Below the Tide of War

by JOHN BUXTON

1

SPRING came again, and we could sit out in the sun and grow brown, which made us look better. A convoy of ambulances crossed the bridge on their way to Yugoslavia. Greece, after her splendid fight against the Italians, was battered into submission by the Germans; and the British had been turned out of the other end of Europe. Hess flew to Scotland. Crete fell, and its fall much depressed us. The bombing of London was resumed.

And then it was summer, and in the morning someone came into the garden where we were sitting in the sun, and called out, “Russia’s in the war!” “Good God! On which side?” “On ours.” Then there was a buzz of guessing and calculating, ending always with the large question mark which then, as now, seems to conclude any argument about Russia. But at least, after a year alone, we had an ally, and one which, whatever her fighting power might prove to be (and most were not very hopeful), would give us a respite, which we badly needed. We read the papers more carefully now, and with some apprehension as the German armies swept on and on. But at least they were going away from Britain. And in the meantime we were tidying up the African map in a businesslike manner.

That summer a small peninsula, covered with birch and willow trees, which lay between the Salzach and a small stream at the side of the camp, was open to us, and we could lie there in the shade, watching the birds, keeping a record of the wildflowers as they came. Here one of my pair of redstarts nested, and I spent many hours watching them. Here too, listening to the rush of the Salzach, I wrote the “Hymn Written from Prison,” which was to be the main poem in my next book. “Westward” was to be published by itself at the end of the year in London, and since I had no further concern with that, I had my next collection of poems much in my mind. It is difficult to shape a book of short lyrics and sonnets, but this long poem, meditated for many months, might bind it together. For the main themes of my book must be love, and war, and behind these the whole relation of man to this world, which is best concentrated and understood through the experience of love.

Some of the poems written this year (1941) were for songs, and were set to music by a friend in prison; a few were sung at concerts. My “Carol in Wartime” was sung in his setting at my village church in England each Christmas of the war after it reached home, and was also sung elsewhere, and broadcast. I felt that I had achieved something if we had made a carol for people to sing in a church I knew so well. Also, I was beginning to get my roots set again, even at this distance, in the soil from which they had been torn.

By the time we moved from Laufen to Warburg, Westphalia, in October, 1941, we had recovered from the first months of starvation, thanks to parcels from home and from friends in Europe and America. We were adequately clothed and had a large number of books in the camp. In many ways we were better off than at any other period of our captivity: the length of time we had been prisoners had not yet oppressed us as it came to do; for we had still scope for thought without the later feeling that our premises were out of date and the opportunities for practical application of our ideas immeasurably remote. We still supposed we might be home by the end of 1942 or at least in 1943; and with the entry of Russia our chances of victory had seemed to increase.

Warburg camp was an abomination of desolation — an expanse of mud and cinders, with wooden huts, surrounded by the usual curtain of barbed wire. No mountains here to delight our eyes, no river, and but five poor apple trees standing in a row beside a ditch. In a neighboring compound some Russian prisoners were kept, starving, ragged, lousy, dejected, utterly lost, and dying fast in the winter months. When a man died they concealed the fact for as long as they could, and drew his rations. They came into the camp for delousing in our showers, blank-eyed and crushed, and we gave them what we could of our soup, or from our parcels, and smuggled cigarettes to them and some news. For now we had a secret wireless and were supplied with news till the end of the war, and not news only but the speeches of Churchill, and later of Roosevelt.

In spite of the bad conditions, our spirits rose with the change. We met recent prisoners with news of conditions at home, who were all reassuring. There were hundreds of RAF officers whose reckless, contumacious attitude livened us up. There were the prisoners from Greece and Crete — the excreta as they were promptly dubbed — and these brought us a most welcome contingent from Australia and New Zealand, including a few Maoris, whose dash and gallantry had already a legendary fame. Among these new arrivals were several old friends of mine whom I had known at Oxford, in Palestine, while training at Aldershot, or when fighting in Norway.

We had grown stale at Laufen that summer and had come to know too well what each of our companions would say or do in any probable circumstances. We had been getting used to being prisoners of war— a thing that must be avoided; and now we were jolted back to life not only by meeting old friends from before the war, or by reunions with some who had been earlier transferred from Laufen, but (perhaps even more) by making new friends. The camp was far easier to escape from than any other in which I was ever kept, and escaping became the topic of most of our thoughts and plans. This meant that we were concerned with the immediate, practical problem of outwitting the German, and we had therefore the less time to brood, or to build castles in the air that were forever being stormed by our realization of how far away peace was.

