Postcards from Captivity

 

It was an unusual place to take a holiday. 
Far from the raucous bedlam of a big city,
this tiny town, a village really,
was tranquil and untroubled. 
Like a resort
there was recreation
for every season. Even in winter
when snow and ice made it slippery to get around.

If the weather was too cold or wet
then one could find distraction
with indoor activities
like making music with friends.

In some ways this place was like a spa
with opportunity to pursue healthful exercise
that restored ones physical fitness.

But few tourists would ever choose
this place as a holiday destination.
Indeed, at the time,

most people were far too busy
to imagine taking a vacation anywhere.

It was 1917 and the world was at war.

Today I present a set of picture postcards
sent by one man from a place he never expected to visit,
much less stay confined to for over two years. 
He was a young officer in the Belgian army
held captive in a prisoner of war camp.

This is his story
told in small fragments of a life removed
from the horrible turmoil of the battlefield.
 

We begin in the winter. A camera positioned at high vantage point takes a photo of men skating (or maybe sliding) around on an outdoor ice rink. It's a large space, at least 30 m (100 ft) wide and maybe twice as long. It doesn't look like a pond but more like a flooded field. Surrounding it is a double row of tall fencing with a snow-covered hill beyond. 

Over two dozen men are on the ice which has been swept of snow. They might be playing a team game like hockey but I think they are too disorganized for that. It's really just a picture of fun. 

The back of the card has no message but does have an official printed form. It's a Kriegsgefangenensendung, a 23-letter German word for "prisoner of war letter". On the left edge is a line for the Name of the Sender and the  address: Offizier-Gefangenenlager, Wiesa b. Annaberg. On the other side is the name of the photographer: Albin Meiche, Hofphotograph, Annaberg,  Sa[xony]. 

Annaberg-Buchholz is a modest-sized town in Saxony, situated in the Ore Mountain region of eastern Germany. It is now the capital of the district of Erzgebirgskreis which is on the northwest border of Czechia, though until 1919 it was the border of the Austria-Hungary empire. Wiesa bei Annaberg is a small village about 4km (2.5 miles) north of Annaberg. It is now called Thermalbad Wiesenbad.  

My guess is that this photo was taken in the winter of 1916-17 or 1917-18, but it really doesn't matter since it's a cheery wintertime image to set the first scene of my story.

The next postcard is literally a scene. This photo shows a tiny theatre stage with a group of 19 costumed characters squeezed together in front of a paper mâché forest grove. Most are men, some in military uniforms of the Imperial Russian army, but three are women, one in a white dress. Could this be a wedding scene from some play or operetta? The women look suspiciously masculine.  

The postcard is signed:

A Maurice Dardene
de Voldemar Piotrovitch
3 (16). 2. 7
"Le Mariage"

The annotation on the back gives a man's name and a title of the scene or play: A Maurice Dardene and "Le Mariage" or The Wedding in French. Was Maurice in this theatrical troupe? I don't know, but, as we will see, it's possible he was. The photo is similar to other postcards of theater scenes produced in prisoner of war camps that I've featured before. Check out The Role of a Lifetime, or The Königsbrück POW Camp, A Theatre of War. 

Also printed on the back is the photographer's name: Julius Dürr, Photograph, Bischofswerda i. S. Bischofswerda is a town in Saxony at the western edge of the Upper Lusatia region, about 12okm (72 miles) east of Wiesa. During the Great War it was the site of a prisoner of war camp for officers, mainly Russian and Canadians. 

Now for a different play. This next photo shows a small group of eight characters, five men and three women, in a drawing room. The stage is about the size of the one in the previous scene and shares some clues that make me think it's the same theatre. The prompter box looks identical, and in the top corners are hanging light fixtures (?) that look the same. One actor with a huge mustache (or Schnurrbart in German) wears a Napoleonic army uniform which suggests this is a French play. One character, a woman, is marked below with an X 

During the war German and Austria-Hungary built hundreds of prisoner of war camps to house enemy soldiers who surrendered or were captured. In these POW camps soldiers were held captive as a prize of war, but they were not incarcerated as punishment for a crime. They were granted a level of freedom that allowed them, within the confines of the camp, of course, to organize many activities and recreations like theater, music, and athletics. Officers, who were a much smaller portion of the total POW population, were accorded an additional level of respect for their rank that freed them from being assigned to work details outside the camp as the enlisted POWs were.  

This postcard was sent through by special post service following a convoluted route from Germany to Belgium.  

Bon et Joyeux anniversaire    [X moi] 
5 Mai 1917
Lovely and Happy Birthday  [X me]
5 May 1917

Moi with an X was Maurice Dardenne, Lieut(enant) d'artillerie belge. He was sending birthday greetings to Mademoiselle Marthe Dardenne of 31 impasse du Chemin de fer ~ 31 railway cul-de-sac, Châtelet, Belgium. Châtelet is a city on the river Sambre in the Walloon region of the province of Hainaut, Belgium.

Lt. Darenne had been prisoner since 1914 when he was captured at Fort Liesele on 12 October 1914. This information was carefully recorded on 13 March 1917 in an Imperial German Army account book of enemy prisoners of war. Neatly typed onto three rows across six columns was the full name of each soldier along with his rank, unit, date and place of capture, and date of birth with birthplace. Lt. Darenne was number 3 on page 16715. 

