‘Captain Robins was speaking German (I did not then understand it). He wouldn’t give way to the Germans. When he walked into the yard the German officer talked to him; he talked back, you could see he was defying him; there were no blows. About 10:00 in the morning 60 (all of us which were there) fell in and they marched us into the road.’287
Clearly still concussed, Robins is very hazy about the events which took place on the march, all he recalls is collapsing and being badly treated along the road.
‘I was knocked down either by a German or by the rush of the other men behind me, all of whom I heard afterwards were hit or kicked. On getting up, I picked up my water bottle which had fallen over my head, and seeing a German running at me with his rifle held in both hands, I swung my water bottle, which was full, clean into his face. I was then knocked down and struck over the face, and it was this blow I believe destroyed my eye.’288
James Napier’s evidence accused an unnamed German officer of instigating further brutality by forcing the British prisoners to, ‘run the gauntlet’, between two lines of German troops:
‘After about a kilometre we were stopped by an officer with the badge of a skull and crossbones who spoke very good English and said, “If I had my own way I would shoot every private and hang every officer wearing the king’s uniform”. He said we had showed the white flag and when they came to take us had opened fire. Also we had used dum-dums that day. He then turned and made a speech to the Germans. After about 60 yards the infantry, who were on the right and the artillery who were on the left closed in on the prisoners from each side using their feet, butts of rifles, whips, sticks and throwing broken bottles. Captain Robins had his head broken at the top and his eye closed up.’289
Judging from the apparent Totenkopf insignia on the officer’s headpiece he may well have been from a Prussian cavalry regiment and he clearly appeared to be incensed by the white flag incidents which had taken place, blaming the British for so doing – the exact opposite of what had actually taken place. He was also angry at the British use of what he termed soft-nosed dum-dum bullets, a story which may have originated from the soft-nosed ammunition used in the British service revolver which some captured officers would have been armed with. Although the dum-dum was a British invention developed for use in India, it had been outlawed at the Hague Convention of 1899.
Another Coldstream guardsman, Private John Cooper, thought the officer sporting the Totenkopf insignia was a general or some other high ranking officer and after the order was given for the German troops to line each side of the road, ‘the British prisoners had to run between them for 4–500 yards’. Cooper thought Robins had his eye knocked out and said he saw two men, ‘of a kilted regiment’, knocked down and killed. If this was not enough, the remainder of the march to Laon was punctuated by frequent beatings which finally stopped when the group were herded into cattle trucks for a three-day journey to Sennelager prisoner of war camp. Private Arthur Burgess was also in the party of prisoners with John Cooper and Lancelot Robins, he remembers quite clearly being made to run the gauntlet. Although some details are slightly different, his account concurs with the others:
‘Just before we got to Laon we, a party of about 77 English, were made to run the gauntlet along a road between German reserves for about 120 yards. They threw stones, bottles, whips, rifle butts at us; Major Robbins (sic) lost the sight of his eye through this, Private Giles of the Coldstream Guards, also lost the sight of his eye through this…two men, presumably of the Black Watch, were knocked down and as they never reappeared, were presumably killed.’290
A similar account of British prisoners being forced to run between lines was described by Sergeant L Heath of 1/West Yorkshire Regiment. He was captured on 20 September when his battalion was overrun north of Paissy and taken by train to Anor, a small town southeast of Maubeuge. Here the party of prisoners was split up into three groups:
‘On the platform there were two lines of Germans at about six paces intervals, through which the first party had to go. This must have all been pre-arranged because the Germans were all armed with sticks, rifles etc and there were also Germans near each truck we had to get in; directly the first party were driven through the small gate so they were attacked by the Germans on the platform. After the first party had gone there was an interval of about a quarter of an hour, and then the second party was marched off and the same was repeated to them. I was with this party.’291
Being unable to walk, Lieutenant Claude Wallis was fortunately not required to suffer the same indignities as Cooper, Burgess and Robins, or indeed Sergeant Heath, but he was subjected to some unnecessarily brutal treatment by his captors. An officer with 1/Loyal North Lancs, he was wounded on 14 September and left in the ruins of a house after the battalion had retired. From his description it would seem likely he was in one of the buildings near the sucrerie close to the Chemin des Dames. He was found by a party of Germans early the next day:
