On This Day, 28 September 1918

Birmingham Daily Post 

Saturday 28 September 1918

GERMAN GENERAL’S TRIBUTE TO BRITISH HEROES.

BIRMINGHAM MAN’S TALE OF MISERY AND PERSECUTION.

A Birmingham man who was serving In the 1st Battalion Royal Welsh Fusiliers at the beginning of the war, and was captured Zonnebeke, near Ypres, on October 21, 1914, has written to a friend a graphic account of his experiences from the time he and his comrades were forced to surrender, owing to lack of ammunition, until he was sent to Holland. When they had to accept the inevitable there were about forty or fifty men holding half a mile of trench, and it was the same all along the line, the enemy outnumbering them by as many as ten and fifteen to one. Surrounded and compelled to surrender, the small band of unarmed men were marched to a farm about half a kilometre distant, the Germans maliciously “potting” at them the while. There the writer had an interview with the enemy commander, who asked “Where are the remainder of the men?” There they are!” said the soldier, pointing to his mates, who had just been searched. “No, you swine,” stormed the Hun, “I mean the remainder from the trench there.” The writer assured his interrogator that there were no others left. The officer could hardly believe that so few men could have held so long a line, but being convinced finally, shook hands with his captive, remarking “Well, you are a brave lot of men!”

The story brings the forlorn band on to Gottingen, whither they travelled in filthy cattle trucks, defiled with manure and badly overcrowded. Except at Munster, which was reached on the 24th, they had been given no food since the time of their capture, and then only two thin slices of mouldy bread. At Gottingen, marching through the streets to their depot, they were reviled by the civilians, kicked, and spat at, their guards encouraging the enraged populace to jeer at the “Englanders.” At the camp, after standing for two hours in drenching rain, they were assigned to huts, sixty men in a room twenty feet square, and had to lie on the bare boards in their wet clothing. The writer, rendered desperate by hunger, escaped from his prison when the sentry’s back was turned, and, thanks to a Belgian, found his way to a canteen used by the sentries, who, thinking he had been given permission to come there, did not object to his purchasing some provisions with a 20-franc note which had been hidden in his puttees.

The rest of the story is a record of unalloyed misery and semi-starvation. The captives asked for food, and were told to starve; but they did get coffee substitute, without sugar or milk, twice a day, and pint of a filthy mess masquerading as soup. On this diet they laboured hard from 4 a.m. until 5 p.m., buffeted and abused whenever physical weakness compelled a slackening of effort. On the second day each man received six ounces of sour bread and thin blankets, on the fifth day palliasses were provided.

And here the diary ends for the moment.