Captain Charles Hargreaves
SOE Liason Officer captured in Yugoslavia
Certainly for quite a long time after the war it took a tremendous amount of re-adjustment. There was a lot of very, very unpleasant memories. I found that I was intolerable, very bad tempered, very, very hard to live with.You become unreasonlable, you know your being unreasonlable and you know your being impossible, but it just seems to be that you can't control it. It's very, very difficult indeed.
During one of my interrogations one of the Germans was smoking a fat cigar and he thought it was a very amusing thing to come across and stub it out on my penis. You know it was not particularly brutal but it was sickening and it made me feel ill and I created like mad. When I got back downstairs to the jail I said I was in pain and I wanted a doctor. A doctor was produced and I head a lot of giggling. They were laughing like mad.This chap merely looked at me and produced a large syringe. He said, 'Ah, I've got just the thing for that, I'll give you an injection' What he did was to put the tip of the syringe into my penis and inject corrosive acid into my bladder. It was agony as you can imagine, but at the same time one couldn't help, well, almost feeling amused, because they were absolutly paralytic with laughter, crying with laughter. They thought it was so funny. But this is something that has of course affected me for the rest of my life.
Two things struck me, first he didn't see the stubbing out of cigars on his penis as particularly brutal and the second he almost saw the funny side of corrosive acid being injected into his bladder. It might sound like madness but after reading the rest of the book and the other blase attitudes to the daily threat of death and torture, new tactics and trainning methods you really aren't that surpised.Another great book on the series and definaltey worth a read.