Then came the news of Pearl Harbor, and America was in at last, as we had known, since the autumn of 1939 and the days of the “phoney war,” that eventually she must be. Perhaps we were malicious enough (remembering that phrase) to get some amusement out of the manner of her entry: certainly it was melodramatic, if that appealed to you, and we had expected something more slick and better produced. We didn’t expect quite such a bums’ rush onto the stage of contemporary history. Well, everyone was in now, and a previous reluctance to see any spread of the war was replaced almost by delight that the whole world was in arms.

There would be little hope for the world now if the war had been fought out in Europe and Africa alone; and if it is still too soon to say that the suffering of six years will be justified, at least we dare claim that it may be. Because we were all in the war, we are all in the peace too, whether we like it or not; and there is our best hope.

2

I WROTE less during my stay in this camp than at any other time until 1944, probably because the lack of privacy pressed more closely on us here than elsewhere. Not that we were more crowded — sixteen in a room 15 feet by 25 feet was an improvement on Laufen conditions, and later the numbers were reduced to fourteen in a room. But there were no reading rooms — or only one, and there was usually somebody digging a tunnel from that; and out of doors, where, in prison as at home, I always preferred to write, it was too dusty, the stench of the latrines was too oppressive, and there was no shade but under the walls of a hut.

As always the daily chores of cooking, washing, mending, fetching rations, stealing coal, keeping a watch on the Germans, and much else occupied us. Also the ceaseless and numerous attempts to escape involved extra parades at all hours of the day and night, and more than the usual number of searches. The Germans, frenzied by our honeycomb of tunnels about the camp, took to blowing them up when found; also to filling them with sewage pumped and carted from the latrines. Once they were doing this when a German general was inspecting the camp. On one of the wagons — we had various pungent words for these — someone had chalked “Deutsche Kultur.” The general turned on his heel and moved off.

The security officer instituted a series of raids (nominally searches) on our huts, usually timed for the small hours of a wet morning, or when we were preparing our meals. Then the Germans would eject us from our huts and would fling all our possessions out of the window into the mud and filth. They even went to the trouble of carrying one boot of a pair some hundreds of yards away from its fellow, and of losing as much of our kit for us as they could. In these conditions we spent not a little time sorting out our belongings and cleaning them. It was not always easy to achieve that tranquillity for writing which some supposed we had.

In the spring of 1942 the pessimism caused by the loss of Singapore was counteracted by the gallant defense of the Bataan peninsula and of Corregidor. The first operations of a new ally are inevitably watched critically and anxiously, and the early months of the Russian campaign had not been encouraging. The dashing raid on Saint-Nazaire prompted wild rumors of invasion; but when these were found to be false, the truth was enough to cheer us. The first RAF raids seen or heard by us since we reached Germany took place, and on some nights we could see flares and fires at Cassel and other neighboring cities.

From time to time newly taken prisoners came to the camp and achieved brief notoriety by wild stories of plans and prospects which we were too eager to believe. The first, swift, terrifying rush of the Japanese was halted; and the Germans, falling before Moscow and suffering incalculable damage in the winter for which they were unprepared, seemed to have reached the limit of their conquests. Their achievement had been amazing, but they were land animals and could only prowl up and down the coasts of Europe, glowering and peering into the West from where their death would come. Even in North Africa it was the sea, and the dogged defense of a devastated island, that kept them from finishing the last lap of their dash to the Suez Canal. It was certain now that Britain would not be invaded and that victory would come. In that certainty the effort of confidence which each one of us had made was relaxed. No longer need we write, a little obviously at times, to show our faith (and it was faith) to the German censors.

The autumn before, some official ass had written from England, saying it was expected that on our return we would need careful watching for pro-Nazi sympathies. It must have required some ingenuity to think out so fatuous an insult: we were their prisoners, not their willing guests, and we were not likely to be endeared to them by the squalor in which they forced us to live, or by the insults and taunts with which they emphasized their mastery. From the first we had assumed that we should win the war, and by a native habit of superiority we at first infuriated but eventually overcame them,

“When are you going to invade Europe?” a German officer asked one of us.