‘After about a quarter of an hour … another party of Germans entered and threatened us with bayonets and made signs to us that if we did not get outside we should be bayoneted. I crawled out of the house on hands and knees together with a few men who were able to do this. The remainder – about 10 – stayed in the house, being unable to move, and I do not know what happened to them. Outside two Germans lifted me to my feet while one stood behind me with a bayonet, with which he prodded me and shouted, “March”. I took two or three steps forward, but collapsed from weakness and in doing so the bandage and tourniquet round my arm became loose, and the blood commenced to flow very badly. Eventually a stretcher was found.’292
On his way to what Wallis describes as a field dressing station, he and the two Cameron Highlanders with him were abused and kicked, one of the highlanders being clubbed with a rifle butt. At the dressing station Wallis finally had his wounds looked at by a German doctor, ‘he spoke a little English and was quite good, cleaning and dressing the wound, and also giving me some food and a little wine’. Wallis was then taken to a small cottage where there were about twenty wounded British soldiers lying on the floor:
‘The men had been mostly wounded the day before, and had had no attention as yet to their wounds. Late in the afternoon the doctor who had dressed my wounds looked into the room and I asked him if he could attend to some of the men. He refused, saying he had no time, but would attend to some tomorrow. No food had been given to any of these men since they had been taken … during the night one man who had been shot in the head went mad and eventually died in the early morning in delirium. A second, wounded in the stomach, died quietly.’293
These accounts were all recorded by men who were taken prisoner on the right flank of the BEF on, or immediately after, the first day of fighting when one of the most notorious white flag incidents took place involving the men of Royal Sussex Regiment. The hostility demonstrated by the Germans – as inexcusable as it was – may well have originated from what they perceived as treachery on the part of the British in shooting down men who were attempting to surrender. Interestingly, accounts from men of the West Yorkshire Regiment who were captured on 20 September are largely – apart from Sergeant Heath’s experience - devoid of any instances of such violent behaviour by their German captors.
24-year-old Second Lieutenant Bertram ‘Bertie’ Ratcliffe had been with 1/West Yorkshires since graduating from Sandhurst in September 1913. He was wounded in the right lung at about 6.15am during the second German attack. After the Moroccan infantry on the right of the West Yorkshires had retired in disarray the two front line companies were surrounded and he was taken prisoner at 2.00pm:
‘I was taken to a small village behind the lines where I remained the night. I saw no infractions of the ordinary laws of war. A number of other officers were captured at the same time as myself, but they were taken off the first day, as they were able to walk. The Germans tried to force me to walk, but I could not. I had a British soldier with me, a man of my own regiment, who was very badl
y wounded in the arm; and on the second day, after resting the night in this small village, when a sentry noticed I could not get along, he allowed me to get on the tailboard of a cart in which there were a number of German soldiers.’294
They were in fact lodged for the night in a church which had been prepared for German wounded. Captain P Lowe was one of the officers Ratcliffe mentions as leaving the next morning. Lowe was taken to Laon where he was put in the former French barracks. He was sure that the Germans were overwhelmed by the numbers of their own wounded:
‘I am of the opinion that the Germans here could not cope with their own wounded, much less attend to ours. There were English who had been here more than a week and who had never been looked at. The head doctor when we did get to see him was polite, dressed our wounds, and saw to the worst cases of the English rank and file.’295
He may well have been correct; Lieutenant Wallis recalled how a mattress which Major Arthur Nicholson of the Cameron Highlanders was using was taken away for use by German wounded.296 Nicholson also had to complain furiously to the doctor to get him to attend to two or three of the badly wounded British soldiers. Nicholson and Wallis were eventually taken to Laon where they found British wounded who had received no medical attention whatever since being captured. Several men died as a result of neglect. Wallis refers to, ‘another man of the Welch Regiment had been shot through the throat’, who died three days after his arrival having had no medical treatment, a man whom Wallis says, ‘could have been easily saved’. One of the neglected wounded at Laon was Private Lawson of the Royal Scots Fusiliers who was captured on 14 September. He was left lying on the battlefield until the following day when, he says, a German parson took him to a house where he spent the next five days. At Laon he was only seen once by a French doctor before he was sent to Germany. During the three-and-a-half day journey to Kassel in a cattle truck he was given one bowl of soup and two pieces of bread.
