men and barbed wire

Korero (AEWS), Volume 3, Issue 10, 18 June 1945, Page 11

men and barbed wire

By

in The Fortnightly, April, 1945

IT is just over a year since I came back from Germany. I suppose that should mean that the years of prison life there should now be visible in perspective. But perspective, in this as in all else, contributes no meaning. Forgetfulness and emphasis, anecdotederived, have contrived to refashion that existence according to the patterns that literature and the traditions of behaviour admit. I can see now, a process of liberation that began with the final search outside the main gate on a wet autumn afternoon and ended with the cheering crowds and the pipe bands in Leith Harbour. The men I knew, and all the thousands within the barbed wire, can easily show themselves, now, as cheerful, irrepressible squaddies. And what marks of that time are on me for good are indistinguishable from old habits. The spectacles remain, of course. The spectacle of Kalamata —the long, silent queues along the quayside at night, waiting for the destroyers ; the Stuka attack by the bridge ; the ten-thousand herd of prisoners shuffling and trotting through the centre square ; the New Zealand Major storming and cursing at the German Town Commandant ; the old, rotten, chewed corpses at the sea’s edge. The spectacle of Dulag Korinththe cooking fires in the dusk ; the market at the gate ; the crocodiles of men spoking out from the cookhouse ; the ordure-smeared scraps of paper fluttering everlastingly

about the camp ; the machine-gun fire along the wire at night ; the undiminishing queue at the two condemned wells ; the sleeping pits dug in the firm sand. The spectacle of Frontstalag Salonika—the two-hour check-parades on the centre square ; the bed bugs and the lice ; Olympus across the bay ; the dysentery patients with shreds of flesh between their skin and bones ; Feldwebel Keminade ; beri-beri: such things are easy to remember, and they have been easy capital for conversation. And at first they were just that, fixed and dead like old photographs. The months, though, have given them increased meaning, whenever I can think of them in sum ; the images have a vividness still which can set going a consciousness of what it was like to be alive at those times. Liberation was not a process of weeks : it was a moment. It was when I boarded a Bakerloo train and started the last stage of the journey home from Stalag VIIIB. Instantly, and with bewildering completeness, the forty-five months of my absence dropped clean away. Here it was, Forhan’s for the Gums, Diagrams of Stations, I am the Phonotas Girl, the salmon-coloured paint on the doors and fittings, the double, dental row of lights : a pattern so familiar that it must signify the real and normal world, a recognition so immediate that it must signify the utter unreality and insignificance of all that had happened since I had last seen it. I was glad of this, for I should be

able to take up where I had left off, perhaps a little better at doing some things, certainly slower and clumsier at others ; there would be all those wartime regulations to find out about. Since that moment, I have had to acknowledge an increasing awareness that the business of returning, of beginning where I had left off, of catching up, is not so simple. Quite largely, I think, this feeling of discrepancy, of incompatibility between myself and people at home was initiated by the weeks of answering questions which insisted on the peculiarities of my experience. I had continually to cast unformed judgments into words and say what it felt like to be back, what sort of life we led in prison camps, what I thought of the Germans. There were lectures and articles which I read, on the psychological abnormalities of prisoners of war and refugees which I have not been able to assure myself were incorrect or exaggerated. . I would catch myself being grotesquely hearty or fatuously dumb. Perhaps this is becoming a little too personal, a little over-dramatized. What I want to convey, however, is necessarily derived from personal experience, although I believe that it is shared by other men who have returned from prison camps, and, I believe too, by refugees and “ liberated ” people. There is the ballooning emotion that comes when freedom is sensed as an actual experience, and with it the feeling that the return to familiar surroundings is all that is necessary for return to normal life ; there is an increasing consciousness of estrangement and abnormality. What happens when a man becomes a prisoner of war, what happens, conceivably, when people have their country occupied by an army of enemies, is a revolutionary change in his make-up as a social being. He does not leave his friends, the people he knows, and go into prison, where he, uniquely, is thrust into a hostile environment and where he must fight an essential battle to maintain his selfhood, where he can, defending it, regard himself as cut off from normal society, from real life. He has with him instead the society that he knew as normal and real, and it is towards this

