The hospital ward in Saint-Omer, France, where Hodgkinson awoke after Dr. Meinhoff operated on his leg, was filled with other Allied airmen. Their meals were enough to live on— a “bowl of hot water with just a whiff of chicken…. A thin slice of sun-baked leather, one small scoop of rice, and a smaller something called a potato.”30 But the ward’s window provided a ringside seat from which to watch their war. The day after his visit, Langendorf likely battled the swarm of Allied planes, which were cheered on by the men in the ward. Bound to his bed by his wounds, the 26-year-old, whose baritone voice had been a fixture on the CBC in the days before his RCAF Squadron No. 1 (later 401) was rushed across the sea to help fight the Battle of Britain, had to content himself with the blow-by-blow account shouted out by more ambulatory men.
The next day, after they parsed the Völkischer Beobachter’s version of the battle, Hodgkinson heard the words “Kanadischer Pilot, schwer verwundet” as an orderly wheeled in a seriously wounded Canadian pilot, his face swathed in bandages. Later, the quiet of the night was broken by a wail, followed by the pathetic words “My face! My face! Where am I? My face? My face?” It took a few minutes for the nurse to arrive and a few more for her to sedate the agony-stricken man.
Some days earlier, after Hodgkinson blanched upon seeing that most of RAF pilot Sandy MacRae’s torso was heavily bandaged, the British officer bucked him up by saying that German machine guns “have a way of rearranging a man’s anatomy.” And, of course, Hodgkinson’s own terrible burns showed him what fire could do to human flesh. Nothing, however, prepared him for the hideous sight he could not break away from when an orderly removed the bandages from the head of the Canadian pilot who had been engulfed by flames. “It was swollen to at least three times its normal size, and so puffed up and inflated were the cheeks and forehead, bloated with poison and pus, that the poor soul’s eyes were barely visible…. his mouth was no more than a slightly flexible gash, which you wouldn’t have thought was capable of forming the sounds of the language.” When the orderly had finished removing the bandages and saw that the pilot’s cheeks were “so bulbous [that] they protruded beyond the tip of his nose,” he cried “Mein Gott!” and fled the room.31
As Hodgkinson bit down on his pillow to keep from vomiting, another Allied officer asked the Canadian what had happened. His story of escaping from his burning plane was similar to Hodgkinson’s. When Hodgkinson asked him his name, he startled everyone by rising from his bed like Lazarus, “his arms outstretched before him and his poor bloated head swinging from side to side,” and calling out “Hodge! Hodge! Is that you, Hodge?”
“Yes! Yes! I’m Hodge. Sergeant Brian Hodgkinson! Who are you?”
“It’s Scruffy, Hodge. Scruffy Weir. Don’t you recognize me?”32
Ignoring the pain of his own wounds and orders to remain in bed, Hodgkinson struggled to embrace Weir. Through his tears, he apologized for not recognizing his friend.
24 NOVEMBER 1941, STALAG X-B, SANDBOSTEL, GERMANY
FATHER PQUET’S “DARK NIGHT OF THE SOUL”
By noting that he was writing on the Fête de Saint Jean de la Croix, Father Pâquet does more than indicate the banal fact that he remembers the calendar of the saints.33 Rather, he telegraphed to Father Labrecque how les religieux understood their trials and provided what amounts to a spiritual diary. Les religieux saw themselves as re-enacting St. John of the Cross’s passion. In December 1577, Carmelites opposed to the reforms advocated by St. Teresa of Ávila (1622) kidnapped her supporter, John. After a trial before a kangaroo court, he was imprisoned in a cell scarcely large enough to hold him, repeatedly brutally beaten in public and fed only water, bread and bits of salted fish.
While Labrecque knew that his brethren’s conditions were immeasurably better, he would have understood that St. John’s struggles to read his breviary by the light that came from an adjoining cell served as a metaphor for the priests’ and brothers’ struggle to live their faith under the Nazis’ heel. Just as St. John was dependent on a kindly friar to provide him with paper, on which he wrote his famous poems, Pâquet and his brethren were dependent on their captors for the materials necessary for the mass and for a place to say it—and, indeed, for the very paper he was writing on. St. John’s escape prefigured not his brethren’s physical escape but, rather, the triumph of their faith over the naked force that kept them behind the barbed wire.
