[I have two reflections on this chapter that I'll share in the next post. - SP]
Suddenly, without any preparation, the Germans selected 700 American POWs, marched us to the railroad siding, and jammed us in as before, and we were off on another journey we knew not where. We left without our daily rations and without a new Red Cross box, which somehow we had expected to get. It was the middle of November. We had not yet been given overcoats, and blankets were turned in. In that land of high blood pressure the guards, shouting and gesturing, worked to get us in the cars.
As before, a milk can was provided and the doors locked. The train started with determination and continued for many hours. The first two days were a repeat of the former trip-no food, no water, a calculated effort at bestiality.
We, however, were different men now. Behind us was a long boxcar ride and several weeks of prison life. There would be few surprises this trip. There would be no false hopes or great expectations. We were alerted to long hours of waiting in switchyards. We'd experienced want of water, food, and air. We would remember the frustrating and maddening necessity of dividing bread and cheese whenever the swines of society chose to toss it in the car. We'd find ways this time to stretch our legs. There would be more readiness to deal with the claustrophobic conditions. There might even be a little cooperation, now that we were all Americans in the car. Of course there would be a stronger sense of self-preservation in several meanings of the words.
Yet it was surprising, what happened. We had learned very little. The disorder was, if anything, greater now that we were really hungry When, after sixty hours, the Legitimate Bastards of the human race opened the door and dumped in some food and water, some men did not get any. There was still the galling problem of dividing a loaf of bread into seven or eight portions and seeing that the pieces were passed around the car. Not all men got some. Then, too, the active ingredient of cheating moved in on the division of food.
***
Through the long days and longer nights we realized that we were traveling south. We could feel it in the warmer temperature, especially at night. As four days dragged into six, we made new friends. Stubby and I met a private soldier named Leonardo Coppola of Nogales, Mexico. My first memory of Coppola is of sitting next to him against a wall of the car and watching him use a small knife, slowly, patiently, slicing a piece of cheese and carefully relishing each bite. He also managed with equal deliberateness to spread some butter and cheese on a piece of bread.
"Want to borrow my knife?" he asked me.
"Thanks," I replied. I sliced my bread and spread some cheese.
Coppola had a two-week beard and a significant mustache. His English had a noticeable accent. Coppola seldom wasted words and his vocabulary betrayed considerable reading. He had not, as I remember him, been long in Stalag XIIA. He was a tank cowboy, an infantryman riding the Patton tanks of the Thirty-sixty Division. In some wild skirmish he, along with a number of others (some of whom were in the car), was captured and sent to Limburg. Coppola had a sense of humor; the gift of laughter in our situation made him quite a man.
There was little for us to do all the long hours of the ride except sleep, dream, gripe, meditate, talk, and listen to talk. Stubby, Coppola, and I listened for hours to our hungry buddies detail the wondrous meals they had enjoyed in civilian life. Every time they sat down to a table it was to thick steaks and large baked potatoes with bokoo butter. They used to load up on stacks of pancakes with bokoo bacon and pitchers of syrup. Breakfast was always several eggs, fried potatoes, sausage followed by bokoo cups of coffee. The empty stomach did marvelous things to memory. In fact, hunger froze their memories around a series of the top eating's of their life and released from capture any cruddy suet and beans or cold hominy they ever consumed.
The empty stomach also performed a miracle in another area of our lives. After a month in prison I realized that I no longer heard the Bunyanesque tales of sexual potency. This powerful human force that had of necessity to be liberated and elaborated upon ad nauseam was suddenly out of the conversation. We no longer heard a single example of glorious sexual conquest. Not one tall tale of life against the dark walls of Britain, the green lawns of Ireland, the haystacks of Scotland. Not one exuberant recitation of exciting shack jobs in Naples. Nary a detail of happy life in truck cabins.
Now it was, "I'm so hungry I could eat a whole pie." It was exclusively "my stomach." Our attention shifted from one organ to another. Out of food, out of sex. Who could have imagined that the stomach was the seat of man's sexual Powers? It was the most delightful surprise of prison life. It was Emersonian: one of life's compensations.
***
There were moments during this trip when life was quiet in the boxcar, when men slept from exhaustion or boredom. There were times when things simply quieted down. One man played softly on a harmonica while we listened and dreamed, and one had a glimpse of the possibilities of companionship or some dream-like communion that might arise from so painful an experience shared by so many men. It never did. During the last few days I was conscious that we were moving farther southward into gentler, warmer country. I stood for hours by the small window, leaning against the end of the car, and watched the beautiful pastoral landscape. We passed groves of dark, mysterious evergreens with sunlight streaming through tree limbs and glittering on the piney ground. They evoked the romance surrounding the words Black Forest. As we looked through our postage-stamp window, now unobstructed by any barbed wire (we had lacked it out), our journey, with a little imagination, was at times like a trip through fairyland. The nights turned warm and soft. It was no trouble to stand in the swaying, rumbling car watching the passing scenery in the soft moonlight of Bavaria.
-0-
