Survivor of the Long March

‘Get rid of your side arms,’ he said, meaning my bayonet. We still had on our overcoats even though it was summer, so I edged myself up slowly onto my knees and then into a squatting position, unbuttoned my coat a bit and undid the webbing which held my bayonet, drew it out and dropped it beside me.

‘Now just wait. We’ll have to just wait,’ he said.

I could see a German officer a couple of hundred feet away, a huge man, flanked by two more gorillas. Anything could happen now, I thought. What will they do to us? The scariest feeling in the world, knowing what these men were capable of and not knowing what they were they going to do. I wished that I had something in my hand, a loaded weapon, preferably. I would have felt better. It would have made me feel like a proper soldier, able to defend myself instead of just being a sitting target. I was lucky to be still alive though. I felt sorry for the others, particularly those I could hear groaning in pain. God knows what injuries they had and how they would be treated. Then the fear hit me again. What was going to happen next?

At first when I had got out of the truck I thought it would be all right. There’s somebody in charge up ahead. We will be OK, they will know what to do. Then I realised I was on my own. I asked myself, ‘Why didn’t the Germans just blow us all up?’ Me, my truck and hundreds of gallons of petrol, it would have all gone off like a bomb and taken us with it. It would have all been over and done with in a second. No fear or no worry. The end. No more. And my last thoughts were for those I was going to leave behind. What would my mother do when she got the news? What would happen to Lily?

The German officer came up the road towards us shouting, ‘Hande hoch! Hande hoch!’ – hands up, and ‘Up, Tommy, Hande hoch!’ I was frightened to get up on my own but when I saw the Sergeant move, I grabbed my helmet and stood up. We walked towards the officer with our arms raised high in surrender. Two others of our unit appeared and I was pleased to see one was Pony Moore. As he walked towards them with his hands up, some of the German soldiers started calling out and making gestures. Pony was a short, thickset chap and the Germans were making fun of his appearance shouting ‘Komm Churchill.’

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