Post-Christmas ... continued (Chapter 23)

 Life in the barracks was more disagreeable after Christmas. Deprived, as we now were, almost entirely of cigarettes and subsisting on a minimum of food, we were even further from the cocky, sexy guys of Garrison. We were in truth as ordinary as dung, and as obnoxious. When times were good-that is, when food, supplies, and sex were sufficient-comradeship flourished or was at least possible. Now comradeship dragged its feet. 

Thievery became a way of life. One man recalled, "In my company you could lay a ten-dollar bill on the bed all day; no one would take it." A half~truth at best, but possible in a company or platoon. But in prison, where life ceased and existence throbbed for its being, men could no longer be trusted. It was a bitter twist that all of life, humor, fellowship, love, even honor, should lie not in the mind or heart of man but in his stomach.

In the darkness and gloom of January and February tempers got short. We all knew that men stole from their friends. I taunted a fellow POW into saying, 'Why shouldn't I steal from him? Some body stole from me!"

There was no response, but he irritated me and I shot back at him, "If you'd steal from your friend, you'd probably steal from your family." He held his tongue, but I couldn't mind. I threatened him with, "If you ever steal from me I'll beat hell out of you." He answered me sharply with, "How do I know you didn't steal from me?" I screamed back at him, "I admit you don't know!" We simmered down and walked apart.

Nights in prison were all the same, except that Saturday night was special. We usually could expect the next day off-and that was good. But Saturday night in civilian life had been date night for many of us. The backlog of feelings about Saturday night made it a lonely night. Sunday afternoons the Germans treated us to recordings played over the sound systems in the yards. We listened to beer hall songs and waltzes by Strauss and other instrumental music. 

Sundays we cooked, slept, or dreamed. We dreamed of going back to the farm, buying a car, staying in the house, and never leaving it, spending all the back pay we would get (or would we?), going into business, wondering about the job we had left. Some of us were convinced that there would be a depression after the war, that there would be another war in twenty years, that we had better look out for the Russians. Most of us just dreamed of getting out. One of the most unexpected happenings in a place of unexpected happenings was the surprising amount and superior quality of entertainment. It was as varied as the men and nationalities.

Aside from individuals such as the mountain boys from West Virginia with harmonica, violin, and guitar music, supplemented by yodelers, we had barracks shows: British, Anglo-American, French, American, and Polish. One night three Poles, friends of the American- Polish POWs in our barracks, arrived with a clarinet, piano accordion, and vocalist. They had been captured in Warsaw, partisans fighting with General Bor, and were professional musicians. 

In addition to a wide variety of popular songs and folk melodies, the vocalist sang light opera. The biggest and best show of all was given by the French: three violins, three  accordions, sax, drums, bass viol, guitar, and vocalist. They performed on a platform in the center of the barracks. We stood or sat around them in a semicircle while others lay on bunks or kept milling about restlessly, as if the music brought unconscious kinetic memories of dancing. Still others built fires, boiled water for tea or coffee, cooked their dinner.  Coppola and Stubby joined me on my new bunk.

In spite of the sour stench of garbage, the dank mustiness of wet wool, the offensive odors of unwashed bodies under rancid shirts and coats; in spite of noisy and noisome gas attacks; of arms and legs infested with enlarged, passed and putrid lice bites; in spite of all these there was, miraculously, an atmosphere of an intimate café.

The superior quality of the music, the foreign atmosphere that permeated the barracks, the light chatter heard throughout the performance all aided in creating the most remarkable and striking illusion of a nightclub. There were nearly four hundred POWs packed tightly into the dimly lit room as the music of the tango, waltz, and fox-trot was intermixed with  classical and semiclassical. Waves of delicious sound washed back and forth across the room. Grey smoke poured from the many drilled holes in the steaming stoves; blue-and-white smoke shot upward from the international cigarettes, each with its own peculiar and pungent fragrance, the German being the most unforgettable. Smoke and sound intermingled and enveloped the room, obscuring the rough bunks and tables, pushing the drab walls and spotted ceiling out of sight, enchanting the six dim naked lightbulbs, and saturating the barracks with the illusion of Paris, the Paris of one's imagination. It was a café inMontmarte.