“My dear fellow,” was the answer, “you can’t expect us to invade till the hunting season is over.”

They taunted us with constant reference to the evacuation of Dunkirk, and Greece, and Crete. But when some seventy of our number escaped over the wire, next morning, the Germans found on the ladders that still leaned against it notices that read “Another British evacuation.”

At first I had been wholly cut off, without contact with home for six months: the prison life was the whole of my active life. Then letters came, and I could begin to pick up the threads of my personal life, though I could still play no part in the life at home. Soon — in fact before I received any letters, though I could not know that — some of my poems began to appear in papers and periodicals in England. Then a few were published in America. And now a book was published, and reviewed, and read, and I had to that extent re-established myself. This not only helped me to tolerate the prison life, which was almost unbearable so long as it entirely bounded my activities; it also further stirred me to go on writing.

But many of my friends were fighting in Africa or at sea or in the air, and a few were dead. I had so early in the war been removed from any further active part in it; and that was exasperating. We did not ask for sympathy or charity, but to be regarded as men seeking, by whatever means they could, still to play some part in the life of their country. And if, in the main, we were confined to thought and speculation, we did not regard that as an end in itself, but knew very well that “all thought is for the purpose of action.” And so, as far as we might, we were preparing ourselves for the new life to which we should return.

To that end we were being fitted by the astonishing mixture of men of which our society was composed. Nowhere else was one likely to live as I did in a room with four regular soldiers; two engineers — one of whom, at the age of nineteen, had won a British and a French decoration (the latter he refused to wear); a Scottish farmer; a masseur; a professional singer, and an actor; a lawyer, a stockbroker; an undergraduate; a man who had been in the mercantile marine in the last war, and had two sons in the Navy in this; and a classical scholar who was, in peacetime, a civil servant. We had chosen each other’s company and, on the whole, did not, in those eleven months, in the least regret our choice. It is some test to live together in those cramped conditions without, at the end, hating the sight of each other. Yet, when in September we moved to our new camp, some of us chose still to live in the same mess.

3

WE LEFT some good friends at Warburg, since the camp was split up and the RAF did not come with us to Eichstatt. Here the camp was in a barracks outside the lovely town, which was rebuilt almost entirely in the eighteenth century; and past the camp, in a valley far too big for it (for it had long ago been the valley of the Danube), flowed the Altmühl. We had no distant views, but the woods across the valley, beech and oak, spruce and larch, were a delight to see after the bleak country about Warburg.

Also, of no small concern to me, there were many trees, nearly all limes, within the camp, and birds were plentiful in the area. Many nested in the camp, among them a pair of redstarts, and for the early summer of 1943 I gave myself the task of studying these in the greatest detail that I could, gathering together a team of naturalists from my fellows, who with me watched the birds throughout the entire day. Two of us for a time got up at 4.30 but soon the Germans forbade anyone to go out before 6.30, so that we had to miss two of the best hours of the day. Later, in 1944, Dr. Erwin Stresemann sent me a supply of rings with which I ringed (or, in American, banded) about 350 birds.

For nearly a year, from September, 1943, to August, 1944, we were allowed out for walks on parole, and this was a delight beyond realization except to men who have been confined within barbed wire for years. To walk for some distance in one direction, to wander about in woods or across fields — what joy it was after our walks had been up and down, up and down, or round and round close to the curtain of wire, our every movement overlooked by the sentries in their towers, our every footstep placed where some other prisoner had a few minutes before placed his, and where another would soon follow.

We were also permitted to visit the churches in Eichstatt, one of many German towns to which Christianity had first been brought by an English apostle, Walburga. We visited the local museum, and there were a few occasions when we were allowed to go to the movies in Eichstatt. This I cared little for, preferring to be out of doors, though I went twice about Christmas, 1943. More to my liking were two walks in the woods at dawn, which a German noncommissioned officer who also was interested in birds and flowers and the countryside arranged for us.

Such were the good things. But when we came to Eichstatt we found already there the Canadians and others who had been taken prisoner at Dieppe a few days before, and soon — because the Canadians were said to have roped the wrists of a few Germans at Dieppe — the Germans handcuffed a number of us. This continued for many months, though latterly the Germans merely handed in the manacles in the morning, and we hung them on pegs in our rooms until they were collected at night. But the first six months or so of this reprisal were very different.

