Below the Tide of War

by JOHN BUXTON

1

HAD it been my good fortune to fight through the Desert, in Italy, or France, or Burma, instead of being captured at the edge of an Arctic fjord in the first British campaign of the war, my poetry might very well have been different. But it would not have been less or inferior. Conditions would not have been ideal for the writing of poetry, but at least I should not have been weakened for months on end by hunger; nor should I have remained throughout the battle for France and the Battle of Britain without a word from England. More important than either, I should still have felt myself to be a part of my own country, and should not have had the exasperation of waiting, waiting, far from any sound of battle, for the outcome of a war in which I had intended to have some part.

For I never agreed, and never will agree, with those who suggest that the artist and the poet ought to be privileged to watch the war from a safe retreat. No poet but would disdain so limiting a privilege, since poetry comes from the full life of a man, not from the sensitivities of mollycoddled skrimshankers. The poets who turned up their noses at the “fetid atmosphere of Europe” would have little to say to those who went through the filth and the stench. We knew it stank — oh! certainly we did! — but we had a more robust faith (or was it merely inquisitiveness?) and we held our fastidious noses and went in.

It is true enough that imprisonment did affect my ability to write. There were times when hunger so dominated our minds, through the weakness it imposed on our bodies, that, waking or sleeping, we could think of little else. There were times when it was too cold to hold a pen. There were times when disturbance was too frequent, or expectation too vivid to permit concentration; and because of the countless interruptions necessitated by our mode of life, there was never any time when concentration could be achieved for long. I was fortunate (as I have often been reminded) in that, being a poet, I could continue my work in prison. But the tranquillity of prison life was illusory, not comparable at all to that chance of serene contemplation of the active world from a chosen intellectual vantage point which Wordsworth intended in a famous phrase. Rather it was the denial of all participation in that active world to one who had volunteered to fight, and who — however great his distaste for fighting — scorned to stand aside. Ironically, though I was in action before all but a very few, I saw less of the war than many Englishmen who never put on uniform. That was a piece of ill luck which at least counterbalances my good luck in having five years in which to contemplate the war in the “tranquillity” assured to me by the barbed wire and machine guns of German prison camps.

Poetry has value only in so far as it is the record of experience not exclusive to the poet. We read love poetry not because of our interest in the poet’s biography, but in our own. The poet concerns himself with those things which men share in common, and it is no accident that the most frequent themes of the greatest poetry ever have been, and ever will be, the commonplaces of human life: love, and death, the beauty of the sensual world in which we move, and the splendor of the intellectual world to which we may attain.

The poet chooses no abstruse topics; is less interested in the quirks and vagaries of the eccentric than in the humdrum ways of the normal; is, at his best, a man like other men, sharing the joys and griefs, the hopes and doubts and certainties of their lives, and different from them only in the gift of words. So, in the end, there is no higher compliment and no surer proof of achievement than “That is just what I have felt, but could not find words to say.” Then the poet may know that he has made clear to some other human being their common experience and so has intensified it for the other that it will remain for him of lasting import.

And my poems, I must insist, are to be judged — with no bias of sympathy or pity — in and for themselves, simply as the work of a quite ordinary person, beset by the same doubts, troubled by the same fears, supported by the same hopes as other men; of one who is a partner in all the stock-in-trade of human life except indifference. They are the poems of an Englishman who, crossing the sea to fight for his country, took part in a futile skirmish, and by some chance was taken prisoner, instead of being killed or getting away, which were the other alternatives for the members of his tiny, feebly armed force. And the account I give here of those five years of imprisonment must be regarded only as the history of a strange experience known to few, and therefore matter for prose; while the poems, being about love and parting, about war and hatred, about flowers, and birds, and stars, and the distant sea, are about nothing strange or unknown.