We still had the emptiness of our lives, the barren, lonely, cold, dirty, unfriendly, and filthy existence that had been ours for weeks. It was true that we were getting snatches of Red Cross boxes and a promise of mail, but the war seemed as far from being over as ever, in fact, the news was worse. Yet the power of music transported us for a few brief moments to the heights of forgetfulness. It was then, and remains now, a haunting moment in the life of many men, of many places, of wide and wondrous differences, all brought together by the common denominator of music. We listened and dreamed and our thoughts went far beyond the barracks back over the sights and sounds we had encountered in recent weeks and months. A single phrase conjured up the purple African sky, a blue Mediterranean view of the sea over green pines, a dark green and brown English moor, the wet green flavor of French rain in Normandy, or an image of home, westward, somewhere between the two oceans. All of us soldiers, all of us prisoners, all of us waiting, all with a single wish, for two hours bound together forgetting irritation and difference, joined in the joy of music.

... 

Chapter 23 - After Christmas

 I missed Christmas (Chapters 21-22) so I'll have to catch up with them at the end of this year (2022 hopefully), so I'm just pressing on ... these chapters involved OCR (optical character recognition) from Adobe pdfs and then cut/paste into Blogger. Some errors in transition are likely.

After Christmas

Prison life was an intensification of army life. After long days of training in garrison and field followed by the hardships of combat, I was conditioned for survival. In January 1 called upon that background, for it was the beginning of our most difficult time in prison.

The days were drenched with irritation. They were long and dark and cold. We lived with the knowledge that until spring there would be little or no military advance, except in the air. The only advances that interested us were those that led directly to our release. Our world became a kind of quagmire, a stagnant pool of immobility. We saw no hope of release until late spring or summer.

We worked through gloomy January into grim February. Increased air raids on Munich, increased work details. We went out every day. Newly captured soldiers arrived from Italy, from across the width of France, from Belgium, from Holland, and from Germany. The compound was further flavored by Czechs from Prague, Russians from Minsk, Britons from New Zealand, Australia, and England, men from Yugoslavia, Poland, and France. 

As winter worsened, no branch of the service, it seemed, escaped capture: reconnaissance men, tank men, infantrymen, paratroopers, and gliderrnen; signalmen, wiremen, artillerymen, medical men, rear-echelon men-all streamed in from the walloping the Allies took in the winter of 1944. 

In prison our spirits went down. Munich was bleaker than ever; the slush-filled streets, freezing railyards, scarcity of wood, diminished food rations all checked our desires to volunteer for work.

"I don't know about your shoulders, Stubby, but mine hurt," I said.

Stubby responded by shifting his wire-wrapped bundle of wood from one shoulder to the other. It was so cold that we wore every piece of clothing we owned, which in turn was heavy and bundlesome and tended to pinch off the circulation of blood. We had walked blocks and blocks in the now-darkening afternoon. We halted to let a broken-down streetcar cross our path. Small, stockily built Russian women worked to keep the rails clear of the black snow. We stopped in front of a restaurant and could look through the drapes in the window. 

Coppola, who was wearing a Hungarian twin-pointed cap and whose head and face was wrapped in an olive-drab GI towel, said, "I wonder what it's like to eat in a restaurant?"

"You mean with knives, forks, and a tablecloth?" I said, and added, "Along with some wine?"

Coppola smiled. In the freezing cold, conversation was hard to come by. It looked warm and civilized in the restaurant, even in stinking Munich. Somewhere along our daily walks we sloshed past the infamous beer hall where, as it were, it all started. Any one of the baroque buildings could have been it. 

It was almost four-thirty and dark when we reached the boxcar. It had a stove that an old Posfen kept warm with wood we and he had brought from town. It certainly must have crossed our minds that at any time we chose we could overpower him, or both guards when there were two. In Munich we could escape almost any moment during the day, in the streets, within buildings, in the switchyards. We could escape while traveling from Munich to Moosburg. The train went through Friesing, a good-sized town, but also through much open country. We knew the route well, knew the woods and the fields. Coming back at night, with the door open, we could have jumped. Not until Moosburg or even until roll call the next morning would we have been missed.

Why didn't I escape? Or why didn't more of us escape? A few tried. Most of them were caught and returned to camp. Some did not return. Where were they? Did they make it over the Swiss border? What did happen to them? We had rumors that they were shot, but we had no facts. It was hopeless to think of escaping from camp-guards were all over the place. It was easier to escape from outside the camp. Why didn't I? I was in a U.S. military uniform, visibly not a German soldier. It was too dangerous to be alone in Munich. The least that could have happened was recapture and some slight punishment; the most, death. The same was true of the countryside. In addition to German civilians, military personnel were everywhere. It would help to secure civilian clothes, and maybe there were some in the bombed buildings, but to get it out was not easy.

It never occurred to me that any part of my military duty was to escape or to overtly torment, frustrate, confuse, irritate, or even destroy the enemy. I was a well-trained goldbricks this training flowered in German prison camp. Perhaps my thirty-three years and military experience conditioned my attitude and actions. Heroics were out. I was not interested in pushing any further my diminishing percentage. I decided to sweat it out where I was. To sweat and wait. That proved to be difficult enough.

