Prisoners Were Puzzled

Press, Volume C, Issue 29505, 5 May 1961, Page 19

Prisoners Were Puzzled

(N.Z.P.A.-Reuter—Copyright)

LONDON, May 3. During a debate on the legal provisions of the Army and Air Force Bill as affecting persons assisting enemy in wartime, Mr R. T. Paget (Labour, Northampton) told the story of two prisoners who were captured while serving with Rommel’s Panzers in North Africa. “There was great difficulty,” he said, “because there was no means of communicating with them, until

in a prisoner-of-war camp somebody recognised the language they spoke as resembling the language spoken on the North-west Frontier of India. “Eventually a professor in Tibetan arrived from the British Museum, and the prisoners were found to be Tibetans. “They had come to the plains because of a drought in the hills. Conscripted “They had been caught by the Russians and conscripted into the Russian Army. “They then had been captured and conscripted into the German Army. “When they were captured by the British Army they were incapable of communicating with anybody but each other. "They were delighted eventually to find somebody with whom they could communicate, and they said there was one question they wanted to ask. “They said: ‘ln our great travels there has been much shooting. What is it all about?’ ’*