The Polish Connection 26-27

June – July 1917

The Germans have now begun bombing London – and on June 13th, 162 were left dead and 432 injured. This war has gone on so long and yet seems so far from being over.

I’ve had another letter from Jo. They had their annual fete at Ropsley rectory where her brother Edmund is vicar.

“Lots of people came. Mother didn’t come out into the garden at all, but Dorothy went upstairs and had tea with her and they chatted. So mother felt well enough later to come down to the drawing room after tea. Rode to Grantham last week and had a tooth stopped. Grand day. Photo taken 2s 6d, lunch 4d, paper ½d, sweets 5d, towards Edmund’s baccy 1d. Dorothy came later to visit and for tea and found me lying in the hammock under the old cherry tree.”

The poor Royals of Russia were shot to death. On July 17th, Tsar Nicholas II, 49, Tsarina Alexandra, 45, and their children the Grand Duchesses Olga, 22, Tatiana, 20, Maria, 18, and Anastasia, 16, and their brother Tsarevich Alexei, 13, were murdered. What an awful thing to have happen. Those poor children had done nothing wrong except to be born royal. The youngest was the age of my Rebecca. What is this world coming to? The Russian revolution is in full swing, which makes the war situation even more complicated than it was before. May God have mercy on their poor souls. They didn’t deserve this.

John often mentions the army food when he writes, and of course Peter talks of food too. Here is an article that I found in the paper on the subject.

A total of over 2,000,000 tons of food has been sent from Britain to the soldiers fighting in France and Belgium so far in the war. The British Army have 300,000 field workers to cook and supply the food. At the beginning of the war British soldiers were given ten ounces of meat and eight ounces of vegetables a day. As the size of the army grew and the German blockade became more effective, the army could not maintain these rations and by 1916 this had been cut to six ounces of meat a day. Later troops not in the front-line only received meat on nine out of every thirty days. The daily bread ration has now also been cut. The British Army attempts to give the soldiers the 3,574 calories a day that dieticians said they need. However, others argued that soldiers during wartime need much more than this.

Soldiers in the Western Front are very critical of the quantity and the quality of food they receive. The bulk of their diet in the trenches is bully beef (canned corned beef), bread and biscuits. By the winter of 1916 flour was in such short supply that bread was being made with dried ground turnips. The main food after that was a pea-soup with a few lumps of horse meat. Kitchen staff became more and more dependent on local vegetables and also had to use weeds such as nettles in soups and stews.

Providing fresh food was also very difficult. It takes up to eight days before bread reaches the front line and so it is invariably stale. So also are the biscuits and the soldiers attempt to solve this problem by breaking them up, adding potatoes, onions, sultanas or whatever was available, and boiling the mixture up in a sandbag.

Food is often supplied in cans. Maconochie contains sliced turnips and carrots in a thin soup. As one soldier says, “Warmed in the tin, Maconochie is edible; cold it is a man killer.” The British Army tried to hide this food shortage from the enemy. However, when they announced that British soldiers were being supplied with two hot meals a day, they received over 200,000 letters from angry soldiers pointing out the truth of the situation. Men claimed that although the officers are well-fed the men in the trenches are being treated appallingly.

We had a small party for Beth’s seventh birthday. I can’t believe that it has been over two years since she and her father first arrived in our church. And on the other hand, it seems as if Beth has been a part of our family forever.

There were nine little boys and girls from her class who came to the party, and we played the usual children’s games – pin the tail on the donkey, blind man’s bluff, and some simple charades. And as the day was fine, we played some chasing around games in the garden to let them work off some of their excitement. I saved up my sugar ration for months to be able to make her a cake, which I decorated to look like a face, with coloured coconut hair and shaped candied fruit that I had saved from before the war for the features. Her father sent her a beautiful necklace of seashells – another of the crafts from the camp in the Isle of Man. I bought her a small bicycle. Most of her toys have been Rebecca’s old things, and this seemed a suitable present to have first hand. She was pleased, and although she will need quite a lot of practice to get balanced properly, Rebecca is a very patient and understanding teacher.

Chapter 27

August 1917

The world is still talking about the children at Fatima. Each week at church we hear more of the stories.

Lucia asked Mary to take them to heaven and was reassured in this way: “I will take Jacinta and Francisco shortly; but you will stay here for some time to come. Jesus wants to use you to make me known and loved. He wishes to establish the devotion to My Immaculate Heart throughout the world. I promise salvation to whoever embraces it; these souls will be dear to God, like flowers put by me to adorn his throne.”

One of the witnesses to this apparition, Maria Carreira, described how Lucia then cried out and pointed as Mary departed. She herself heard a noise like, “a rocket, a long way off,” and looked to see a small cloud a few inches over the tree, rise, and move slowly towards the east until it disappeared. The crowd of pilgrims then returned to Fatima where they reported the amazing things they had seen, thus ensuring that there were between two and three thousand people present for the July apparition.

But the rest of us have a normal life to live so here is my latest letters from Peter.

Dear Barbara, Rebecca and darling Beth,

Thank you so much for sending me a cake for my birthday. However not much of it was left after the censors had a go at it. They have to examine all articles most meticulously. They are so worried that you might be sending me something useful to me, considered dangerous by them, that they cut and poke into everything sent. Even walnuts are opened, as messages have been found in them. They scrutinize every letter and even postcards for some secret code in the decoration. It is really very upsetting and frustrating for those of us who are trying to do our best.

Now that the United States has come into the war, our interests are looked after by the Swiss Legation, and those of the Austrian prisoners by the Swedish Legation. We have had a visitation by our representatives. I wonder if things will become better as a result.

