by Sean Longden
In the early days following the defeat of the BEF, some evaders who reached Marseilles made contact with Polish soldiers in the city. In August 1940 the Polish legation reported that there existed a group of fifty destitute British soldiers in the city who were entirely reliant upon the generosity of their Polish allies. The Polish camp, in the Queen Victoria Memorial Hospital, became a haven for men who intended to escape since the Poles had no intention of handing anyone over to the French authorities and – unlike the French – had little interest in whether their behaviour upset the Germans. They even attempted to establish an escape network involving sending Britons to Spain on passports provided by the Polish consul.
Also assisting evaders to leave Marseilles was Captain Charles Murchie of the Royal Army Service Corps. He ran a team of twenty-five guides who operated from the area around Lille. Their task was to send evaders on to a ‘reception centre’ in Paris. From there, the men made their way into the unoccupied zone. Initially, Murchie sent men from Marseilles to North Africa by boat, until London requested he begin to send them via Spain. By early 1941, the system he had established operated smoothly. Captain Murchie’s northern guides brought men across the Vichy border and submitted to him expenses claims for costs incurred during the journey. He also gave the guides money for their fares home. So successful was the system that Murchie was forced to give up his endeavours. He had simply become too well known to be able to continue to operate. He found men arriving from as far away as Brussels and asking for him openly by name. When French attention became too great, Captain Murchie was himself forced to flee to Spain, taking with him a British sergeant who had been his assistant and André Minne, a Lille cafe-owner who had made five journeys to Marseilles as a guide to evaders.
When John Christie arrived in the unoccupied zone he took a train to Marseilles and then telephoned the American consulate. By February 1941 the US consul had provided assistance to 400 British soldiers who had escaped from the occupied zone. However, not all the men seeking assistance received the advice they desired. When John Christie and his companion finally reached the port, the consul advised they hand themselves over to the French authorities at the local barracks of the French Foreign Legion.
The barracks to which they were sent became a vital waypoint in the evaders’ journeys to freedom. Located in the old port, the Fort St Jean was famed as the Foreign Legion headquarters and its main recruiting base. Entered via an iron bridge across the harbour waters, the seventeenth-century fort was on a rocky island, totally surrounded by water. By January 1941 Fort St Jean was home to eleven British officers, forty-nine NCOs and 175 other ranks.
Some evaders initially found themselves interned in the Ste Marthe barracks, a detention barracks for the Foreign Legion. Conditions within the camp were appalling and there were no toilet facilities. Instead they had to use the prison yard that was swilled down each morning. Other evaders were interned in the Fort de la Revère in Nice where the senior British officer, Captain Whitney, reported to the Foreign Office on the ‘absolutely unbearable’11 conditions, the cases of tuberculosis and the suspicion of German infiltration. A similar situation was found in the internment camp at St Hippolyte du Fort, near Perpignan, where a soldier turned up calling himself MacBrendan. Back in the UK checks were made on his identity. No records could be found of his birth, or his claimed service in the British Army during the Great War, or of his having been involved in military intelligence with the BEF.
Once inside Fort St Jean, John Christie found himself directed to the room that was to be his home as an internee. He would be sharing it with about twenty other ranks, including a fifty-five-year-old veteran of the Great War, while three officers were housed in a separate room. Others within the fort slept in cells, to which the doors were fortunately left open all day. Each morning the men rose at 7 a.m., ate breakfast at 8 a.m., then paraded at 9 a.m. For the rest of the day there was little for them to do. The internees were allowed to give their parole and go into town, with officers allowed out at any time and other ranks allowed out between 6 a.m. and 9 p.m. Once in the town, they were free to visit the Seaman’s Mission and were able to collect the money that was available via the Reverend Donald Caskie.
Although it was a vast improvement on sleeping in woods and barns, life in the fort was far from comfortable. The internees reported they were in desperate need of extra blankets and winter clothing. The treatment experienced by some of the sick internees was also not up to accepted standards. One soldier, a Private Street, was interned in the hospital at St Hippolyte du Fort. He had lost an arm during the battles in northern France and had also suffered serious chest wounds. Fellow internees noted his health was failing fast since French doctors were unwilling to operate on him.
