things about his person: stub of pencil, needle, matches, knife, bits of old wire and string. And on The March, true to form, he was always on the lookout for things to make our lives better, opportunities to search the area and any empty houses along the way.
When we left camp Jimmy had a rucksack made from a hessian animal feed bag on his back. I’m not sure if he had found the bag and stitched it together himself or our tailor friend had made it. He kept all his stuff in there including his tartan trews, which he changed into when the weather got better months later and the sun was shining, I enjoyed watching him up in front, head held high, tartan legs striding along, and the ribbons on his Highland cap fluttering behind.
39 men.
Left the farm at Langenau [20 January] 2 men stay in hiding.
Everybody in good spirits.
It was Saturday (one of our rest days) when the camp was evacuated. No rest for us though. We had started with forty-five men in the camp back in 1940, lost a few, gained a few and were down to forty-one. When the officer took the roll call there were two men missing and a couple of guards were sent to look for them. Our two chaps didn’t appear and we never heard any shots fired so maybe they got away. God knows where they went. To the coast to find a boat? Madness. In the end the guards were called back and we set off on foot down the road.
The Germans had loaded two small horse-drawn carts – one full of supplies, including some Red Cross parcels, and their equipment; the other nearly empty. This was later used to fetch bread from villages where a bakery was still in business, and also to carry those too ill or injured to walk. I remember looking at the horses thinking they looked in better condition than us. There were bags of feed on the cart for them but it wasn’t enough for a long journey in the middle of winter.
Of course, the guards were more worried about keeping the horses fed than us prisoners. We felt sorry for the creatures. They were doing a good job so we kept an eye open for hay when we stopped off somewhere. If we kipped in a barn or stable we grabbed a handful of straw and fed them when we could. I remember Laurie saying, after we’d been a month on the road when everybody, including the horses, looked on their last legs: ‘If one of the nags goes down, at least we’re in with the chance of a decent meal.’ Those horses turned out to be lot tougher than us.
[21 January] March 42km. Nearly all of us throw away a lot of kit.
Much too heavy to carry
It was on the second day that the dreadful weather conditions got the better of us and I and most of the other men realised the folly of struggling to carry bundles, boxes, bags, whatever, of belongings. Nearly everybody started throwing things away as they went along. You could look back and see a trail of discarded items. During an early stop, I said, ‘I can’t be doing with this!’ and tipped out the box leaving everything in the snow except my bit of food, cigarettes, piece of soap, socks, and my spoon and bowl. What I couldn’t fit into in my already filled coat pockets got left behind.
Survival. That was what we focussed on. You concentrated on the walking, watching your feet and the boots of the men in front and getting into the rhythm. Nobody wanted to fall behind. God help you if you got detached. And when other groups of men gradually joined us along the way, it was even more important to stick together and not get separated. Even though we hadn’t a clue where we were going, we thought, ‘Better the devil you know. Stick with your mates.’
We were fortunate, my pals and I, to be at the back of the line so the first men in front were clearing a path which made it easier for us. We still had to battle through deep snow sometimes up to our chests, sometimes digging it away by hand, other times stopping to get shovels off the back of cart while the guards looked on. It was exhausting. Every icy breath drawn in hurt your lungs and made your teeth and head ache. Every movement was painful. Every step dangerous. It was so slippery that you had to watch every step so you didn’t fall. I thought about our horses at home, how I used to take them to the blacksmith’s in winter to have studs put in their shoes for the bad weather. We could have done with some of those on our boots to give us a bit of grip. It was never this like in Essex even during the worst winters. Such a struggle just to be able to walk a few hundred metres. Would there ever be an end to this torture?
Always the snow and the ice. It was the continuous gnawing cold which made your eyes water except the tears froze and glued your lids together. Even with a scarf wrapped round, your cap on, and coat collar up, your head ached as though somebody was banging an ice cold hammer through your brain. Even with two pairs of socks on, your feet were so cold you had to look down and check that they were still there at the end of your legs. Even if you had gloves or your homemade mittens on and stuffed your hands deep into your pockets you could still feel them burning with cold as though they were being held over a hot flame. Utterly, utterly miserable.
There was a plan of sorts – to go in a westerly direction from camp to camp – but it didn’t always work out like that. We didn’t know the route and I don’t think the guards did either half the time. Sometimes we walked for days in huge circles coming back to where we started. Cries went up: ‘Christ in heaven, we’ve been here before!’ or ‘Where in f------ hell are we going?’ but it made no difference. We just carried on. We followed orders. With guards carrying machine-guns you just did. No questions asked. In spite of having walked all day, it was so cold that gangs of men got into circles at night to keep warm and continued walking round and round; others were so frightened to lie down and go to sleep that they used to prop each other up as they snatched a few minutes sleep here and there.
Not long after we started on The March, we began picking up other POWs – twenty, thirty or forty men at a time, until we had a steady column of about 100–150 men. It was a shifting and changing group. Some stayed a few days to rest or work and moved off again and some others would join us. Some of our original guards stayed for quite a while but as time went on, older men replaced the younger ones who left, called back to fight the Allied advance from the west and the Russian Army from the east.
One of the first groups to join us was a bunch of American airmen who were pulling homemade sledges. They seemed very well-prepared with woolly hats and scarves wrapped round their heads and some had fur mittens, even goggles. We were very envious of them with their belongings packed neatly on the sledges even though it was probably quite difficult pulling them along on the ice and through the thick snow.
They looked pretty fit and well fed to me and we learned that they had only been prisoners for three months. When we told them how long we had been POWs they were shocked. ‘Jeez, no wonder you guys look like death warmed up!’ They could see in our haggard faces that we had suffered a lot. Of course, most Yanks love the Brits and everything British and as they had been stationed over in England they waxed lyrical about our countryside and village pubs but mainly our food. ‘Oh, we love your fish and chips’ and ‘How about those steak and kidney pies?’ How much they missed them. If they missed them, what about us? I did think it was insensitive of them going on about our wonderful food when we were starving but at least they shared a cigarette or two with us and a bit of chocolate. One good thing about smoking was that it curbed your appetite. Our stomachs had shrunk over the years so we were used to eating very little but it was still hard, very hard to cope in these conditions.
Our bits and pieces from the Red Cross parcels were soon eaten up and we relied on the handouts of stale bread distributed by the guards. Keeping warm by moving was more important than eating. You didn’t want to sit down or your trousers would freeze to the ground. You didn’t want to take your hands out of your pockets even if you had strips of old blanket wound round them because the tips of your fingers would get frostbite. At times groups managed to clear a small area and light a fire or two and make a brew with melted snow and a few tea leaves from someone’s pocket. We would pass the bowl around the lucky men in the group. It reminded me of happier times felling trees in the Rosenberg forest.
Hebby managed to make notes during the journey in a diary which he had taken from the blacksmith’s where he had worked. He kept track of places and distances we covered. I don’t know how he worked out how far we walked each day because we didn’t always see sign posts or know which places we’d been through but he was the sort of person who kept his eyes peeled, listened to other people and picked up information that way. What he wrote down helped me when I jotted down my own notes using the blank pages of my New Testament. I brought
