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from The
Guardian Thursday 31 August 2000
I hated that job. You
knew you were going to fill that trench in.
 From
Bill Easton’s story: he was captured in March 1918 and kept in France to
work before being sent to Germany.
A lot of men were dying
from dysentery. These they used to bury by the dozen in coffins that
reminded me of orange crates: you could see through the wood. They used to
have some people from a medical college, and they used to do postmortems ...
but nobody wanted to sew them up again ... We were supposed to sew them back
up.
We had to get up early,
and there would be a row of dead and we would put them on a hearse
crossways, about eight to 10 on there, right high. The old horse
that pulled the hearse looked as though It was going to fall down any
minute.
On the way, we’d pass
some cottages, and women used to come out, on their knees. There was a
trench dug as far as you could see across this field, deep enough to take
two coffins on top of one another.
Oh, I used to hate that
job, to see this trench going practically out of sight and you knew you were
going to fill that in. Then the priest would say his litany none of us could
understand ... and we’d have to put a handful of soil on each coffin
before we shovelled the earth into the trench ... There were no graves In
the cemetery with names on.
 Prisoners of the Kaiser: the Last PoWs of the
Great War, will be published by Pen & Sword, £16.95, in late October.
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