The Prisoners Return

Word went round Edinburgh like fire: the ships with exchanged prisoners would discharge in the Firth of Forth next day. Edinburgh lined up six deep along the Leith waterfront. Offshore, in the rare sun of a late October morning, the Empress of Russia and the Drottningholm (the men called her the Trotting Home) began transferring their racked and crippled cargoes to tenders./-

Sirens wailed, ships' whistles bellowed the V-for-Victory. Bands played, pipers skirled and people sang old songs and the new hits. But when the tenders came in, the 4,000 repatriates were singing the song many had sung when they marched away to war: Roll Out the Barrel.

Plans for a ceremony were swept away in a rush of plain people to make tired and broken men feel welcome. Dockers, Forth riveters, nurses, generals, sergeants, privates, onlookers and excited children laughed, wept, blew their noses hard. Cripples, as they came ashore, thumped the Scottish ground with their crutch tips, said: "By God. It's good." In the hubbub few heard General Sir Ronald Adam read a message from Their Majesties, beginning: "The Queen and I bid you a very warm welcome. . . . We rejoice to think that you are safely home."

Then the mass moved toward the improvised canteen--all except the quietly smiling stretcher cases--for a spread of precious tea, coffee, hot milk, pies, buns, slab chocolate and 10,000 sandwiches that the women of Edinburgh and Leith had frantically put together the night before. Some noticed that the prisoners reached first for white bread and newspapers.

Reunion. The white ship with the green band around her belly and red crosses all over her turned up in Liverpool next day. As the Atlantis came alongside the quay, a voice began calling "Cynthia"; soon the battered ranks along the rail were roaring in chorus: "Cynthia, Cynthia, Cynthia." A tall, handsome girl stepped out of the packed crowd on the dock and waved. Cynthia Elliot, niece of Lady Maud Carnegie, was taken prisoner with a mobile canteen unit in France in 1940, put to nursing 1,500 wounded and captured men of Dunkirk. With many of those men she was transferred to Dieppe to await the 1941 exchange ship, the one that never came because at the last minute the Germans backed out of the deal. The Germans gave Cynthia the job of breaking the news to the men. Released last month, she had been a fortnight in England. Said Cynthia, as 800 British and Dominion and 14 U.S. wounded rode, stumped or walked with shattered arms in splints down the gangways of the Atlantis: "I simply had to come to Liverpool, but I didn't expect that terrific shout."

/- By international definition, exchange is for those who have no further military value.

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