British prisoners seemed like men older than Americans. They
looked like middle-aged men, especially the sergeants. Many Englishmen were gray-haired, their faces deeply creased with lines, and
many of them wore heavy, serious looks. Regarding battle talk, the
English were more apt to comment on equipment, always calling
the German Merry. The American talked about his experiences, frequently overembellishing his adventures. I was always amazed to
watch the English soccer games played with considerable energy,
energy I could not have spared, energy Americans simply did not
have. It was a sobering experience to realize that many of the British
soldiers had been three to five years in prison.
...
During the long hours of the 218 days of prison life I, like all the
other men, spent the days sleeping, eating, preparing food, talking,
scratching my bites, pacing around the yard, reading, thinking.
There was ample time to think. I listened to stories, a million of
them, in diverse dialects from Manhattan to Mississippi: from men
who were in civilian life salesmen, bartenders, bricklayers, a man
who was a fashion designer, a professional gambler from Alabama,
a New York orchestra leader, a Harvard freshman, men who were
carpenters, teachers, truck drivers, grocerymen, farmers, a whiskey
salesman, a CPA, a welder, the lean, the lame, the potbellied, the far-sighted squinting with the nearsighted, the colony of gluttons, the
POW who at thirty-three had the mind and emotions of a below-average child of ten, the dazed man who, in spite of a wife and three
children, couldn't remember the date he sailed, arrived in Europe,
or was captured, the Brooklynites who argued over their inane
game of naming favorite movie stars: men of Polish, French, Danish, Irish, German, Mexican, Czech, Jewish descent.
Prison life was naturally a true conglomeration of us all. But
even with the understanding that World War II was the common
man's war and that we comprised a common man's army and with
the knowledge that the army had quotas to fill, it was appalling that
so many poor specimens of mankind were sent on so perilous and
important a mission and were forced to face so brutal and so coldly
calculating an enemy as the Germans.
There were many pleasant moments while sitting in the
warmth of the sun in the semi quiet barracks relieved of the agony
of the Munich detail. I read, wrote, thought, and reflected upon all
the many strange places I had been during the three years of a journey from home-a home to which someday, I would return. I wondered at the resiliency of the human body and mind to adjust to so
widely varied a set of environments and experiences that had been
mine and hundreds upon hundreds of us ordinary men from America. Not one man among us could ever have imagined one iota of the life he was destined to live, the multitude of men he came to
know, the kaleidoscopic experiences that were to be his. Before it
happened he would have disbelieved it could; years afterward he
still has doubts that it did happen. It was all too incredible to be
believed, too momentous and monstrous to comprehend, he too
small a cog in it to see much more than the next cog. In the rare
moments of quiet in prison, in comparative safety withdrawn from
action, nearly uninvolved even with the immediate life, a man
could catch a glimpse of the enormity of his times.
In garrison life, seeking privacy, I went to the furnace room of
the barracks, writing into the night. I wrote in jeeps, in a truck cabin,
in the dungeonlike holds of ships, in fierce wind and sandstorms
within a tent in Tunisia, in candlelit private homes in Naples, in a
library in North Ireland, a British barracks in Scotland, a shattered
Norman farmhouse, a tent in England, the floor of Stalag XIIA, and
on the splintered surface of a table in Stalag VIIA. It would seem
that most anyplace would serve if one had to write, including the
Service Club, whose thundering blasts of full-volumed jukebox
contained so encompassing a cloud of sound that one found at the
center a vacuum of silence.
