct line of fire.
‘Schnell’ – hurry up. We were pushed towards the front door. ‘Gehen Sie nach innen, ‘ – go in, which we did. Pony followed me in and he was taken away by someone straightaway and I never saw him again. It was dark as I came in from the bright sunlight, and the place felt cold and damp. It was packed with people: men everywhere, standing, squatting, lying on stretchers and on the bare floor. Others were squeezing past bringing in more men and taking others out, presumably ones who had died from the look of them. What a noise! All the languages of the world, it seemed, being spoken but words of pain and suffering are universal. The heat from all the bodies crammed in together was overwhelming.
There was that awful smell of dead meat and stale blood reminding me of Uncle Joe’s butcher’s shop. I was used to seeing cuts of meat on a marble slab and half carcasses hanging up on metal hooks. The smell of bones and animal waste, which had been hanging around a while, was familiar to me, wafting as it did into our kitchen from next door. But this was something else.
As I walked further inside, I could hear my army boots clomping on the wooden floor boards. There were only four or five small rooms and they were crammed full of men. Some were still like corpses, others screaming and shouting and writhing about. I couldn’t hear the sound of my feet and felt the soles of my boots sticking on the floor. I looked down to see trails of fresh and congealed blood everywhere. Wounded men were crying out in pain as they waited to be treated. Those who were uninjured were trying to help, holding bloody bandages and field dressings which couldn’t cope with the terrible injuries some of the men had suffered. There were fellows operating in every space and corner, on tables and on the ground where the wounded lay. Whether they were doctors or medical orderlies, I don’t know, but they were doing their best to help those most in need.
I was shocked. This shouldn’t be happening. This was just an ordinary, everyday place where the local French bobby drank his coffee in the morning and locked up a few drunks or petty criminals overnight. We had no time to take it all in as we were thrown in at the deep end. We stood to attention and waited instructions. In a mixture of English, French and German, men, some recently captured too, in blood-stained uniforms started shouting out commands: ‘Hurry up, hold this one down,’ and ‘You over there, take that man’s head,’ and ‘Don’t move an inch or he’ll die.’ Who was enemy and who ally, didn’t matter now. We were all the same there.
I thought of taking off my army greatcoat to put it somewhere safe from this bloody mess. It was a precious possession, even though I had cursed it in this hot summer weather. But there was no time to worry about that sort of thing. Just as well that I didn’t remove it as I would never have seen it again.
I certainly needed my coat later on when we were on the move again and started the first march of our captivity. That same coat saw me through the war and was a life-saver on the second march, which took me home half way across Europe.
I had to do it. Just get on with it. Holding down these fellows while they were operated on, just there on a kitchen table, without anaesthetic and with only the most basic surgical instruments. One of us stood at the head and one at the feet. There was no time to be squeamish. Steel yourself and get on with it. I tried not to look at the doctor as his knife cut into the skin and the blood spurted out. Or at them when they were struggling to resuscitate somebody whose heart had finally given up.
I thought of my dear pet dog, Peter, holding him while he had his fits and whispering words of comfort. So I did the same to these bloody strangers. I held them tight and told them, ‘Everything is going to be OK.’ It was a losing battle in some cases. Better to have tried, I suppose, than not. And if a chap passed away in my arms, I held him for a moment and said a little prayer. Then he was carted off somewhere and another poor soul took his place in the make-shift operating room.
You can’t prepare yourself for something like this. I had never seen a dead person in my life. I got upset when Peter died and I had to bury him, so imagine how I felt now. It was bad enough seeing your friends dead or dying on the road side and poor Pony in such pain, with his thumb hanging off. Here I was, a twenty-one-year-old greengrocer’s assistant, four weeks into the war without any proper training, facing this dreadful ordeal.
If somebody had told me beforehand: ‘Private Waite, your duties are to assist army doctors in their operatio
ns on the battlefield,’ I would have said, ‘Not bloody likely. Find somebody else.’ Even now after all this time it upsets me to think about it, those poor men, the pain they were in and the dreadful conditions the doctors worked in, trying to save lives. Bullets and shrapnel were being taken out of legs, arms and chests – wherever the damage had been done.
