Games like bridge and, for Darch, cribbage, were vital ways to keep their spirits up and their competitive instincts honed. And the games did more than simply take up time, as important as that was. In a world where they were powerless, where a guard nicknamed “Ukrainian Joe” sadistically bullied and physically pushed around men who could not respond, card games and cribbage reminded the Kriegies that, elsewhere, rules governed everyone equally. The games provided and transported players from the drab surroundings of the prison camp to a place that all knew from before the war. “You forgot you were in a miserable hut in Germany when you were playing; you had to concentrate on the cards and think about strategy,” explains Darch, who found that, as did writing and receiving letters, cribbage took him out of the prison camp.
CHAPTER FIVE
October–December 1942
“Anyone stepping over this trip-wire will be shot”
— SIGN IN POW CAMPS
4 OCTOBER 1942, MILAG NORD, NEAR BREMEN, GERMANY
FATHER LOUIS LARIVIÈRE USES SPECIAL WARTIME PRIESTLY POWERS
On 4 October, Father Larivière did something not covered in any of the theology or canon law courses he took while studying to become a priest. So that the celebrants at the second (5 p.m.) mass he conducted could have communion, which he was required to have with them, he made recourse to the special powers Pope Pius XII had given priests in war zones. Larivière gave himself special dispensation from the rule of Eucharist Fasting, a rule that no longer exists. The rule that communicants must fast for five or six hours before consuming the Eucharist was meant to ensure that the body and blood of Christ would not be mixed with ordure or urine.
The Protestant padres required only Bibles when preaching to or comforting the men; the Anglicans, The Book of Common Prayer; but Catholic priests required more than their missals, Hosts and communion wine. Presumably the German censors, who earlier in the year pondered letters asking for titles such as Apologia Pro Vita Sua, were relieved to find in a June letter a less technical list: New Testaments and hymnals; catechisms; and pamphlets on the Church, the sacraments and mass, social questions and married life.78
Larivière likely referred to this last in early October. For though the details are lost, he had to deal with the morale-crushing receipt of one or more “Dear John” letters. “There is nothing more demoralizing for a soldier, especially if he is a prisoner, than the infidelity of the other,” he wrote to Monsignor Joseph Bonhomme. “I hope that young Canadian wives are made to realize how odious this injustice is toward a conscript.”79
EARLY OCTOBER 1942, MARSEILLES, VICHY FRANCE
DUMAIS SEEKS HELP FROM THE AMERICAN CHARGé D’AFFAIRES
He expected a warmer welcome from his fellow North American.
A day earlier, just before Dumais left for the station where he was to take the train to Marseilles, the hotelier who risked his life hiding him grasped, then dropped, the Canadian’s hand before hugging and kissing the foreigner who had come to fight for France’s liberty. Now, having just explained to the American consul in Marseilles who he was and that the two Free French soldiers with him wanted to escape to fight under General Charles de Gaulle, Dumais stood dumbfounded as the consul said, “The United States is a neutral country…. There’s nothing I can do for you.”80 Although the United States had been at war for almost a year, it maintained diplomatic relations with Vichy France, as did Canada.
A short while later, believing that they were the reason he’d been given the cold shoulder, Dumais’s companions persuaded him to try again, this time alone. The consul saw Dumais as soon as he entered the consulate but didn’t have time to speak before Dumais said, “You’re American and I’m Canadian. Does that frontier really make so much difference?”81 Set back on his heels, the consul asked, “Where are your French friends?” Dumais told him that he’d left them in a café. Legally this changed nothing, but it changed everything. “Go to this address. There you will find a doctor. Tell him you have a sore throat and a sore right foot. Go at once, and don’t tell your friends. Good-bye and good luck.”
8 OCTOBER 1942, STALAG VIII-B, LAMSDORF, GERMANY
THE DIEPPE SURVIVORS ARE SHACKLED
The ripping sound of the Schmeisser submachine-gun bolts being pulled back seemed but the stuff of another post-Dieppe nightmare. Then, through the pre-dawn darkness, came Sergeant Major Beesley’s call: “Everybody up!” Just a few moments later, the guttural “Raus! Raus!” of armed guards as they slammed doors open could be heard.82 In Grogan’s hut, the goon nicknamed “Dog Man” led five Doberman pinschers, while another guard walked down the aisle with his rifle’s bayonet ominously locked in place.
