Armageddon - Max Hastings [286]
Military prisoners suffered less than concentration-camp inmates during these marches. Yet the last months of the war provided the worst experience of their captivity. One morning early in January 1945, Private Tom Barker’s camp was alerted to move. The young British soldier walked for the last time to the farm of the Otto family, where he had worked for three years. They, too, were preparing to flee from the Russians. Frau Otto was holding Laura the mare while Hugo shod her, in readiness to pull their cart. Their daughter Gerda was baking bread: “To the other children, it was all an exciting joke, but Gerda was old enough to realise that this was a tragedy, and it showed in her face.” Barker gave her his accordion. She offered him two loaves of bread and a piece of bacon. He borrowed the family sledge, in the hope that the prisoners would be able to use it to take with them some of the remarkable accumulation of possessions they had assembled since 1941.
We now had to say goodbye. You may think it strange that goodbyes between what were supposed to be enemies should be difficult, but difficult it was. I had long since become . . . one of the family. I wanted to hug them all, but because of everything I hesitated to do so, something I always regretted. I could still remember the agonies of the refugees in Belgium and France in 1940. I knew that, for these people, conditions would be almost unbearable, in the depths of a bitter winter.
And so the young British soldier and the German fugitives parted, to play their separate roles in the vast trek west, through months in which Barker suffered experiences far more dreadful than anything he had known during his three years in Poland.
American airman Richard Burt was among those who began to march in February from Stalag IVB. The prisoners were soon desperately hungry. They received their best break when RAF fighters strafed the column. Cannon fire killed the horses of their ration-wagon. The starving prisoners butchered the animals and enjoyed their first solid meal for weeks. Otherwise, they picked and boiled dandelion leaves, crushed grain and made soup. They journeyed across eastern Europe for three terrible months, scavenging every mile of the way. Burt was grateful for his own boy-scout training—“Some of the city boys found it very tough.” They never washed, and were all riddled with lice and ticks: “I felt ashamed of myself for falling into such a sick state. We were weak, wet, hungry, and not much seemed to matter most of the time.” The very act of walking became intolerable. They hated especially the hard cobbled streets of towns. No one knew what happened to many men who fell by the wayside in snowstorms or collapsed later from exhaustion or starvation. None had any thought of escape so close to the end of the war. Indeed, they feared being left behind by their columns, finding themselves at the mercy of a hostile population. The prisoners were taunted and cursed by many German communities through which they passed, and even stoned by children urged on by their parents. “We seemed most likely to be killed when they found out that we were Americanisch Luftwaffe,” wrote Burt. When the prisoners finally met Allied