Dunkirk: The Men They Left Behind (38 page)

Not every overnight stop was so fraught with danger. At Frévent marchers recalled arriving at a factory to be greeted by the sight of a perfectly attired sergeant major of the Welsh Guards, complete with clean-shaven chin, who was holding a steaming cup of tea. It was a bizarre sight for men who had not had a hot meal or drink for over four days.

Of all the things experienced on the march into Germany, one thing made the greatest impression upon the prisoners. What mattered more than anything was the shortage of food. The marching may have blistered their feet and left their legs aching, but nothing was more important than the fact they often had almost nothing with which to sustain themselves. As a result, they relied on their meagre reserves of fat, something that was soon used up as they marched mile upon mile towards Germany.

The men captured at Calais were among the first to join the marching hordes. Their spirited defence of the port, against all odds, may have won time for the remainder of the BEF to escape. But all it had earned the defenders of Calais were bitter memories, exhaustion and hunger. Yet as they began to march there was little chance to satisfy their aching bellies. In such circumstances, even a single egg was manna from heaven. When Lt-Colonel Ellison-MacArtney found one, he offered it to all his men in turn. Yet all refused, insisting their CO deserved that rare treat. On the sixth day of the march they each received a ration of thin barley soup with half an ounce of sausage. The next morning they received green and mildewed loaves that had to be shared one between ten. One soldier described his soup ration as ‘nothing more than dirty water cooked in a pig-trough’.
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The story was the same everywhere. It was the beginning of the process in which the hungry prisoners discovered that an empty belly was the one thing guaranteed to stop a soldier thinking of women. It was a bitter experience that would follow them for the next five years.

Those who eventually managed to pass reports of their ill-treatment back to the UK highlighted the poor food. For many, it was not just the question of rations being issued. As the almost inevitable soup was ladled out there were many who had nothing to collect it in. Having lost so much of their kit, they had no mess tins to hold out. Discarded rusting cans were pounced on at the roadside. Some improvised, holding out their steel helmets. One desperate man even took off his boot and held that out to receive his soup ration. When Fred Gilbert, already weakened by three bullet wounds and long days of marching, found himself in a food queue without a receptacle, he did the only thing possible, he stretched out his cupped hands and accepted a handful of soup. That was his entire ration for the day.

The men craved the taste of the nicotine that had always previously helped to suppress hunger, yet only the luckiest among them still had any tobacco. The pipe-smokers fared best. They crammed their pipes into the corners of their mouths and marched onwards, as Eric Reeves remembered: ‘I didn’t have any tobacco but I had my pipe. You can still suck on an empty pipe and get a lot of enjoyment, you get the taste and smell of nicotine.’

The last substantial group to join the eastward march were the men of the 51st Highland Division. Three weeks after the first prisoners had started marching, the Jocks rose from their barbed-wire enclosure on the cliffs above St Valery. After a night in the open, one group of prisoners were fed raw salted herring and black bread. Such was the foul taste of the fish that most immediately threw it away. It would be the last time they would reject food, however sickening. The next morning the same men were given a cup of coffee and two British Army hard tack biscuits. Another group watched as a German lorry drew up. Stopping beside the fence surrounding the prisoners, the Germans on board began to throw loaves of bread to the famished men. As the men fought over the loaves, scrabbling in the rain-soaked grass for a handful of crumbs, the purpose of their visit was revealed. As the Germans shouted, ‘England
kaput
!’ to their prisoners, the men looked up to see a film crew recording their desperate fights for the consumption of audiences eager to witness the German mastery over their British enemies.

The humiliation was just the start of their misery. In the course of their ten-day march, some remnants of the Highland Division did get the occasional food issue. During one stop a soup ration appeared but it was insufficient to feed everyone in the column. An officer made an announcement that the NCOs should divide the men into groups by their units and then draw lots for who would get the soup. The plan was that they would be ineligible for the next ration. Some men recorded receiving a pack of hard tack biscuits to share between three men each day and, as one man recalled, a cup of black liquid ‘said to be coffee’.
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Others, like Jim Pearce, received nothing more than a lump of bread, green with mould: ‘So we lost weight rapidly.’