Captain Herbert Sutherland was wounded on 14 September just north of Vailly whilst fighting with 1/Northumberland Fusiliers. His subsequent treatment by his German captors was, in his opinion, quite reasonable under the circumstances. Sutherland had been wounded in several places, a bullet through his right thigh, shrapnel wounds in his back and shoulder and a splintered shoulder blade. As the battalion retired he was unable to get back and after being found the next morning he was carried back to a haystack on a waterproof sheet by four German infantrymen. There his wounds were attended by two medical orderlies and the next day he was carried back to a field dressing station where a doctor examined his wounds but, ‘did not disturb the dressings’. Taken eventually by an ambulance wagon to a hospital at Filain, his wounds were looked at again by a German doctor:
‘In the dressing room were four or five English soldiers who were all wounded. I was left in the room with them for about two hours, during which time one of the soldiers died and his body was taken away. I asked the German doctor if he was going to take the man’s identity disc and small book or report on the man’s death. He replied that he was not going to. I told him that according to the Geneva Convention he should do so, but he said he was not complying with that convention.’297
It was at Filain that Sutherland met Gerard Kempthorne, the medical officer attached to 1/Lincolns. Kempthorne had been captured on 14 September after the Lincolns had retired and remained on the battlefield attending the wounded and recalled that after being relieved of his field glasses and map, how a ‘middle-aged subaltern arrived talking perfect English and remarked [that] he had many friends in England and we ought to be fighting on the side of Germany’. Kempthorne had refused to leave the field until all his men had been cared for and it was in the process of doing this that he was wounded in the leg by British shrapnel. Sutherland only learnt afterwards that the Germans had offered to take Kempthorne back out of danger, ‘but that he had refused to go until all the wounded had been taken’.
Private Harry Horry was one of the Lincolnshire wounded left on the field. initially wounded in the right thigh he had been wounded a second time in the foot. According to Horry’s evidence he was left on the battlefield for five days during which he fed himself on raw swede before being finally picked up and taken to a nearby farm – possibly d’Hameret Farm on the modern day D15 – where he spent another eleven days in the company of other wounded British soldiers. He complains that they were given very little food during this time and although not ill-treated as such, his story is one of neglect by his captors. His account of his journey to No. 3 Lazarette at Hamburg in a cattle truck without food or water was typical of many prisoners’ experiences and ironically he was fortunate that his wounds, albeit not life threatening, were serious enough for him to be involved in a prisoner exchange in August 1915.
There were a number of quite remarkable escapes recorded by men who were captured on the Aisne in 1914, an activity which was made considerably easier by the relative proximity of neutral Holland. Would be escapees only had to make for the neutral frontier and once successfully negotiated, freedom beckoned. Coldstream Guardsman Private John Cooper was one who made a ‘home run’ on 30 September 1918 in the company of Sergeant Edward Facer who was captured on 15 April 1917 serving with 21/Australian Machine Gun Company. Imprisoned at Dülmen, southwest of Münster, the two men took three days to reach the Dutch frontier.
