A HUNDRED years ago, Newport and Gwent suffered their most grievous blow of the First World War when hundreds of soldiers of the Monmouthshire Regiment were killed during the Second Battle of Ypres which took place between 22 April to 25 May.

The battle saw soldiers from the regiment’s three battalions – the 1st based in Newport, the 2nd in Pontypool and the 3rd in Abergavenny, suffer enormous casualties as they tried to halt the German push to capture the Belgian town of Ypres and open the way to the Channel ports.

AFTER the carnage on the battlefield during the first week of May, news began to emerge of the scale of the number of dead.

While some were plunged into mourning, others had the bitter-sweet knowledge that their loved ones were in captivity.

The picture depicting the defiant stand of the 1st Battalion, the Monmouthshire Regiment on the 8th May during the battle was first hung in the old Newport library in Dock Street.

Kenneth Coombes is 89, but he remembers the day his father, 1st Mons veteran, Walter Henry Coombes, took him to see it. He was ten-years-old and he recalls how his father looked up at it and said to me “that was the day I was taken prisoner.”

Walter was one of the 130 men of the 1st Mons who were captured that day. Many more would follow for whom ‘the war would be over’.

Kenneth Coombes tells how his father was taken to a Prisoner of War camp at Giessen near Frankfurt in Germany but not before an arduous forced march.

The hand-to-mouth existence of the journey haunted him for years after. He told Kenneth never to refuse an offer of any food or drink as Walter remembers saying “I don’t mind” when asked if he wanted something water and then bitterly regretting his response when hours later there was nothing more to drink.

He told Kenneth of how when being marched through Germany, he happened to be marching with French prisoners. He adds: “The locals recognised my father’s uniform and singled him out. They were jeering ‘Englander!’ at him.”

Although later on in the war Giessen was known as a “well ordered camp with good sanitary conditions and clean water”, conditions were primitive and life was hard. Camps were surrounded by a 10 feet high barbed wire fence.

The prisoners slept in wooden, one-storey huts on bunks with mattresses filled with wood shavings, paper and sometimes straw. Lice, mice and other vermin were a problem. Although beds tended to have two blankets and the huts were heated by a stove.

Prisoners, especially those with the right experience were put to work on nearby farms, with the luckiest getting to live on the farms where their food would be better. Walter, though, was sent to work in salt mines near the camp.

PoWs working in the mine would be woken at four in the morning and given coffee and bread. At five they would leave for the mine and work from 6am until 2pm. Their back-breaking work meant hauling trucks full of rocks to be lifted to the surface or hacking away at the stone with pick and shovel. The hard, hot work underground gave the men blisters and sores which were aggravated by the salt which did not heal properly.

The luckier ones not working in the mine would not have to get up until 6am, when they would be given their work for the day. For these there was only coffee, but the cleverer would remember to keep their bread from the night before to have something to eat for breakfast. At noon the prisoners would get soup and at 5pm they would get black bread made mostly from potato flour.

There were some diversions to take the men’s mind off their captivity. Walter Coombes took to boxing in camp tournaments, whilst others joined one of the orchestras and bands set up by prisoners.

Also vital to morale were the postcards the men were allowed to send home. Walter was able to reassure his mother at 13 Caroline Street in Newport with cards like this sent from his camp saying he was well:

Dear Mother,

Just a few lines hoping you are all quite well at home as it leaves me in the pink[?] The weather is getting warm now I am sending you this card so write back and let me know if you get it. Walter xxxx

Other Monmouthshire soldiers captured during the battles around Ypres too would see the war out from behind barbed wire.

A Newport Tommy fighting alongside Walter in the 1st Mons was Melville Ray. He had been last seen on May 8th by Rifleman John Healey bravely venturing out under heavy fire to fix a cut communication line. They hoped he was injured and in hospital, but no-one knew for sure.

The South Wales Argus of 25 May reported he was missing, but a week later his parents of 87 Lime Street, received a postcard which informed them that Melville, “had had the good fortune to stop a couple of bullets and got captured." He would spend the rest of the war in a German Prisoner of War camp near Duisburg.

Such news, although heralding years of hardship for some men of the Monmouthshires, at least brought the good news that their sons, husbands and fathers were still alive.