The female cooks were allowed to leave unmolested, then Sheeran and his fellow GI's " ate what we wanted and soiled the rest with our waste . " Then the German mule drivers, whose lives were protected under he Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 and the 1929 Geneva Convention on POWs, were given shovels and ordered to " dig their own shallow graves . " Sheeran later joked that they did so without complaint, likely hoping that he and his fellow GI's would change their minds.