In general, however, conditions of internment, while not comfortable, were at least not onerous. As the French described it, this was a case of liberté surveillée. In the words of escaping Britons, it was ‘rough and ready’.12 After weeks or months of scrounging food they could at least expect French military rations that included a litre of red wine per man per day. At St Hippolyte, two British soldiers even requested permission to marry local women they had befriended while on visits to the town. In particular, the other ranks were pleased that the officers made little effort to enforce order upon them. Instead of taking control, they appeared to live their own lives until the time came for them to disappear and head towards freedom. It was just as well, as John Christie noted: ‘We remained very much a collection of individuals. We had reached Marseilles very much under our own steam, either singly or in pairs and none of us was very inclined to give up any part of control over our own destiny.’13
The independent nature of the men who had made their way safely through occupied France to the unoccupied zone meant that few among them were prepared to sit out the war in the stupefying boredom of an internment camp – especially when the camp was filled with lice and some French guards were stealing their food parcels. When they went into the town many faced a hostile reception from locals, especially French sailors who were angered by the British sinking of French ships at Oran. One or two, in particular the sick and wounded who had been promised repatriation, made no attempt to escape the fort. However, for the majority leaving France remained their aim. Using the same independent means that had brought them south, the internees gradually slipped away to make their way home. One officer approached the commandant at Fort St Jean and informed him he wished to withdraw his parole. The commandant understood exactly what he meant and replied: ‘So you’re off again – good luck.’14 On another occasion, when the commandant met up with a British medical officer who had been returned to the fort following an unsuccessful attempt to stow away on a ship, he told him: ‘Better luck next time!’15
The nearest British territory was Gibraltar. From there, escapees knew they would be able to report to the authorities and eventually rejoin their units. The preferred route of escape from France to Gibraltar was via Spain, paying up to 1,000 French francs per man to be smuggled over the Pyrenees to Barcelona. Some evaders even found themselves accompanied by French guides who did not ask for money; instead they requested the soldier assist them to reach England in order that they might join the Free French forces of General de Gaulle.
The aim of the evaders was to be able to reach a British consulate or the embassy in Madrid before they were detected and interned by the Spanish authorities, but they were to discover that it was not simple either to cross the border or to remain anonymous once within Spain. First they had to reach the border in safety. It was not just a case of joining a train in Marseilles and alighting once it had crossed the Spanish frontier. During the summer of 1940 the American authorities had been able to assist by passing word to an American representative in Port Bou, just over the frontier in Spain, giving the likely time of arrival for escaping British soldiers. However, the French authorities soon became aware of the numbers of men attempting to escape into Spain and made sure that t
horough checks were made on train passengers. As a result it became necessary for men to leave trains a few stops before the border and continue the journey on foot. One group even took a train to Perpignan, then hired a taxi to take them to the Spanish border.
Although routes could be found that avoided French police patrols, the problem was that the border ran along the Pyrenees, forcing men thousands of feet up into the mountains to avoid checkpoints at road crossings. Following cart tracks and rough mountain paths, they trudged for days to cross the mountains. Even in the summer the temperatures dropped as they climbed up the rocky mountainsides. From the dizzy heights of the mountains they could look down to the blue of the Mediterranean – to a world of fishing boats and seaside cottages – and wonder how it could be so cold where they were. When the skies were clear, the piercing sun seared their skin, leaving it dry and burnt. Then when the clouds closed in on them they were chilled to the bone in their inadequate clothing. In the upper reaches of the mountain range they could at least find plenty of water – as long as they first broke the ice on the rocky pools. Those who engaged the services of local shepherds were guaranteed a journey that took in familiar paths and winter shelters. For the men who travelled alone it was simply a case of going up one side of the mountains and hoping they could find a safe path to descend into Spain.
Yet there were greater dangers than getting lost amid the peaks. Spain was under the government of General Franco, whose victory in the Spanish Civil War had been facilitated with the assistance of the Nazis, who had used Spain as a testing ground for the same military tactics that had brought Poland and France to their knees. Though neutral, Spain was not guaranteed to give a safe passage to soldiers attempting to reach Gibraltar.
Some evaders headed directly to the nearest big city, Barcelona, where they hoped to retain their anonymity in the cosmopolitan crowds of the port. Like Marseilles, Barcelona was another port city famed for having a vast underworld in which fugitives could take refuge. As a city in a neutral country, Barcelona offered another incentive. Upon reaching the British consul, the escaping soldiers were able to acquire civilian documentation and continue towards Gibraltar. By December 1941 the consul in Barcelona had assisted forty-six soldiers from the BEF who had reached his office without being apprehended. Initially these evaders were sent to Madrid by train; however, this practice was stopped after the Spanish authorities began searching trains between the towns. As a result the consul thought it simpler to deliver the men using his own car, which had diplomatic immunity.
Many of those who escaped over the mountains soon encountered patrols of the Civil Guard. Showing a distinct lack of understanding of the situation in Spain, when apprehended, some of the soldiers even asked Spanish policemen to direct them to the nearest British consulate. It did not take long for them to realize such assistance would not be forthcoming. Taken into custody, the soldiers soon found themselves crammed into the filthy cells of local police stations. Under Spanish law they should have been arrested and committed to court under a warrant of arrest for ‘crossing the frontier clandestinely’.16 Those carrying foreign currency could also be charged under regulations prohibiting the importation of currency to Spain. In reality, few were ever actually charged. Between August and November 1940, the British consulate in Barcelona recorded that a total of seventy-three British soldiers had been detained upon entry to Spain. It was reported that a large proportion of them were men who had slipped through the enemy lines at St Valery.
Some arrived in prison to find fellow Britons they knew from Marseilles who had been captured earlier. The threadbare clothing, matted hair and filthy skin of these men soon warned them there was little hope of a swift return home. The cells were seldom big enough to accommodate the ragged gangs of soldiers. The diet was inadequate. One cabbage provided soup for fifty. The cells were unlit and the latrine buckets overflowed. Some were housed in prisons that were already crowded with political prisoners from the Spanish Civil War. One such prison had been constructed to house two hundred men but actually held over a thousand. At the Prison Habilitada Palacio Misiones in Barcelona British prisoners shared the facilities with thousands of Spanish citizens who were opponents of Franco. While held there the British soldiers heard the executions of Spanish prisoners who seemed to have been picked out at random. In another prison it was noted that some Republican prisoners were men who had been wounded during the Civil War, including amputees whose wounds had not yet fully healed.
