Survivor of the Long March

walk by. I don’t suppose I looked any better than them although my face and arms were quite brown from spending so much time out of doors. And although I was thin, I was fit with muscles in places I never knew you had them. Yes, I had something to be thankful for. I had remained pretty healthy with no serious illnesses and I see now how that was a good preparation for what came later – The Long March home. But I had another two years to wait for that.

My guard arrived and I was about to leave when someone came up behind me and tapped me on the shoulder. ‘Yours, I believe,’ and handed me with my little packet of biscuits.

When I returned to my camp I was welcomed back by everybody who crowded round, patted me on the back and gave me a cigarette. ‘All right, Chas,’ and ‘Good to see you, mate,’ and ‘Saved you a bit of bacon.’ I felt like a returning hero even though I had done nothing brave except sit out my solitary in a dark cell. I vowed never to do anything stupid like that again. ‘Yeah, that’s right, Chas. You keep your nose clean.’

I was careful after that because I was frightened of being punished again, of possibly going to a place called Graudenz where serious offenders were sent. We had heard stories from men we met from other work detachments, about what went on there. ‘You don’t want to go to that hell hole,’ they said. ‘Dreadful place. You go in for a month, do 12 hours a day unloading bricks, sand and cement from the barges. Live on half rations, return to your own camp for a couple of days to recuperate and then go back again.’ Absolute torture.

When I think of it now, I was lucky; I got off lightly. Unfortunately having a bit of a temper is part of my character and not something so easily controlled when, in the heat of the moment, you think something is wrong or you witness an injustice, it’s hard to keep quiet and do nothing. The soup incident was pretty mild compared with what I foolishly did a few months later.

11 A Nice Bit of Cheese

There’s nothing worse than toothache once it starts and if you can’t get any relief, it drives you crazy. One of our chaps did it himself, took out his own tooth with a penknife. Now I didn’t fancy doing that, not just because of the pain but the sight of blood all over the place. My toothache went on for days and I couldn’t eat or sleep properly. Eventually I couldn’t stand it any longer.

I went to see the Unteroffizier in his office to ask him if I could go and see a dentist. He was sitting at a desk and stamping bits of paper, moving them from one pile to the next as Hitler looked down on him from the wall behind. I waited for him to finish what he was doing. I realised that I didn’t know the word for dentist. Or tooth. Never mind, you just have to have a go, don’t you. One of my big regrets is that I didn’t learn German while I was in the camp. We picked up odd words and repeated phrases we heard but it was very limited; we never had proper conversations. If we had been allowed to speak more to the guards it would have been good.

When he finally looked up I said, ‘Entschuldigen Sie. Ich brauche einen Dentist bitte,’ – Excuse me. I need a dentist, please, and pointed inside my mouth and pulled a face as if in pain, which, of course, I was. ‘Tooth hurts. Tooth schlecht,’ – bad.

‘Zahnartz, ja?’ he said.

‘Ja,’ I said, nodding. ‘Ich brauche einen Zahnartz, bitte.’

‘Nein. Kein Zahnartz.’ – no, no dentist. He shook his head and dismissed me with a wave, adding, ‘Keine Zeit. Keine Soldaten,’ – no time, no guards. He couldn’t spare one of his men just to take one prisoner all the way into town to a dentist and then back again. And that was that.

The toothache continued and I was just considering borrowing a penknife and having a go myself when Laurie and Sid came up with an idea.

‘Oh, Chas, my tooth hurts,’ said Laurie, pulling a face.

‘Me, too, something chronic,’ Sid joined in, rubbing one side of his jaw. They both agreed to say that they had toothache and needed to see a dentist. So armed with the word, ‘Zahnartz’, they trooped off to see the Unteroffizier. He seemed to have had a change of heart and decided to let us all go. He could justify this to his superiors, the deployment of one guard to three prisoners on this occasion. I thought it was marvellous that my two pals were willing to put themselves through this and the likelihood of a German dentist extracting a tooth or two. That was the way people treated toothache then: they pulled the offending tooth out. So the next morning, instead of going to work, we were marched off to Freystadt.

It was a half hour walk or so to the village and we had to make our way to the main road along rough tracks from the farm. We were escorted by this particular guard who was following behind, carrying his rifle down by his side ready to fire if we decided to make a dash for it. I don’t know if he was particularly nervous or had been told by somebody that we were a trio of dangerous desperados but we certainly weren’t going to give him any trouble. Me with my raging toothache, Laurie and Sid more worried about what was going to happen than making a bid for freedom.

Suddenly, as we were going along the main road, we heard this strange sound in the distance. There was a bend ahead and we couldn’t see what was coming. Clump, clump, clump, clump, getting louder. Very odd. The guard knew immediately what it was and shouted, ‘Hinunter!’ – get down. We dropped down into the gully by the side of the road and lay there not daring to move. Memories of the road outside Abbeville came back to me as I lay face down in the dirt. I stopped breathing for a moment and listened, trying to make out what was going on.

When we dared to raise our heads up enough to see over the top, I saw a column of 40–50 men and women coming round the bend. They were dressed in dark, filthy clothes that mostly hung off their skinny bodies. The clomping sound was the noise from the wooden clogs they were wearing on their feet. It was a shocking sight. Their faces were white, their eyes sunk right in and they had no hair at all.

There was a guard at the front, behaving as though he was leading a triumphal parade. There were guards either side, some with rifles, others with revolvers in shoulder holsters, holding a whip in one hand which they dragged along the ground and then suddenly cracked. One guard held the lead of an Alsatian dog in his other hand. A guard at the rear held a sub-machine gun, no doubt keeping an eye open for anybody who dropped out or was foolish enough to try and run away.

I couldn’t bear seeing this and my temper got the better of me. That red mist of anger, frustration, injustice and helplessness rose before my eyes. It was a bit silly, I suppose, you will probably say I was mad but I jumped out of that gully, scrambled up on to the road and rushed towards one of the guards. ‘Schlecht’ – bad, I shouted. ‘German culture, bad,’ and I spat at the guard’s boots. ‘Schlecht,’ I moved my head down to spit again.

The guard hardly broke step and the next second, I felt the butt of his rifle hit me hard between my shoulder blades. I collapsed and the pain was so intense like an electric shock that I couldn’t breathe. Completely winded. I stayed there on the ground fighting to get my breath back, paralysed, as much from fear as shock. Was a bullet in the head from one of the other guards going to follow?

Poor Laurie and Sid couldn’t do anything but watch. If they had got up on to the road and come to help me then they would have got the same treatment or worse; we all could have been shot. By the time I came to and started to get up, these poor devils were away down the road. I could see star shapes and big white patches, the size of dinner plates, stitched on the back of their jackets, which denoted the category of prisoner they were.

Why didn’t they try to escape? Even if they got shot, surely that was better than what lay ahead. Going to some God forsaken spot, digging their own graves and then lining up to be shot. Maybe they still hoped that they would get through somehow. I was very, very lucky not be killed. They were almost out of sight when I returned to my pals and the guard.

I didn’t care about my toothache any more. My pain now was nothing compared to that of those marching prisoners. We carried on our journey and said not a word about what we had seen there or on the way back.