As the Canadians were marched to the furthest end of Stalag VIII-B, the thought that they had survived the beaches of Dieppe only to be massacred on a field in the middle of a cool German night seemed too horrible to be true, but nothing else seemed to make sense.
Once assembled beyond the barracks, instead of the staccato sound of gunfire drowning out the thud of bullets hitting human flesh, the Canadians heard an interpreter read in halting English a statement that caused equal measures of bewilderment and derision: “The German Government has always shown the utmost clemency to prisoners of war and accorded them the treatment due honourable men captured in battle.”
The machine guns would not be silent much longer, the Canadians feared, when they heard that both at Dieppe and during a later raid on a Channel island, German soldiers had been found shot with their hands tied behind their backs and that, since the British government refused to provide assurance that such inhumane treatment would not be repeated, Germany had “no alternative but to take reprisals against all the members of the Dieppe Force!”83
The Canadians knew nothing, of course, about the raid on the island of Sark on 3 October. Some may have known that when the commander of the Royal Hamilton Light Infantry, Lieutenant Colonel Robert Labatt, had asked Major General Hamilton Roberts, the commander of Operation Jubilee, what to do about prisoners who could not be taken back to England, Roberts is reputed to have reminded his men that they carried revolvers. Roberts’s orders were that prisoners were to be kept in pens if captured before being loaded onto landing craft so they could be taken to England and interrogated. Morever, he also ordered that this written order not be taken ashore. But Brigadier William Southam had brought a written copy ashore, and the Germans had found it. Ron Beal heard one German say that the Canadians were going to be treated like pigs because on the beaches of Dieppe they had taken German POWs to a “Schweinerstall,” a tendentious translation of “pig pen.”
In any event, what mattered now were the machine guns, the curious sight of the guards standing in front of them holding two-and-a-half-foot-long strands of rope and the order for ten men to step forward. Determined to show the Germans that the Canadians were better soldiers than they were, Beesley called out “Marker” and Remi Leroux stepped forward.84 The Germans took no chances and marched Leroux and the nine men who followed him into a building at bayonet point. Once inside, each was ordered to cross his arms in front so hands could be tied together.
Over the next few hours, as groups of men were marched away so that their hands could be tied, the Dominion soldiers quickly found ways to mock the Germans. Some laughingly compared the punishment to childhood games of cowboys and Indians. Others had comrades untie them so they could get back in line, to be tied up all over again.
After the last Canadian hands at Lamsdorf had been tied, the officer leading the operation again spoke through the interpreter. As part of the reprisal, the Canadians were forbidden both from leaving their barracks during the day, except to go to the latrine, and from lying down on their bunks during the day. The cutting off of their Red Cross parcels violated Geneva and, more importantly, threw the Canadians back onto the inadequate German rations. Sentries at Lamsdorf were ordered to shoot anyone outside the barracks who was not in a group of ten tied or shackled men accompanied by a “sanitator,” a medic
al orderly identified by a white arm band, whose hands were not tied because they were needed to help the shocked men use the latrine. As well, the attack guard dogs that normally patrolled the outside perimeter of the camp at night would now patrol inside the compound during the day.
Shackling struck at the heart of their honour as soldiers. According to the laws of war, POWs are not criminals. Rather, they are prisoners because they belong to a military enemy; they are incarcerated because of international politics, that is, because Canada was at war with Nazi Germany and each of them represented Canada. Even more than the difficulties shackling caused for eating or drinking, shackling was a symbolic attack, making men who had voluntarily signed their attestation papers that made them soldiers in King George’s Canadian Army appear like men on a chain gang and thus as unfree men tout court.
The men were deeply humiliated by the indelicacy of the latrine arrangements. Being unable to unbutton their own trousers meant that several times a day another man had to perform this intimate act. “Worse, both for the ‘sanitator’ and us, was the need to clean us. We did not have toilet paper. Instead, he had to use pages ripped from a softcover pocket book. Before using it, he had to rumple it up and then, of course, clean us in the most degrading manner. And each of us had to stand there while he did this to nine other men,” recalls Darch, who more than seven decades later still cringes at the memory.
