大象传媒

The details of this will be at the best sketchy and mainly anecdotal with few real points of reference. The few points of reference I have used are, to the best of my knowledge, correct.

My father, Aloysius Thomas Costello, was a sergeant in the Royal Army Medical Corp based in Aldershot at the outbreak of the WW2. With the declaration of war he became a member of one of the Field Ambulance units and was very shortly in France as part of the BEF.

Eventually the unit he was with was stationed in a small town near Lille named Flines lez Rache.My understanding is that here they took over the convent and converted it into a hospital.Upon their initial arrival in the village my father was detailed with organising a temporary billet for all in a farm. When everybody was settling down for the night, he realised (much to his associates mirth), he had not allocated himself with a sleeping birth. He spent the night in a stall in a barn next to the farmers best milker. Apparently there was a bonus to this. . . the night was so bitterly cold that his associates were half frozen by the morning. He on the other hand had spent the night as warm as toast from the body heat of the cow.

He was fortunate enough to strike up a friendship with a local family and spent Christmas day 1939 with them. I understand there were a brother and sister in their mid teens named Pierre and Julienne. Julienne died of pneumonia in 1943.My father carried a photograph of the two of them in his wallet until he died.

There was a tale recounted of a particularly unusual night in a cafe when my father finished the evening drinking half pints of cherry brandy with a fairly high ranking Belgian officer. I am unable to recall any of the specific details of this incident, but it seemed to result in a most spectacular hangover.

His first contact with the enemy came as a monumental eye opener. He,( being 5'5" and a little over 10 stones in weight), had to have a rather swift rethink on the opposition when he saw his first German prisoner. The British rumour/propaganda machine had managed to convince him that the enemy were, malnourished, undersized and almost with "paper uniforms and cardboard boots". Needless to say,when he encountered a 6'2" blond Teuton in an immaculate uniform and the best boots he'd ever seen, my father began to suspect that all was not as they had been led to believe.

When the phoney war was brought rather abruptly to an end, my father took part in the hasty withdrawal to the coast.During the withdrawal he had occassion to be involved in setting up two more field hospital/large emergency aid stations. The first involved commandeering a cafe which had a ballroom/dance hall attached. Whilst the owner of the establishment was only too happy to assist them, initially there was apparently a communication problem which prevented the Belgian and French Officers,(and their attendant lady friends),from understanding that the entertainment for the evening was over.The issue was very quickly resolved in no uncertain terms when a score of pairs of studded boots began crunching across the dance floor followed by a flood of wounded.

The second incident involved setting up shop in an abandoned shoe factory.All seemed to be going well until the refugees passing suddenly seemed to change. It became apparent that the "refugees" were inmates who been released from a mental institution, a relatively short didtance up the road.The assumption was that this had been done either by the advancing German forces or by some one who had considered the German forces were to close to leave the inmates in the institution. Whichever was the case the decision was made to make all speed and, for those who could, depart. My father was given an order by a T.A. Captain to dispose of amputated limbs and any other human tissue from the operating theatre in the appropriate manner. The "appropriate manner" was to dig pits and bury the human tissue with large quantities of lime to destroy it. Realising that this was not feasible, as it would almost certainly involve his capture, my father devised an alternative. Desperate times call for desperate measures. He arranged for all the tissue and limbs to be stacked in an enormous cupboard, knowing full well that the Germans would dispose of it all when they very shortly turned up.
All went well until the Captain made a final inspection. Needless to say he felt the desire to inspect the cupboard and was engulfed in a deluge of human tissue, when he opened it. the Captain made it clear that, at some point in the future, my father would be subjected to a court martial. As he never saw the Captain again, or heard anymore of the court martial my father made the assumption that the Captain's return to our green and pleasant land had not been as successful as his own.

To be continued.

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