Prisoner of War record for 
Maurice Arthur Joseph Dardenne
Source: Prisoners of the First World War
ICRC historical archives

His full name was Maurice Arthur Joseph Dardenne, Leutnant~ Lieutenant in the 15th battalion of the Fest(ungs)~fortress artillery of Fort Liezele in Belgium. He was captured there on 10.10.14 (10 October 1914) during the German invasion to take Belgium prior to advancing on France. He was born on 12 August 1892 in Châteletville (Heinaut~Hainaut). So in May 1917 when he marked his X, Lt. Maurice Dardenne was approaching his 25th birthday. His youthful handsome face made him perfect to play a female role in that play.

Map of the National Redoubts
around Antwerp, Belgium in 1914
Source: Wikipedia

Belgium's security was invested in guarding the important port city of Antwerp. Between 1859 and 1914 the Belgian military constructed a series of 28 forts called the National Redoubt that were arranged in two rings around the city of Antwerp. On this map of the fort system, Fort Liezele is located at the 7 o'clock position. Like many of these fortresses, Fort Liezele, was built out of masonry and concrete 2.5 m thick but woefully unreinforced. By 1914 these forts were armed with two or three mounted turrets of heavy artillery. 

But Belgium lacked Germany's huge armament industry and its cannons could not compete against the larger and heavier German field artillery. When the German army besieged Antwerp in late September 1914 their guns fired at the Belgian forts from a distance that the smaller Belgian cannons could not reach to do any damage. In August the Germans had also used Zeppelins for the first aerial bombardment of a city. 

When the final German assault broke through the outer ring of forts the city fell 12 days later. On 10 October the last Antwerp garrison surrendered and those Belgian troops unable to escape west to France or east to the  Netherlands were captured. Lt. Dardenne was one of them. Altogether 730 Belgian officers and 40,500 Belgian soldiers were taken to Germany as prisoners of war. Around 2,000 would die in captivity.   

According to records at the archives of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) based in Geneva, after his capture Lt. Dardenne was first sent to a POW camp in Döbeln, a large town in Saxony. The German military account with his name is dated 23 January 1915. The list has six artillery officers from the 15th battalion at Fort Liezele and three from the 14th at Fort Breendonck. This camp was run by the German XIX Corps which also ran the camps at Bischofswerda and Wiesa.

At some point in late 1916 or early 1917 Dardenne was transferred to a new officers' camp in Wiesa. This postcard shows a nighttime scene of the main building there where he was housed shimmering in winter snow. A caption reads: Offizier – Gefangenenlager Wiesa. The building has four floors plus attic rooms with windows aglow in electric light. It looks a bit like a large school adorned by a central cupola dome. 

Puis en bonne santé - Embrassements
No. 21,  30 Mai 1917
Then in good health - Kisses
no. 21,  30 May 1917

Like the previous one, this card was sent by Maurice Dardenne to Mademoiselle Marthe Dardenne of Châtelet. Written in one corner is "no. 21", a reference to his 21st correspondence to Marthe. Soon after the belligerent nations began taking prisoners, the International Red Cross, worked to establish a postal service for captured soldiers. It was complicated because the war closed all borders which meant letters and parcels could only shipped via neutral nations. It also soon required a massive cost for rail transport which snatched valuable time and resources needed by the military forces. Soldiers and their families learned to add special codes to keep track of their letters and parcels which were often mixed up due to long postal delays. Belgian soldiers likely had an advantage over their French, British, and Russian comrades for less delayed postal service since Belgium was now occupied by the German armed forces.

former Robert Friedrich Kartonnagenfabrik (now hosiery factory)
at Wiesa bei Annaberg, Saxony, Germany
Source: 28 February 1932 Illustrated Erzgebirge Sunday Paper

In February 1932 a small regional German newspaper reported on the history of the officers prison camp in Wiesa. It even provided a wonderful non-winter photo of the same building as in Lt. Dardenne's postcard. According to the report the building was a cardboard factory newly constructed in 1914 for an Annaberg businessman, Robert Friedrich, but never made operational. It was conveniently situated near a train station and had grounds large enough to construct three more barracks for imprisoned officers and their German guards. 

The Wiesa camp first opened on 3 August 1916 with the arrival of "180 French and Russian officers and 65 boys. The French came from the fighting at Verdun, where the surprise German attack began on 21 February 1916, which achieved a gain of 20 kilometers wide and 10 kilometers deep by March 8 and captured the armored fortress of Douaumont. 25,000 French were taken prisoner. The captured officers were distributed among the four officer prisoner camps in Saxony in Bischofswerda, Döbeln, Königstein and Wiesa. The arrival of the transport was known only to a few people, so that the prisoners entered the Wiesa camp almost unseen."

This picture postcard shows a painted landscape view of Wiesa bei Annaberg, Saxony. The tall steeple in the center is St. Trinitatis Evangelical Lutheran church of Wiesa, Just beyond to left center is a building very like the cardboard factory. Though this card was sent before the war on 25 October 1913, I think it still may show the factory as it was being constructed

This officers' camp in Wiesa was probably set up to deal with the great influx of enemy prisoners taken as the war moved into its second year. Apparently it was too small to be described in British catalogs of the camps, and in fact, it may never have housed British officers. Belgian and French officers could be kept together as they generally shared the same language. (Though many Belgians speak Dutch or German as their native language.)

In 1921 a German scholar, Dr Wilhelm Doegen (1877-1967), director of the Sound Department at the Prussian State Library in Berlin, published a book entitled: "Peoples Held as Prisoners of War, The Attitude and Fate of Prisoners of War in Germany". The book is a terrific compendium of statistics, photos, and descriptions of how the German prisoner of war system was devised and managed. It covers issues of housing construction, health, and morale. According to this webpage for an archive of Wilhelm Doegen's work,"during World War I, he visited 70 POW camps where he recorded over 250 languages and dialects, as well as examples of traditional music." 