One good point about Spain was that, despite Franco’s victory in the Civil War, the nation’s political loyalties were still divided and the country was gripped by an economic malaise that had caused widespread poverty. Thus not only were escaping British soldiers able to count on a measure of assistance from sympathetic civilians but they could also bribe their way out of trouble. One officer, who found himself and his men held in a gaol where the guards even allowed a whore to ply her trade among the prisoners, was able to bribe a guard to make contact with the British consul.
Eventually many of the interned soldiers were transferred to the concentration camps at Miranda del Ebro and Cervera. Covering eight acres and situated to the south of Bilbao, the camp at Miranda had become notorious following the defeat of the Republican forces in the Civil War. Often arriving with their hands chained together, the incoming prisoners had their heads shaved and were given filthy prison uniforms of rough cotton tunic and trousers. Within the concentration camp the British soldiers discovered men of all nationalities, some left over from the Civil War but most soldiers of Europe’s defeated nations who were planning to reach safety to continue their fight against the Germans. There were even a number of German deserters housed within the camp.
The regime was harsh, bordering on vicious. British officers complained of being lashed with thorns, while others recalled beatings with leather thongs and sticks. Inmates were flogged for minor offences and one favoured punishment was to force offenders to march around the camp carrying a stone-filled sack. The British embassy reported that many inmates, who did not appear to be slacking in their work, required treatment for weals after being attacked by whip-wielding guards. Some inmates were also employed to break stones used for road building, although the British were usually put to work peeling the endless piles of potatoes that were served to them at mealtimes.
At night the men slept in two layers, the first in two lines on the floor and the second on a wooden shelf running along the walls. Blankets were shared one between two and many of the men slept naked to avoid the lice that inhabited their prison uniforms. If a man wished to use the latrines at night he had to remove any clothes and wrap a blanket around himself when he left the hut. When one Scottish sergeant attempted to leave the hut without removing his trousers he was beaten with a rifle-butt and kicked repeatedly as he lay on the floor. Each morning the guards arrived with whips to raise the inmates from their beds, striking any man who did not move swiftly enough. Life within the camp soon took its toll on the mental and physical well-being of the inmates. Their bodies became marked with open sores where they had scratched incessantly at insect bites. Some suffered nervous breakdowns, while dysentery and scabies became widespread.
While conditions at Miranda were awful, at least the inmates were able to exercise in the open air. After incarceration in cramped, stuffy cells, simply to be out in the clear mountain air was thought glorious. They might have been surviving on pitifully meagre rations but just to be able to see the sky and taste the crisp air seemed a bonus. Meanwhile the British embassy was reporting back to London that the men at Miranda were living in conditions a great deal better than in the provincial prisons. They would have found little comfort in the ambassador’s words: ‘I have no reason to believe British prisoners have been treated any worse than Spaniards. The treatment of any prisoners in Spain is harsh; the Spaniard is naturally insensitive and cruel.’17
At the concentration camp in Cervera conditions were not so oppressive. The food was adequate a
nd each man received a bottle of wine per day. Another bonus was that none of the British prisoners was required to work. The camp commandant stressed to the British consul that the soldiers were only delaying their eventual release by their constant escape attempts, tearing up bedding to make rope ladders. This information was passed on to the senior British NCO and he gave his word no further escape attempts would be made.
On 12 September 1940 Lieutenant Hogg, Royal Engineers, sent a telegram from Spain to London: ‘Stuck here with five others – Embassy very slow – can you help – Hotel Peninsula Gerona.’18 Claims that embassy staff and consuls were slow to assist the men interned in Spain were refuted by the Foreign Office. Indeed, as it was pointed out, the British officers in the Hotel Peninsula were having all their bills paid directly by the consulate. The ambassador’s official line was that there was little they could do to force the Spanish to release the men. Instead they preferred to press for ensuring all interned British soldiers were transferred to Miranda as soon as possible in order to be able to focus relief efforts. The diplomats were well aware of the pressure faced by the Spanish authorities to enter the war on the German side. They also understood that the Germans were putting pressure on Spain not to allow the release of the British internees. This made the situation tricky for the British ambassador.
Rather than putting direct pressure on the Spanish, some thought it better to influence them indirectly. A letter from the vice-consul in Gerona requested that effort be made to publicize the sufferings of the prisoners in Spain. He requested that the embassy use British and American journalists based in Madrid to raise the subject. He wrote: ‘If the public in England got wind of the manner in which British officers and men are being treated . . . there would be a fine shindy. Their only crime is that, after a 900-kilometre journey, facing every kind of hardship in an effort to get back and continue to fight for their country, they crossed into a neutral land without papers. There they find hardships equal to those of their long trek, without the stimulation of risk and danger.’19
