Both David Quarrie's father and grandfather were held prisoner by the Germans - in two different wars. STEPHEN LEWIS tells their remarkable stories.

A LARGE black and white photograph hangs on a wall in David Quarrie's Holgate home.

It shows cheering troops on a train, many waving helmets in the air. They are crowded so closely into the open wagons that some are almost leaning over the side. But it is the expressions on their faces that is so remarkable.

They have the look of men just demobbed and about to return home to wives and children.

In fact, says Mr Quarrie, they are off to fight at Passchendaele: one of the bloodiest battles of the First World War. Many would never return.

Among the men on that train - although he is almost hidden - was Mr Quarrie's maternal grandfather, Lieutenant Raymond Bushell.

He was the youngest of three sons of Harry Bushell, the owner of H Bushell & Sons, the York agricultural implements business. Educated at St Peter's School and brought up in Holgate, he enlisted in 1914 at the age of 20 and was commissioned as a lieutenant in the Durham Light Infantry on August 4, 1916. He survived the war. His two older brothers, Neville and Horace, did not.

Mr Quarrie, a regular correspondent to the Press letters page, only had a handful of conversations with his grandfather about his wartime experiences. "Like most people involved, he didn't want to talk about the war," he says.

But he gleaned enough to know that his grandfather had been filled with horror and pity by what he saw and experienced.

The things his grandfather spoke about were 'trench foot' - the 'rotting' of feet caused by standing ankle deep in water for so long - and the appalling suffering of thousands of horses and mules, whipped to the point of collapse so that they would haul heavy guns through mud and along wrecked roads.

And then there was the appalling carnage of battle itself - and the seeming inability of senior commanders to learn from it. "It was the way things like pity, care and compassion were regarded as weakness," Mr Quarrie says. "It was seeing so many fine young men blown to pieces in crazy walking attacks into German machine gun fire; the way the war was still being fought in the same way after three years of colossal loss of human life."

The average survival rate for an officer of his grandfather's rank was just six weeks, says Mr Quarrie. He and other officers were required to wear a wide brown belt - the Sam Browne belt - which inevitably marked them out as targets. Yet even here there was no flexibility. His grandfather asked for permission not to wear the belt. "He was told 'No. It is part of your uniform. You must wear it at all times.'"

Somehow, Lt Bushell survived Passchendaele. But his war came to an end in Hangard Wood in France during a big German offensive in March 1918.

He was surrounded, and without ammunition. "So he and 19 ordinary Tommies gave themselves up," Mr Quarrie says.

Then something extraordinary happened. As the prisoners were being held, the Kaiser's son - known as "Little Willie" - rode up on his horse.

"He asked Grandpa, 'Are you all right ?'" Mr Quarrie says. His grandfather replied in no uncertain terms that they weren't: that he and his fellow prisoners had been told to spend the night lying beside a hedge, damp, cold and with no food.

"Little Willie had them moved into a large church, given a hot drink and some bread," Mr Quarrie says. It was a remarkable moment of humanity in the midst of so much inhumanity.

Lt Bushell and his fellow prisoners were then marched across Germany to a POW camp in an old Polish military barracks at Graudenz in present-day Poland. He spent the rest of his war there, with 600 other officers and 800 troops. It proved a miserable existence, Mr Quarrie says: the prisoners were constantly cold, hungry and bored.

Food was little more than turnip soup twice a day. "He lost a lot of weight, and his stomach shrank by nearly 50 per cent," Mr Quarrie says. Even though he went on to live to the age of 99, his grandfather never really recovered his appetite.

Lt Bushell's wartime story wasn't quite over. When he returned to the UK after being repatriated at the end of the war, he received a handwritten letter of congratulations from none other than King George V. It is now included in an album of wartime mementos he kept - including his POW documentation, old photographs, and POW money - that is one of Mr Quarrie's most treasured heirlooms. The handwritten letter is dated December 1918, and begins: "The Queen joins me in welcoming you on your release from the miseries and hardships which you have endured..." It is signed: "George R".

Back in York, Lt Bushell joined the family business, then married Marjorie Kay in April 1921.

Almost exactly 20 years later, in 1941, the young man who was to marry Raymond and Marjorie's daughter Joan was himself captured by the Germans, this time in the Second World War.

Don Quarrie - David's father - was a captain in the Royal Marine Commandos, who'd grown up in Scarborough. A Dunkirk veteran, by 1941 he found himself in Crete, fighting a rearguard action as British troops were evacuated by sea. Eventually, out of ammunition and badly injured by bomb splinters in his back and legs, he was captured and flown to a German military hospital.

When he awoke following surgery, one of those odd things happened that says so much about about the strangeness of war. His belt and loaded revolver were hanging beside him, Mr Quarrie says. He asked an English-speaking German doctor why this was. The man replied: "Sir, you are an English officer. We don't expect you to misbehave."

For the next four years - until February 1945 - Captain Quarrie was held as a prisoner of war at three different POW camps. His story would not have been out of place in the film The Great Escape. He made six escape attempts, Mr Quarrie says proudly - once getting as far as a bridge in Cologne. He'd travelled there by train, pretending to be a Dutchman because his German, while by now very good, wasn't perfect.

In Cologne he slipped in amongst a group of French workers crossing the bridge. But the efficient Germans counted the numbers reaching the other side - and found there was one too many. Capt Quarrie had no choice but to surrender - and was promptly seized by the local Gestapo, who decided he had been trying to blow up the bridge. He came very close to being executed, Mr Quarrie says - but managed to talk his way out of it, eventually persuading the Gestapo commander to call the commandant of the camp from which he'd escaped. This man confirmed that Captain Quarrie was indeed an escaped POW, not a saboteur - and he was promptly returned to prison.

There were other escape attempts - and eventually, at the sixth attempt, he succeeded.

The Germans were moving their prisoners westwards to avoid the oncoming Russians. As the column of POWs was marching through woodland, Capt Quarrie and a friend managed to slip away. For a while, the Germans hunted them with dogs, but without success.

The pair were sheltered by a German farmer who hated the Nazis, until they were rescued by the advancing Americans.

War over, Captain Quarrie returned to Yorkshire, where he married Joan Bushell and then also joined the Bushell family firm at the request of his father-in-law - the man who, a generation earlier, had himself been a German prisoner of war.

Captain Quarrie went on to write a book about his wartime experiences. He lived to be 82 - and amongst some his son's most prized possessions are the model ships he made by hand while a prisoner of war: ships that were kept by a friend and fellow prisoner after he escaped.

The Germans were more than happy to allow their unmanageable prisoner to make the model ships, Mr Quarrie says. "While he was doing that, he wasn't trying to escape!"