Dr. Doegen included a short outline of activities at the officers' camp at Wiesa.
 

WIESA __
    a. Lectures (in November 1917):24 hours of instruction and lectures weekly on German, English, Spanish, differential and integral calculus, trigonometry, mechanics, geometry, arithmetic, algebra, electricity, history, and Russian (with explained reading passages), literature, philosophy, mathematics, natural sciences, and law. Library. Music studies, concerts, a puppet theater, film screenings, board games, and card games.
    b. Sports, gymnastics (parallel bars, horizontal bar, and vaulting equipment), tennis, croquet, and ball games; walks, gardening, handicrafts (wood carving, ivory inlay work, macrame, clay modeling, painting, knitting, and knotting).

This is a photo of the music room in Wiesa. Six chairs and music stands are arranged  next to an upright piano. On the piano and chairs are three violins, a cello, a mandolin, and a guitar. Bright sunlight fills the room. The caption reads: Offizier – Gefangenenlager Wiesa.

This postcard was no. 24 from Lt. Dardenne and this time is addressed to Madam Gustave Dardenne at the same address in Châtelet.

Recu lettre Victor 7 -  Bon baisers
No. 24,  13 Juin 1917
Received letter Victor 7 -  Best kisses
no. 24,  13 June 1917

The short note refers to Maurice receiving Victor's letter no. 7. Like the first postcard of the men on the ice rink, this photo was taken by Albin Meiche of Annaberg. 

In the summer the officers at Wiesa took advantage of their ice-free playing field for other sports. In this postcard there are two different matches going on. In the foreground a dozen men playing football. The camera has caught the ball in motion and someone is about to do a header. In the background behind a tall fence is a tennis court with a couple of players next to the net.   

This card was addressed to Madame Gustave Dardenne of Châtelet and postmarked on 22 July 1917 in Wiesa, though Maurice Dardenne dates his short message, no. 29, 11 July 1917. Since he has already demonstrated the use of X marks moi, I don't think he is pictured in this group of football players.

Bonne Fête Victor et Marthe - Baisers 
No. 29,  11 Juillet 1917
Happy Holiday Victor and Marthe - Kisses
no. 29,  11 July 1917

Maurice's good wishes to Victor and Marthe on a card addressed to Madame Gustave Dardenne makes me think that they are his younger siblings and that Madame is his mother. This might have been the start of the school holidays in Châtelet. 

Pursuing physical culture was a part of military training that would understandably become very common in prison camps. This photo has a surreal quality as a man hangs horizonal on a high bar. Whether the camera has caught him planking stationary or in mid-swing, I do not know. But it looks hard to sustain either way. Beyond him is a compatriot in uniform. Officers and soldiers considered themselves still in service and under command of their nation's senior officer in the camp. Almost all of the soldiers in my collection of prisoner of war camps wore appropriate military uniforms even though the fabric became threadbare and dirty as the years went by.

Just to the right of the other soldier is a little hut for a German guard. They were stationed around the Wiesa camp playing field and I believe this one is visible on the far side of the ice rink photo. It marked as number 10 under the little roof.       

This card was sent to Marthe Dardenne and marked by Maurice as no. 32. dated 24 July 1915, but the postmark date is 3.8.17. Prisoner mail got low priority. 

Vive  Ste. Marthe! Bons bécot
No. 32,  24 Juillet 1917 
Long live Saint Marthe! Good kisses
no. 32,  24 July 1917 

This message seems a more personal note for Marthe. Was Maurice praising her for an scholastic award? Could it be for her Catholic confirmation? In that case she would be around age 7 or 8. His 24 July date might be a clue as there is a biblical Sainte Marthe of Bethany whose feast day is July 29 and maybe he is connecting the postcard to her name day. Sainte Marthe is venerated by Roman Catholics in Provence, France, as she took care of the hungry, and is traditionally considered the patroness of housewives, waiters, waitresses, and cooks. But without more clues Marthe's age and relationship to Maurice remains a mystery.

Within the cardboard factory a room was reserved for a Catholic chapel. This photo shows a fairly elaborate altar with a central crucifix and two supporting statues. At the bottom of the photo is the caption: Offizier – Gefangenenlager Wiesa. All the armies, of course, had chaplains in service, but they were not captured in sufficient numbers to administer to their fellow prisoners of war in every camp. According to the 1932 report on the Wiesa camp, there was a French chaplain at the samp, but Russian soldiers had a challenge as they worshiped in the Eastern Orthodox faith which was nothing like Catholic or Protestant rites. So a Russian chaplain was brought in from one of the larger camps in the Saxony district.    

This card was not posted but it came with the others from the same dealer so I believe it must be part of Maurice Dardenne's estate. Like the first photo of the ice rink, this has the same official Wiesa camp form printed on the back, though here there is a fuzzy reverse overprint. Most likely Maurice sent some postcards inside letters which have sadly been separated from the postcards. Such is the destiny of all holiday picture postcards. All postcards and letters were subject to censors under the German commandant. On the cards that were posted there is a red F.A. stamp that shows the message was approved for posting. This may account for the delay getting camp mail into the German postal system.  

The 1932 German newspaper report include this description of how the officers were able to purchase extra items to have in camp.   

Like all other prison camps, the Wiesa Officers' Prison Camp also issued its own camp money in the form of vouchers. No prisoner was allowed to carry cash. He could only buy with the store money substituted for him. This prevented German money from accumulating on a prisoner, which could then have been used for
bribery, escape attempts, etc.

