Meeting the Enemy (32 page)

In addition to effective starvation, German guards were instructed to mistreat the prisoners. CSM Gibb claimed to have obtained printed orders stating ‘that no mercy was to be shown to us; we were the men who had, every one of us, assisted in stopping the Kaiser’s army from going to Paris and they were to think of their comrades who were being brutally treated in France, and be strong.’ Gibb claimed the German interpreter encouraged prisoners to write home describing conditions.

At Mitau, the men were forced to clear or dig trenches in the German second and third lines, as well as constructing communication trenches linking them to the front. They were also employed collecting ice from a nearby river. According to Gibb, the men paraded at 5.30 a.m., moving off around 6 a.m. and returning to the camp about 5.30 p.m. They were given no food between these hours and there were only two breaks of twenty minutes during the day. Survivors recalled that Russian shelling injured a number of men and at least one prisoner was shot in the stomach by a sniper.

The lack of food coupled with atrocious weather quickly took its toll. Private Arthur Soder of the 1st Dorsetshire Regiment, for example, was left helpless as his weight dropped from 69kg to 40kg in a little over five weeks and one leg swelled to twice its normal size through the effects of frost.

If Corporal Robert Steele’s description of the men’s physical condition on leaving Libau was even moderately accurate, there can be no doubt as to the terrible conditions at Mitau where victims died within three weeks of arrival. On 17 March, Private Reuben Wilmott of the Border Regiment died from the effects of cold. According to Soder, ‘He was quite stiff through the frost when we found him in the morning. He was lying just by the flap of the tent.’ Six days later, Able Seaman Philip Rootham also died. Witnesses stated that he was carried back after a day’s work unconscious through exhaustion. He died on the way to hospital. Private Albert Roberts of the King’s Own Royal Lancaster Regiment died later the same day and was buried next to Rootham. Private James Brown of the Highland Light Infantry followed soon after, succumbing to the cold on 22 March, and on 23 March Private Mulholland died.

Only those who were dangerously ill were taken to hospital, including those, survivors claimed, who self-mutilated in order to escape their circumstances. Lance Corporal Harold Sugden was detailed to work in the hospital where 200 men from Mitau were taken. He noted that they were in a deplorable state, just ‘bags of skin and bone, with frost-bitten feet and mostly suffering from nephritis or kidney complaints, with swollen legs . . .’ In hospital more died, including Private Kinsman, Lance Corporal Waterman, and Privates Harvey, Walker, McCulloch and Farmer.

‘By the end of March the parties were in a terrible state,’ acknowledged Gibb. ‘The remainder had to be assisted to their work in the morning, and we had to carry most of them home in the evenings.’ Derbyshire vicar’s son Able Seaman Cedric Ireland died on 26 March in his comrades’ arms on the way back from work.

Ireland had reported sick that morning but was detailed for work nonetheless. Witnesses stated that he had to be helped from the trenches at the end of the day and that he died on the way back from ‘weakness, cold and hunger’. His death would be followed by five more in as many days.

By 2 April, only 176 men were left in the camp, just over a third of those who had arrived less than six weeks before. Of these only fifty were fit enough to work although many more were sent out regardless of their physical condition. Four days later, another three men died, although, of all the deaths, that of Private Alan Skett was the only one reported as murder rather than as the result of gratuitous neglect. CSM Gibbs witnessed his comrade’s death.

On the 6th April about 10 p.m. Private Skett, Coldstream Guards, was shot at point blank range. Owing to weakness he was a light arbeit [worker], but he had been working all day with a party and had collapsed on the mud. When ordered to proceed with his work he could hardly rise. He got up somehow but could scarcely stand. He could not work or even walk, so he was shot. The body was left out where it fell. It was covered with a piece of corrugated iron. I managed to get him buried somehow on the 9th, quite near the camp.

One witness, Corporal Charles Wright of the 5th Lancers, backed up Gibb’s story.

