Thought for the Week: The cable car
Ernest Hall reflects on a memorable encounter
Many years ago when our two sons were teenagers (they are now in their early sixties!) my late wife Heather and I took them on a camping holiday in Austria. It’s a beautiful country, full of friendly, hospitable people – and I was able to exercise the very ungrammatical German that I had learned as a prisoner of war.
One day we took a cable car ride to the summit of the Muttersberg. We shared the cable car with a German family who were a mirror image of ourselves – husband, wife and two teenage children, though I think theirs were a boy and a girl. We conversed and I congratulated the father on his excellent colloquial English.
‘Ah yes,’ he explained, ‘I was a prisoner of war in England for three years. I worked on a farm and that’s where I learnt my English.’
‘I, too, was a prisoner of war for three years,’ I replied, ‘but I only spent the final eighteen months working in Germany. That’s why your English is much better than my German.’
‘Where were you captured?’ I asked. ‘In Tobruk,’ he said, adding in case I had never heard of the place, ‘That’s in Libya, North Africa.’
It’s a small world. I had been captured when the Tobruk garrison had been overwhelmed by the tanks of Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps on 21 June 1942. He had been captured in the same place a few months later! Nor was that all we had in common.
We were both gunners in heavy mobile artillery. I was part of a six-inch howitzer team. His gun was a 155mm field gun. From January until May 1942, when Rommel launched his major offensive, we were on opposite sides of the Gaza Line – about fifty miles west of Tobruk. We had both gone out with our gun teams into the miles-wide operational area (we called it ‘no-man’s land’) that separated the two armies to fire at unseen targets according to the relayed orders of the ‘observation post officer’, who could see the target and where our shells were landing.
In the evening we would listen on the radio to a posh voice assuring us that: ‘Our mobile artillery has been active in the Libyan Desert today. Several artillery duels have taken place and an enemy battery was silenced.’ That often meant no more than that the enemy battery had used up its quota of ammunition for the day or had been ordered to return to base before 6pm, 7pm or whatever. No doubt a few miles away enemy gunners were listening to similar rubbish on the German radio.
The knowledge, on the day of our encounter in Austria, that a few years earlier this amiable, middle-aged family man and I, whose families shared the cable car, had been trying (fortunately unsuccessfully) – in a desert land far from either of our homes – to kill each other, confirmed to me the value of our Peace Testimony far more than any impassioned speech I had ever heard, or article I had ever read.
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