Transcript
Well the Germans whisked me into an ambulance and drove me to the nearest prisoner of war hospital. It turned out to be a hospital solely for French prisoners of war. No one spoke any English.
I was lucky because I'd learnt French at modern school so I wasn't behind the eight ball but anyway they took me there and almost immediately I was lying on the operating table while the chief surgeon from there operated on me.
I was six months in this French hospital but there again I was lucky because the chief surgeon in this hospital was a Frenchman. He was Rene Siemens (?) who was before the war, professor of surgery at Strasbourg University and a man of renown in Europe. He was a very skilled surgeon and so I was lucky to be taken to the place that he was being held a prisoner so some of the other doctors there figured that it was his skill that saved my life.
So I was lucky again. There are so many occasions on which I just had great luck, but I find it hard to credit.