In the first winter a few people escaped and the Germans instituted parades at all hours of the night. We put a stop to that eventually by keeping the Germans up from nine at night (when our lights were turned out) till eight in the morning, through our dilatoriness in coming on parade, and by wellorganized shuffling when at last we did parade.

Conditions for living were better in the older barracks than at Warburg, but in the newer concrete bungalows the damp was very bad, so that with green mold under one’s paillasse, and hoarfrost on the walls, we were not in much luxury. The light, as usual, was extremely poor, though later it improved. And as always we were overcrowded. But, physically at least, we were by now inured to the slum conditions in which we had lived so long, and cases of tuberculosis were not unduly common. Mentally, many were beginning to feel the strain of an apparently interminable confinement, and though some breakdowns occurred in the first winter at Eichstatt, not many went hopelessly mad until the last winter of the war. Then indeed, in our fifth winter in prison, and with our food reduced to the mere scraps of German rations, we were near to collapse.

Yet even then, so resilient is the human spirit, a fortnight’s good feeding at Christmas, caused by a German order that we must keep no reserves of food in camp, had a miraculous effect on all except a few. In myself I very well knew this, for, after writing nothing for months, I wrote thirteen poems in eight days — stored up, I suppose, during the long blank period before; and I also wrote half a play — only half because by then we had used up all our food, and the Germans had, once again, closed down our theater, so that there seemed little point in forcing myself to complete it. (At the same time the Germans removed our stools and tables and paillasses, so that it was very difficult to write, and nearly impossible to sleep because of the cold.)

This was the bewildering contrariness of the Germans’ treatment of us: one day they would take a few of us on a walk to hear the dawn chorus of the birds; the next day they would take away our bedding. Fuel was a difficult problem the last two winters and was solved — so far as it was solved — by parties of us going out to blow up the roots of felled trees, and bringing these into the camp, or by collecting spruce cones in the forest. But these supplies were never sufficient to keep some of the huts dry, let alone warm.

4

IT was at Eichstatt that we met our first American prisoners, but they stayed too short a time for many of us to get to know much of them. This we regretted, especially since the whole of the British Commonwealth was now well represented (though there were few South Africans), and we found we could gain much by exchanging our views about the future. A series of lectures was held (under some camouflaged title, to keep the Germans away), in which a representative of each of the Dominions and of India spoke, trying to suggest the contribution of each country to the future. An American was to have spoken, but they were moved to an American camp too soon.

Perhaps then (1943) most of us had been in prison long enough to cease hankering after the old life, for we knew it could never now return (as some had hoped); and we concerted our thoughts for the political future with deep seriousness, working hard on such books and government papers as we received. That year, before we had become exhausted by too long an imprisonment, the intellectual life of our community was at its highest. Afterwards we began to grow weary of never having an opportunity of testing our plans and hopes in practice; and we tended to put them aside, and to concentrate on the more immediate task of keeping alive and sane. Many took examinations in all sorts of subjects, perhaps chiefly as a reassurance to themselves that they had not entirely wasted their years in prison; perhaps, too, because they cynically regarded some certificate or other as more likely to ensure their employment after the war, than the profounder thought which they might give to political and social and other matters. No doubt these were right, so far as they went.

Soon after our arrival at Eichstätt the battle of El Alamein was fought, the first stage towards the return of our troops to Europe. Next came the Allied landings in North Africa, and the threat to Italy became obvious. At the beginning of the New Year, Stalingrad fell to the Russians, who now began their titanic, ponderous advance across the width of a continent. The Germans were cleared from Africa. Sicily was invaded, and our troops had returned to Europe, this time, in contrast to 1939, with the Americans at their side. Italy collapsed, and we pondered the fact that Italy had entered the war after many of us had been taken prisoner and that now she was out of it.

In prison we heard the bombers flying overhead at night, and we listened for the rattling of doors and windowpanes as the RAF bombed Stuttgart, Augsburg, Nuremberg, Munich. We were forbidden to go outside our barracks during alarms, and one man was shot standing by the door of his hut, and another who went to pick him up. A month or two later, fifty RAF prisoners who escaped were returned to their camp as cremated ashes. As the Germans warned us with notices posted in the camp, escaping was no longer a sport. They were less cocksure, less certain of their victory; and their leaders, warned by our demand for unconditional surrender, could look for no quarter.

