1915_ The Death of Innocence - Lyn Macdonald [184]
Much of the recruiting propaganda was aimed at stimulating women to encourage their men to enlist. There were posters depicting noble matrons – ‘Women Of Britain Say Go!’; white-haired old ladies at cottage doors drawing the attention of a reluctant son to troops marching on the road outside – ‘It’s Your Duty, Lad!’; young girls arm-in-arm with a soldier – ‘Is Your Best Boy In Khaki?’; and many women regarded it as a personal mission to accost every young man in civvies to shame him into joining up.
Jeremy Bentham and his friend Bob Southin had been favoured by the attentions of one such lady on a train journey from Harwich to London, and somewhat to their astonishment for they had been in the war from the very beginning. It was true that they could be loosely described as wearing civilian clothes, but ‘loosely’ was an appropriate word for their suits fitted where they touched and, on that particular day, five days after their escape from the internment camp at Groningen in Holland, they were already coming apart at the seams. Bentham and Southin were two of the fifteen hundred men of the 1st Brigade of the Royal Naval division who had entered neutral Holland when they were cut off by the advancing German Army after the Battle of Antwerp the previous September, and they had been languishing in internment ever since.*
Able Seaman J. S. Bentham, Benbow Bn., 1st Brig., Royal Naval Div.
It was an elderly lady who got into our compartment and tackled us and did she feel small when Southin told her we were escaped prisoners of war! Of course we were very pleased with ourselves, but we must have looked like a couple of scarecrows. At the camp the Dutch officials opened and inspected all our large parcels but they didn’t bother about small ones, so I wrote to a friend of mine to send out a couple of suits folded up small, a bit at a time. I think his sister cut out the pieces and he sent them one at a time, a sleeve, a trouser leg or the front of a jacket, and thread and some buttons. It took us some months to collect all the pieces and then we had to sew them together, not very expertly.
Groningen wasn’t like being in a prisoner of war camp in Germany. We weren’t short of food, though the diet was pretty dull, but tradesmen came to the camp with barrows selling cake and fruit and chocolate and cigarettes and we had plenty of money to buy things, because we were paid a certain amount by the Dutch authorities and I also got a monthly pay-cheque from the Dutch agents of Cocks-Biddulph, the bank I’d worked for in London. We also used to make photograph frames out of Dutch cigar boxes which we sent to Selfridges in London and in return they sent us out cigarettes and anything we needed, so we were quite well off, and the local people were very good to us. In fact the camp was open to civilian visitors every Sunday, and whole crowds of them used to come to see us just as though they were visiting the zoo and we really felt like caged animals. But I got quite attached to a Dutch girl who used to come and talk to me through the barbed wire and we got so friendly that she persuaded her father to write to the Commandant to ask if I could visit their house for a meal now and then. We got so friendly that one evening, just before I was due to go back to the camp, her elder brother asked me when I was going to give his sister a ring! Well that really scared me and it certainly speeded up our plans to get away.
Of course,