For months and years, the prisoners of Wiesa passed the time reading, smoking, playing cards and writing. They had at their disposal a rich library of French and Russian works supplied by universities, as well as a music room with violin, cello, piano and harmonium, and a small home cinema. Furthermore, the French had built a tennis court, built a bowling alley and acquired gymnastics equipment at their own expense. A large proportion of the prisoners also engaged in vegetable cultivation and the cultivation of flowers of all kinds on the associated 3-acre site; still others practiced the breeding of rabbits, chickens, and pigeons, even pigs and goats, in a large number of stables and then sold the animals to residents of Wiesa, etc.

 

My final postcard from Maurice is a wintertime scene of the hills above the Snow is heaped against the perimeter fence and in the lower corner is a note:
28 ft. The black and white photo has a kind of abstract quality as the contrast is too extreme to make out all the details, but I imagine that Maurice on looking out his barrack windows and seeing his little camp covered in snow must have felt it a magical sight that he wished he could share with his family.   

This was postcard no. 55 and it was now 6 March 1918. The card was sent to Mademoiselle M. Dardenne. Perhaps a recognition of her maturity? 

à quand de les lourelle? Baisers
No. 55,  6.3_1918
when will we see them? Kisses
No. 55,  6.3_1918

Lt. Maurice Dardenne of the Belgian artillery had been confined for 3 years, 4 months, and 24 days. His sustained holiday had doubtless lost all novelty and salutary qualities.  That winter of 1917-18 the future still seemed unpredictable. One could always hope but the fate of the world was as yet undecided. 

Soon the American Expeditionary Force would join the French and British on the great battlefield of the Western Front. But the outcome would only be determined by more vicious bloodshed. For someone so long separated from their family, their comrades, and their fellow citizens, Maurice must have felt unbearable longing to return home. "When will we see them?", he asks. He could not know then, but he had 250 more days to wait. 

The war continued up until 11 a.m. UT on 11 November 1918.

2,738 men died on the last day.

I have been unable to learn anything more about Maurice Dardenne. So I know nothing of his fate or of Marthe, Victor, and Madame Gustave Dardenne. What little I could discover only increased the number of questions I have, of course, but his name is fairly common and there are few Belgian resources open for long distance internet research. 

Maurice was an artillery man so he would have experienced a share of the noise, bedlam, and destruction of the war, but captivity spared him from the worst terror. No doubt he and his fellow imprisoned officers picked up some news of the war. But it would have been stale news by the time it reached Wiesa and very likely distorted or mistaken. 

While he was held in captivity, his homeland Belgium was occupied by the Imperial German army. From the beginning of its invasion the German forces committed numerous atrocities and systematic war crimes against Belgian civilians. It became known as The Rape of Belgium. Here is a description from the Wikipedia entry:

Throughout the war, the German army systematically engaged in numerous atrocities against the civilian population of Belgium, including the intentional destruction of civilian property; German soldiers murdered over 6,000 Belgian civilians, and 17,700 died during expulsions, deportations, imprisonment, or death sentences by court. The Wire of Death, a lethal electric fence maintained by the Imperial German Army to hinder civilians from fleeing the occupation to the Netherlands, resulted in the deaths of over 3,000 Belgian civilians. Some 120,000 were forced to work and deported to Germany. German forces destroyed 25,000 homes and other buildings in 837 communities in 1914 alone, and 1.5 million Belgians (20% of the entire population) fled from the invading German army.

While Maurice was on his forced vacation, his family and friends back home endured relentless brutality that must have greatly added to his stress. Unfortunately his postcards offer too few lines for us to read anything between them. Did he survive the war? The pandemic? The great depression? The next war? We can only imagine and guess.

This set of picture postcards have more than one story to tell. The photos are more like tiny scenes from episodes in a long running television drama. We see odd characters whose names we don't know. Events and places that make no sense. It looks vaguely interesting if we only knew the context. That is what I've tried to present here—a context. I don't know how Maurice's story began or ends. But I do know something of what he once experienced and what he missed out on. It was no holiday, despite the pretty pictures. 

 

This is my contribution to Sepia Saturday

where nothing ever interferes with delivery of the mail.

Playing on a Level Field

 

Unlike their usual work attire
these men wore uniforms
that were not regulation issue.
There was no insignia of rank
yet each man knew
their position in the squad.

They shared a common esprit du corps 
as teammates in the great game.

Their focus was always on victory, of course,
but they understood that even in defeat
there was honor and glory, too.

These men were soldiers first
and footballers second,
held captive behind enemy lines.
But they were two teams from rival leagues

that sadly never got to play a match with each other.

The game was a football match, known as match de football in French or a Fußballspiel in German. In this photo postcard two teams are at play on a very sandy ground next to a tall grassy berm. A few bystanders watch along a wire fence that surrounds the playing field. The men are dressed in knee length pants and long sleeve shirts. I believe one team distinguishes itself by wearing white bandanas as a headdress.  

They are all French soldiers of the First World War held captive at a prisoner of war camp in Königsbrück, a small town in Saxony in eastern Germany. I have a large collection of photo postcards from this camp and have written several stories about this remarkable place. My most recent story was in December 2024, The Königsbrück POW Camp, Music in Captivity.  

The Königsbrück POW camp was one of the first camps for captured enemy soldiers set up by the Imperial German military command in August 1914. The camp was situated on the grounds of a large German army base used for infantry and artillery training. Within months the POW camp was filled with thousands of French, Belgian, and Russian soldiers. Later in the war captured Italian and Serb soldiers were added to its prison population. At its height in 1918 there were around 15,000 men housed in barracks that were largely built and maintained by the prisoners.