I have already sufficiently explained why I joined up and was not a pacifist — to me the only alternative. I was fortunate in that, having some previous knowledge of Norway, I was able to volunteer for service there, and indeed for the particular task on which I was sent. I had free choice not only whether I should fight or not, but where, and in what capacity. If in the event my choice was a poor one, at least it was mine, and I have no regret that I made it. For, knowing Norway as I did, and having so deep an affection both for the country and the people, I should always afterwards have felt (if I had not gone) that I had missed some occasion of serving them. I knew that many of my friends must be engaged in the fighting, and would be in danger; therefore I wished to go. It was not until I returned home, after Norway had been set free, that I learned how they had fared; and for one of them I wrote some memorial verses.

2

To MOST Englishmen fighting on the ground traditional for our wars, across the Channel, there is a feeling that they are part of a continuous process of history; and in the Low Countries, as also in Greece and Crete, in Sicily and Italy, they have a sense of comradeship with all, whether Englishmen or not, who through many centuries have fought and died there. These men dominate the country where their battles are fought, because not only the flat plains of Flanders but even the valleys and mountains of the Mediterranean lands have so long been the stage of man’s history.

In Norway, so sparsely inhabited, a country without ruins or many monuments, there is no such feeling. There, even as we entered the fjord where we were to make our landing, the mountains and the snow and the great icecap of Svartisen were sternly aloof, not inimical to us, but utterly indifferent and uncomprehending. Here no battles had been fought; no dead gathered in from the field; no memorial statues or tablets raised. Here came we, the first of whom history will keep a record, to fight, to kill, and to die in this place; and since this was so there was at once a realization of the petty futility of our battle, and of the splendor and permanence of our battlefield.

To me this brought solace and assurance, for it was my belief that nothing so revealed the character of a man as the struggle to fit himself to live in wild, hard country. The men and women who had seemed most complete to me had been those who were always aware of their environment, farmers and fishermen and sailors — men who must constantly be alert to cope with wind and tide, storm and heat, drought, flood, mist, or snow. The townsman, who has eliminated all these things, and even darkness, from his environment, has not such deep roots in life as the countryman; and if the society of many men sharpens his wits (as some suppose) he is not much the gainer.

To many the physical world, with its inhabitants other than ourselves, is no more than a back cloth, to be noticed perhaps in moments of boredom with the human actors, but for the rest nothing more than a device for revealing their actions. To me the supreme value of human life was only apparent if I regarded the other living things of the world, and the world itself, and if I took note of them all so far as I could. How else might one justify the immeasurable expense caused by human life, but by considering all these things?

“Landfall” I wrote as we approached the coast of Norway, just below the Arctic Circle.

LANDFALL

I ran down to my cabin and wrote it at once, an exclamation of grief that we must come to so serenely beautiful a place in order to show, by what we must do there, a disregard of it that was altogether wrong and false. Through many other poems that I was to write in the coming years ran this thought, but accompanied later by the consoling knowledge that whatever we did in those years of war scarcely affected the world about us. This solace I found in listening to a chiffchaff singing near the camp to which I was brought a few days after being taken prisoner, and the poem I wrote then is complementary to the poem of our landfall. This was the first poem I wrote as a prisoner.

THE PRISONER TO THE SINGING BIRD

May 16, 1940

3

ON the night on which I was taken prisoner, along with a few of our troops and about half a dozen Norwegians I was put into a woodshed at a farm. First we had stood against the wall of the house while our captors debated whether to shoot us: they had some reason to be embarrassed by our presence, for we had sunk their ship, there were no roads, and counterattack must soon be expected. The other British did not understand German, and (so far as I remember) only one of the Norwegians did. He had fought in Finland, in the winter war; had returned after being wounded in the head, fought in the south of Norway, and now again in the north. He had some ham, which he shared with us. In the woodshed I found a fleece, also a piece of raw, salted cod. I had food and shelter, and, being tired, slept. During the night the Germans dropped some mortar shells near us — a mistake for which the noncommissioned officer in charge of us apologized later — and a few other prisoners were brought in.