MID-OCTOBER 1942
DUMAIS REACHES “THE ROCK”
The cut to half a biscuit and half a cup of water a day was not unexpected after Gibraltar signalled it could not spare a ship to meet the trawler that had picked up Dumais and 64 other men from a beach near Canet-Plage, a small village on the Mediterranean Sea. As he sweated under the hot sun while his thirst mounted and stomach growled, Dumais could not help but think of the few days he’d spent at the doctor’s in Marseilles, where he became a “parcel” in the care of Patrick Albert O’Leary, the nom de guerre of Albert-Marie Guérisse.
There he’d had his first bath in weeks, slept between starched sheets, been given clean clothes and, before the doctor even came home, had afternoon tea with his wife. During the days he stayed in his room reading, spending the evenings talking with his hosts.
Had Dumais known that O’Leary, who after escaping at Dunkirk returned to France to run an escape line, had said he was a Canadian airman to explain his accent, the real Canadian would have understood why O’Leary confirmed Dumais’s identity by quizzing him on obscure details about Quebec and Montreal. A few days later, Dumais was surprised when O’Leary led him into a train compartment filled with rough-looking men—and flabbergasted when he started speaking in English to the men, who were also on home runs.
At Canet-Plage, O’Leary placed the French-speaking Dumais in a hotel and the others in a three-room cottage. Four nights later, at 1 a.m., O’Leary led them single file down to the beach, where they waited, scanning the sea, not for a light but for a dark spot that would grow larger as the boat moved closer. After hours of shivering in the darkness, as the first hint of light appeared on the horizon, O’Leary led them back to the cottage. The next night was equally disappointing, as was the next after that. MI9’s standard operating procedure could be summed up in baseball lingo: “Three strikes and you’re out.” O’Leary’s radioman, however, convinced London to try again. Late that night, unsure whether he’d really seen a patch of blackness in the darkness, Dumais shut his eyes for several seconds. When he opened them, “the dark spot was still there and was definitely bigger.”85
Bigger, but not big. Instead of boats like the landing craft that took the Fusiliers de Mont-Royal onto the beaches at Dieppe or like the more than 30-foot-long voyageur canoes that could hold three tons of cargo and 12 men, Dumais saw a couple of dinghies. Concerned about the stability of a dinghy designed for two holding eight standing men, Dumais “gingerly bent down to hold onto the side” of the small craft, only to find about an inch of freeboard.
A few days earlier, Dumais had imagined an escape involving a Royal Navy destroyer whisking him to Gibraltar at 30 knots. Reality was much more prosaic: the dinghies took them to a small trawler, crewed by ex-pat Poles, capable of making only six knots. The heat could be alleviated by a swim, but nothing could be done about the cut in rations, which, when some men were caught queuing up for seconds, the captain enforced with the threat of throwing the miscreants into the sea.
Since the trawler had to look like a working fishing boat, whenever a boat and aircraft came near, Dumais and the others had to scramble under upturned lifeboats or reeking fishing nets. One night, woken abruptly by the sound of shells straddling the trawler, Dumais ran for his lifeboat station and heard from the dark sea a voice calling out through a loud-hailer, “What ship are you?” Since the men knew that the British gunners had their range, each moment seemed endless, until the captain called out the name of his boat. Dumais had speculated about the ship’s allegiance but never imagined that “the smelly old trawler” belonged to the Royal Navy.86
19 OCTOBER 1942, STALAG LUFT III, SAGAN, POLAND
FATHER GOUDREAU ASKS FOR SOMETHING FROM HOME
Although his days were filled with ministering to some 500 men or reading philosophy and theology, time and separation from his confrerers wore heavily on Father Goudreau. Letters helped, though the seemingly random sequence in which some arrived made logical exchange difficult. Back in August, he tried to put his best face forward when he told Father Gilles Mousseau that just seeing his “patriarchal beard” in the photo he’d enclosed in a letter made him smile. But the strain soon broke through as Goudreau echoed the psalmist, writing, “Thus, the days pass…. but the months are long. When will our sacrifice end?” In September, an exchange with Father Terragon, in which Goudreau urged his friend to start editing the book he was writing as soon as he could, even though “university presses take such a long time” to publish, took Goudreau beyond the barbed wire.
