A Prisoner of War Returns

13th September 1914, Luton: A Luton man, Walter Horace Jeffs, has returned home after being held as a prisoner of war in Germany. He had visited Lucerne in Switzerland with some friends at the end of July. When the war broke out his friends stayed in Lucerne but he decided to make a dash for it. On 8th August a message was received by his family that Jeffs was a prisoner at Baden and they later received a postcard from him saying he was “alive, well and in good spirits”, but as it was written in German they suspected it may not have been written entirely by Jeffs himself. He arrived back in Luton last week, saying he had been struck in the eye by an officer and roughly handled when he was arrested but had not suffered any further violence. He had been hungry however, being forced to travel by train for seventeen and a half hours without food and being given only one meal a day. When his health began to fail he was given a pass to leave for Holland. The friends he left in Lucerne, fearing that they would be stuck there for six months, were evacuated on a government boat and reached home at the beginning of September.

Source: Luton News 10/9/1914 and 24/9/1914