There were different nationalities including French and Senegalese, probably about a hundred men there. Some were walking-wounded and others had been brought in from where the attacks had been. I think we were only there about three or four hours, that’s all, but it felt like weeks. I grew up that day. So much had happened to us since we had taken the wrong road to Dunkirk. Things went quiet all of sudden. Perhaps they had run out of patients but someone came in and ordered us out. We were on the move again and I followed the others outside, back into the midday sun.
We joined another group of prisoners with their guards and we marched to the edge of town just outside Abbeville to a large barracks, which turned out to be a French prison. We were all mixed up and then shoved in five or six to a cell where we slept on straw and dirt on the floor that night. I wasn’t one of the lucky ones who got a drink of water and a crust of bread in the morning. This was good preparation for the hardship and starvation which followed. I was separated finally from my company and anybody I knew. I was truly alone.
A week later, my parents received a telegram saying that their son, Private Charles Henry Waite, of the 2/7th Queen’s Royal Regiment was ‘Missing in Action’.
5
Like Cattle
Details of some events are as clear today as ever, sharpened by the retelling; others not as precise as time has passed. But impressions of particular experiences are so real that I am close to tears as I write this. Fear, anger, humiliation and sadness fill my heart, and even the distance of seventy years does not really lessen these feelings. Whatever we were as young men, as newly recruited soldiers, we did not deserve what happened to us.
So this was what war was like. Bloody chaos. No one was properly prepared for it on either side it seemed to me. A terrible mess of casualties, which no one knew how to cope with; hundreds of prisoners and nowhere to put them. Who knew or even cared about us? I was afraid all the time of what the Germans were going to do. Having no control over anything in your life is very frightening. You have got used to a routine in the army, following orders and instructions from officers, knowing what your job is and working towards the same goals: fighting Hitler and bringing peace to Europe.
The men I met along the way over the next few weeks told stories about mistakes and accidents, bungled attacks, poor defences and dead and injured left where they had fallen. I heard about a massacre not far away where hand grenades were thrown by German soldiers into a barn full of British soldiers who had surrendered and been locked in for the night. I was afraid something like that would happen to us.
My war was over as far as I could see. I was completely in the hands of the enemy. As long as I could keep going for the next few months (and I still believed it would be over by Christmas) stay out of danger, cope with whatever lay ahead then I would get back home safely. But you don’t know what lies ahead do you. And you don’t know what inner resources you have to draw upon to survive because you have never really been tested.
I know that somehow I got from Abbeville to Trier, a distance of over 350km. I marched to that dreadful city, the place where thousands of prisoners were being processed to be sent on to camps all across Germany and Poland. They had to wait for transport, which for many, including me, meant by train in a cattle truck. But to be honest, my memories of the 1940 march have merged with those of the second march in 1945 – the much longer and much worse one. Not surprising that I forget the details of that summer of 1940. It was only a taste of what was to come during that second march: walking all day with little food or water; sleeping in the open air or finding shelter in barns or under hedges; and abused by German guards. It was hot weather and I was still wearing my greatcoat but I was in good physical shape. But in 1945, we had the additional challenges of one of the coldest winters on record that January, of having suffered years of misery, fear, exhaustion and starvation and of watching fellow men die and helping to bury them by the roadside. Those are things you never forget.
So I know I walked with other prisoners, the group growing as more and more men joined us along the route. We were accompanied by armed German guards, as we made our way across France and Belgium to the Luxembourg border with Germany. I remember that as we went through villages, French women were putting buckets of water out for us at the side of the road and as fast as they did that, the Germans guards kicked them over. The cruelty of that stuck with me, and I remember thinking that this was only the start of something terrible.
We arrived at the outskirts of Trier where there were twenty or thirty fellows all dressed in black, lining the road. They were holding sticks and shouting, ‘Sons of English bitches!’ over and over again. They started beating the legs of the weakest ones, who could hardly stand anyway, as we passed. Could things get any worse?
I couldn’t have imagined the horror that awaited us on the next leg of our journey, travelling a further 1000km deeper into unknown territory, somewhere far over in the East.
