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.
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