Next day the problem of our transport was solved by loading us onto the seaplanes which had cut us off the day before by landing behind us. (We had no anti-aircraft defense of any kind.) In our plane a German, wounded in the stomach, lay on the floor groaning and cursing the government which had taken him from home. We landed at Trondheim, where we were separated from the Norwegians and interrogated. We remained three or four days in the town, and then were taken by car to the aerodrome at Vaernes. Here were eighty British soldiers and forty British merchant seamen, the crew of the Thistlebrae, captured in Trondheim, where she had put in for repairs after being bombed on the Narvik voyage. Here I was the only officer and had the task of making continual complaints about our treatment, and was the recipient of frequent threats.

My complaints were two: first, that our men were forced to work on repairing the aerodrome and on loading and unloading military stores at Trondheim; second, that we were constantly open to the danger of bombing by RAF and Royal Naval aircraft. The commandant said we should take the same risks as the Germans. I pointed out that we did not in fact do this, since we were locked in our huts while they could take cover in the open and in the cellar under one of the huts in our compound. The commandant lost interest. After this I used to take my walks in the compound to which I was confined, in such a way that my tracks made the pattern of the Union Jack on the ground, which I hoped might show up if the aircraft ever took photographs. It seems possible that they did recognize us by some means, as one Sunday, during a ground-strafing raid, one of them did a roll in sight of our compound. We proclaimed this to be a recognition signal.

Meanwhile the men worked on the timber runways of the aerodrome, and assisted in fueling and bombing up. This gave them opportunities of sabotage by watering the petrol, and by tampering with the bombs in a simple way shown them (I believe) by a Norwegian working on the aerodrome. These Norwegians collected cigarettes and chocolate for us, and helped so far as they could. One day a few arrested as spies, including a woman, were brought into our compound.

This was surrounded by a high wooden palisade, beyond which it was possible to see the tops of a few birch trees near at hand, and in the distance, to the north, the white-topped mountains. The sky was my main view, and there I watched the birds flying over, whimbrel and redshank, geese, merganser and other duck, swallows and martins. I also watched the German aircraft go out, and counted them; and when they came back I counted them again. The results were often very encouraging to us. Sometimes the aircraft crashed near the aerodrome or overturned on landing: then, as after each raid by our own machines, we would watch the Germans making crosses of birch, and these too we would count.

When I had been there a few days, German airmen began to come to see me, out of curiosity, and not, usually, in any bullying spirit. What did I think of the Führerprinzip? Hopelessly out of date I said, and laughed at the puzzled eyes. I quoted parallels from the history of the Dark Ages, and the airmen called up some others to listen to this astounding heresy. I cast aside any respect for historical accuracy, thinking it irrelevant and perhaps even detrimental to my argument. Did I think Hitler was like Napoleon? This was too naive, and the answer was obvious even if in those May days of 1940 the British were not being conspicuously victorious in the neighborhood of Waterloo.

I had other occupation. There was a copy of Shakespeare in the camp, brought (I think) off the captured Thistlebrae, and I read a play and some of the sonnets on most days. I also wrote several poems, among them “Elegy,” and at least one sonnet, though which it was I now forget.

ELEGY

(For——, killed at Hemnesberget, May 10, 1940)

We were also permitted to write letters, but only one of mine ever reached home. Probably they were scanned for information and then destroyed. But while in Trondheim I had with Norwegian help sent letters through uncensored to Sweden, and a message to a friend in Oslo which was somehow or other forwarded to my wife, who was thus only a few weeks in uncertainty.

On May 22 two British aircraft dropped leaflets warning Norwegians living in farms and villages near the aerodrome to leave in the next fortyeight hours. We were moved back into Trondheim, on May 27. We believed that the Norwegians working on the aerodrome, and living in the neighborhood, had made protests about our being left exposed to attack by our own aircraft. A day or two later the aerodrome received the promised raid.

In Trondheim I met several of my unit who had been taken prisoner, and heard some news of what happened to the rest. (Most got back to England.) These days in Trondheim were uneventful and without danger or other interest. A blustering German sergeant asked me, impertinently, why I had come to Norway.

“To kick such as you out.”