I was outside the tent in which we lived, about 9 p.m., when I heard a shot. About 15 minutes later a party of about seven or eight British prisoners came in. I asked them what the shot was, and they told me that Private Skett, Coldstream Guards, had been shot because he was too weak to walk, and the sentry who was with the party did not want to leave him behind . . . I saw the wound in his chest which had been made by a rifle bullet fired point blank. The jacket round the place where the bullet had entered the body was torn and scratched. On asking for further details I was told by an eyewitness, Private [James] Fudge, [2nd] Manchester Regt, that Private Skett collapsed in a heap, being too weak to walk any further. He could not be placed on the small two-wheeled wagon, which the party was dragging with it, as it was already occupied by a man who had previously collapsed. The sentry ordered him to get up and when Skett replied in German ‘I cannot’ the sentry stepped back a pace and shot him dead.

In April a further eleven men perished before the weather gradually began to improve.

Survivors of Mitau picked out two Germans for condemnation. One was the camp interpreter, named Logermann, who, it was said, was fond of interpreting a man’s answer in such a way as to land him in trouble. The other was the camp commandant, Lieutenant Hermann Prahl of the 1st Jaeger Regiment, 8th Army Corps.

According to witnesses, Prahl spoke fluent English; he had been living in England with his family when war broke out and was interned on the Isle of Man. Corporal Robert Steele, presumably in conversation with Prahl, reported that the officer had been badly treated in England ‘and was now going to have his revenge’. Steele claimed that Prahl secured his release from internment with forged documents, but, whatever the truth, there is no doubt that this officer deeply resented the prisoners under his command. Private Charles Brown, 1st West Yorkshire Regiment, recollected that in a moment of anger Prahl declared ‘that he had a son in England, and said he would treat us dogs as the English were treating him’.

The Germans hoped that the free passage of letters home would pressure the British government into changing its tune. The ploy worked well. A number of letters, all expressing desperation, were forwarded by parents to the government and Prisoner of War Department, with covering letters pressing for action to help relieve the plight of these men. All prisoners’ letters were variations on the same theme and included words to the effect that they were in Mitau purely because of the British government’s treatment of German prisoners in France.

In mid-March, Private Frank Barlow, 1st West Yorkshire Regiment, wrote to his father, John Barlow. His letter is typical of those sent home.

I told you in my last letter that we were going to be removed, and so we have, to a worse place than we have ever been in. We have been moved right up behind the firing line, and where we go to work is right in the Fire Zone; where the shells are dropping and it is very dangerous.

The work we do is digging trenches and felling trees; also carrying them, which is very hard. We live in a tent, which is partly heated, but it is very cold. When we wake up in the morning our boots are frozen. The reason we have been sent is that they say our Government have German prisoners doing similar work, and that they have sent them behind the firing line, and the sooner they move their men to a better place, the sooner we shall be moved.

So father will you please show this letter to somebody of higher rank in order that something can be done, because if this goes on much longer, the sooner a bullet or a shell puts us out of our troubles, the better . . . We are behind the Russian and German firing lines, and if you have any idea what a Russian winter is like you will know how things are with us . . . God help us if we have to stop here much longer. [Sentence here crossed out by the German censor] account of frost-bites . . . so please try and do your best, because we can’t stick this much longer, as we are all getting weaker every day.

Excuse my writing as I am so cold; perhaps you will hear from me again if I am lucky . . .

His father did not hear from his son again. Private Frank Barlow died on the last day of March, just as his parents received the letter.

Another letter forwarded through the Germans’ so-called ‘Express Mail’ was sent to Kathleen Peploe, living in Southgate, north London. It is not known who she was, other than that she was part of a small charitable organisation sending parcels to prisoners. In two years she received more than three hundred letters and postcards from grateful prisoners, but in early May 1917 she received one from a private in the Middlesex Regiment and this time it was regarding his plight. She forwarded the letter to
The Times
, which published it on 18 May, precisely as the Germans had hoped would happen, albeit a little late in the day. Once again, the letter bemoaned the prisoners’ dilemma, which was ‘many times worse than in 1914’. The letter also spoke of the atrocious food and asked Kathleen Peploe if she could help by making the facts known ‘as we all think it very unfair either to German or English prisoners to be in such a position’.