THE BOMBERS

There was little enough sign of any break in the German discipline, and their improvisation after the collapse of Italy — still more, perhaps, their brilliant exploit in rescuing Mussolini, for whatever good that did them — commanded our reluctant admiration. Later we could more unreservedly admire the magnificent courage with which they endured the devastation of their cities by our bombing; and we were astonished that it seemed to make no difference in their bearing to us. They had come to expect it, and towards the end, knowing defeat was certain, they deliberately chose to go through to the very depths of suffering, as a sort of purgation for the evil they had done to others. This, at least, was the view of not a few of them, a mystical faith that they might only achieve rebirth, like the Phoenix, from ashes of their past.

We had little cause to like the Germans — rather less, it might be supposed, than the loud-voiced civilians at home and elsewhere. But we restrained tolerably well any wish for revenge, and we knew that we must continue to live in the same world and the same continent as the Germans, whether we liked it or not. They had some appalling defects, but unless we were to accept their own racial twaddle we could not generalize about “Germans.” And it would be absurd to deny them all good qualities; for if these were not always very patent to us, yet even we were not altogether unaware of them. We could not mock at “Nazi fanatics” for their gallant defense of Brest and Dunkirk. We could not sneer at them for bringing disaster on their country when to surrender would have brought them the immediate blessing of deliverance to Allied occupation. We remembered Malta, and Tobruk, and the Battle of Britain, and mockery at the courage and tenacity of the Germans, simply because they were Germans, seemed unworthy and soiled.

They had starved us and bullied us and confined us in cramped, unhealthy squalor. They had taunted us, and jeered at us, and delighted in showing their power over us. They had killed some of our companions and wounded others. Most of us hoped never to see a German again. But we were ashamed at some of the things that were said at home in the name of the Allies, and we were cynical about the self-righteousness that sought to justify the bombing of their cities at the same time that it shuddered at the enormity of the flying bombs and rockets. We had an uneasy feeling that our disgust at this form of warfare was due to chagrin that we had not thought of it first. And if anyone questions this, let him remember Hiroshima.

5

DURING the two and a half years I spent at Eichstiitt I wrote much. I translated some twenty medieval Welsh poems, besides a few modern Welsh and Norwegian poems. I also made translations of Egill’s Saga and Orkneyinga Saga, of parts of the libretti of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion and of Mozart’s Magic Flute for performance in camp, as well as of some songs set by Grieg. Also I wrote a number of prose essays and articles. In the autumn of 1944 another volume of poems was published in England under the title of Such Liberty, but the majority of the poems in this were written in the first three years in Germany. Now I wrote a number of sonnets reflecting, to some extent, the happenings in the war: the defense of Greece, the bombing of Germany, the invasion of Sicily, the advance of the Allies in the West.

WHEN FIRST I WENT TO GREECE

Also I wrote some more personal songs and sonnets; and with these a long reminiscent poem of the English countryside in which I had been born and brought up. But personal reminiscence is not a favorite topic with me, and the greater part of my poems of this time have little reference to my biography.

Of these the most ambitious, “Atropos,” was begun in December, 1943, and the first version was written very quickly. I tried to revise it a year later, but I was tired then, and probably too weak (I had lost about a fourth of my weight), and I was too much troubled by the threatened mental collapse of some of my companions to do justice to it. Eventually I reshaped it after my return to England, but the changes are slight, and chiefly designed to make the meaning clearer. I had always been fascinated by the speculations of the modern physicists; and it was natural, in my circumstances, continually to be confronted with the question “What is the point of this existence?”

It seemed to me that here was a task for a poet; for if the artist cannot maintain his faith in the value of life, who can? That was the task of all of us in prison or in the occupied countries — a task then more clearly understood (because there was greater need to understand it) than in more normal circumstances. And the physicists had demanded a profounder answer than the usual commonplaces, if only because their thought had shown that nothing of the world in which we live our present lives would ultimately survive. So our immediate questioning, made very pertinent by the apparent worthlessness of our present life, was to be answered finally only in the wider terms in which the physicists must be answered. Often, in revision (though not in the first excitement of writing), I felt I had attempted a task utterly beyond my powers. But that is not for me to judge, and the poem shall stand or fall on the judgment of others.

