Hilary St George Saunders, The Left Handshake, 1948

Chapter V

ENDURANCE

Scouting in Captivity

IN AN OFFICE on the first floor of the Court-house at Nuremburg, Monsieur Raymond, a short, middle-aged Frenchman the skin of his face much creased about the eyes, worked daily during the trial of the German war criminals. He was in charge of many of the papers and files which constituted the bulk of the evidence against them. His particular care was the documents and other evidence relating to concentration camps, and he kept in steel filing cabinets, alternating with bare tables at which sat industrious typists, exhibits of such horror that when they were produced in court even the prisoners in the dock were observed to show signs of uneasiness. Dreadful to see, they were the crudest examples of that strain of sadistic madness which is one of the least pleasant features of the German character.

Among these grisly relics of the new Dark Ages was one which at first sight aroused little comment. It was an outline map of the Baltic countries, accurately drawn in black ink, displaying—its only detail—a neat figure in red ink inscribed in the centre of each country. The map was headed "Baltic Jewish Extermination Map" and the figures represented with painstaking accuracy the number of Jews down to the last child at its mother's breast, put to death in that part of the world. This map was one of a number of others showing by means of conventional symbols the whereabouts of the internment and concentration and prisoner-of-war camps throughout the area controlled by the German Reich. Monsieur Raymond, who had been an inmate of Buchenwald, was very ready to show them.

In nearly all of them some element of Scouting was found to exist, and wherever it was found, it was noticed that the will to survive had never been wholly extinguished, however terrible, indeed indescribable, the conditions of life might be. This is the first and most important fact to be borne in mind when the position of Scouting in those places of horror and despair is examined. Beside the spirit the Scouts created, the ideals and therefore the hope which they kept alive, the actual deeds they did were of small account. It was the fact that they were Scouts and did not forget it that counted.

With this in mind, then, let conditions in a number of internment and concentration camps, those darkest patches on the drab shield of our civilisation, be examined. What happened in Italy and Germany before 1939 need not be mentioned, for the advent to power of Mussolini and then of Hitler so completely put an end to Scouting in those two countries that it is doubtful whether any trace of it remained, even in the concentration camps or penal islands to which those two dictators sent all who disagreed with them. Perhaps in the first days of Dachau or the Lipari Islands, some early victims of Fascism may have derived help and comfort from the Scout Law or the Scout example. There is no record to say.

The story begins with the advent of war, not in the wide grey plains of Poland or in the forests of Western Germany or on the sun-scorched rocks off the Italian coast, but beyond the Pyrenees by the banks of the Spanish Ebro. There, couched like a beast lying in wait for a prey, waiting to swallow up those who escaped from Hitler, lay the camp of Miranda. It had been established by Franco for the imprisonment of the enemies of his Fascist friends, and it was there that in 1942 a Belgian Rover, a member of the Liege Rover Troop, of which half the members were killed by the Germans, founded the Clan de l'Etape. He did so to meet a need which seemed to him vital. Miranda was technically a transit internment camp where men, caught after they had crossed the Pyrenees, were held, until their fate had been decided. The more fortunate, especially the British and Canadian who could call upon the help and assistance of the Embassy in Madrid and the Consulate in Barcelona, did not remain for long. Others stayed for months, even years, in a place where men fought with knives for an extra ration of soup, and where hunger and idleness were the prison visitors.

It was to combat these two insidious ills, the one physical, the other moral, that the Clan de l'Etape was founded, unique among Scout Troops, not so much because of its situation—for many other Troops were founded in concentration and internment camps—but because of its constantly changing membership. Some of those who belonged to it had hardly passed the preliminary tests before they found themselves on their way to the next stage of their fate. Others, like he who bears the pseudonym of Aries, stayed for most of the war. At one time or another ten different nationalities were represented in the ranks of the Clan. Four of the founder members were Frenchmen masquerading as Canadians, and these were presently joined by two Belgians, one calling himself The Talkative Wolf and the other Aries, already mentioned. The Talkative Wolf soon passed on elsewhere and the Troop for a long time was composed of only three persons, but was gradually increased until the first full meeting took place on the 26th November, 1942, when nine new members were admitted.

It was at this meeting that the Troop was christened. Its members met on Thursdays, and presently divided it into various sub-sections which studied each a particular group of subjects. There was the lecture centre, a section of actors, a section making badges, another forming a glee club, another studying the stars, and a sixth all possible roads from France through Spain to Gibraltar. The seventh section was devoted to physical training. Thus it was that everything under the sun, from politics to sport, from religion to science, was discussed in a sustained effort to prevent their minds from sinking to the level of their weakened bodies. These, too, they looked after as well as they could, despite miserably inadequate food—the ration was cabbage soup twice a day and five ounces of a substance called bread. They practiced judo for two hours every day under the direction of the seventh section.

To enter the Troop, a candidate was required to pass a number of tests of considerable severity and outside the usual run of Scout tests. For example, if he reached Miranda in the winter, he must bathe in what was known as the camp fountain in a temperature of five degrees below freezing point. He must sleep for three nights on the ground with the centre of his body supported by planks set on edge, although a comparatively comfortable mattress lay, inviting and empty, beside him. The Troop paid special attention to new-comers and did their utmost to help them to bear the shock of what was, for most, their first taste of prison. Courage and hope were very low in the camp, but in the ranks of this Troop they were high, and their esprit de corps was such that even the slouching Spanish guards looked up to them. More, they relied on them to put an end to the violent quarrels and fights which constantly broke out among their fellow prisoners.