For reasons I have yet to discover, the commandant permitted photographers to record the soldiers' daily lives at the Königsbrück camp. Thousands of photos were produced and most were used by the imprisoned soldiers for correspondence to their homeland. In my earlier stories I've already covered the music, theater, and some of the art that the prisoners participated in, but they had other recreations too and football was one popular activity. 

The photographs from Königsbrück were printed on postcard stock that had a distinctive imprint on the  back for the photographer, Carl Schmidt, located am Bahnhopf ~ at the train station. This card was sent via the Kriegsgefangenensendung, the prisoner of war postal service, to Mademoiselle Fernande Montels of Decazeville, a commune in the Aveyron department in the Occitanie region in southern France, about 100 miles northeast of Toulouse. My understanding is that most of the mail received and sent from German POW camps in WW1 was conveyed across borders via the neutral Swiss Postal Service.

The writer to Mlle. Montels was Alfred Cerene, a French soldier in the 156e infantry regiment. Alfred's postcard has an official prisoner of war mark stamped with a date 28 January 1918. He was now approaching his 4th year in captivity. 

According to records kept at the International Red Cross Archives,  Alfred was captured on 20 August 1914 in a battle at Morchingen or Morhange as it is now known. This commune is in the Lorraine region of northeast France. In 1914 it had a German name because it was part of the French territory that Germany acquired after defeating the French army in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71. 

Alfred's unit was part of the French 2nd Army which was deployed against the German 6th and 7th Armies during the Battle of Lorraine (14 August – 7 September 1914), one of first major battle lines on the Western Front. The German forces sustained over 66,500 casualties, including 21,800 dead. The French army reported over 46,000 casualties with many more soldiers captured. This initial conflict was very mobile and volatile. It set up conditions for the long trench warfare that began in late 1914. 

My second image at the top was clipped from this postcard of 29 men arranged in a typical athletic formation. Most wear a kind of football outfit with a few in army uniform. A soccer ball takes center place. They number more than just one team, almost enough for a kind of small league. Behind the group is substantial building with glass windows that looks too respectable to be prisoner barracks. I think it may be a building for the German camp commandant and staff, but the few military jackets and one hat are definitely from the French army. 

This postcard also came from the Königsbrück POW camp as shown on the back. There is no postmark but the front has a note and date:

A moy boy ami Charles Desmone...(?)  en souvenir in de notre captivites. 
~

To my friend Charles Desmone...(?)  in memory of our captivity.

16 – 8 – 17

Unfortunately the soldier's signature is too spikey to decipher
and only Charles knows who it is. 

A second photo of the football match at Königsbrück gets us closer to a goal. It's a rare action shot of men in motion, unlike most of the photos in my collection which are generally static poses for the camera. The goal is just two thin stakes with no net, only a piece of string defines the top.  

This card was also sent by Alfred Cerene to Mlle Fernande Montels of Decazeville. Judging by his calligraphy flourish it looks like he acquired a quality fountainpen. Maybe a gift from Fernande? There is no stamped date so we can only presume that it was sent in the winter of 1918. 

I have over a dozen postcards from Alfred all addressed to Fernande, but I have no way of knowing her relationship with him. The messages have a faint essence of love and hope that still lingers in the paper and handwriting. I like to assume they were sweethearts, but I do not know if they ever married. But since she was the recipient of these cards, I am indebted to her for preserving them. 

The image that starts my story is clipped from a postcard also from a WW1 prisoner of war camp. But this one is more rare, as it is a picture of German soldiers held at French prisoner of war camp. In my collecting experience postcards sent by captured German soldiers are very uncommon compared to those of French POWs. In this photo eleven men with their football, rank and regiment unknown, pose outdoors  on well trampled ground. In the distance behind is a hazy outline of a city. Closer is a barbed wire fence. It's a mix of men in their 20s and 30s, all wearing athletic shorts and jerseys that have no insignia. Since a football team required 11 players, I think this is a picture of a champion team. 

There is no caption or message on the front but the back has the standard French title Carte Postale with a note that looks contemporary with the photo.

Prisoners of War
88 Company
Rouen, Frankreich
2 F...... (Fußballer....?)
m....    1919

Rouen is a port city on the river Seine, about 75 miles northwest of Paris. During the war the British Army set up multiple convalescent depots in Rouen to deal with the thousands of casualties brought in from the front lines. After the war ended, some of these depots were used to house captured German soldiers until they could be repatriated. I believe these soldiers were part of that post-war process. We can't know if they were enlisted men or officers but they certainly shared a common bond as proud footballers.

The photos of the German and French prisoners' football teams are an unusual glimpse into a less brutal, even peaceful, aspect of this terrible Great War. Of course, these pictures bring up questions that may never be answered. Did the POWs ever play against a team of the camp guards? Were there any professional players in the teams? Did anyone save the football?  

According to the Wikipedia entry on Prisoners of War in World War One, during the course of over 4 years of warfare, between 6.6—9 million soldiers from all the belligerent nations were captured and held in prisoner-of-war camps. After the armistice ended the war on 11 November 1918, soldiers held prisoner by the Central Powers of Germany, Austria, Bulgaria, and the Ottoman Empire were released very quickly. However those held by the Allied Powers of France, Great Britain, Russia, Italy, and the United States were retained for a year or more. Most were not granted freedom to return to their homelands until late 1920. For those held in Russia, where the government had fallen to the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, the delay was longer to 1924. For some soldiers like Alfred Cerene these photos served as a memento of a very different experience of the war. A bond of brotherhood made from a shared love of football.

I'll finish with a short film of a football match
that the men in my photos would remember
and may even have attended.
It's was the Football final
of the 1912 Summer Olympics
held in Stockhom, Sweden.
The team from Great Britain beat Denmark,  4 — 2.

