At Mustafa Barracks, on the morning after the SUSs had piled the sand up in one corner of the square, the staff sergeants ordered them to collect two buckets each. Columns of inmates ran double-time with a bucket in each hand, filled them with sand, ran to the diagonal corner of the square and poured it out. The morning’s labor succeeded in moving the entire hill from one corner to the other. When they had finished, their lungs gasping for the dry desert air, the men were ordered to move the sand back again. This would be repeated, along with drills and physical training, every day. The sand hill at Mustafa Barracks epitomized the Sisyphean absurdity of their daily “tasks.” Bain called it “the sheer lunacy of the regimen.”
Joseph Heller, who served as a bombardier in the U.S. Army Air Forces in Italy, observed a similar madness in his army’s punishment system. It led him to conceive the character of a habitual deserter, Ex-PFC Wintergreen, in his comic masterpiece, Catch-22:
Each time he went AWOL, he was caught and sentenced to dig and fill up holes six feet deep, wide and long for a specified length of time. Each time he finished his sentence, he went AWOL again. Ex-P.F.C. Wintergreen accepted his role of digging and filling up holes with all the uncomplaining dedication of a true patriot.
“It’s not a bad life,” he would observe philosophically. “And I guess somebody has to do it.”
On alternate Sundays, the men at Mustafa Barracks wrote letters. Bain wanted to write to his brother, but he did not know where Kenneth’s unit of the Royal Engineers was stationed. He had no desire to communicate with his parents, so he fabricated a family as remote from his own as his imagination could contrive. This Bain family’s exalted address was Radcliffe Hall, Long Willerton, Hampshire. His letters referred to his younger brother at Eton and their fox-hunting sister. Knowing that Captain Babbage censored inmates’ letters, Bain employed as many difficult words as he could to force the lazy officer to consult a dictionary.
Commandant Babbage, RSM Grant and the staff sergeants held absolute power over Bain and the other prisoners. They could insult them, humiliate them and batter them. Any man who allowed himself to be provoked into striking back was restrained in a bodybelt, and, out of sight of other prisoners, beaten senseless. In Rigby’s The Hill, based on the author’s experience, the camp medical officer accepted the staff sergeants’ explanations that prisoners with broken noses and ribs had fallen down. Bain did not mention similar cover-ups by the medical officer at Mustafa Barracks, but he noticed that no staff sergeant was reprimanded for mistreatment.
Every night in their cells, some of the men whispered among themselves. They did it softly to avoid detection by staff sergeants listening at their doors. But Chalky White, cocky as ever, sometimes raised his voice. One on occasion, Staff Sergeant Hardy flew into the cell and shouted at White, “You’ve been communicating, haven’t you?”
“No, Staff.”
“I saw you! I heard you! You were communicating, you horrible little man, weren’t you?”
“Yes, Staff.”
Hardy imposed Punishment Diet Number One, bread and “desert soup,” in a solitary cell for three days. Stating that it took two to communicate, he charged Bill Farrell with listening and gave him the same sentence. Three days later, the two prisoners returned to the communal cell chastened and starving.
In the parade square one afternoon, harsh sunlight glowing off the white walls made Bain squint. Suddenly, Staff Sergeant Pickering called out, “You there! What do you think you’re grinning at?” Bain thought Pickering was speaking to someone else, until he closed on Bain’s ear: “You horrible man! Answer when I ask you a question. What do you find so funny? Why were you grinning?”
“I wasn’t grinning, Staff.”
“Are you calling me a liar?”
“I was frowning. The sun was in my eyes. I’ve got fuck all to laugh at.”
“You’re right! You’ve got fuck all to laugh at. And you’ll have a bit less tomorrow when you’re on jockey’s diet.”
The next morning in Captain Babbage’s office, RSM Grant read out the charge: “Smiling on Parade.” Bain pleaded to Babbage, “I wasn’t smiling, Sir. The sun was in my eyes. I was frowning.”