Pâquet also knew that his friend would understand how the 16th-century Spanish mystic’s poems, especially his most famous “Dark Night of the Soul,” charted his and the other missionaries’ spiritual lives. “Dark Night of the Soul” opens with the frank admission that, beset by doubts, in the middle of the night the poet (the “soul”) leaves the house of God “by a secret ladder” and finds himself seemingly alone in the world. For the fathers and brothers who have been cast into the Nazis’ hands, “night” is more than the moment of doubt that such important Catholic thinkers as Augustine and Thomas Aquinas admitted to. Whether it occurred in the stinking hold of a German warship, while hungry on a train, when finding one’s self able to offer only prayers—which seemingly go unanswered—when watching Russian POWs starve to death or when alone at night in a cold hut far from home, listening to the rumble of your empty stomach, the “night” of being a prisoner of war is one that, if it admits of God’s presence, keeps the Holy Spirit well hidden. As Labrecque knew, St. John sings that deep in the night, redolent of sin and death, the soul finds that darkness itself is an ember that “guided me/ more surely than the light of the noon/to where he was awaiting me / —him I knew so well.”34
By alluding to the poem, Pâquet shows how in the light of their faith, their humiliations and the pain they feel at their own and others’ sufferings gather.
LATE NOVEMBER 1941, STALAG LUFT I, NEAR STETTIN, GERMANY
COX MISTAKES A DEAD MAN FOR A PILE OF POTATO SACKING
Cox was struck by the remnants of humanity, the Russians reduced by the Germans far below simply being the shards of Soviet armies smashed by Wehrmacht. Given the Nazis’ concept of the Untermensch, it is an open question how the Germans would have treated the millions of Russian prisoners who had fallen into their hands had Stalin signed the Geneva Convention. Since he hadn’t, the Germans felt free to march the three million POWs captured on the battlefields of Poland and Russia with little food or water, and no protection against the elements to POW camps; marches during which hundreds of thousands died. Free to ignore outbreaks of dysentery that killed thousands more in camps in which Russian POWs received less and worse food than did the Western POWs, and little medical attention. In some camps, the death rate of Soviet POWs reached 2 per cent per day. Free to let them shiver in the cool of autumn and die in the cold of winter, clad only in the rags left from their summer uniforms. Over the course of the Ostkrieg, three-quarters of the four million Russian POWs died; in the first year, fully two million died, some collapsing where they stood, in sight of the missionaries and other Allied POWs.
The thousands of gaunt bodies that somehow still walked in the compound that abutted Stalag Luft I testified to the lengths that the Nazis would go to work their will on Europe. The cold wind that came through the chinks in the wall of Cox’s barracks, which was barely heated by the pot-bellied stove, ripped through the Russians’ thin tents. At the risk of being punished if caught and knowing that they were increasing their own hunger, Cox and the other Allied pilots threw loaves of bread over the barbed wire, and, for a few moments, saw “a glimmer of what had been a human being.”35
But those loaves, a dozen or even a hundred dozen, could do nothing against typhus, which broke out among the lice-ridden Russians. It didn’t take long for infected lice to bring the disease into Cox’s compound. Typhus, the Germans well knew, was the scourge of many an army, killing thousands of Napoleon’s men as they trooped toward Moscow. Accordingly, the Germans allowed the Senior British Officer in the camp to contact the Red Cross for a supply of anti-typhus serum, which was quickly administer
ed to the British POWs, albeit painfully since German medics used only one needle for each line of men.
Those Russians whom the Germans chose to form a slave labour force survived to do the Nazis’ bidding because were allowed to shower to rid themselves of lice. They used the same shower room Cox and his comrades used. One day, the change room was especially crowded, and Cox had to undress next to a three-foot-high pile of what he took to be potato sacking, perhaps worn by a Russian POW. When he inadvertently stepped on the rough cloth, Cox felt something strange. He looked down and saw to his horror that he had stepped on the head of a dead Russian, one of the 11,000 souls to perish in that typhus epidemic.
