First repatriated prisoners from Switzerland

A British chronology of the war records under 11 September 1917 that the first group of British prisoners of war repatriated from Switzerland reached England. They were sick and wounded soldiers who had first been captured and held in Germany and then, under the 1916 agreement, transferred to internment in neutral Switzerland. Now the most seriously ill were returning home. The exact date of the first transport’s arrival could not be confirmed in other sources, but the British press wrote about internees returning precisely in mid-September.

The first Britons arrived in Switzerland at the end of May 1916. The soldiers were housed in the Alpine resort of Château-d’Œx, and soon also at Mürren above the Lauterbrunnen valley, and the officers in places including the area around Montreux. The internees were not free, since they could not leave Switzerland until the end of the war, but they lived in hotels and boarding houses, received treatment, learned trades and played sport. The British historian Susan Barton, author of a monograph on internment in Switzerland, writes that those whose condition did not improve were examined by Swiss military doctors, and those found incurable or unfit for service returned home. Their places were taken by further wounded men from the prison camps. According to some studies, the sending home of internees whose treatment was expected to take a long time was also provided for by the Anglo-German agreement concluded at The Hague in July 1917.

The exchange was eagerly awaited. In August 1917 the internees’ magazine at Mürren wrote that “all Mürren is talking of the exchange”: those who had qualified were already packing, and those who had to stay grumbled. Many feared that taking part in football matches and sports competitions had made them look healthier than they really were, and that this was why they had not been chosen. The sports clubs later complained that repatriation had taken away their best players. When the first internees left Château-d’Œx and Mürren, crowds came to the stations, and at Mürren the tourist club gave a farewell reception for 300 people for those departing. Among the repatriated was the senior British officer at Mürren, Lieutenant Colonel F. Neish of the Gordon Highlanders, who on behalf of the former internees thanked the Swiss nation for its hospitality. According to the English Wikipedia, the airman Arthur Whitten Brown, shot down and taken prisoner in 1915, also returned from Switzerland in September 1917; in 1919, together with John Alcock, he flew non-stop across the Atlantic.

According to official figures cited by Barton, in September 1917 86 British officers and 774 other ranks were repatriated from Switzerland. Their route, like every detail of the prisoners’ return, had to be agreed by the belligerents, and the way from Switzerland to England led through France. Bombardier Eales of Long Buckby in Northamptonshire told the local newspaper that he had travelled back in a group of 415 comrades. On arrival in London he was taken to hospital, and after a few days he was able to go home, which seemed to him “like heaven”. The greatest luxury for him was white bread, for he had eaten only black bread for years. New prisoners came to Switzerland to take the places of the repatriated. At the end of November 1917, 81 officers and 326 men arrived from Germany one after another, and the next day about 200 more Britons, some of whom had been in captivity for over three years.