6

WITH the beginning of 1945, after the Battle of the Bulge, it became clear that the war must soon end. The Germans were being pushed back from West and South and East, and the intensive bombing made conditions in the center chaotic. Still they held on and kept their discipline; and as the armies advanced, so they withdrew the prisoners, marching them through the snow and frost from the East front with what little they could carry, or putting them on trains that were constantly wrecked by Allied aircraft. In March we had fiftyfour air-raid alarms at Eichstiitt, and early in April we could hear the guns. We hoped we might be overrun before the Germans could move us, for we feared that if we were taken down into the Alps our chances of rescue might be small. Some, we knew, had been taken south as hostages. We made plans for all likely happenings, including attempted massacre if the SS took over from our guards, or for cooperation with parachutists if these were dropped for our protection.

On April 12, I began a diary as a record of the last eventful days. These extracts from it show our excitement and confusion; —

“April 13.—Swedish plates, roller skates, bed casters, and so forth, have been made into wheels for trolleys, barrows, and other less conventional vehicles. The mess in the rooms is not to be listed: fragments of every sort of clothing, box, vessel, utensil; food in enormous and unpackable piles. Cigarettes, soap, tobacco; cooking pots, frying pans, ‘smokeless heaters’; cones, wood, boxes; broken lockers, stools, chairs, paper and straw packing; pictures, photographs — all the junk of five years’ imprisonment, normally stowed away, or hung on the walls, or pushed under the beds, now spread everywhere in astounding confusion. And everywhere packing, packing, and refuse blazing, and cheerful, dusty, sweaty faces. The whole thing is a gamble, and at the end (not far off) all are confident of soon returning home. Discomfort we long ceased to worry over; danger we shall share the chance of alike; and hunger seems most improbable, and that to most of us (after the six months of this winter) is the most feared of all risks, because it weakens the spirit as it weakens the body. This is a very insufficient picture of the camp today — of the end-of-term feeling, of the sentimental moment of partings long expected, but not in this way. There is so much so drearily familiar; and yet, in the glorious, disgusting, stuffy, dirty mess there is something that seems to symbolize the end of the necessary routine of prison.”

“ April 16. — I spent most of the morning wandering round talking to Americans and RAF. The Americans are very friendly and chatty, and don’t wait to be introduced; but the British — up to the eyes in filth, for years in prison — wait till a mutual acquaintance mutters names inaudibly.”

“ April 17. — We spend almost all our time preparing meals, eating them, and cleaning up after them. There must be several hundreds of open fires constantly in use, and it is a remarkable sight to see groups of officers — we (Army) fairly tidy, the RAF and USAAF in all sorts of rags and odds and ends — squatted round little puffs of smoke in between tents or barracks.”

“April 25. — Hardly slept all night owing to excitement, discomfort, stomach, noise of guns, bed boards falling on me from the bed above, feet prodding the top of my head. Saw first swift of the year this afternoon — the sixth season running I’ve seen the first as a prisoner. Many aircraft going over this afternoon — towards Regensburg mostly, but also sounds of bombing in Munich direction. To all intents and purposes this camp is now under Allied command. Sounds of battle all afternoon. It seems certain now to be a matter of days till our relief — possibly even hours. Leaflets brought in warning all Germans about treatment of Allied prisoners of war, signed by Churchill, Truman, and Stalin. Naturally a most exciting day, with continuous noise of war and aircraft of all types flying over very frequently. Read a little in The Faerie Queen, but mostly in a daze, walking round, talking to friends (most of whom are in a similar state). It is impossible to realize that we are now in our last days of imprisonment — it doesn’t make sense, and then suddenly one gets a glimpse of what it means — but in imagination I’ve never really got out of Germany yet.”

“April 26. — Spent a smugly virtuous afternoon sewing and washing, preparatory to release. I feel rather less bewildered with the excitement today, and could seriously think of my arrival in England, and of walking up to Long Crendon from Thame station.”

“April 29. — Some bullets came cracking and whining into the camp soon after 10.00 A.M. The battle, such as it was, died away after the cheese factory, outside the main gate of the camp, had been occupied. Firing ceased in the neighborhood, except for a mortar to the north, about 11.58. At twenty minutes of one the Stars and Stripes was visible over Moosburg. About this time the German guard went past the wire in full kit to surrender. About 1.15 the Stars and Stripes, the Union Jack, and the Red flag were hoisted over the entrances to the camp. It is now two o’clock; and more cheering, as I write this, greets the entry of a Sherman tank1 into the camp.”