"Coppola," I said, "what'll you do when you get out of prison? Aren't you afraid you'll no longer give a damn?"

He thought for a moment and answered, "Could be." "There are a lot," he continued, waving his arm toward the men in the boxcar, "who'll never do anything again." 

I said, "Maybe you'll take off for a couple of years and read all those books?"

"Right now," Coppola answered, "I'd just like to sit in the sun of Nogales. just sit and soak up the heat."

"Under a big sombrero, eh?" I said.

Stubby groaned and moved his stiff legs out from him and, changing positions, said, "I might come join you. I never want to see winter again."

We finally heard the whistle, and the train left the yards. It rattled and banged and rocked without a stop through the darkness to Moosburg.

When we got inside the barracks I found the Monster's bunk vacated. I grabbed it. Why he left or where he went I don't remember. He could have gone on a farm Kommando. These were volunteer groups that periodically left the compound. We understood that each POW who joined a Kommandogroup got two Red Cross Boxes, mittens, other clothes, and the promise of better food on the farm.

We also knew that the work would be harder. But then, too, there was the hope of being free on the farm. This was countered by the knowledge that so long as we stayed in a stalag there was safety from air raids and there was safety in the numbers. Finally, friends were sometimes separated on the  Komrnandos.

Life in the barracks was more disagreeable after Christmas. Deprived, as we now were, almost entirely of cigarettes and subsisting on a minimum of food, we were even further from the cocky, sexy guys of Garrison. We were in truth as ordinary as dung, and as obnoxious. When times were good-that is, when food, supplies, and sex were sufficient-comradeship flourished or was at least possible. Now comradeship dragged its feet. Thievery became a way of life.

One man recalled, "In my company you could lay a ten-dollar bill on the bed all day; no one would take it."

A half~truth at best, but possible in a company or platoon. But in prison, where life ceased and existence throbbed for its being, men could no longer be trusted. It was a bitter twist that all of life, humor, fellowship, love, even honor, should lie not in the mind or heart of man but in his stomach.

In the darkness and gloom of January and February tempers got short. We all knew that men stole from their friends. I taunted a fellow POW into saying, 'Why shouldn't I steal from him? Somebody stole from me!"

There was no response, but he irritated me and I shot back at him, "If you'd steal from your friend, you'd probably steal from your family." He held his tongue, but I couldn't mind. I threatened him with, "If you ever steal from me I'll beat hell out of you." 

He answered me sharply with, "How do I know you didn't steal from me?"

I screamed back at him, "I admit you don't know!"

We simmered down and walked apart.

Nights in prison were all the same, except that Saturday night was special. We usually could expect the next day off-and that was good. But Saturday night in civilian life had been date night for many of us. The backlog of feelings about Saturday night made it a lonely night.

... to be continued ...

An Actual Shower of Frogs, Tunisia 1943

From WJ Stigall's WWII memoir, A Shower of Frogs

Chapter 4: Kairouan and a Shower of Frogs

The day of July 9, 1943, was very much like every other day in Tunisia. The single exception to the deadly sameness of our life was the sense of imminent action. Nothing was more certain about the days and nights around the Kairouan arc than that they would be pretty much the same. The same olive-drab uniforms, the same uninspired chow, the same marches, the same faces rising out of the same bodies, the same sameness. If one felt lucky, he might try a fig from off the tree or grapes from merchants in the nearby village of El Elen or Skrina. The result was usually diarrhea. The smells of the day went the distance from obnoxious arrogant camels to the fragrant jasmine, from dirty dishwater to the sweet-smelling oleander. 

The sameness was occasionally broken by a drive into an Arab village, passing on the way small donkeys, dirty-looking "Arabs" and once a magnificent group of wild horses racing one another madly along the dust-filled fenceless roads. As we were driving back from Kairouan one afternoon, a dark cloud came over the camp and it rained water and hundreds of tadpoles, which squirmed around on the hood and floor of my jeep. We thought it very odd, being pelted by small living forms from the sky, each about half the size of the head of a pencil. [With the editor's apology about the characterizations: WJ Stigall loved North Africa, including the people there. Hence his quotation marks.]

By then we were so used to the strange sights of Tunisia that only later, when my honesty was questioned, when it was thought that there was upon me "the spell of Arabia" or that I had a Moses complex, only then did I search for the scientific explanation for this "plague" of frogs. 

Water, in being blown up from the ponds, also sucked the infinitely small tadpole. Fierce winds, common in Tunisia, blew both water and tadpoles some distance and eventually dropped the living matter with the rain.