EARLY DECEMBER 1941, DULAG LUFT, FRANKFURT
HODGKINSON ENTERS A WORLD WITHOUT CIVILIANS
Dr. Meinhoff was a puzzle.
When a sadistic orderly increased Weir’s pain by leaving his wounds open to the air, Meinhoff threatened to transfer the man to the Russian Front. While escorting Hodgkinson to Frankfurt, Meinhoff, who was on his way to Stuttgart on leave, bought the Canadian lunch and protected him from an angry crowd, in the Cologne train station.
These acts made it all the more difficult to comprehend that this cultured man was indeed a Nazi. One day, Meinhoff asked Hodgkinson why he was even involved in the war: “[You Canadians are] 3,000 miles from this war, for God’s sake…. Why should you bother your head about it, let alone pay the price you guys are paying in this hospital?” Meinhoff dismissed the argument another pilot made, that everyone knew that Germany would not stop should Rommel be successful in conquering North Africa and if Russia collapsed: “Did it ever occur to you people that the world needs a new order? A system for governing itself, a more efficient method of production and organization, which only we Germans can provide?” A Scottish officer had the last word. “That bullshit you’re peddling is making me sicker than your bullets!” Some weeks later, however, in the Cologne train station, Meinhoff provided a coda of sorts after Hodgkinson took the top off his sandwich and winced when he saw the filling: “Now then, aren’t you sorry you didn’t mind your own business and stay at home in Canada like a good boy?”36
At Dulag Luft, after the obligatory stint in solitary confinement, Colonel Gustave Metterling played the usual game of placing cigarettes within reach without offering them, and softening Hodgkinson up by telling him that he’d learned his English in New York, where he sold forgeries to “the gullible rich.”37 Hodgkinson took the cigarette, guessed that saying he had been a radio announcer before the war wasn’t revealing anything Metterling didn’t already know and agreed with the intelligence officer that Germany would never be able to compete with American production lines.
8 DECEMBER 1941, STALAG LUFT I, NEAR STETTIN, GERMANY, AND STALAG X-B, SANDBOSTEL, GERMANY
THE KRIEGIES LEARN THAT THE UNITED STATES HAS ENTERED THE WAR
The radio was like ones bought across Canada at stores such as Canadian Tire. The power came not from an electrical connection but from the “cat’s whisker,” a thin, fine piece of wire lightly touching a piece of crystalline stone, the wire and the earphone coming from stolen telephone parts. Unlike the ones teenaged boys built on boards so they could be proudly shown off to family, the crystal radio at Stalag Luft I could be taken apart in seconds, so its parts could be hidden. On 7 or 8 December, with one ear pressed to the receiver, the camp’s shorthand expert copied down the news that the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor, and that as a result the United States had entered the Second World War. 38
At Sandbostel, Fisher learned of the Japanese attack from a German guard on 8 December, and immediately recognized it was a strategic mistake. What les religieux learned about Pearl Harbor went unrecorded, but if he learned of it on the night of 7 December, Brother Antoine Lavallée played it safe, writing of his concern for the souls of the hundred Russians for whom they gave the rites in articulo mortis, which the Germans would have dismissed as feminine Christian weakness.39
MID-DECEMBER 1941, STALAG LUFT I, NEAR STETTIN, GERMANY
MAKING HOMEBREW FOR CHRISTMAS
As December wore on, the men in Cox’s barracks readied to celebrate Christmas. They melted Red Cross chocolate to dip peanuts in, which, in the holiday spirit, were placed in decorative dishes made from the foil that had wrapped their cigarettes. The Germans supplied wheat flour, which the enterprising cooks stretched with homemade potato flour, for a cake.
The joyous ornaments of the season heightened the POWs’ feelings of loneliness. Howland’s memories of his family back in Fort Qu’Appelle, of the Christmas scenes in the windows of the red-brick Hudson’s Bay store, were magical. Memories of the crèches in church and at home were at the same time a balm and a source of great pain. The soothing rituals of carols and the expectation of a Christmas meal were double-edged swords, pale imitations of the holiday cheer the POWs once knew.