He had my bed removed, and amused himself with occasionally visiting me and drawing the death’s-head sign of the SS on the wall, above where I slept. Since he used chalk this was easily rubbed out; and I borrowed the chalk to begin to teach some of my fellows Norwegian. We were in a school and so had a map-hunt, but with little success. The British vice-consul, Hr. Kjeldsberg, got us some chocolate and a few bits of clothing. Therefore when I reached Germany I was the envy of all because I had two pairs of socks, two pairs of pants, and two shirts.

On May 31 we were moved out to a stable near the fort of Trondheim. Here we slept on straw in a loft; and from the compound, since there was only barbed wire and no palisade, we had a fine view to the east, to the mountains, so short a walk away, that beckoned us to Sweden. Here we met some of the few survivors of H.M.S. Glowworm, the destroyer that, after her torpedo tubes had been shot away, turned and tried to ram the Hipper. She had steam enough to butt the Flipper before she sank, but could do no damage. It was good to meet the Navy, and all we needed now to complete the party was some airmen, but these were as yet rather scarce — we never saw a British plane until we had been taken prisoners — and we had to wait some months longer.

We had been only a few hours in this camp when a Norwegian lad rode by on a bicycle and cried out, “Long live England!” The German NCO in charge ran to the wire fumbling for his revolver while we yelled some response. The Norwegian was well away before the German fired, and he laughed and shouted back, “Long live England!”

On June 2 four of us were sent down by train to Oslo. Our two guards were inoffensive, and allowed us to buy ham sandwiches, coffee, and chocolate at the station in Trondheim. When we were as far south as the Dovrefjeld I was in familiar country, and as we crawled across the sub-arctic bog of Fokstumyra (of which I knew every yard) I made some excuse, and got to the door of our coach. It was locked, and before I had time to shut myself in the lavatory to try my luck with the window, one of the guards came along. The railway had been repaired everywhere except for the great bridge at Hamar. Here we had to walk to join another train.

When we arrived at the station in Oslo we waited for some time, which gave me the opportunity of talking to a few Norwegian civilians there, asking about the behavior of the Germans, about the news from the West, and telling them what I could of conditions in the North. A girl there threw me a bunch of marigolds, and these I carried with me to the room where I was housed.

4

WITH the end of the evacuation of the BEF from Dunkirk taking place, it was impossible not to wonder if England too might be invaded and overrun for a time. I think I am honest if I say that throughout the succeeding months I never once believed that this would happen. Somehow, against all reason, certainly against the more experienced opinion of the senior among us, the younger men refused to imagine an England in German occupation. Whatever respect we had for their military power, whatever knowledge we had of our own defenselessness, we had, through our own experience as their prisoners, too profound a contempt for Germans as men to consider them capable of being even the temporary masters of England. And if a few, more logical perhaps than most of us, believed England would be occupied, none that I ever spoke to, or heard of, at any time, in any condition of mind or body, considered final defeat to be possible. And it may be that it was our refusal to admit that England could be defeated, although we, her soldiers, had been defeated, that was the best contribution we could still make in the war.

It was not until years later that we read even passages from Churchill’s speeches, or knew of what was done in those months in England. The Germans had all the arguments on their side: no British troops still fighting in Europe; London in flames; the Mediterranean route impassable; Britain left without allies or any probable accession of allies in time to help her. They had, besides, power of life and death over us, of which they were at times not unwilling to give us practical reminders. But it was more than enough to have surrendered our arms: that had been beyond our control. To surrender our minds or spirits to these people was not so much rejected by us as not even thought of.

On June 8 twenty-nine of us left Oslo by ship. We docked at Aalborg and traveled on at once to Hamburg. That day was memorable in the life of a prisoner because we had seven meals, provided at various stations by the German Red Cross, and demanded vociferously by us whenever we changed from the custody of one set of guards to that of another. In Hamburg we were bundled into an air-raid shelter beneath a fine new barracks.

