The Codebreakers: The True Story of the Secret Intelligence Team That Changed the Course of the First World War by James Wyllie, Michael McKinley Page A
Authors: James Wyllie, Michael McKinley
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was their enemy as they trudged along the endless road, suffering from the choking dust and the hot sun. Near the small village of Bethancourt, Hay called a halt and they dug in. Heavy shelling began the next morning, followed by wave upon wave of German infantry. As they swarmed forward, Hay was struck down.
For the rest of the day, he swam in and out of consciousness, tended to by his men. Ordered to retire at midnight, they carried him away on a stretcher, the pain almost unbearable: ‘I still remember the agony caused by the weight of my body pressing down on my neck … while my head, just clearing the ground, trailed among the wet beetroot leaves.’
The next day, further orders arrived: the wounded were to be left behind. Two of Hay’s men stayed with him as long as possible. Then he lay helplessly by the roadside until the Red Cross picked him up and he was ferried to a civilian hospital at Cambrai. For the first month, he was attended to by French medical personnel, who were struggling to accommodate the flood of Allied casualties filling every available space: wounded men were lying in the corridor.
His condition remained critical: an abscess had formed in the wound owing to the presence of a bone splinter, and he needed surgery. The doctor used a lancet to reveal the jagged, splintered edge of the skull. Then he ‘broke off one or two pieces of bone about the size of a tooth, then jammed in a piece of lint soaked in iodine’. Hay survived this crude procedure but was still too sick to be moved, whereas most of the captured British casualties, victims of the same massive German offensive that had netted Hay, were being ‘sent to Germany packed in cattle trucks, with no medical attendance, no food, no water’.
On 21 October, he was transferred to a small, gloomy French Red Cross facility in an old school building. Here his knowledge of the language allowed him to develop friendships with the locals who visited the sick, including a woman who would cook them tasty meals that Hay would help prepare, peeling the potatoes for the twice-weekly treat of
pommes frites
. He even conquered his aversion to snails. Another bonus was a consignment of English tobacco courtesy of a patriotic
marchande de tabac
, who had buried the most valuable part of her stock in a back garden.
As he slowly recovered feeling in his stricken limbs and began to gingerly walk again, Hay observed the consequences of German occupation: such things as bicycles and sewing machines were requisitioned, while those caught in possession of pigeons – which were used by both sides to carry messages – would be condemned to death.
Once the Germans took charge of the hospital, conditions deteriorated rapidly, the wounded piled up, and Hay was kept awake at night by the mournful cries of the dying. He also received a stark reminder of how lucky he’d been: ‘a French soldier was brought in with a head wound in almost exactly the same place as my own, but a hair’s breadth more to the front of the head. This difference of perhaps a tenth of a millimetre had left the Frenchman deprived of speech, memory and motion.’
Shortly after Christmas, which was marked by a tree, turkey and plum pudding, Hay joined the list of prisoners deemed transportable and left by train on 6 January. The journey seemed interminable. There were several changes, food was a rarity, and once in Germany itself, Hay and his fellow prisoners were subjected to abuse from their guards – who ‘behaved with great rudeness and barbarity’ – and from hostile crowds gathered on station platforms.
Eventually he arrived at his destination, Festung Marienberg, ‘a place of great architectural and historical interest’, about a mile outside the town of Würzburg, and joined around 50 fellow officers, mostly French, with a sprinkling of British prisoners. Hay slept on a narrow wooden plank with a mattress made from ‘a coarse linen sack … stuffed with straw’. His few
For the rest of the day, he swam in and out of consciousness, tended to by his men. Ordered to retire at midnight, they carried him away on a stretcher, the pain almost unbearable: ‘I still remember the agony caused by the weight of my body pressing down on my neck … while my head, just clearing the ground, trailed among the wet beetroot leaves.’
The next day, further orders arrived: the wounded were to be left behind. Two of Hay’s men stayed with him as long as possible. Then he lay helplessly by the roadside until the Red Cross picked him up and he was ferried to a civilian hospital at Cambrai. For the first month, he was attended to by French medical personnel, who were struggling to accommodate the flood of Allied casualties filling every available space: wounded men were lying in the corridor.
His condition remained critical: an abscess had formed in the wound owing to the presence of a bone splinter, and he needed surgery. The doctor used a lancet to reveal the jagged, splintered edge of the skull. Then he ‘broke off one or two pieces of bone about the size of a tooth, then jammed in a piece of lint soaked in iodine’. Hay survived this crude procedure but was still too sick to be moved, whereas most of the captured British casualties, victims of the same massive German offensive that had netted Hay, were being ‘sent to Germany packed in cattle trucks, with no medical attendance, no food, no water’.
On 21 October, he was transferred to a small, gloomy French Red Cross facility in an old school building. Here his knowledge of the language allowed him to develop friendships with the locals who visited the sick, including a woman who would cook them tasty meals that Hay would help prepare, peeling the potatoes for the twice-weekly treat of
pommes frites
. He even conquered his aversion to snails. Another bonus was a consignment of English tobacco courtesy of a patriotic
marchande de tabac
, who had buried the most valuable part of her stock in a back garden.
As he slowly recovered feeling in his stricken limbs and began to gingerly walk again, Hay observed the consequences of German occupation: such things as bicycles and sewing machines were requisitioned, while those caught in possession of pigeons – which were used by both sides to carry messages – would be condemned to death.
Once the Germans took charge of the hospital, conditions deteriorated rapidly, the wounded piled up, and Hay was kept awake at night by the mournful cries of the dying. He also received a stark reminder of how lucky he’d been: ‘a French soldier was brought in with a head wound in almost exactly the same place as my own, but a hair’s breadth more to the front of the head. This difference of perhaps a tenth of a millimetre had left the Frenchman deprived of speech, memory and motion.’
Shortly after Christmas, which was marked by a tree, turkey and plum pudding, Hay joined the list of prisoners deemed transportable and left by train on 6 January. The journey seemed interminable. There were several changes, food was a rarity, and once in Germany itself, Hay and his fellow prisoners were subjected to abuse from their guards – who ‘behaved with great rudeness and barbarity’ – and from hostile crowds gathered on station platforms.
Eventually he arrived at his destination, Festung Marienberg, ‘a place of great architectural and historical interest’, about a mile outside the town of Würzburg, and joined around 50 fellow officers, mostly French, with a sprinkling of British prisoners. Hay slept on a narrow wooden plank with a mattress made from ‘a coarse linen sack … stuffed with straw’. His few
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