The Melting Pot

Continued from previous post…..

One recalls the eventual arrival at an open compound with its double line of barbed wire fence; the panic of a prisoner who tried to scale the barbed wire and escape from this human rat trap, and the sharp bark of German rifle as he slumped to the ground. Poor devil… he never stood a chance, but sheer dementia had banished all reason before he steeled himself in adjustment to a situation which he had probably never contemplated. Possibly most of us had envisaged a lost limb or hoped for a slight ‘blighty’ wound which offered a short respite from the horror of stinking trenches and that black morass of mud which had all the quality of a sucking quicksand. But – Prisoner of War – how many had ever considered that an option? Military manuals gave little space to such a possibility. You were told that you were not compelled to afford anything other than your name, age and rank to anyone seeking information which could possibly be of use to the enemy, in the event of your being captured. Such a possibility seemed to be ruled out, really. The situation was most unlikely to arise.

Well, it had that day for thousands of men, whose future was clouded in nebulous speculation. Nobody could offer you anything tangible to bite on. For a long time ahead, in fact, there would be little of anything to bite on. Starvation was a word one had never used, much less contemplated as a possibility for oneself. Still, you would learn to allay that gnawing hunger pain which gave you a sickening nausea as your inner mechanism clamoured for sustenance. The British naval blockade was doing this to millions of Germans too, to a lesser degree perhaps, but you could derive little comfort from this knowledge.

Food, always FOOD, became an absolute obsession. All conversations revolved around it, making its lack even more devastating. If those nocturnal junketings with friends offered temporary euphoria or satisfaction, stark reality of your plight would crash into your mind as soon as you awakened. Then back to the endless discussions on the unchanging theme. God. What fools we were, just turning the knife in the wound with those gastronomic repetitive exercises of the past. Menus of London eating houses. Joys of the ‘Cheshire Cheese’, where you selected and served yourself from a loaded Dumb Waiter or sideboard. ‘Sam Isaacs’, the fish restaurant with the inevitable succulent chips. Even the merits of trotters and tripe, whelks, oyster bars, jellied eels. Your choice conversationally was endless. But oh, the futility of it all.

Then at long last: parcels from home, and those Red Cross parcel days which gave life a new colour and hope and courage. You even invited a friend to ‘dinner’. The liquid from the pork and beans tin with added water made soup – of a kind. The remaining beans, mashed with the odd potato salvaged from your daily German soup ration, provided a pâté. Satisfying and quite Mrs Beetonish. Rice and milk – one tin between four guests – from the Red Cross parcel. This could be stretched by the further addition of water; the only commodity still plentiful. Occasionally a biscuit, with an infinitesimal portion of cheese. All swilled down with issued ersatz coffee of crushed acorns, if you could stomach that beverage. Then an Abdulla cigarette, passed round for a ‘drag’ until you got to the pin at the smoked out butt end, all rather like an Indian Pow Wow pipe of peace.

Then conversation and ‘experiences’ of men who, before the war, had followed diverse occupations: diamond mining, timber felling, Canadian trapping, District Commissioner in India. Life had become fuller again as stomachs became fuller. An occasional discussion on religion brought on your own realisation of how little thought you had given to this subject, and you recalled a little shamefacedly that Drumhead Service when you and thousands of other new prisoners had knelt and given thanks on that Easter Sunday, some days after capture, conducted by that South African Padre with one arm only and one eye. He who refused to be repatriated on account of his disabilities because, as he said, “I can do God’s work in a Prison Camp.” And then you thought of the little camp chapel, with its dwindling attendances as parcels became more plentiful and the war news from the Western Front and the High Seas gave hope of a return home. As one cynic remarked, “Let’s hope the Almighty has a sense of humour,” as he recalls that pious service of thanksgiving on that first Easter in captivity, when “Morgens, caput” seemed quite a possibility.