In the international battle of wills, Germany gained the upper hand. Reports of the suffering reached a wider audience through the press and questions were asked in the House of Commons. Tough-talking MPs such as William Joynson-Hicks suggested taking 1,000 German officers from Donington Hall POW camp and transferring them straight to the front line, but this was not the answer and would only increase pressure on Allied prisoners in German hands.

The British blinked first. On 28 April, the War Cabinet ordered all German prisoners to be withdrawn thirty kilometres from the trenches, Berlin being notified of the decision. On 11 May, the government demanded an assurance that the Germans would withdraw all British prisoners from the firing line on all fronts: that assurance was received on 16 June, six days after the survivors of Mitau had returned to Libau. In response, the British notified the French of their ‘urgent desire’ to recall the 2,000 loaned German prisoners to Britain. This transfer was completed the following month, at which point the British government felt in a position to request the removal of British prisoners from Russian soil. Those men still at Libau were allowed a month’s rest after their ordeal. Accommodation was improved and food parcels previously withheld were distributed. Light work was the order of the day until the men were returned to Germany in November.

The story had come full circle but at great cost to the prisoners of war. CSM Alexander Gibb recorded that of the 500 sent to Mitau only seventy-two survived the rigours of camp life without needing extensive hospital treatment; as many as thirty had died. Today these lie together in Nikolai Cemetery in Mitau in Latvia. Many of the men had suffered grievous physical injury, which the Reverend Williams bore witness to in his diary: ‘Of those who survived to return home, many were so physically crippled and broken that one could almost wish they had died.’

Survivors who were exchanged gave statements as to what went on at Mitau, and, while dates and times occasionally contradict each other, the consistency of their stories is compelling. CSM Gibb probably spoke for many when he asked, ‘When the war ends, and the reckoning comes, is all this to be passed over in silence?’ It was, in fact. It was forgotten. Neither Logermann nor the guard who shot Private Skett was ever sought at the end of the war, never mind prosecuted, for their treatment of British POWs. Lieutenant Hermann Prahl was killed in action in Italy in November 1917.

The aggressive diplomatic petulance exhibited by both sides was typical of the spats that characterised Anglo-German relations in 1917. Concurrent with the reprisal in Russia was another incident in March that was to cause more than normal consternation in Britain, and another round of irritability and non-cooperation. It concerned the death of an able seaman, twenty-four-year-old John Genower, at Brandenburg POW camp.

Reports of deaths in POW camps were commonly exchanged between nations at war but this case was different. Through the American Embassy, the British government was informed that Genower had died ‘as a consequence of burns’ in a fire at the camp, but further details were not forthcoming. The government was unwilling to accept what they felt was a terse and uninformative response from the Germans. In retaliation, it was decided that the British would respond as evasively when a German POW death warranted the same sort of additional detail.

In May, the British government sent a Memorandum of Communication to the German government concerning the death on 12 April of a German prisoner of war, Adam Ultsch, from gunshot wounds. Ultsch was shot while attempting to escape from a POW enclosure in France – not that the Germans were given this information. Other than announcing Ultsch’s death, the Memorandum was deliberately vague.

The German prisoner of war Adam Ultsch of Theisenort, born on the 24th September 1887, died of a gunshot wound on the 12th April.

It is recognised that the above particulars are insufficient but they correspond with those furnished in the under-mentioned German notes verbales . . . On receipt of a satisfactory reply to the Foreign Office Memorandum, relative to the insufficient particulars furnished by the German Government regarding the violent deaths of British prisoners of war in Germany, further particulars will be furnished in regard to the death of Ultsch.