This is my contribution to Sepia Saturday

where everyone is a good sport
and plays by the rules.

The Königsbrück POW Camp, Music in Captivity

 

It looks like a military band playing a typical outdoor concert.

The soldiers are all in uniform led by bandleader
wielding a baton as long as a sword.

But it's not really a band
as the only wind instruments
are a clarinet and a flute

and the rest are string instruments.
Their uniforms are an odd mix of regimental dress.

And slippers are rarely included in an army kit.

The men also sit on stout rustic stools
with crude wooden music stands.
Not really military issue.

A closer look shows that the violins
are simple wooden boxes made roughly like folk instruments,
and the drummer has only a tambourine and triangle.
They couldn't make enough noise
for a platoon to march to
much less a regiment.

The group also has a cellist,
rarely seen in a military marching band.
but his instrument is strangely made, too,
with a flat angular shape and a simple headstock for the string pegs
instead of a cello's traditional curves and carved scroll box.
There is also a guitarist which is also an uncommon instrument
to find in any orchestra or concert band.
His instrument is more shapely than the violins or cello
but its wooden top has a very coarse grain.

The men wear French Army uniforms
of the Great War of 1914-18.

But instead of defending their homeland
they are hundreds of miles from the battle lines
playing music in a place they never expected to be.

They were captives,
French soldiers held in a German prisoner of war camp
located in Königsbrück, Saxony, Germany.

It was a quiet place
far removed from the constant terror
that tormented their comrades
on the Western Front.

Here the men were confined but safe

with a lot of time to pursue other avocations 
that most soldiers never dreamed of in this violent age.

In Königsbrück one of these popular recreations for soldiers was music. 

There was a lot of it.

The full postcard photo shows 12 French soldiers with musical instruments seated on a flat dirt plaza in the shade of some trees. It could almost be a park in Paris. But the caption gives a different location: Gefangenen Lager Königsbrück Musik Kapelle ~  Prisoner of War Königsbrück Music Band. The men wear an assortment of different coats and tunics, but they all have the French army field cap. Their collar and cap badges have a mix of different regimental numbers with the addition of a white paper sticker signifying their prison barrack's number. 

The back of the postcard has a lengthy message in German with a handwritten date of 3 October 1915, about 14 months since the beginning of the war in August 1914. On this same date the commander of the French Army, General Joffre, abandoned his attempt at a breakthrough in Champagne, ordering the local commanders to fight a battle of attrition, which was terminated on 6 November. The  offensive had only advanced the French line for about 2.5 mi (4 km) at a cost of ±100,000 French and British casualties. The French attack in Champagne used 35 divisions against 16 German divisions and its artillery fired 2,842,400 field artillery shells and 577,700 heavy shells, which, at that time, exhausted the French stock of ammunition.

The photographer was Carl Schmidt of Königsbrück, and his studio produced thousands of photos of the prison camp. Most were used by the prisoners or their German guards. 

Königsbrück was one of 176 similar camps set up by the Imperial German Army, 96 camps for enlisted and non-commissioned officers and 80 separate camps for officers. The camp at Königsbrück was chosen because, conveniently, there was already an army training base there, just outside the town. The camp received its first prisoners, about 1,000 French soldiers from the Western Front, on 27 August 1914. Soon afterward several thousand Russian soldiers from the Eastern Front arrived. The German military command quickly realized that success in war created a new problem. They would need a much larger prison system, so a new expanded camp for common rank soldiers was hastily constructed in Königsbrück. 

Two months later at the end of October 1914, the Königsbrück POW camp housed 14,535 enlisted men and noncommissioned officers. All were secured by a guard detail of around 1,800 German soldiers. By 1916 the camp was divided into four sections: a French camp with 4,000 prisoners; a Russian camp with 8,000; a Serb camp with 3,000; and a smaller Italian camp of just a few hundred. The last two nationalities were prisoners taken in action against the forces of Austria-Hungary, Germany's ally. 

Several years ago when I first discovered postcard photos of soldier orchestras from WW1 prisoner of war camps, I was intrigued by how many camps developed music and theater programs for their captive audience of soldiers. My collection now has hundreds of these postcards which depict the ways the men entertained themselves after they had been removed from the battlefield. In 1914 none of the nations at war ever expected it to continue beyond a few months, but after the initial battle lines settled into a stationary conflict, the logistics of maintaining prisoner-of-war camps became a major challenge that had not been included in war planning. By November 1918 when the war ended Germany had around 2.5 million men confined in prison camps. 

With so many captive soldiers, there was only limited work that they could be used for, and then only the enlisted men, not officers. The camps retained internal order using each captive army's military rules and language. But how could a camp prevent boredom, the tedious malaise of every prison? International postal service was disrupted because of closed borders but agreements were soon reached that allowed prisoners' mail to follow a circuitous route through neutral countries like Switzerland. Postcards were already a popular and easy method of  communication so photos like the one of the Königsbrück band were produced for both domestic post and enemy prisoner mail. 

In the first years of the war, the United States was also neutral before it finally joined the allies in April 1917. It also had a very large German-American population. American aid societies like the Red Cross and YMCA worked to provide prison camps on both sides of the war with book libraries and, surprisingly, musical instruments. In this era before radio and recorded music a band or orchestra was considered vital to manage the morale and spirits of imprisoned soldiers. However the handmade instruments suggest that at the beginning of the war the Königsbrück prisoners found a way to make their own musical instruments even before the YMCA provided assistance. 

