The Long Road Home: An account of the author's experiences as a prisoner-of-war in the hands of the Germans during the Second World War by Adrian Vincent

Author:Adrian Vincent [Vincent, Adrian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sapere Books
Published: 2020-06-07T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seven: The Art of Going Sick

BEFORE we had been transferred to the mines, the business of going sick had been a fairly straightforward matter, even if not always successful. Having decided that the time had come to have a rest from work, you waited until a particularly cold day arrived. Then, as the guard came in to send you out to work in the early hours of the morning, you would lift your head feebly from the pillow, croak out that you were sick, and then fall back on your pillow and wait to see what happened next.

Things then progressed according to the temperament of the guard responsible for getting the men to work that morning. If he was tough and sensible, he would promptly pull you out of bed, kick you up the backside and start roaring. On those occasions you philosophically went to work. If, on the other hand, he was new or uncertain of himself, you pressed home the point of your sickness as dramatically as possible until you won the day. It often worked quite well. The only unfortunate thing about this system was that, with no M.O. around, you were likely to be sent to work even if you were genuinely sick.

In the mining camp, going sick became a much more complicated matter. Every mining camp had been allotted an English M.O. and a couple of orderlies to attend to the constant flow of prisoners returning injured or maimed from the pits. This meant that whenever you wanted to malinger, you had to pull the wool over the eyes of a qualified M.O., whose main concern was to keep the percentage of sick down so that the genuinely ill would not be driven out to work to make up the daily quota of manpower required. If a sick call was beneath the quota allowed, the officer and his medical orderlies were quick enough to build it up with false cases. As they always kept a roster, it was a very fair way to work.

But waiting for one’s turn on the roster was a slow business, and as the work in the pits was unpleasant, to say the least of it, everyone did everything in his power to be ill as often as possible and for as long as possible. In the beginning, the doctor and his orderlies were more than a match for us, and conversations in the sick-bay would go somewhat as follows:

‘Well, what’s the trouble this time?’

‘I’ve got a pain, sir.’

‘What sort of pain?’

‘An awful pain in my back, sir. Every time I lift a shovel or bend down, it’s sheer agony.’

‘Is this where the pain is?’ A finger taps the back lightly.

‘Aaaaah!’ And then a little breathlessly: ‘That’s it, sir. You’ve got it right on the spot.’

The doctor and the patient gaze blandly at each other.

‘Bring the heat-box, orderly.’

As the medical orderly moves forward with the heat-box, the patient knows that his attempt has failed. The heat-box is a home-made, wooden

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