society, towards his friends and acquaintances themselves, that he has to reorder his attitude. It is difficult to think back to our state of mind during the first days of captivity in Corinth. We all, I suppose, based our ideas of German prison camps on press versions of Dachau horrors ; we envisaged lives flattened out under relentless discipline and omniscient organization. We expected the worst, and prepared for it. There would be a time of tough and bitter experience, and we had to get through it as best we could. So, when we departed— most of the ten thousand of us did— customary ethical standards, we did not feel that we had jettisoned decency for good and all, but that we had pocketed such things until the time came for employing them, again. In fact, conditions were extremely bad just at the beginning : no food was issued for the first three or four days at Corinth. Wounded and sick were segregated and cared for, after a fashion, so that there were no obvious claimants for sympathy or generosity. The job was to keep oneself alive, and nobody had anything to spare for anybody else. There were exceptions, of course, as there always are ; close friends remained together, and food that had been saved or scrounged might be shared with the man one “ mucked in ” with ; but, apart from the existence of such cobbers and muckers, society around each prisoner would be regarded by him as a cunning enemy : people you had liked and trusted for years, and with whom you had shared a number of dangers and excitements would be watched suspiciously while they divided up the rations ; fights over this occasionally took place. On the positive side, this meant that life resolved itself into a perpetual intrigue for food. Even when things were a little easier, fear of future shortages, fear of jealousy, or of importunate begging hardened each man’s selfishness and cunning " into permanent features of P.O.W. life. The campaigns and humiliating shifts directed in the Dulags towards cadging food from men who went outside the camps to work or who had other means of getting extra food were resorted to later in the Stalags for

privileged jobs, better quarters, fuel, or protection by a “ racket-king,” as well as for potatoes and sugar. For most people, this business of scrounging, wangling, and ingratiation was the really serious business of life ; it is possibly the aspect of prison life in which most danger for the future life of the prisoner of war lies. The other notable break with normal standards of living which occurs at the start of captivity and which tends to be better adjusted as time goes on and conditions improve, rather than to become more definite, is the almost conscious and deliberate rejection of common decency

and cleanliness. This is perhaps an inevitable consequence of bad living conditions —although for most of us they were no worse than those of the retreat through Greece, when almost everyone managed to keep clean and tidybut it went beyond the mere negatives of not washing or shaving, not keeping one clothes clean ; within a few days, the crowded barracks at Corinth camp swarmed with lice, to compete with the bed bugs that infested them already ; a curious index of this deterioration was observable in the enormous increase in spitting. Lack of

privacy was absolute, of course, and latrines were a stretch of sand pitted with shallow trenches ; but most men neglected the most elementary principles of hygiene even to the extent of only kicking sand, and one was liable to come across excreta in the most surprising places. Flies, and dysentery, were thick in the air. At Salonika there were inside latrines and running water, and this side of things improved. But the problem of barrack cleanliness remained, and of the primary chores that any community necessitates, and which were not done. N.C O.s placed “ in command ” of a barrack by the Ger-

mans, uncertain of the extent to which they could exert authority in any case, quickly became, or were made, aware of the anomalies of their position, and were usually afraid to issue orders. Certainly nobody was fool enough to volunteer for such jobs. All arrangements affecting order and cleanliness, therefore, were deferred until an outraged and contemptuous guard imposed them as orders. And this aspect certainly does have its long-term effect. The resentment aroused by such scenes with guards, and the connotation that all work, inside as well

as outside the camp, comes to have as “ work for Jerry ” introduces a positive and obstinate element into a previously apathetic or a social rejection of cleanliness and order. Also, the bludger, the debrouillard, can invoke right feeling and military duty on his side, and does so, frequently. Throughout the period of the Greek Dulags, the great herd of men which had been driven through the streets of Kalamata on the morning of April 30, 1941, remained, for the most part, a herd. Dirty, unshaved, undisciplined, shiftless, grubbing continually for bits of food and cigarette ends, indecent, selfish, we must have provoked by our appearance the bullying and occasional irresponsible shootings that stirred wretchedness into a fierce misery. In Germany, in the permanent camps, the Stalags, conditions are very different. The camps are planned and organized for their purpose. The German rations themselves are slightly better, and are regular. Camp administration and guards are recruited from older men and from those unfit for active serviceapart from the few Party men. * But most important of all, the International Red Cross services come into full action, B.R.C.S. parcels of food, undreamed of in transit camps, arrive, correspondence is permitted, parcels of clothing, books and tobacco can be sent from home. In response to specific needs, and following the forms set down by the Geneva Convention, organizations have to be arranged between prisoners and camp authorities for distributing Red Cross supplies, for corresponding with Red Cross authorities at home and in Geneva and with the Protecting Power in Berlin ; football leagues are started ; the inevitable classes in German grow into established schools with enormous curricula ; makeshift concerts and entertainments grow into dance bands and a permanent theatre. However, the prevailing mood is still to “ see it through,” and not to ” make the best of things.” The organic, community life that emerges is short term : the recurrent and arbitrary suspension of all social functions, standstill orders, the complete vacuum around the community, the impossibility of imposing more than

