Mexborough and Swinton Times December 21, 1918.

Sapper J Howarth
Royal Engineers

Sapper Howarth, 7, Milton Road Mexborough, has arrived home from Germany.

He was captured at 9 o’clock on the morning of April 9, 1918, on the Armentieres front. He was given no food that day, and throughout the day was engaged in carrying wounded.

At 6 o’clock in the evening he was turned into a field, without overcoat and blanket, and spent the night on the wet ground. He carried on like this until the 12^th, when he was marched to Lille, when he was given some black bread and coffee substitute (burnt barley).

Every available place was packed with wounded, and scores of them died every day for want of attention. One man, severely wounded, had lain for seven days without attention, and his bandages stank. Sapper Howarth was kept on working Lille until the 30^th, and was then sent to work on ammunition dumps and making light railways in Armentieres. He began at 4 a.m. and finished at 6 p.m. and was sustained between those hours with a little black bread and some very watery soup.

At night, when he returned to ‘Lille, he used to boil potato peelings thrown away by the Germans. Every day, during this time, some British prisoner or other died of starvation. The British prisoners, although working in France and Belgium close behind the German lines, were made to give a German address on the letters and postcards home, and they were never able to write home. On the day the armistice was signed the party of which Howarth was a member were marching to Germany to take up winter quarters. They were marched twenty-two miles, and then were suddenly abandoned by their guard. There were 1,500 of them, and the Dutch frontier was only a mile away, but the Dutch authorities refused them, stating that they had no ‘accommodation for them. T

They were thus thrown on the hospitality of the Belgium’s, who from their scanty store did their very best for them, and fed and sheltered them for a week until they could be conveyed to England.