Since the Troop was comprised for the most part of temporary members, they formed a habit from the start of keeping a log. book in which each set down what he felt inclined to write, a song, a joke, a record of his experiences up to the moment of entering the camp. Of its kind it is one of the most remarkable books ever written. Neatly bound in wood, with the Scout Badge carved upon it, and copiously and excellently illustrated in line and colour, it now reposes in the archives of the training centre at Gilwell Park, to which it was presented during the Jamboree of 1947. Its pages record with an accuracy all the more vivid because of the restraint imposed upon themselves by its many authors, their adventures and their hopes.

Take, for example, the story of that Belgian Scout, Carombelle. Having escaped from the Belgian Army after the capitulation, he reached his home in Liege only to find that his brother had been killed. Carombelle determined to continue the fight. It took him six months to find means to quit Belgium. Then he fled south through Lille, Abbeville, Paris and Bordeaux until he reached Tarbes, where he was arrested. By then he had acquired a companion, and on both of them consenting to work, they were released. Having laboured for some months and saved all the money they could, they set out for Spain, climbing the Pyrenees without a guide and with only a compass to aid them. They passed safely across but were then arrested by the Spanish police, who put them back over the frontier into France. There once more they obtained work as carpenters, and then, when they had accumulated sufficient funds, made a second attempt. This time they went as far as Figueras, where they were arrested for the third time and eventually sent to Miranda. There the story ends. No one knows what happened to them after they left that camp.

Some of the Scouts whose names and writings appear in the book were as young as fifteen. One of these wrote: "I regret neither my flight from home nor the hardships which we suffered nor those which await us, for all of them can be borne by means of the Scout spirit. Scouting teaches us to fight against Nazism and against any system of training men to become mere automats. I regard my life at Miranda as part of my schooling, as something which, having experienced it, will increase my capacity to serve." Michael Elias was his name. He, too, was never heard of again.

The book gives a wonderful picture of the strange, compelling unity of Scouting. In it is a Jewish song beginning with a quotation from the 150th Psalm, "Praise Him in the cymbals and dances: praise Him upon the strings and pipe...."

"We sang with those we left behind us:
We sing to-day with those who have departed:
We will sing more joyfully to-morrow when we shall return free to our free country."

On the first page was written a summons to all who read it or who signed it to "meet at the Obelisk in the Place de la Concorde on the 1st August of the year following that in which the war ends." The meeting was to take place at 11 a.m. precisely, and those who attended it were to eat together and take part in "moultes festivites." When that day came, on the 1st August, 1946, those remaining of the Clan de l'Etape to the number of eleven kept the rendezvous. The sky was blue with large white clouds and, at the foot of the Obelisk, the small group of Scouts grew larger minute by minute. They were clothed in all kinds of kit and many of them wore rows of ribbons on their chest. When noon struck they compared notes. There was Delsemme, who had been parachuted into France in December, 1944, and was the Federal Secretary of the French Federation of Scouting in Great Britain. There was Chauvet, who had been a member of No. 4 Commando and then joined No. 11 Allied Commando. There were Demot, fighter pilot of the R.A.F. in a Belgian squadron; Bourdens, a Free French fighter pilot of the R.A.F. There was Brochon of the Free French Navy, radio operator. There was Rousseau, driver of a tank in Leclerc's Armoured Division. There was Dickert of the Algerian Riflemen. There was Putscher, who had been badly wounded when serving in the Tank Brigade of De Lattre de Tassigny's 1st Army, and with him was Cesarsky, a machine-gunner in the same regiment.

Finally there was Weist, a French Commando soldier who had served with Leclerc's Division. In addition to the eleven, news was received of eight others. Of some twenty more there is no trace.

The same spirit which was to be found among the Scouts in the notorious camp of Miranda de Ebro was equally as strong half the world away in the internment camps of the Far East created by the savage Japanese. The unheralded attack on Pearl Harbour was the first of a series of blows delivered with great skill and rapidity against the British Empire and the United States which went far to create for a short time the new Asia of Japanese dreams. Shanghai, Hong Kong and Wake Island were all in their hands before 1941 was out, and their legions were through Thailand and well on the way to the Burma Road. Then in swift succession fell Borneo and Sarawak, the Solomon, Gilbert and Marshall Islands, and New Guinea. On the 15th February, 1942, with the fall of the "impregnable fortress" of Singapore, the whole of Malaya fell beneath their sway. Less than a month went by and the conquest of Java, Sumatra and the Philippines was completed. By the middle of May all British forces had been driven from Burma, and by the third week in July Papua had fallen into their hands. Throughout this vast area the white, as distinct from the native population, was not large. Such as it was, however, it became a slave population employed either on the railroad of death, that terrible line of communication between Bangkok and Moulmein, whose every sleeper, it is said, cost a life, or the building of airfields on the hundred and one islands of the Eastern Ocean, or merely languishing behind barbed wire.

Hilary St George Saunders, The Left Handshake, 1948
Chapter V: Endurance. Scouting in Captivity

Part One: Introduction

Part Two: China

Part Three: Malaya

Part Four: Dutch East Indies, Formosa and Thailand

Part Five: Germany

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