Perhaps because they knew that behind the convivial singing, which would reach its high point on Christmas Eve, was real pain, in mid-November the guards at Stalag Luft I had given Cox’s barracks a large wooden barrel in which to make homebrew. The POWs started the fermentation using yeast and dried fruit. When their Red Cross supplies of fruit ran out, they added scraps of vegetables, including frostbitten turnip, which, Cox discovered, was surprisingly sweet.
A few weeks before Christmas, the brewmaster decreed that the mash was cooking nicely and that, instead of adding to it, they now had to skim off the fermentation foam. [Because they were brewing in a barrel and not a still, where the alcohol is boiled off and collected in copper tubing, skimming off the foam in which particles were suspended would remove these unwanted particles from the brew.] As Christmas drew closer, two pints of brew per man were ready.
25 DECEMBER 1941, STALAG X-B, SANDBOSTEL, GERMANY, AND STALAG LUFT III, SAGAN, POLAND
CHRISTMAS DAY
Many POWs recall that, no matter how hungry they were the rest of the year, by skimping and saving from their Red Cross parcels (and, in some cases, because of extra rations from the Germans), they were able to have an acceptable Christmas dinner. Their cake may have been as heavy as lead, but Cox’s Christmas dinner measured up. He attributed the gusto with which he and his comrades sang carols to the homebrew. Packing the punch of rotgut whisky, it ensured that they would be hungover. But it also lowered their emotional guard, tightening their bonds to each other, and made the war, at least for that evening, seem something outside the clapboard barracks in which their decorations made from foil spread the light of a weak bulb.
Of the 450 or so Canadians taken prisoner in the previous 12 months, les religieux were the best prepared to celebrate Christmas in their enclaves, in a country that despite its long Christian history was even less accepting of Christ than were the “heathen lands” they were sent to evangelize. Though their letters spoke of the pain of being separated from the Basutos in their time of famine, the missionaries remained les bons pasteurs; “If Jesus were to walk the ground today,” they believed “he would be in a POW camp.”40 With supplies given to them from the Red Cross, on Christmas Eve the Oblates at Sandbostel conducted masses in a small room that had been set aside as a chapel, where they improvised a crèche. Despite one being at 9 p.m. and the other at 11 p.m., both were “midnight masses,” the French Canadians taking special joy in the first, which was en français.
Late that night, a few hundred miles to the east, in Poland, Father Goudreau sat at his desk writing, knowing that as he did, the sky was beginning to lighten above Canada’s most eastern shore. It had been four months since he’d been separated from his brethren and had passed through two other camps, and the strain of being alone was beginning to show as he compared himself to, of all things, the Wandering Jew before continuing, “It’s Christmas! It’s cold outside, the white flakes touch for the first time the soil of Pomerania. It is indeed a little cold in my heart … I am warm tonight, the play of warm friendships of old…. It seems that I will stay here until the end. I have lost faith in being released.
” Alone in his little room in Stalag Luft III, despite the joy of the Nativity and his heartfelt best wishes to the Oblates back in Canada, Goudreau could not help but write that he found himself “at the zero point of hell.”
CHAPTER THREE
January–July 1942
Behind the barbed wire, it is not only the most vigorous who survive, but those who carry fire.
— ALFRED FABRE-LUCE, DOUBLE PRISON
EARLY JANUARY 1942, STALAG VII-A, MOOSBURG, GERMANY
BRIAN HODGKINSON SEES RUSSIAN POWS DIE
Near midnight, having managed to blot out the torment of the cold drops of water that fell on him—the men’s breath having condensed on the ceiling—and the vermin that crept from his paillasse into the warmth of his clothes, the report of three high-powered rifle shots jolted Brian Hodgkinson awake. As he climbed down from his bunk, another inmate rubbed the frost from the window, revealing a Russian POW on the ground near the fence. The “gut-wrenching moans” of another hanging on top of the barbed wire that divided the Russian from the Allied compound provided a ghastly undertone to the POW, who said in horror, “They’re leaving them to die in the cold!” A few minutes later, another recent arrival asked why the Russians headed into their compound rather than out of the camp. The answer: “The poor bastards are starving, and they know if they can get into our compound we’ll feed them. Trouble is they never make it.”41
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