Josiah Roger Lloyd Atkins

Many thanks to Forces War Records for allowing me to use this article, and I would encourage everyone to visit their excellent and very informative site.

www.forces-war-records.co.uk

If you would like to view the original article, it appeared in Forces War Records Magazine dated January 2016, and is available at the following link:-

www.forces-war-records.co.uk/magazine/issues/2016/01/content/assets/basic-html/page-I.html

The following story appeared in the Forces War Records Magazine dated January 2016, and is transcribed here with the kind permission of Forces War Records. www.forces-war-records.co.uk

My father, Josiah Roger Lloyd Atkins, was born in Merthyr Tydfil on 23rd November 1896 and served in WW1. When he died in the late 1970s, I found, amongst his papers, an account of his memories of being taken prisoner by the Germans on 21st March 1918, which he typed 50 years after the end of the war.

In the hope that this may be of interest to you, I have attached a copy of his account, together with a photograph of him in uniform. I also have an original copy of the POW camp Graudenz ‘The Vistula Weekly Newspaper’, 1918. The camp was in West Prussia. When he first joined the army he was accepted into the Honourable Artillery Company, until he became a Commissioned Officer in the Machine Gun Corps.

One of my grandsons, aged 10, was given a school project for half term which was to be based around WW1. It was with great pleasure that I was able to offer him information based on my father, his great grandfather, and I have just received his completed half term homework, on A3 paper, which included my father’s photograph, his typed account, the significance of the poppy, the poem by John McCrae, and a photocopy of a Dead Man’s Penny. I felt very proud and emotional at my young grandson’s interest and application, and know that his great grandfather would have been equally proud and emotional.

Yours faithfully, Mrs Gilly Lloyd Whitlock (Dorset)

By Josiah Roger Lloyd Atkins, Officer, Machine Gun Corps: This happened to me.

Whenever the 21st of March comes around, memories come crowding back of the incident that happened on that day in the year 1918. As it all occurred a little over 50 years ago, you who read this might well be excused for expressing the doubt that, after such a period of time, memory must become a little dim, and imagination must supplant accurate memory to some extent. As the pundits in the field of human memory will tell you, if impressions are strong enough, they become firmly planted in the mind and recollection becomes effortless and more or less automatic. So I can, without the slightest hesitation, claim that the impressions of that day were as strong as any impressions could be, and the recollections today are as crystal clear as though everything happened yesterday. Why? Well, it was the day that I first became a guest of the Kaiser until the end of the Great War. ‘Guest’ perhaps is a slightly extravagant word for incarceration in a Prison Camp, so if you prefer ‘offizier kriegsgefangen’, well, you just make your own choice.

There was great jubilation in Germany on that day, or maybe the next day. Not, mark you, because they regarded my capture as all that important, but I was just one of an estimated 20,000 soldiers of the Allied Forces, and one must admit, that’s quite a lot of soldiery, by any standard of fighting potential. Now, on consideration, it seems somewhat ironic that they – the Jerries – employed almost the identical military tactics which culminated in our disastrous Dunkirk in the Second World War. All of which goes to prove that they seemed to know their job, while we… well, the less said the better, perhaps.

Being ‘taken prisoner’ is a very disturbing business, leastways I found it so. I became acquainted with the German language for the first time when an interrogating N.C.O. gave me a rather baneful look, drew his hand across his throat and quite cheerfully said, “Morgens. Caput. Sie.” A remark which produced a supporting chorus of “Morgens, caput,” from his fellow soldiers – displaying obvious glee. One could be excused, I think, for feeling this was a little playful humour on their part, until one of our chaps, who spoke German, explained to me that it meant, “Tomorrow. Finished. YOU.” And that little gesture with the edge of the right hand across his throat made one feel that the joke – if joke it was – appeared to be in very bad taste. I was young, you see, just 21, and there seemed such a lot of things that one had planned to do with one’s life, and you never expected it to end like this. I thought of lots of friends I would never see again. I felt I’d like to have been privileged to thank my mother for lots of sacrifices she had been compelled to make since my father died when I was a boy of 10. It all seemed so unfair that now I could never do anything to repay her.

Still, buoyancy of spirit is very marked in the young and the depression soon passed. It was comforting to see many beribboned, very senior, officers in that column of weary prisoners trudging through the Flanders mud and the back areas of German occupied territory. One experienced a comforting warmth from the pat on the shoulder from some ageing peasant woman, who darted out from a shell ravaged little hovel with a wary eye on that mounted Uhlan with his menacing lance, as his mount cantered along that straggling line of prisoners, tapering back in an endless ribbon, getting dimmer and dimmer in the early evening light.

To be continued…..