Every few seconds we heard a terrible scream or someone yelling. Another German officer came towards us and beckoned us to stand. He spoke good English too and told us that anybody who was injured, and he pointed at Pony, was to go inside where they would be seen to and those who weren’t, meaning us, would be directed to ‘Lend assistance’ as he put it.
I thought that sounded better than sitting about worrying about what was going to happen next. If we could help some of these poor devils who were in terrible trouble that was a good thing: fetching water, carrying a stretcher or comforting a soldier. At least we would be out of the direct line of fire.
‘Schnell’ – hurry up. We were pushed towards the front door. ‘Gehen Sie nach innen, ‘ – go in, which we did. Pony followed me in and he was taken away by someone straightaway and I never saw him again. It was dark as I came in from the bright sunlight, and the place felt cold and damp. It was packed with people: men everywhere, standing, squatting, lying on stretchers and on the bare floor. Others were squeezing past bringing in more men and taking others out, presumably ones who had died from the look of them. What a noise! All the languages of the world, it seemed, being spoken but words of pain and suffering are universal. The heat from all the bodies crammed in together was overwhelming.
There was that awful smell of dead meat and stale blood reminding me of Uncle Joe’s butcher’s shop. I was used to seeing cuts of meat on a marble slab and half carcasses hanging up on metal hooks. The smell of bones and animal waste, which had been hanging around a while, was familiar to me, wafting as it did into our kitchen from next door. But this was something else.
As I walked further inside, I could hear my army boots clomping on the wooden floor boards. There were only four or five small rooms and they were crammed full of men. Some were still like corpses, others screaming and shouting and writhing about. I couldn’t hear the sound of my feet and felt the soles of my boots sticking on the floor. I looked down to see trails of fresh and congealed blood everywhere. Wounded men were crying out in pain as they waited to be treated. Those who were uninjured were trying to help, holding bloody bandages and field dressings which couldn’t cope with the terrible injuries some of the men had suffered. There were fellows operating in every space and corner, on tables and on the ground where the wounded lay. Whether they were doctors or medical orderlies, I don’t know, but they were doing their best to help those most in need.
I was shocked. This shouldn’t be happening. This was just an ordinary, everyday place where the local French bobby drank his coffee in the morning and locked up a few drunks or petty criminals overnight. We had no time to take it all in as we were thrown in at the deep end. We stood to attention and waited instructions. In a mixture of English, French and German, men, some recently captured too, in blood-stained uniforms started shouting out commands: ‘Hurry up, hold this one down,’ and ‘You over there, take that man’s head,’ and ‘Don’t move an inch or he’ll die.’ Who was enemy and who ally, didn’t matter now. We were all the same there.
I thought of taking off my army greatcoat to put it somewhere safe from this bloody mess. It was a precious possession, even though I had cursed it in this hot summer weather. But there was no time to worry about that sort of thing. Just as well that I didn’t remove it as I would never have seen it again.
I certainly needed my coat later on when we were on the move again and started the first march of our captivity. That same coat saw me through the war and was a life-saver on the second march, which took me home half way across Europe.
I had to do it. Just get on with it. Holding down these fellows while they were operated on, just there on a kitchen table, without anaesthetic and with only the most basic surgical instruments. One of us stood at the head and one at the feet. There was no time to be squeamish. Steel yourself and get on with it. I tried not to look at the doctor as his knife cut into the skin and the blood spurted out. Or at them when they were struggling to resuscitate somebody whose heart had finally given up.
I thought of my dear pet dog, Peter, holding him while he had his fits and whispering words of comfort. So I did the same to these bloody strangers. I held them tight and told them, ‘Everything is going to be OK.’ It was a losing battle in some cases. Better to have tried, I suppose, than not. And if a chap passed away in my arms, I held him for a moment and said a little prayer. Then he was carted off somewhere and another poor soul took his place in the make-shift operating room.
You can’t prepare yourself for something like this. I had never seen a dead person in my life. I got upset when Peter died and I had to bury him, so imagine how I felt now. It was bad enough seeing your friends dead or dying on the road side and poor Pony in such pain, with his thumb hanging off. Here I was, a twenty-one-year-old greengrocer’s assistant, four weeks into the war without any proper training, facing this dreadful ordeal.
If somebody had told me beforehand: ‘Private Waite, your duties are to assist army doctors in their operations on the battlefield,’ I would have said, ‘Not bloody likely. Find somebody else.’ Even now after all this time it upsets me to think about it, those poor men, the pain they were in and the dreadful conditions the doctors worked in, trying to save lives. Bullets and shrapnel were being taken out of legs, arms and chests – wherever the damage had been done.
There were different nationalities including French and Senegalese, probably about a hundred men there. Some were walking-wounded and others had been brought in from where the attacks had been. I think we were only there about three or four hours, that’s all, but it felt like weeks. I grew up that day. So much had happened to us since we had taken the wrong road to Dunkirk. Things went quiet all of sudden. Perhaps they had run out of patients but someone came in and ordered us out. We were on the move again and I followed the others outside, back into the midday sun.
We joined another group of prisoners with their guards and we marched to the edge of town just outside Abbeville to a large barracks, which turned out to be a French prison. We were all mixed up and then shoved in five or six to a cell where we slept on straw and dirt on the floor that night. I wasn’t one of the lucky ones who got a drink of water and a crust of bread in the morning. This was good preparation for the hardship and starvation which followed. I was separated finally from my company and anybody I knew. I was truly alone.
A week later, my parents received a telegram saying that their son, Private Charles Henry Waite, of the 2/7th Queen’s Royal Regiment was ‘Missing in Action’.
5
Like Cattle
Details of some events are as clear today as ever, sharpened by the retelling; others not as precise as time has passed. But impressions of particular experiences are so real that I am close to tears as I write this. Fear, anger, humiliation and sadness fill my heart, and even the distance of seventy years does not really lessen these feelings. Whatever we were as young men, as newly recruited soldiers, we did not deserve what happened to us.
So this was what war was like. Bloody chaos. No one was properly prepared for it on either side it seemed to me. A terrible mess of casualties, which no one knew how to cope with; hundreds of prisoners and nowhere to put them. Who knew or even cared about us? I was afraid all the time of what the Germans were going to do. Having no control over anything in your life is very frightening. You have got used to a routine in the army, following orders and instructions from officers, knowing what your job is and working towards the same goals: fighting Hitler and bringing peace to Europe.