7

I HAVE already learned, from the questions I have been asked, that it is almost impossible for anyone who has never been a prisoner to imagine what it is like. Some are puzzled that men should go mad in prison. It is not the outward things, which can be pictured, that are most difficult to bear; it is the unending sense of being caged, and of being watched wherever one goes, whatever one does. It

1 Of the 14th Armored Division, operating under the command of General I’atton, who himself visited the camp on May 1. is not so much the discomfort, the fleas, the stench, the hard beds, the cold and the damp, the crowded squalor of it all, as the lack of privacy; not mere hunger so much as the degradation of the mind which it brings — the continual forcing of the mind back to the subject of porridge or of treacle pudding.

Hunger is quite unrelenting and altogether displaces other desires. “I hope my wife wouldn’t be offended,” a friend of mine said to me, “but if it was a question of her or a good square meal, I’d take the good square meal.” I agreed.

Perhaps most exasperating of all was the knowledge that we were out of the fight till the end, while our friends (those of them who were still alive) were out there fighting. And some kindly fools complimented us on our good luck in not taking part in the landing in Normandy!

THE PRISONERS

Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.

It is not the biography of the poet that concerns the reader of poetry so much as the history of his time; not what happened to him alone, but what happened to his contemporaries, and him among them. So in these pages I have sought not to draw a self-portrait, which would be of scant interest, but to depict the life I shared with my fellows — not only with my fellow prisoners (and they counted some millions), but with the peoples of the occupied countries whose life was so similar to ours. And not with them only, but with all men confined in body or limited in thought by the overmastering catastrophe of these years.

Who has been free in this time? Who has not had to choose — or to yield to another’s choice — between what he ought to do and what it is expedient to do? Who has not questioned the whole purpose of human life in these years when, in order simply to maintain it, we have had to cast away so many things long considered to be of worth?

In my war poems it may (I suppose) be possible to trace “the growth of a poet’s mind,” springing from a sensuous delight in the world in which he lived, rising then to an intellectual interest in man’s place in that world, and at last, by the sharing of the life here recorded, coming toward maturity in the knowledge and love of men. For that is the only maturity which a poet can reach, and this process is all that is relevant in the biography of any poet.

Therefore, if there is one thought running through them all, one assumption from which they derive, it is this: that in spite of all physical suffering; in spite of loss of liberty; in spite of the necessity of putting aside our moral nature and taking upon us the dire task of killing; in spite of regret for the past and uncertainty for the future; beyond all doubts, triumphing over the challenge of every question, human life has, here and now, supreme value. This has been the faith of all poets, and it has been their task to state it as clearly and forcibly as they might, especially in times of great doubt and suffering. That is what poets are for. And the value of what they write comes not from any experience peculiar to themselves, but from the common humanity which they share with all men, regardless of their race, or nation, or faith, beyond the things that divide men.

And so in war it is part of the poet’s duty always to insist that victory is not in itself proof of right, however firmly he may believe in the cause of his own country. Equally, he will not admit that defeat has any compulsive argument to bring against his convictions. It is one of the vilest things about war that in order to uphold moral right it is necessary to disregard it, for in war only might suffices, and many, in their sincere conviction of right, are led to equate these, as their enemies had done. We were fortunate that in 1940 we might lead the world by our assurance in the value of the things we fought for, and without regard to our military weakness. The immense cost of that leadership we did not calculate, knowing that whatever it might be we must consider what was right, not what was expedient. It was as well that a nation should be put to that test, of deciding freely without recourse to the deplorable question of “Does it pay?”

Most certainly it did not pay, any more than it paid any individual Englishman to fight in those days. But that we fought on then made it certain that when later other nations fought at our side the victory guaranteed by the overwhelming power of our arms would be won for something other than mere power. Yet always the poet must be vigilant to see through the sham self-righteousness of propaganda; and he may not shirk the statement of views which, because they clash with the hypocrisy inevitable in a nation at war, are certain to be unpopular.

So the poet in war is a man at odds with himself. He is a citizen of his own country, upholding its political beliefs and practices, sharing in its traditions, — an Englishman, an American, or a German, — but he also transcends these temporary divisions, and knows himself to be a man. I would add that he is aware also of his membership in a greater community even than that of mankind — the community of all created things.

ON SEEING THE SEA FOR THE FIRST TIME FOR FIVE YEARS

(The End)