“If the Staff Sergeant says you were smiling,” Babbage replied, “that’s what you were doing.” He sentenced him to three days on Punishment Diet Number One in solitary confinement.
The isolation cell, on the upstairs floor in one of the barracks, measured six by eight feet. Three blankets, a piss-pot and a bucket of water lay on the stone floor. When Staff Sergeant Hardy locked him in, Bain thought, “I’ve got to stay here for three days, seventy-two hours, with nothing to do, nothing to read, nothing to look at. I shall go mad.”
• • •
Bain squatted on the ground and thought back to the first book of poems he had ever read, Algernon Methuen’s Anthology of Modern Verse. With the fond recollection of a first love, he saw his teenaged self opening the book at Thomas Hardy’s “Afterwards.” (“When the present has latched its postern behind my tremulous stay . . .”) Reading a sequence of Hardy poems had afforded a kind of pleasure he had not known before. The next poem he had read was Walter de la Mare’s “Farewell,” which he whispered to himself in the cell:
When I lie where shades of darkness
Shall no more assail mine eyes,
Nor the rain make lamentation
When the wind sighs;
How will fare the world whose wonder
Was the very proof of me?
Memory fades, must the remembered
Perishing be?
Reciting verse eased the first hours of idleness and solitude. He was soon recalling when and where he had discovered various poets. T. S. Eliot and A. E. Housman came in the winter of 1938, during the Junior Amateur Boxing Association Championship at the Holborn Stadium Club. His thoughts wandered forward to “that long and golden summer of 1940 . . . a lyrical interlude of sheer pagan bliss” in the arms of a girl named Barbara. Where, he wondered, was she? He feared she “was probably bringing comfort and joy to some well-hung G.I.” Putting her out of his mind, he paced the cell. There were four more hours until the evening slice of dry bread.
Bain had until then resisted the temptation to hate the guards, keeping at bay emotions that he believed self-destructive. But hunger for food and books was forcing him to despise Pickering. Even if “Smiling on Parade” had been a legitimate cause for a penalty, Bain had not been smiling. He had not done anything. Childlike rage consumed him, and he sought an outlet in imagined acts of revenge.
He saw himself after the war, walking up to Pickering in a pub. He would ask the former staff sergeant whether he recognized him. Pickering would say no. Bain would answer, “Does Mustafa, Alexandria mean anything to you?” As Pickering made for the exit, Bain would grab him by the arm. At the moment of retribution, reality intervened in the form of commands barked by the staff sergeants outside.
Bain was suddenly “embarrassed, even a little ashamed, as if his fantasizing had been observed.” As the hours passed, filling time challenged his imagination. He tried to name a novelist for each letter of the alphabet, “then a composer, then a boxer, a poet, a cricketer, a politician and so on. . . .” Hardy opened the door, threw him his evening slice of bread and said, “Try not to make a pig of yourself.” The guard taunted Bain with that night’s menu at the sergeants’ mess: steak, fried potatoes, salad, fruit, cheese and, afterward, drinks in the bar. “How’s that sound?”
“It sounds very nice, Staff.”
“You fancy yourself, don’t you? You think you’re a fly man. Well, you’re not. You’re nothing. You’re nobody. And let me tell you this. There’s a few of us got our eyes on you. . . . So, watch your step, my lad, or you’re going to get a lot worse than PD One.”
That evening, an unexpected act of near-kindness by Staff Sergeant Brown plunged Bain into confusion. Brown came in
to the cell just before lights out and told him to get his blankets ready for the night. “I’d use one of them for a pillow if I was you,” he said, “and keep your clothes on. Gets cold in the night.” Brown’s words, so unexpected, hinted at something “approaching humanity.” When the cell went dark, Bain regretted Brown’s solicitude. Clinging to the purity of his hatred, he curled into a fetal position with his head on a folded blanket and thought, “Fuck ’em all, including Brown.”
Staff Sergeant Henderson woke him in the morning with another piece of bread. Bain kept half of it to eat later. When Henderson returned to the cell, he seized the leftover bread. “You’ve been hoarding food. You expecting a siege or something?” Bain’s fists clenched, but he kept them at his sides. “Don’t you look at me like that, lad!” Henderson exited the cell before Bain could move.