When we eventually reached the railway station, we were not alone. I saw hundreds of British soldiers, those recently captured in Belgium, who had just arrived from holding camps. They were grouped on the platforms and down on the tracks while armed guards patrolled. There was an engine being shunted along a track until it made contact and was attached to a row of cattle trucks standing in the sidings.
Suddenly there was a terrific banging sound as guards marched along the tracks unbolting and sliding back the doors of the trucks which gaped open like monstrous mouths, ready to swallow us up. The guards were in a hurry to get the job done, to get rid of all these unwanted, useless prisoners. They started rounding up groups, pushing them at gun point towards the doors like livestock going to market, perhaps to be slaughtered. I could see that when one truck was full they slammed and bolted the doors and then moved on to the next empty one. We were helpless to do anything except wait our turn.
We were marched down to the tracks and herded towards the waiting men. Guards tried to line us up, but we were all in a heap, pushing forward, not because we were keen to board the train but the sheer pressure of the numbers and the panic got us in a mess. A sudden noise of gunshot. One of the guards fired in the air, thank heavens, only as a warning, and everyone stopped dead where they were. When it was our turn we were all pushing forward so we had to scramble up and into one of these trucks. There was a sergeant with us who had torn his stripes off; you could see where they had been. He tapped each of us on the head, almost as if he was blessing us as he counted us in: fifty-seven men reduced to the status of animals.
Inside it was as bad as you imagined. There was dirty straw on the floor and a dreadful smell of excrement and urine, left behind by recently transported livestock or another human cargo. Before the doors were shut some pails of water were put in and someone threw in some loaves of bread (which turned out to be stale already when they were shared out) and a couple of round cheeses. Luckily some of the fellows still had their army jack knives, which had escaped the guards’ previous searches.
We were packed in tightly and you had to stand or you could just about sit down with your knees drawn up to your chest. When the guards shut the doors, most of the light disappeared and we were left with what came through gaps in the wooden slats of the sides. When night fell it was pitch black. We had no idea where we were going or how long we would be in there. It was a shocking experience. Some were wearing their greatcoats like me, others just their basic uniform but you can imagine how hot it got with us all crammed together with no proper ventilation. Add to that, the stink of unwashed bodies and our filthy, shitty, lice-infested uniforms; it was unbearable but I had to bear it. To survive and not give in was the on
ly way to beat the bastard Germans.
We were all severely dehydrated and some of the weaker ones were suffering from heatstroke. Nothing you could do. You couldn’t move to give them more space – there was none. The train stopped a couple of times, just long enough for guards to open the doors, refill the pails and put them back in. I never got a drink. Most of the water slopped out of the pails anyway, as our truck bumped and lurched along at speed or it was drunk by those nearest to the pails. Every man for himself, I was learning.
It was a rough time, even for the fittest men and many were in a sorry state, already ill with a fever and the runs from their weeks of marching across France and Belgium. Obviously there was no toilet, and no room to move to a corner out of the way in order to do your business. The soldiers who still had their steel helmets ripped out the linings and padding from inside and used them as chamber pots, passing them over for somebody to use and then passing them back with their contents over to somebody on the side. They tried to get rid of what they could through cracks or holes in the floor or emptied them in a corner out of the way. Some men couldn’t get a helmet in time and had to shit in their pants where they stood.
God knows how I escaped catching dysentery. Perhaps it was just as well that I didn’t drink any of the water or eat the bread or cheese which had been passed around by hands which had been holding helmets of shit and piss. When we arrived at the field camp I remember seeing hundreds of discarded steel helmets all over the ground. Nobody could wear their helmet again, even if they had wanted to, with no padded lining.
How could one human being treat another in this way? I was brought up to believe ‘Do no harm’ and ‘Do as you would be done by.’ How could they do this to us? We cursed Hitler, the German people, the war, even the British Army for sending us here. Some men were so exhausted or demoralised they never said a word the whole journey. Others talked a bit about what had happened to them, but not for long. Afraid. We were all terribly afraid and talking made things worse. Nobody had any words of comfort. How could they? ‘It’ll be all right.’ We couldn’t say that, not after what we had experienced since being captured. Silence was our refuge.
Survivor of the Long March Page 6