We had three men guarding us there, and when they found that we came from Norway one spoke to me and asked if I could speak Danish. I answered in Norwegian, which was near enough, for both of us were unwilling to converse in the abhorred German. There was a small cell at the side of the room in which we were, and this guard took me in there. He was Danish, he said. I pointed to his uniform and asked why he wore that. He said he had been an engineering student in Frankfort and when the Germans occupied Denmark they impressed him into the army — here he seized me by my blouse and gave an imitation of the German recruiting sergeant. He dared not desert, for the sake of his family, though he might himself have got away to Sweden.

“But England and France and America will win the war,” I said. France didn’t seem in a very good position, America was not even in the war, but I was confident England would not be defeated.

He grew very excited: “England must win.”

I said she’d win all right but it might take time. Then he gripped me again, drew his bayonet, pointed it at me, and said “Du — Tyskland; jeg — England” and made as if to stab Germany (impersonated by me) to the heart. He gave me his address, which I concealed very carefully, and we parted firm friends — an excitable Danish student forced into German uniform and set to guard me, a British prisoner, and both of us with the same overmastering hope: the eventual defeat of Germany, which alone could set us free. But perhaps in the five years that followed, he was killed fighting somewhere for a country he detested, in a cause which he condemned. At least we prisoners were spared that.

Next day we went through Berlin — I remembered the underground railway between stations which I had several times used, more willingly, in peacetime — and eventually we arrived at Thorn in Poland. We were put into a fort on the former Russo-Polish frontier. It was crowded with British troops from the West, many exhausted and dying after their march across Europe into captivity, sick with dysentery or pneumonia, brown and thin and worn. There were Poles there too, running the kitchen and other arrangements of the camp; and French Moroccans, silent and bewildered. The camp was filthy and stank, and even if you lay in the sun on the ramparts you would almost certainly rise up with lice in clothes and hair. Fleas we soon came to disregard as merely a nuisance; lice we were more afraid of.

Before leaving Thorn I found an anthology of English verse containing, among other things, Spenser’s “Epithalamion.” This I copied, together with several poems by Lovelace and perhaps some others, long admired and much loved by me. One day in the autumn I read the “Epithalamion” to a number of my fellow prisoners, in a garage at the camp.

At Laufen we were housed in a vast building once the residence of the Archbishop of Salzburg, which was about fifteen miles away up the Salzach. On arriving we had our heads shaved, an unnecessary indignity since we were not then lousy, and one which was, obviously, intended to depress us. I think it only made us angry. On June 27 I noted in my diary that I had agreed to give some lectures on English poetry and that, as a slight aid to doing so, I had discovered that “a gunner subaltern in Room 80 had the Albatross Book of Living Verse.” This was progress, though as Room 80 held close on one hundred people the owner, whose name I did not yet know, might not be very easy to find. My own room had about ninety inmates, sleeping on beds in groups of twelve, three tiers high. We fed — so far as we could be said to feed — in these rooms.

Under June 28, I have a note of the foundation of an English Club, of which I was elected president “for the duration of one war,” and which used to meet each Sunday to read papers written by the members, or extracts selected by them from any books they might find. It had its first meeting on June 30 and flourished for fifteen months, but when we moved camp the members were dispersed. We even had “dinners,” to which each member brought his slice of bread and piece of potato, which it became conventional to decorate in some manner, perhaps by shaping the potato, when mashed, into the form of an animal, or by inserting in its bleak surface some ornament made of bread or cheese. At these dinners each member had to read some topical, and usually scurrilous or seditious, verse of his own composition.

We soon became so feeble through the lack of food that if we walked upstairs to our rooms we had a “black-out” and had to lie down for a few minutes; yet we made good friends and had lively talks about countless things, and those “sudden dumps and dreary sad disdain” of which Spenser writes did not much afflict us in this first autumn and winter. Or if they did we kept them, as I think we almost always did until the last winter of the war, strictly to ourselves.

5

I SUPPOSE I may claim to be a fairly representative member of that strange society of prisoners, taking part in most of its activities, sharing in most of its thoughts and feelings. The poet differs from his fellows not in the kind of his experience, but in its intensity, in the vividness of his impressions; and perhaps I should add (for it is certainly true of me) in his ability to live in the present, without much regret for the past, though not without a very lively interest in the future.