One group was offered rations by their guards on the proviso that they dug latrines for the column. Despite the lure of food they were simply too weak to break the shovels through the soil. Another were pleased to find they had stopped beside a duck pond. As many as possible pulled off their boots and wallowed in the murky waters, revelling in the relief it brought to their aching feet and filthy bodies.

For those who retained some strength the nightly breaks meant an opportunity to beg, steal or scrounge whatever food was available. Dandelions, dock leaves, daisies and any other roadside weeds became a regular part of their diets. One man recalled boiling nettles in his tin helmet to make what passed for nettle soup. On another occasion the same man paid 50 francs to French colonial troops who had slaughtered a cow. His share of the kill was the unwashed tripe. Another soldier reported that his best night on the march was the one when he somehow managed to find a chicken. The chicken was soon killed, plucked and boiled in a discarded French helmet. Such fare was a luxury. One group of men marching from St Valery caught a dog and stewed it. However, the food carried by a group of French Moroccans was too extreme for even the most desperate British prisoners. The soldiers were aware that whatever the men were carrying was giving off a foul smell. When a German soldier made them open the sack, its contents were revealed. A rotten horse’s head fell to the floor, alive with maggots.

The prisoners – dizzy from the effects of the encroaching starvation – consumed anything and everything that was vaguely edible. As they marched they cut through the landscape like a cloud of khaki locusts. Fields and farms next to the roads they marched along became the scenes of vast foraging sweeps as the men desperately searched for anything edible. As Eric Reeves remembered: ‘The only thing that saved me from starvation were the clamps of mangel-wurzels. You’d wait until the guards on their bikes were out of sight then you’d jump in and get as many as you can carry. Then you’d get back in the column and share them out with guys you’d never even seen before. So we ate them raw and unwashed.’ For Fred Coster the experience was one that could never be forgotten: ‘Eating these damn raw potatoes, most of the chaps got diarrhoea. They were dropping out of the column to go to the toilet all the time. It was very debilitating and disgusting. But that was how you had to live – or you’d go under.’

Gangs surged towards clamps of vegetables stored by the local farmers. Swedes, potatoes and sugar beet were pulled from clamps, the dirt brushed from them, then stuffed hungrily into the mouths of the marching men. It didn’t matter that they needed to be cooked before consumption – few men had any way of cooking them, nor any matches to light a fire. Instead the foul-tasting raw vegetables were chewed and swallowed as enthusiastically as a gourmet meal.

As the columns passed through the countryside, whole piles of vegetables disappeared into the bellies of the marchers. Yet for many the appearance of the piles was as much a frustration as it was a relief, as Dick Taylor remembered: ‘You’d see a clamp of vegetables in the distance, but by the time you got there it had all gone.’ Even the condition of vegetables was of little interest, with some men recalling eating rotten onions taken from a roadside pile. Desperate for sustenance, David Mowatt joined the gangs that descended on to the vegetable piles: ‘We reached this pile of turnips – all covered in soil – that heap had a life of its own, it just moved. It disappeared as we went past. We also got blighted potatoes. But they nearly killed us. I was very ill, we got diarrhoea.’ As a trained chef, Ken Willats knew more about food than the majority of his comrades. Yet, just like the rest of them, there was nothing he could do but join the scavenging hordes: ‘One time I picked up some crushed rhubarb from the road. I thought “I’ll have that!” That was the length you were prepared to go to get something to eat. Rhubarb’s not very nice uncooked, but when you are starving it’s like nectar!’ While large numbers were hit by stomach upsets as a result of the poor food, there was another side effect suffered by those who had been forced to eat the most basic of roadside produce. As RAMC man Ernie Grainger remembered: ‘Food! We ate grass. As a result, when you passed water it was green – because of the chlorophyll!’

Even the homes they marched past became fair game for the increasingly hungry soldiers. In one village Tommy Arnott and his mate ran to a house: ‘There was an Alsatian chained to the wall so we went round the back and opened the door. The lady in the house had been baking bread – it was on a tray – big square loaves. She was going to put the dog on us but, by the time she got the dog, we ran off to the column clutching two loaves. Poor soul, we pinched her bread, but that’s what starvation does to you.’