Alone without the food he had saved, Bain was more outraged with himself than with Henderson. His inaction made him feel cowardly:
All right, he thought, they were right, the commandant and the rest of them. He was a coward. If he hadn’t been a coward he would have knocked Henderson’s dirty teeth down his throat. He hadn’t done it because he was afraid. He was afraid of the consequences: the body-belt, that wide leather waist-band with a steel cuff on either side to pin the prisoner’s hands down so that he was a man without arms, defenceless against the time they crept, silent at night on plimsolled feet, to burst into the cell and use him as a punch-bag and a football. . . . He was afraid.
Bain was closer to despair than at any other time since his arrest. But it struck him that Henderson’s eyes had betrayed fear. The staff sergeant had left the cell quickly, much faster than usual. If Henderson taunted him again, “He’d smash the bastard.” Henderson did not taunt him again.
The treatment meted out to him earned a mention in his poem “Compulsory Mourning”:
You’ll be confined in darkness and we’ll not
Allow you more than two hours’ light each day.
You’ll be on bread and water. There you’ll stay
For three full days and nights and we shall find,
I think, that this will concentrate the mind.
Bain returned to the communal cell after his three days’ isolation, secure in the knowledge that he had survived PD One and could do it again.
No news reached the inmates, apart from what little seeped through in censored letters from their families. Bain did not know that his friend Hughie Black and the rest of the 5/7th Gordon Highlanders were fighting that summer in Sicily. After Bain left them at Wadi Akarit, the Gordons had advanced north up the Tunisian coast. Tunis fell on 12 May 1943, ending the North African campaign. The 51st Highland Infantry Division disembarked for Malta on 5 July, spent three days near Valletta and landed unopposed on the Sicilian beaches on 10 July. The British and Americans achieved victory in Sicily on 17 August. But, as in North Africa, they failed to prevent the bulk of the Axis forces from escaping to fight again.
Chalky White, who seemed privy to every rumor circulating in the barracks, told Bain that a second front was about to open in Europe. The army had begun recruiting men for the invasion even from military prisons. Soldiers willing to fight again would have their sentences remitted for the duration. Bain had doubts.
The steady cruelty of the regime persisted. “More days passed, each an ugly replica of the one that had gone before,” Bain wrote. Bain’s friend from the Durham Light Infantry, Bill Farrell, collapsed during drill. The sergeants took him away, and Chalky White told Bain later, “Bill’s kicked the bucket, the bastards killed him. I’ll get one of them fuckers for this, I swear to God.” White and the other SUSs, however, were powerless.
Bain, whose hatred of the guards was growing “like a malignant flower,” wrote,
It was outrageous that the mean, stupid and sadistic staff, not one of whom had ever been within range of any missile more dangerous than a flying cork, should be able to abase, mock and abuse men who were, in many cases, their physical, moral and intellectual superiors or at least had been tested in circumstances of pain and terror beyond the imaginings of their present captors and whose failures surely merited something other than this kind of punishment.
At the daily ten-minute Communication Parades, the men could not speak about Farrell’s death within earshot of the staff sergeants. Instead, they rehearsed the formulaic exchanges of a suburban cocktail party. “Where do you come from?” Bain asked a man facing him.
“The Midlands. Near Coventry. What’s left of it.”
The man said he had read that American privates in Britain were paid more than British officers. “No wonder they’re fucking all our women.”
Bain asked, “How’d you get anything to read? Who gave it to you?”
The man from Coventry explained that the regulations, “the bit that Babbage never reads out,” allowed any prisoner with more than fifty-six days inside to request a book or magazine. All Bain had to do was ask one of the “screws.” Bain considered which staff sergeant to approach, settling on Brown. Brown, the short sergeant who had advised him how best to use his blankets in solitary, “was probably the least overtly hostile and sadistic.” Bain found a chance two days later, when Brown took charge of the cell. “Excuse me, Staff,” he said. Brown, startled that an inmate would “speak before spoken to,” said, “Well?”