In this photo an ensemble of 23 soldiers, all string players, pose for Carl Schmidt's camera. Nearly all are holding a mandolin, with just a few violinists and a cellist to add variety. The caption reads: Gefangenen Lager Königsbrück Franzosen Kapelle ~ Königsbrück Prisoner of War Camp French Band. Most of the instruments have the same folk style construction. The cello has the classic body shape but it is flat, not arched, and the peg head is plainly made. It may be the same instrument as in the first photo but the player is a different man

Making a violin, much less a cello, requires a number of sharp tools like saws, planes, chisels, drills, etc. plus some descent timber, too, not to mention gut strings and horsehair for the bow. A mandolin is similar to a violin but has doubled strings. How were these instruments acquired? While it's possible the instruments were donated or purchased from a German woodworker in Königsbrück, I think it is more likely that a fellow soldier with the special skills of a luthier constructed these instruments. The wood probably came from boxes or was salvaged from piles of kindling around camp. The horse hair for the bows was likely easy to find in a rural community like this. But where did the tools come from?

Like the previous postcard, this one was sent by a German soldier, most likely a guard, using free military post on 8 September 1915. On that same evening in September, four German Navy Zeppelins flew across the English Channel on a bombing raid of London. Two of the airships turned back because of engine trouble, while another got lost and instead attacked a petrol plant at Skinningrove, Yorkshire that caused little damage. However the fourth zeppelin reached London, where it released a 300-kg (661-lb) bomb, the largest yet dropped on Britain, which killed 22 people and inflicted the most damage by a single airship or airplane bombing raid throughout all of World War I.

 

Of course music doesn't have to be played in large groups. The men interned in the Königsbrück camp also formed smaller ensembles. This private photo has a quartet of a French sailor and three soldiers seated on a park bench and playing a mandolin, a trumpet, an accordion, and a violin. They look like friends but the photo may have been staged as propaganda to demonstrate the pleasant conditions in the camp. Unlike in the other ensembles the string instruments are properly made. The violinist looks very competent, even professional, in his stance. The trumpet has rotary valves which would not be the favored design in France where piston valves were used on brass instruments.

This postcard was never mailed but has the same printed form on the back used by Carl Schmidt's photography studio for the Königsbrück camp.

This next POW ensemble from Königsbrück is an octet of string players, except for one trumpet player in the back who may be the same man pictured on the park bench. The other instruments are violins, a cello, a double bass, and possibly a viola. The men are seated very close together on a small stage framed by curtains and a painted backdrop. Written in ink is a caption: "Baracken lager – Lauenstein – Orchestre." The name may refer to a nickname for the barrack as Lauenstein, Germany is about 250 miles east of Königsbrück. 

The octet's instruments all look to be of traditional construction. The men appear to be quite serious about their music and except for the uniforms they could easily be professional musicians performing in a theater. I wish I knew how they found instruments during wartime. Did they have help from their German captors? And what about sheet music? Any skilled musician could make arrangements for the camp's eclectic mix of instruments, but they would still need blank music paper, another commodity that would have been in short supply or rationed. 

The postcard was sent to Michael Pineau of Courdemanche, a commune in the Sarthe department of the Pays de la Loire region in north-western France. The sender was Adrien Pineau, a soldier in the 90th Infantry Regiment. The red censor stamp has a date of 28 October 1918, just two weeks before an armistice was declared to end the war. Already the allied forces had prevailed over the Ottoman Empire in the Middle East. And by this date the Hapsburg Empire was beginning to break up with the Austrian-Hungarian army retreating in Italy and new democratic governments in Czechoslovakia and Hungary rushing to establish new independent nations. In ten days Kaiser Wilhelm is forced to abdicate the German throne and flees to the Netherlands. 

It seems the soldiers confined to the Königsbrück camp had no shortage of talent as there was a vibrant theater there. I last wrote about some postcards from these productions in my story, The Königsbrück POW Camp, A Theatre of War, published in December 2023. Most of these shows seemed to include a small orchestra seated in front of the theater's small stage. In this photo an orchestra of ten musicians watch attentively to the action on stage where two French officers appear to question a woman while her maid and houseboy set (or clear) a meal. Music was often used in all kinds of theater works as an interlude between scene changes. Here the caption reads: Gefangenen Lager Königsbrück Teater.

Most of the prisoners in Königsbrück were Russian and that section of the camp had its own theater and orchestra. Here a group of seven musicians watch a play that looks like a romantic comedy involving a happy (or unhappy) couple, a judge or father, and an old crone. The play's title is written in Russian Cyrillic script on a poster in the center. The musicians are seated on the same rustic stools used in my first orchestra photo. We can't see their instruments by I believe they are all string instruments with at least two or more Russian balalaika, a triangular strummed instrument.

The back of this card has a long message in German, again likely sent by a German guard at the Königsbrück camp. I think it is dated 14 March (März) 1915, but German handwriting is quite challenging. ( Zs and umlauts are particularly difficult to spot.) Just four days before this date the Battle of Neuve Chapelle started in the Artois region of France. The British Army and the Indian Corps attacked a point on the German trenches and briefly captured a new position, but were repulsed a day latter and forced to retreat. The British sustained 12,892 casualties, ±7,000 British and ±4,200 Indian, while the Germans lost around 8,500–10,000 men over the full 11-day campaign.  

Several photos in my collection are of variety shows put on in the Königsbrück POW camp. In this photo there are 15 musicians in the orchestra and 24 performers in the cast. The two women on stage, and in the other theater photos too, are not women, of course, but men, a theatrical illusion that goes back to ancient times. To assign any sexuality/gender terms from our 21st century to these entertainers of 1914-18 is grossly incorrect and an injustice, I think, to the history of theatrical artists.