Driven to desperation by the lack of food, some men tried to get help. There were those who feigned sickness, hoping it might lead to better treatment. In one instance a soldier who found himself amid a large group of French prisoners discovered they had facilities for treating the sick. So he feigned a seizure, was carried to some farm buildings used as an aid post, then kept visiting the latrines to suggest he had dysentery. The ruse worked and he was able to get food from the French and a few days of desperately needed rest. After a few days’ rest he moved on, before trying the same ruse of a feigned seizure and finding himself put on to a truck carrying the sick.

One of those who wasn’t feigning when he collapsed amid the marching hordes was Eric Reeves. He was one of the men who was ‘travelling light’ – he had no greatcoat, no groundsheet, no mess tin and no waterbottle. All he had was an empty gas mask case and a small haversack. Everything else had been lost when he was captured. There was something else he was not carrying. Reeves was a small man, just over five foot tall with hardly any reserves of fat to sustain him as he marched day after day without food.After four or five days I was exhausted – I’d lost all my mates by this time – and we’d stopped for the night in a field. It was freezing that night and we were wet through. The next morning you could see steam coming off the blokes’ uniforms as they eventually dried out. I’d had very little sleep and as I got up I just collapsed. I sank down to my knees. I heard a bloke say, ‘Quick grab him’ and half a dozen of them picked me up. At this point there was an issue of soup going on to the Froggies. So they carried me shoulder high down the hill. The French and Germans were pushing us but the blokes said, ‘No he’s sick – he’s wounded’ and they carried me right through the crowd. So we all got some soup.

It was a genuine relief for Reeves, who might otherwise had been left behind to face execution by the guards. Realizing there was at least some concern among both the French prisoners and the German cooks, Reeves and his new-found mates decided it was worth repeating: ‘We did it three times! One bloke would say, “Hey, little-un, pass out, we’re going to get something to eat.” I never knew the blokes who were carrying me but they kept me alive. Helped me keep going for twenty-one days of marching.’

He was not alone in his increasing weakness. As the hunger and sickness began to bite, some men were forced to link arms to support each other as they marched. R.P. Evans, a private in the Gloucestershire Regiment, recalled offering assistance to one of the weaker men: ‘A man walking just in front of me collapsed and a German officer was screaming at him and waving his pistol, so I put an arm around the man’s waist and his arm over my shoulders and somehow coaxed him along for two or three miles, until a lorry came along picking up the stragglers. I often wondered what happened to that chap afterwards.’
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He went on to describe the condition of his fellow marchers: ‘The men’s condition was indescribable, and with ten days’ growth of beard, and their faces caked with dust, seamed through with rivulets of sweat, they looked like beings from another world.’
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This result of using up their reserves of fat became a very noticeable side effect of the long days of arduous marching. In a letter that eventually reached the War Office, one prisoner summed up the misery of the period when he reported: ‘You see we got nothing for the first twelve days, and had to do forced marching right through France and Belgium. I was taken prisoner after a great battle when we were surrounded for two days without water, and only gave up because of the cries of the wounded . . . the first time I had a chance to sit on a hard seat I found I had been living on my hips, then I noticed my breast had gone as flat as a pancake. I had used up all the fat I had . . . so I’m now just gristle and bone, but as hard as iron.’
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While the physical effect of the incessant marching was shown on their bodies, the deprivations of the march also became evident in their clothing. Nights spent sleeping in the open soaked their dirt-encrusted woollen battledress with dew, covered them with mud and grass stains, and introduced the sort of creases that would have once brought any sergeant major screaming down on them. Now no one cared what they looked like. Small rips and tears became gaping holes. Even their boots – that most had hardly ever expected to ‘wear in’ – began to wear out. David Mowatt, having been issued a brand-new pair of double-soled army boots just three weeks before he was captured, found the strain of the daily slog took its toll on the boots. By the time he reached Dortmund he had worn through the soles.