I am now on the committee which helps distribute the goods made in camps for sale, so I will tell you some of the problems we have had and some of the successes.

Each morning we have a guard bringing representatives of the Industrial Committees in the four camps, with hand trucks to take in any raw materials that have arrived for our use, and to take out to the hut completed articles for packing. Our entertainment hut has been enlarged so that it can serve as a store for the goods made in our camp. We are now in business.

This growth did not take place without difficulties. On one occasion the Industrial Adviser was told that his permit was withdrawn and that all our work must cease, because a few baskets made in camp had appeared in a local mart. There followed some anxious weeks of negotiation before we started again under a new permissive charter.

Love from Peter

And his next.

Dear Barbara, Rebecca and Beth,

These small sheets of paper are so frustrating. I never get to finish what I start saying to you. So I will continue here.

Do you want to know how we manag to dispose of the huge quantity of articles made in the camp work-shops? The task at times seems almost impossible. Many of the articles made at first were unsellable anywhere. They were beginners’ attempts, of poor design, and often falling to pieces before they arrived. This difficulty was largely surmounted by a system of double inspection before the goods left the camp, first by the industrial committee, and then by our own visitor. Even then it was often difficult to refuse some article on which a poor man might have spent days of close labour, in the hope of getting a few shillings to send out to his wife, only to be told at the end that his work was not up to the necessary technical standard.

The second difficulty is that all the ordinary trade markets are closed to us. The condition on which any products are sent out of camp is that they should not be publicly advertised for sale, nor disposed of to any shop or firm. The sales, therefore, have to be entirely sympathetic and personally arranged. Our general Camp Visitor takes around with him cases of articles which he exhibits and sells at his meetings amongst friends, and also keeps a good stock in a showroom in London, where visitors of all sorts are induced to come and buy.

Some of the smaller articles are sold readily enough. There are, for example, the dainty little animals of all kinds made from cuttlefish moulds filled with the melted silver-paper, which children were set to work to collect all over the country. There was the menagerie of wooden animals with jointed limbs, the wriggly snakes with shining eyes, and the neat little inlaid match cases. Boxes of every size, shape, colour and design are being made in all the camps, and innumerable shinbones of beef have been transformed into elaborately carved vases, or cut into sections and fashioned into napkin-rings. In fact, we have used all of our supply of bones, and are now having bones from Liverpool butchers sent in to us.

At the other end of the scale there are the most interesting and intricate carvings and mechanical models, and private orders are taken, even to the extent of suites of furniture.

Fortunately we discovered openings abroad. A Prisoners of War Relief Committee in New York, formed chiefly to try to aid prisoners in Siberia, undertook to dispose of camp-made goods for the benefit of the makers. Our camp is making full use of this opportunity and sending across consignments by boat after boat.

Love from Peter

And another.

Dear Barbara, Rebecca and Beth,

A second foreign market has emerged due to the energetic efforts of the late Crown Princess of Sweden to help prisoners of war in all lands. She organised in Stockholm an exhibition and sale of articles made in the prison camps of Russia, Germany and England. To this we sent thirty-three cases of goods, valued at well over a thousand pounds, and they were sold within an hour or two. A second similar exhibition is being held later at Gothenburg.

Small consignments are being sent to Norway and Denmark, and a large one was disposed of in the Prussian House of Lords. This happened almost accidentally. We had sent the goods to Dr. Hartmann, the president of the Zurich Committee for helping interned civilians in all countries. He arranged to sell these in Zurich, but they were so long upon the road that his market was gone by the time they arrived. Not realising that we had no permit to send the goods to Germany, he forwarded them to Dr. Rotten, who arranged the exhibition and sale in Berlin.

Every proposal to make goods for trade sale, whether it was one article or a thousand, has to be submitted in full detail to the Home Office for approval before work can begin.

Drat, no more space to write. I will continue in another letter.

Love from Peter

And the last.

Dear Barbara,

Among the products the internees offer are the making of dolls’ wigs, construction of some of the Montessori Educational material, and the assembling and painting of small model ships and railway trains. The most considerable amount of work, however, is that provided for the watchmakers, of whom there are a large number in camp, and the basket-makers. There were on now a hundred men are kept busy in turning out baskets of every size and shape. The Industrial Adviser is very anxious, in this enterprise, to leave behind a permanent new industry in the Island. Parties of men are taken out to the marshy parts of the Island to cut willows, and prepare the ground for future growths, and a local employer has helped to fit up a disused mill, near Peel, as a basket-making shop, to which our stock will eventually be transferred.

I know you asked me some time ago to ask my friends about the visitations in Fatima. I have not yet done so, and I am so very busy with my work at the moment, but I will try to see if I can answer your question later.

Love,

Peter

I must write to John and Peter both with the news about the Labour party convention which is being held in Manchester at the Albert Hall on Peter Street. They mostly are talking about industrialization due to the workers involvement and naturalisation of the Irish.

And again at church I have been updated on the Fatima children’s visions.

Lucia asked the lady who she was and for a miracle so everyone would believe. “Continue to come here every month. In October, I will tell you who I am and what I want, and I will perform a miracle for all to see and believe.”

Lucia made some requests for sick people, to which Mary replied that she would cure some but not others, and that all must say the rosary to obtain such graces. “God wishes to establish in the world devotion to my Immaculate Heart. If what I say to you is done, many souls will be saved and there will be peace. The war is going to end; but if people do not cease offending God, a worse one will break out."