fractional alterations on a rigid environment— these hedged social existence with provisos, regulations, taboos, and fears. They provoked, too, defensive attitudes of cynicism or of “ sense of humour,” and a blank inability to think of workable improvements. For individuals, routine was a vitally necessary protective device. The disposition of our food into the constant proportions of the daily mealsthe bread ration made three thin half-slices for supper, five for breakfast, and two for —the turnabout at cleaning our quarters and washing up after meals, and all the other minutiae of daily existence were ordered not so much for efficiency’s sake as for the sense they created of living in a normal, familiar world. Similarly, the perspective of the barrack-room from one’s own bunk, the crackpot shelving nailed up around it, the location of one’s friends and enemies about the camp, the character of the compound guards, the time for the issue of Red Cross parcels, the stains and graffiti on the walls and neighbouring bunks were all familiar constellations whose removal or disturbance affected the foundations of existence. Consequently, to have to change quarters involved a tremendous emotional upheaval. Such an order was issued not infrequently, and entailed merely our removal, much at our own pace, from one barrack to another, perhaps in the same compound. All barracks were identical in design, variations in the physical conditions of different parts of the camp were for the most part trivial, and the time and labour needed for removing and settling down might well have been regarded as the welcome occupation of a day or two. But no ; for days and weeks after a —and before, if we suspected it —we would be consumed with savage resentment of the German authorities ; crises de nerfs would alternate with long spells of melancholy brooding ; we would avoid people on whom we relied normally for half an hour’s conversation ; the vistas of the war would prolong themselves interminably. We acquired, in this reaction to our environment, a special set of psychological modes according to which we lived. These modes determined our ways of

thinking and the matters which occupied our thoughts, the orientation being always away from what would disturb or worry us. For example, my own reactions towards the war became entirely technical and impersonal. The reading of the Deutsche A llgemeine Zeitung, the winnowing of rumours, the endless discussion and prognostication of events, absorbed a great part of each day, but the devastation of towns in the West and the slaughterous battles in Russia, Rommel’s advance and Stalingrad, affected me only in terms of their historical significance—an attitude impossibly abstract now. Dejection and pessimism came, but not from allied reverses, or from the impact of German propaganda ; they were consequences of periods of military inactivity. Again, we talked enormously, but we avoided that perpetual discussion of common acquaintances which can become the dominant topic among a group of people; incompatibilites and dissatisfactions in personal relationships cannot be faced when those relationships are indissoluble and close, so that the only protection was not to acknowledge the existence of such difficulties. Talk was the one great amenity, and filled a great part of each day; in such a huge, leisured, and stable community, the opportunities for social intercourse and for getting acquainted with scales and categories of living other than one’s own were illimitable ; there can be few prisoners whose horizons have not been considerably extended in these directions. Inherent in this conversational traffic, though, are the same dangers as there are in too close a confinement within the bounds of any social class. Everybody in a P.O.W. camp has a contemporary background and a recent experience practically identical with everybody else’s. Back in normal society, the repatriated prisoner can often find himself rather lost in talking to people without that background and experience, much as products of the worst public schools find themselves lost when they have to do with a working man. In permanent camps, racketeering and bludging, although they persist as wholetime pursuits, tend to become less obtrusive, an inevitable consequence of the

greater stability the community has, and of the respectability such stability affords. In the long runand this counts in the years of Stalag lifemost men adopt an habitually ingratiating manner towards those in useful positions, and will do far less for other people in general than they did before they were captured. The occasional memory— and the occasional consciousness of their continued existence —of these developments in oneself is one of the more disturbing legacies of P.O.W. life. Perversions, sexual or criminal, were not, I think, widespread, but they were practised fairly openly and without challenge. A curious and revealing circumstance was the existence, for most of my two years in Germany, of a Stalag razor gang which intimidated British W.O.s in charge of certain camp affairs, who engaged in one or two quite bloody exploits, among minor bullying and rough-housing, without, so far as I know, any counter move being made by the thousands of us who knew of them. This is perhaps the extreme case to which was applied a governing principle of social relationships in prison camp—the right of the private individual to make himself a public nuisance. Apart from the qualifications which I am trusting any reader to make for himself, this account, besides reflecting the incoherence of unassimilated experience, would be absurdly grim. Of course men, even when they become prisoners of war, do not cease to be rational beings ; I do not mean to suggest that virtue and right conduct are expensive luxuries ; I certainly do not think of myself or of other returned prisoners as fit subjects for psychiatric treatment. Most of us —l certainly—have had extremely valuable experience in prison camps ; I met a large number of interesting people ; many very funny things happened ; there were many enjoyable times ; a pleasant sort of easy friendliness existed ; I had time to read ; I had time to think. What I have been trying to record are the reasons I can find for a feeling ; a feeling of our lives as having been lived according to modes utterly different from those I had felt, thought and behaved in before, and from those I am still working myself into now, after a year.