December in Prison
It was the first of December 1944. Coppola, Stubby, and I were settling down for a winter in prison. I had finally given up expecting the war to end before Christmas that year. Word had drifted in to us that our mission in Holland had failed and that German resistance in Germany had stiffened and stopped the advancing Allied armies.
Stubby was lounging quietly above Coppola, who was trying to read by what remained of the light of day. Leonardo had by now a fine full red beard, augmented by a mustache with long, well-twisted ends. His slow, thoughtful movements, sometimes seemingly calculated, gave him an appearance of age well beyond his middle twenties. His beard, mustache, and slow gestures suggested a nickname, Pop.
I was stretched out in my bunk with my head turned toward Coppola and away from the fine mist of powdered excelsior that trickled down from the sack above me. "Hey, Pop," I called out to interrupt him, "how long has it been since you've eaten a piece of meat?"
He pulled himself out of the book and slowly, deliberately, time being no pusher of Coppola, thought for a moment, then said, "Six weeks." He ran his right hand repeatedly across his mustache out to the far ends. He added in a low, soft, accented voice, "In France. A week or so before I was caught."
Stubby leaned over to say, "We had some meat in Holland. Eight weeks ago. Haven't had a piece larger than an inch square since we got here, and that was in soup." Many unpleasant things could rightfully be said of GI chow, the quality of which depended upon the staff sergeant and his cooks, but even at its worst, we had meat two or three times a day. In possible. He almost never spoke, but when he did it was in a quiet tone, agreeable and simple. He loved to talk about the farm from where he came. I never knew his name, but in spite of his utter gentleness, the word monster forced itself upon me.
Across the bunk from the Monster was Arriga, whose large body supported a huge head with an enormous jaw and arms that swung freely from his heavy shoulders. His hair was dark and twisted: it lay scattered over his head, a part of it dropping from a low hairline into his eyes. Arriga's hands were gigantic and moved awkwardly, as though they were unskilled in the simplest of human activities. His body was covered with lice and flea bites grown into festered sores. The itching irritated Auriga, so he sat up in bed with his shirt and trousers off, scratching his bites with uncontrolled passion.
He was like an ape in a cage sitting on his top bunk endlessly, silently seemingly enjoying the ecstasy of scratching. Normally Arriga's face was a blank. However, when angered he flared up or grew sullen and surly and, when prodded to it, was riled to animalistic violence. The suddenness of his temper was frightening. But normally he was quiet, even childish. Arriga would move slowly across the floor dragging his unlaced shoes and sit down at the table with his "stamp pictures" and various souvenirs he had collected from Munich. He handled them, over and over again, moving them about on the table in some personal pattern. With his heavy hand he copied drawings from other men's sketches. He was twenty-four and had been in the army since eighteen months before Pearl Harbor. Arriga's mother had to OK his volunteering for the army. As he told it, "I was sure scared that she wouldn't do it." Arriga could neither read nor write and was (according to him) declared unfit for overseas duty. He was captured fighting on the western front.
We all worked on the Munich detail, and on evenings when we got back early, around six or seven, there was time to thaw out beside the stoves, heat water, play cards, talk, sing, lie on the bed and stare at the ceiling at the patterns formed by the wire against the scalding above one. There was also time to bake puddings. The puddings were made with bread or round, crisp Canadian crackers ground down into crusts. Chocolate, raisins, powdered milk, prunes, butter, sugar (or any part thereof) were mixed and stirred up in a homemade balding pan. The puddings were baked either in the brick oven in the room between the barracks or in a homemade stove tied, for security, to a pole in the center of the barracks. The brick oven contained one section partitioned off with shiny tin panels on which the delicious puddings were baked. In the barracks, the community stove was a German adaptation. It was there when we came; we simply added numerous holes for the individual blowers and homemade ovens. When Red Cross boxes arrived containing all the ingredients for a pudding and wood was available, the fragrance of the culinary delights balding in the ovens saturated and smoked the barracks.
The puddings took from fifteen to twenty minutes to bake. Most men did their own balding, but some paid another POW one cigarette to stand by and feed the oven wood. If wood was scarce, we paid a German guard one cigarette for the wood. The balding of puddings was one of the principal activities of prison life. We stood around the stoves waiting our turn to use them; we stood about just to watch others using them; we stood and griped because some men failed to contribute their portion of wood; quarreling, bitching, kibitzing, we stood and shared, open-mouthed and with ravishing hunger, at the glowing puddings going in and coming out of the ovens.
-- to be continued -
