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 operations 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
