Trapped Behind Enemy Lines by John Anderson Victor Piuk

Author:John Anderson, Victor Piuk [John Anderson, Victor Piuk]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Military, World War I
ISBN: 9781473874077
Google: CeFnCwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Pen and Sword
Published: 2015-10-30T02:55:08+00:00

Chapter 8

In Captivity

David may have escaped with his life following Julie-Celestine’s dramatic and emotional intervention in court, but the excitement and limited freedom of his life as Mademoiselle Louise was a thing of the past and he now faced a potentially long and uncertain future as a guest of the Kaiser in Germany. The tension and daily fear of discovery may have gone, but in Le Cateau he had at least had a degree of freedom, within fairly restricted limits, and real contact with the outside world. He had also had a support network, a substitute family and the love of his sweetheart Aimée. Despite her apparent safety at this time, David could not be sure that her part, too, in his concealment and escapades might not be discovered – perhaps by the same route of betrayal by a jealous or bitter Mauvaise Française.

His saviour, Julie-Celestine, had also paid the devastatingly high price of a custodial term for her courage and her devotion to her young foreign charge. She knew that she had saved David’s life but also that they would no longer be able to see and support each other. They would not be housed in the same prison to serve their sentences, although they would share the same deprivations and anxieties. For Julie-Celestine the burden must have been heavier, with additional worry about what was going on at home with her young daughter Marie, now without both her parents and her elder brothers.

The cruel fact was that David and Julie-Celestine were not only foreign prisoners held in Germany as a result of the war, but also were going to be considered as the lowest of the low, treated and held as common criminals with none of the limited privileges which were supposed to go along with official ‘prisoner of war’ status. David may still have been technically serving in the army, but he was captured out of uniform and the Germans no longer considered him a soldier. And while for David, at least, this would eventually change, it was initially to civilian prisons that they were both sent. Their situation will be looked at in this chapter, but it is worth considering first in general terms how conditions for prisoners developed as the war went on.

Germany took an incredible 7 million prisoners during the war and some 2.4 million of these were held in Germany itself. In France’s catastrophic first few months of war she lost tens of thousands of troops captured by the enemy, and while fewer British were taken prisoner, their number was still substantial. Then there was the vast number of Russians taken on the Eastern Front. Of course, everyone was expecting a short and victorious war, so no proper provision had been made for the masses of men who now needed shelter, food and looking after. The first winter of the war was a very cruel one for POWs, who were often without proper accommodation.

In 1915, the Germans set about a programme of building proper camps for prisoners and these would eventually number around three hundred.

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