In such circumstances as these the man stood out, by his personality, by his character, neither enhanced by opportunity nor graced by position, but simple and unadorned. Perhaps we tended to judge one another by too limited a test, but consciously or not, each one of us gauged his fellows’ worth by their desirability as companions in battle. We had been ashamed at first, all of us, to have suffered the indignity of surrender; and our first task was the recovery of self-respect and pride. To this we came in our different ways, unaided for the most part unless by the absurd arrogance of our German masters. That these should be the lords of Europe — the thing was laughable, and in our laughter we found our pride that we were Englishmen. These Germans, if they conquered the world, would never know what to do with it — conquerors, for a time, they might be; rulers, never. These were the heirs of the barbarians, and their achievement, however astonishing to the military mind, would be as futile and as brief.

Throughout that summer and early autumn we were without news from home and had reason to suppose our letters were not being sent, few and short, as they were. We had no news but that in the German papers, and their version of the Battle of Britain was not reassuring. Our ribs and joints stuck out more and more, and our bellies swelled with the diet of stinking potatoes and cabbage soup. There were few books, only those we had carried into prison, and these might be borrowed on short loan if one could find the owner and get on a waiting list.

We started a library (on whose staff I remained to the end). We lectured, and listened to lectures, on poetry, and beekeeping, on heraldry and pig farming, on paleography, ornithology, travel, and sport. Such knowledge as we had we pooled in this way, and where our knowledge failed we guessed or invented unscrupulously. We were not deluded into valuing our lectures too high: if they made men forget that they had eaten the slice of bread meant for supper, or that they ought to have asked Bill if they could have his potato peelings, or that they must go to gather some cherry leaves to smoke, then these lectures had done all that was needed. Hours were spent learning languages — most began with German, but soon gave this up for Chinese, or Welsh, or Serbo-Croat.

Chiefly, perhaps, we talked of food, and of pubs and restaurants at home; and many lists of pubs and many idealized menus were made out, to be thrown away later when they had come to seem too remote. Houses were planned for after the war — the phrase haunted us perpetually; and visits and travel were considered over and over again. But from the beginning some of us, and in the end most of us, rejected such daydreaming, thinking it misfortune enough to be haunted in our dreams by confectioners’ shops, and pubs, and girls, and clean clothes and houses, and comfortable beds, and all the multitudinous things beyond our reach. We wished to plan more largely, from fundamental things, supposing that if we could build a world nearer to the heart’s desire these other things, too, in time would have their place; but unless we could rebuild the world they would be of no account.

We were idealists; but we knew something of the difficulties before us, with the world we had lived in collapsing all around. Some clutched at a hope that the old order would be restored, but most were determined that it should not. We thought that perhaps a special charge was laid upon us, removed as we were from the battle, to think as clearly and constructively as we might, not for ourselves alone but for our fellows engaged in the war, and for those who had died and would yet die before we were returned to life.

And we were determined that when the war came to an end we would not stay content with the speculations we had made, but would somehow or other play our part in the renewal of human society and in the prevention of further war. We would not, when it was over, and in relief at our freedom, resume a wholly private life, however great the temptation, but would refuse to say, “Well, that’s over; now I can get on with my job and let the rest go hang. That had happened after the last war, with individuals as with nations.

Other poems I wrote in those first lean, anxious months, “Harebell,” “Lime-tree,” “Swifts,” took up the theme of the first poems written after capture.

LIME-TREE

SWIFTS

Also I wrote several sonnets more directly concerned with the war, and with that conflict between pacifism and participation in war which can never be resolved by reflection alone. I had been six months without any news at all from home, and perhaps I may be forgiven for such nostalgic, “escapist” poetry. After all, to us “escape” was not a word connoting cowardice, or a refusal to meet the challenge of life, as it seems to be for some literary critics.