“I wondered if I could get something to read,” Bain dared, with the innocence of Oliver Twist asking, “More.”
“And what put that into your head?” Bain answered that the regulations allowed him books and magazines. Brown demanded to know who had told him that. Bain protected his source, saying only that it was someone he did not know on Communication Parade. Peeved, Brown left to find something for Bain to read. He returned a few minutes later and threw a magazine in Bain’s direction. Bain looked at it in the near-darkness of the cell, suddenly seeing that the letters were in Arabic. Brown grinned. “Satisfied?”
Bain lunged, but Chalky White grabbed him before he got close to Brown in the doorway. Another prisoner, Ron Lewis, held him down. Brown slammed the door behind him, and Bain yelled, “You little shit! I’ll kill you!”
Lewis and White let him up. Lewis warned him that the screws would “have you strapped in a body-belt before your fucking eyes are open. Then they’ll kick the shit out of you.” He said it had happened to a friend of his in the Black Watch. Bain realized he should have kept his temper to avoid more time in solitary and a savage beating. Pondering what awaited him made him so ill that he could not eat the next morning’s breakfast. At the first muster, he waited for his name to be called. Nothing happened. He assumed Brown had not yet had time to submit a charge sheet, so they would come for him later.
Chalky White said, “You scared the shit out of the little bugger. He’s not put you on a fizzer ’cos he’s so bloody scared.” Lewis reminded him that, while Brown might be afraid to go against Bain one to one, he had “the whole fucking army behind him.” Whether White was right or wrong, he had saved Bain from a beating. In his poem “Compulsory Mourning,” Bain wrote,
But I’ll get out and then I’ll drink to you
Chalky and Jim—and this I hope is true:
As long as I am able to survive,
While I still breathe, I’ll keep you two alive.
A few days passed without Bain being placed on a charge. When Staff Sergeant Brown took the rotation over Bain’s cell one evening, he came in and gave him a book. Before Bain could speak, he left and bolted the door. The book was in English: George Moore’s Esther Waters, which Bain told Chalky was a novel. Chalky said it proved Brown was “shit-scared.” Bain did not believe it. Thinking that Brown was making amends for his cruelty with the Arabic magazine, he wrote, “He was capable of remorse and of compassion.”
Some of the prisoners noticed “three strange officers” coming out of Captain Babbage’s office one day, further ignit
ing the rumor that the army was preparing to reprieve those who would fight in Europe. A few weeks later, Bain was called in to meet the Sentence Review Board. A colonel and two majors interrogated him in Captain Babbage’s office, without Babbage. The colonel explained that a second front was about to open “somewhere in Europe.” Many soldiers lacked combat experience, and “battle-hardened” troops were needed. Bain’s division, then training in Britain for the invasion, was understrength. The colonel said, “We need every battle-experienced man we can find, and so we’ve been taking a look around various punishment establishments to see if we can find chaps who’ve learnt their lesson and are prepared to soldier on.”
With Bain’s file in front of him, the colonel said he deserved his punishment: “It was a damned bad show. Your let your comrades down.” Then he asked the important question: would Bain return to his battalion and fight?
“Yessir.”
Later, Bain would say, “I’d have promised to be a human torpedo or anything to get out.” Having served only six months of his three-year sentence, Bain left the Mustafa Barracks that afternoon.
After Bain’s release, Scottish Labour member of parliament Thomas Hubbard asked the secretary of war in the House of Commons whether he was “satisfied with the living conditions obtaining at Mustafa Detention Barracks, Alexandria.” The war secretary, Sir Percy Grigg, responded, “I am not aware of any grounds for complaint.”
NINE
Although most of the mentally and emotionally unfit men are weeded out before they get into the Army or in their early days at training camp, severe advanced training conditions and combat itself can put new strains upon any man.
Psychology for the Fighting Man, pp. 294–95
The Deserters: A Hidden History of World War II Page 10