There was a great deal of publicity devoted to the escape of Bertie Ratcliffe in 1917 who was captured on 20 September in the West Yorkshire trenches on the Chemin des Dames. He succeeded in escaping from a train with five other British officers:
‘At about 8.00pm we arrived at a small junction 2 kilometres south of Crefeld; it being dusk we five left the train as it was drawing out of the station, ran a short way along the line until we came to a crossing, where we divided into three groups – Major Hall went one way, Captain Morgan and Lieutenant Ross another, and Squadron Commander Briggs and myself a third. We each had a map and compass with us and some chocolate. I was dressed in full uniform, with a British warm.’298
Ratcliffe’s compass had been sent to him by his mother whilst he was a prisoner at Ingolstadt. Concealed in a tin of Harrogate toffee he managed to hide it from the authorities until his escape from the train. His companion, Edward Briggs, was one of the pilots on the famous Royal Naval Air Service raid on the Zepplin sheds at Friedrichshafen in November 1914. Briggs was the only pilot not to return and was brought down after the fuel tank on his Avro 504K had been holed by machine-gun fire. Ratcliffe and Briggs became separated the following morning when they were seen by a sentry:
‘Before he had time to do anything we turned and fled in a different direction, at the same time separating from one another; he followed me, but I ran for about a quarter of an hour, then lay down in a ditch getting my bearings by my compass …I went into an opening of the forest and across a space of low heather. I was going very quietly along when just on my left, I saw a sentry walking towards me. Looking before me I saw a piece of barbed wire about 6 inches from the ground. I started to run as hard as I could over the frontier, but I had only done about four paces when I caught my foot on a bush and fell. The sentry followed me and when I got up he was standing 2 yards from me.’299
It looked very much as if his bid for freedom was over. The sentry walked over to him and asked who he was, Ratcliffe says the resulting conversation lasted half an hour and involved bribing the man with twenty-five marks, after which the sentry pointed out the direction of the frontier. Bertie Ratcliffe crossed the border into Holland at 5.30am where he was taken to Venlo police station and from there to the British Consul at Rotterdam. He was possibly the first British PoW to make his way back to England where he received a hero’s welcome and was invited to lunch with George V. Only three of the five men – Ratcliffe, Edward Briggs and Morgan – who had escaped from the train, successfully crossed the frontier into Holland.
Yet in reality the majority of the men captured on the Aisne remained in German hands for the remainder
of the war. For some such as Captain Lowe of the West Yorkshires it was a long captivity accompanied by the mental strain of imprisonment in a confined space. Writing after his release in 1918 he recalled the boredom and stress of captivity:
‘For older officers who, like myself had been prisoners from practically the beginning of the war, the effect of imprisonment is mental. The winter is the time that tells. One’s exercise is walking round and round a muddy or snow covered track within a wire fence.’300
Perhaps what was more exasperating for him and others like him who were taken in the early months of the war, was the rapid promotion which many of his brother officers who were captured later on in the war had benefitted from. Thus officers who were his junior in September 1914 arrived in captivity as majors and lieutenant colonels. ‖I was, of course, unfortunate’, he wrote, ‘as after 23 years service I am still a captain, thus though one of the oldest of the English officers, I was one of the juniors with a corresponding lack of cubic air space’. Lowe’s comments on imprisonment draw attention to the plight of the prisoner of war, whom, like the badly wounded and disabled discharged as unfit for further service, bore their scars quietly and practically unnoticed.
Chapter 15
Epilogue
We understand the whole of the BEF is being relieved on the Aisne by the French, but we do not know our destination although rumours point Flanders way.
Captain James Jack, Scottish Rifles – on hearing of the move from the Aisne
As the last British units withdrew from the Aisne they left their legacy in the form of hastily dug trench lines. When the French territorials finally arrived to relieve the Grenadier Guards at Soupir on 12 October, Bernard Gordon Lennox remarked in his diary that the French poilus were too short to see over the parapet of the Guards trenches but felt that it would only be a temporary occupation before the line moved north again. How erroneous his assumption would prove to be.
BEF Campaign on the Aisne 1914 Page 25
