I am Jane Bower, and my paternal grandfather was Herbert Bower, who died when I was seven months old. My father Leonard Bower, who died in 2021 aged 100, wrote the following to tell me what happened.
World War I, April 1917. My father Herbert was taken prisoner. He was one of the lucky ones, though he wouldn’t have used the word ‘lucky’ himself – perhaps blessed, or even chosen. His life was saved by three men. But for them, I wouldn’t be here today.
The battle of Arras, in the Great War, as we used to call it, began at nine o’clock on the morning of April 9th, when our army went over the top to attack the German lines. My father, aged 25, was already out in no man’s land in charge of a squad of men in a so-called advanced observation post, in fact a shell hole.
Casualties were heavy under intense machine gunning and artillery, and our men were thinned out. Finally, somewhere, my father fell, with shrapnel in his back and, despite his heavy army boots, a very terrible wound to his right foot.
He couldn’t move, but remembered trying to shout for help, so must have been conscious at least from time to time. He was there for the best part of two days, no sign of life around him, only distant, sporadic machine gun fire.
Rescue
But well into the second day, his isolation ended. Two German soldiers took the risk of crawling out of their trench, finding him and dragging him back to safety.
They then took it in turns to carry him, some two miles or more, to a field medical station behind the German lines, where they left him. I often imagine their difficulty over what must have been shell-torn ground, like a rough sea. My father never saw them again; never knew who they were.
Recovery
Deep in Germany in the hospital at Cassel, there was a prisoner of war camp. The surgeons were preparing to amputate Herbert’s foot, but one of them, Dr. Karl Figurnoff, believed he could save it, and persuaded them to let him try. This surgeon was a prisoner of war, a Russian soldier who had offered help to the hospital.
My father became his patient and close friend. All his wounds were successfully treated and his foot saved, though the wound was not completely healed until I was about ten years old, in 1930.
Meanwhile a letter was sent to my mother from the army record office:
Madam,
I regret to have to inform you that a report has been received from the War Office to the effect that No. 27194 Lance Corporal Herbert Bower, West Yorkshire regiment, was posted as “missing” on the 3rd May 1917…
I think this ‘Missing’ notification was probably the greatest shock of mother’s life. I wonder what she did when she read it that morning in May 1917. My two brothers would have been in the house, Roland 2 years 8 months, Alan seven weeks old.
Later in 1917, my father heard that his brother Tom had been killed at Passchendaele.
After the war
Peace came in 1918 and the prisoners were repatriated in 1919. Travelling in an English train, my father scribbled a few words in pencil on a postcard. He had no stamp but addressed it to my mother, marked it ‘Prisoner of War on active service’ and threw it out of the train window as they went through a station. It had been stamped when my mother received it, and another message added: ‘Glad to hear Herbert is on his way – Lucy Taylor.’ I wonder who she was. My parents were never able to thank her.
Some weeks later Herbert returned home, bearing his discharge certificate. This gives the reason for his discharge as ‘scar on right heel’. ‘Scar’ is hardly the word – it was a suppurating, open and a visually distressing wound, as if his foot had been chopped in half lengthwise from back of heel half way along the sole, needing hospital treatment for years.
My father brought back with him many solemnly posed photographs of himself and Dr. Figurnoff together. On the back of one of them, in beautiful copperplate handwriting and perfect English, Dr. Figurnoff has written:
‘Even during months of captivity, opportunities arise that may create a lasting good fellowship with men of other nations.’
My grandfather returned to his previous life and my father Len was born in 1920.Although in the tailoring business by profession, Herbert’s true skill and passion was singing, and his remarkable bass voice was frequently requested for major solo parts in choral works such as Mendelssohn’s Elijah and Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius. Herbert never accepted payment for his singing, saying that it was a gift from God.
Jane Bower’s one-woman play Daddy’s Diaries can be seen on YouTube.