SONNETS

I

II

HEMNES

III

6

ESCAPE was a constant preoccupation of our minds and a frequent topic of our dreams. To some it was an almost unceasing physical task, not so much because of any hope of getting home (the chances were so very slight) but as the only means by which a man could easily delude himself into thinking that he was still taking part in the war. It was one of the commandments of our code; our duty was to escape, and to make the Germans waste the largest possible number of men in guarding us.

In one camp, in the eleven months between October, 1941, and September, 1942, we dug more than one hundred tunnels; and countless other attempts to escape were made. How many got out of camp I cannot say; three only got back to England. For that result how many hours were spent in scraping earth away with a fragment of iron bound to a stick? How many hours on disposing of that earth? In drawing, copying, duplicating maps? In dyeing cloth and faking German uniforms or civilian clothes? In making fans to pump out the foul air from the tunnels? How much ingenuity, and nervous strain, and self-denial in the saving of a store of food (as often as not found and confiscated by the Germans)? Was it worth all this? Every time.

Yet all these things are more properly to be described by one of the few who succeeded in getting home. In five years only three got back from any camp in which I was held, but from some other camps there were more successes. The furthest I ever got was to have perhaps my head and shoulders beyond the wire, sixteen feet under ground. There was not much satisfaction in that.

That first autumn at Laufen only one escape was made, by a tunnel from the garden (as it was called) — a patch of land on the left bank of the Salzach, where were a couple of cherry trees and some flowers. (After the escape the cherry trees were cut down.) From this patch of ground we could watch the local populace on the bridge, as from some of our rooms we could watch them in the streets of Laufen; women in dirndls, small children, civilians. It seemed odd to see civilians — to look out on another world that we had once known, where there were creatures of another sex, of more innocent years, and men (strangest of all) not in uniform, not concerned in this trade of killing to which we were dedicated. It was like looking at a picture of the people of another age, beautiful but utterly remote. We felt no envy when we saw, at week-ends, canoes coming down the river, or heard the cries and laughter of bathers. They were nothing to do with us, but were inhabitants of another world in which we had no share.

I have often been asked how long we thought, in those days, that we should be in prison. We had a misguided hope that we might be exchanged, or sent to a neutral country, in two or three years, in accordance with the provisions of the Geneva Convention. None of us expected the war to last five years, and though only a few defeatists supposed it could end soon, “Home by Christmas” was for years a slogan to keep up our spirits. I forget if that phrase was invented in 1940:1 suppose so. But more sober calculations led us to forecast the entry of the United States in about eighteen months (a surprisingly accurate guess), and the end of the war about a year thereafter. We left out of account the entry of Russia, and we expected that the U. S. A. would forestall Japan by a previous declaration against Germany, which (we thought) might warn off the Japanese. Being wrong in both of these guesses, our forecast was too optimistic, and we were far too sanguine about the likelihood of an early invasion of the Continent.

Had we known that we must face five years in Germany I think many would have broken down far sooner than they did. Our ignorance was then most merciful; and few would maintain that if we had known how long it would be we could have planned work accordingly. I doubt it very much. We should have been too oppressed by the prospect of five years to set about any real work; besides, we knew we could not have survived five years on the diet we had during the first eight months. As it was, we always hoped something would turn up, in characteristically British fashion, and incessant disappointment never broke down our underlying Optimism.

In 1941 parcels began to come to relieve some of our wants. We received pajamas and another rug (and we no longer shivered all night); socks and underclothes and shirts (and we no longer had to stand about half-naked while we washed and dried these); books and other things that we had asked for. Food parcels at last began to come, and we lost our potato bellies, and the occasional quarrels, and even fights, over a slice of bread or a scrap of cheese ended. Our cropped hair had grown now. We had found our places in the community and made friends with whom we talked and walked and drank thin beer in the canteen. The numbers in the camp were reduced, and we had at last room to sit when we fed, though the crowding remained throughout far worse than in the worst slum.

In the autumn some Americans had made their routine visit to the camp, and at the door of my room had stopped and stared; and then, “You poor bastards,” said one. We liked that, not for the sympathy expressed, but because it made us laugh, and because someone had come in from the outer world and had realized something of our life.

(To be continued)