Just how much life behind the barbed wire influenced Goudreau is evident in a mid-October letter to his sister. “You would not believe the happiness that flashes in our eyes with the receipt of a letter,” he writes before going on to a simile that owes less to Matthew 5:14 (“You are the light of the world”) than it does to what he’d heard from hundreds of downed airmen: “It is like a jet of burning crude oil.”
At the end of the letter, Goudreau turns to a more banal concern. Since he doubts that the latest fix of his watch’s main spring will last, he asks that his brother-in-law contact the Tacy Watch Company for a replacement spring. For without the watch, time moved even more slowly.
EARLY NOVEMBER 1942, STALAG VIII-B, LAMSDORF, GERMANY
HUNGRY CANADIANS WATCH HELPLESSLY AS RUSSIAN POWS DIE
As colder weather set in, morale plummeted.
The Canadian prisoners had not yet received any mail, neither had their families. Indeed many, including Darch’s, did not know if their loved ones were alive. Family lore says that when Darch’s mother learned he was a POW, she fainted.
With their hands tied, everyday tasks became impromptu ballets for the POWs. Rolling a cigarette required three men: one each to hold the paper, pour the tobacco and provide a wet tongue against which to rub the gummed side of the rolling paper.
Neither the daily rations nor the twice-weekly restaurant-sized pat of margarine or one-ounce slice of stinking fish or cheese filled stomachs, though they did cause hundreds of cases of dysentery, which both the men and the sanitator faced with admirable stoicism. Sometimes the meat in the soup was easily identified by the rat’s skeleton found in the broth. Yet despite their hunger, the Canadians would stand by the fence that divided their compound from the Russians’ and throw their emaciated allies what food they could.
Nothing the Canadians could do, however, could stem the typhus epidemic that killed hundreds of Russians. Every morning, human skeletons, barely able to walk themselves, somehow summoned up the strength to carry dead comrades on anything that would serve as a stretcher out
of the camp. The soldiers, universally known as Ivans, took step after exhausting step until, without a word from a minister let alone the traditional volley for a soldier, they dumped their comrades, not yet stiff from rigor mortis, into an open pit.
MID-NOVEMBER 1942, ARBEITSKOMMANDO 1049, NIEDERORSCHEL, GERMANY
PROVOST MARSHAL A. ROBERT PROUSE LEARNS TO CUT WOOD
The doctor in Rouen told Private Robert Prouse that even though his legs were numb, he must keep them moving, so he spent hours sweeping the floor and bringing food to those more badly wounded than he was. One day, he graduated to being an “anaesthetist”—one of four who held a patient down while a German doctor operated without the aid of anaesthesia. In early September, he was among those shipped to the hospital at Stalag IX-C, 150 miles southwest of Berlin, arriving just in time for the typhus epidemic.
In an effort to staunch the outbreak of diseases carried by lice and fleas, the POWs were shaved from head to toe; Prouse never forgot the moment that a German orderly held his penis in one hand and with a straight razor swiped away his pubic hair. Mercifully, the doctor at the nearby hospital used anaesthesia when he operated on Prouse’s infected calf. The hospital staff were less fastidiousness about the ward’s toilet, “a filthy mess, with the floor, walls and seat completely soiled.”87
Prouse arrived at the POW camp to find his comrades’ hands tied with cord used to bind Red Cross parcels. The camp authorities knew he was Canadian but ignored this, and the fact that, since he was an NCO, he could not be made to work. Assuming that because he was a Canadian he was also a lumberjack, Prouse was assigned to Arbeitskommando 1049, a plywood factory. For piling and cutting logs with a power saw (something he’d never seen before) and later as a carpenter’s helper, reichsmarks were credited to his account, which he could have spent at the camp’s canteen had there been one.
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