The orchestra is predominantly French but there are some Russian soldiers in it too, marked by their peaked caps. The instruments are mostly traditional made, but the guitar and cello/bass on the right are clearly made in a crude folk style. 

This photo was produced by Carl Schmidt's studio of Königsbrück, but was never posted.

This photo is captioned Gefangenenlager Königsbrück Serben and shows a string band of seven Serbian soldiers standing on the same sandy plaza as my first photo of the French orchestra. Their violins are all traditionally made and there is a double bass, too, played by the shortest musician. 

Though in July 1914 Germany declared war on Serbia in support of its ally Austria-Hungary it did not initially send troops there until October 1915 when a second campaign was launched under German command. At some point after that, thousands of captured Serbian soldiers were sent to the Königsbrück POW camp, a number that eventually reached around 3,000. They were housed in a separate section that probably had more connection to the Russian section, since their language also uses a Cyrillic alphabet. 

This card was sent by a French soldier named Georges Cretté of the 82nd Infantry to Mademoiselle Renee Piette of  Beauvais, a town in the Oise département of northern France, 75 kms (47 miles) north of Paris. 

In this next photo the same seven Serbian musicians are surrounded by their fellow Serbs. The caption reads Königsbrück Serbenlager. 

Serbian music was probably considered pretty exotic for the other French and Russian soldiers, not to mention the German guards at Königsbrück. Serbia like the other Balkan ethnic nations has a  folk music tradition that uses modal scales and asymmetric rhythms that are not part of central European musical culture. 

The card was sent by a German soldier but without a date.

Perhaps the most unexpected musician see in the Königsbrück POW camp was a bagpiper. In this case a Serbian piper accompanied by two  E-flat clarinetists play while a ring of Serb soldiers dance around them. The high treble clarinets are typical piccolo instruments found in many brass bands around the world but they would not have been common in German bands. I think they must have come with the musicians when they were captured. Likewise the bagpipes are very unusual to see. Though it's a simple folk instrument with a single drone and chanter, the Serbian pipes are very different from the Scottish highland pipes, or the German Dudelsack, or the dozens of other European bagpipes. 

In this photo the Serbian piper is playing alone in the midst of other Serbian and Russian soldiers. It has recently rained and the camp street has turned into sandy mud. Carl Schmidt numbered this photo #654. 

This photo was numbered  #653 and shows a different pose of the same piper. This postcard was sent by Alfred Gigout, a Sergeant of the 153rd Infantry Regiment, to his wife Madame Gigout of Manonville, a commune in the Meurthe-et-Moselle department in north-eastern France. What did she think when she saw this photo? 

When the captured Serbian soldiers were sent to Königsbrück they arrived with a large number of sick men, mainly suffering typhus, which required them to be quarantined. Contagious disease was the worst calamity that any prison could experience but it was especially onerous for a POW camp which had limited resources. In Königsbrück 176 Serbs died from typhus and were buried in a cemetery there. 

In September 1918 a monument to the fallen Serb soldiers was erected in the cemetery. It was made in stone and carved by sculptor Edmund Delphaut, a French adjutant of the 153rd Infantry Regiment. I wrote about this impressive statue in my August 2021 story Monument to the Fallen, Königsbrück 1918. 

In this clip from a photo of the Serb monument, the artist Delphaut is looking up at his statue. I believe the other man next to him, looking at the camera, is Alfred Gigout. During the four years  he was confined to the prison camp, Alfred regularly sent photos of Königsbrück's camp life to his wife . Many of these postcards are now in my collection and have inspired me to tell the story of this remarkable place.

If you Google "Königsbrück Germany" the first image that pops up is of this same monument to the fallen Serb soldier of World War One. It is all that remains of the German prisoner of war camp of 1914–18. After the war most of the remains of soldiers buried there were disinterred and taken back to their native lands. The barracks and grounds of the Königsbrück prison camp were taken over for other military use.  Eventually after the Second World War and then the division of Germany in the Cold War the land reverted to a forest and it is now preserved as a park watched over by a brave Serbian soldier. 

That monument bears witness to a terrible time of war. Yet it is also an example of a uniquely peaceful endeavor made by soldiers who put their skills and talents toward producing art, music and theater. So far I have far more questions than answers but the photo collection I have acquired of the Königsbrück POW camp shows that it was a place where culture thrived and was shared across multiple foreign languages and traditions. How that happened and why was it recorded by Carl Schmidt's camera is still a mystery but I think it is a story worth telling.  

The next chapter to this series will be about the art work produced by the soldiers in the Königsbrück prisoner of war camp. Stay tuned, as the Serbian bagpiper will return. 

Here are links to my other stories on this POW camp.
The Königsbrück POW Camp, A Theatre of War,
The Königsbrück POW Camp, Soldiers at Ease
Monument to the Fallen, Königsbrück 1918
Art in a Time of War
The Prisoners of Königsbrück

I can't resist including a video
about Serbian bagpipes.
Here is a short one from
the YouTube channel of Vladan Radisavljevic 
who has compiled a large collection of vintage photos
of Serbian, and maybe Croatian, bagpipers to the sound of the bagpipes.
My impression is that there are two types of Serbian bagpipes.
One has a short chanter with a high pitch sound,
and the other is longer with a lower pitch
and an upturned bell like the one played by the Serbian soldier.

Even for a bagpipe, the Serbian pipes make a very jarring noise
that is possibly one of the most teeth-grinding sounds you will ever hear.
Its constant drone and dissonant noodling reeds

are so annoying that it could start another war
if you had to listen to it every day.

This is my contribution to Sepia Saturday

where making a piece of cake

and a case for Peace
require two different recipes.