Deserter: The Last Untold Story of the Second World War. Charles Glass
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Grant instructed the six new arrivals. ‘I give the commands mark time, then halt and then right-turn. You will then be facing Captain Babbage.’ Babbage was camp commandant. ‘He’ll have your documents in front of him. He’ll read out your sentences, which you already know. Then he’ll read out the official rules and regulations of Number Fifty-Five Military Prison and Detention Barracks. He’ll ask if you’ve got anything to say. My advice is to keep your mouths shut.’
Bain, a meticulous observer, was harsh in his unspoken assessment of prison staff. It astounded Bain that Babbage, slouched at his desk, was ‘quite as repulsive as he was’:
He was very fat and the sparseness of the colourless hair that was spread in ineffectual thin strands across the pale and lumpy baldness of his head made it difficult to guess his age. The open collar of his KD [khaki drill] shirt showed his almost imperceptible chin disappearing into folds of flesh and his mouth was half open and sagged slightly to one side. The rest of his features were smudged and blurred; his eyes were ill-tempered and bilious looking and the pudgy hands on the desk were noticeably tremulous.
Captain Babbage dealt with each man in turn, reading out name, sentence and offence. To Bain, he said, ‘Three years penal servitude. Desertion in a forward area.’ Bain was not expected to respond, and he didn’t. Babbage, whose appearance did little to detract from his pomposity, launched into a speech he must have given before:
You’re here because you committed crimes. In your case – all of you – it’s the crime of desertion. You’re all cowards. You’re all yellow. You think you’re tough guys and you’re not. You’re soft and you’re yellow. If you weren’t you wouldn’t be here. You’d be with your comrades, soldiering, fighting. Well, you listen to me. You thought you’d leave the dirty work to your comrades. You’d have it nice and easy here. In fact I wouldn’t be surprised if you don’t wish to God you were back with your units. Wherever they are. We’re going to punish you. Make no mistake about it …
Babbage continued in this vein, berating them for cowardice and threatening additional punishments. He warned, ‘You get funny with us and we’ll smash you.’ He recited the regulations, which included: no photographs to be kept; no smoking, ever; no speaking except on Communication Parade, which was ten minutes per day, under the eyes of the staff sergeants; one censored letter to be written home every other Sunday; complaints to be made only to the commandant; frivolous complaints to be punished by solitary confinement on Punishment Diet Number One (eight ounces of dry bread twice a day and a bucket of drinking water); and violence or threats of violence to earn constraint in body-belts and straitjackets. ‘Any questions?’
There were no questions. RSM Grant returned them to the square and Staff Sergeant Brown. Brown ordered them to the cell and into full Service Marching Order, which mean fastening on large and small packs, (empty) ammunition pouches, gas cape and ground sheet. Brown drilled them for an hour outdoors, marching them forward and back, wheeling and turning. Bain remembered struggling for breath and being unable to see for sweat over his eyes. At drill’s end, they marched back into the cell to clean it. The time was eleven in the morning.
Tiffin, or lunch, was at noon: the same as breakfast, except that jam was added to the bread. The afternoon consisted in pack-drill, during which Bain experienced ‘a dark numbness’ that defused some of his anger. Standing motionless, the SUSs were ordered to talk to one another for ten minutes. This was Communication Parade. The staff sergeants walked up and down the lines, directing men who were not talking to speak to the man opposite, telling those who were speaking to watch what they said. Bain did not know the man he was facing, but, to avoid a reprimand from Staff Sergeant Brown, asked him his civilian job. He had worked at Watney’s Brewery. Brown ordered Bain to continue talking, and he asked, ‘Read any good books lately?’ This made the man smile, prompting a rebuke from Staff Sergeant Brown: ‘I catch you two grinning again I’ll have your dinners.’ At Mustafa Barracks, ‘Smiling on Parade’ was a punishable offence.
Late afternoon brought the last meal of the day: watery mutton stew with rice. The SUSs ate silently in their cells, and the lights went out on schedule at 9.30 p.m. ‘John had completed a full day,’ Bain wrote, ‘one which, with perhaps minor changes, would be the model for every other week-day he would spend as a prisoner in this place.’ Some days were different in one respect: they were worse.
Six weeks into Bain’s confinement, the administration introduced a novel punishment: the hill. One afternoon, a truck delivered three loads of sand that the SUSs piled onto a corner of the square. They returned to their cells that night wondering what new torment the sand portended.
Ray Rigby, a British writer who as a soldier served two spells in a British military prison in North Africa, wrote about another sand pile in his novel The Hill. As at the Mustafa Barracks, his fictionalized prison received truckloads of sand without explanation one day: ‘All day long trucks roared into the prison grounds and deposited the sand, and slowly the hill began to take shape. The prisoners, bare to the waist and sweating in the intense heat, shovelled away in silent fury.
The hill grew, reinforced with large rocks, until the men had built it up to a height of sixty feet. Rigby wrote that ‘every man-Jack of them hated the sight of it’. They were ordered to scale its summit and race down the far side, again and again, until they could no longer walk, let alone run. A staff sergeant forced one prisoner over the hill so many times that it killed him. The hill of the novel symbolized everything the inmates, and even a few guards, despised about British military justice.
At Mustafa Barracks, on the morning after the SUSs had piled the sand up at 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 labour 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 US 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-Private First Class 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 MO 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