Deserter: The Last Untold Story of the Second World War

Into the sandy square sauntered Regimental Sergeant Major Grant. Dressed more smartly than the already punctilious staff sergeants, he wore a tailored uniform with a hat and Sam Browne belt normally reserved for officers. A leather band with a shiny RSM insignia was tied around one wrist. Bain saw in Grant’s face ‘the bitter, clenched and potentially vicious expression that seemed to be part of the uniform of the corps’. His apparent lack of physical strength lent him ‘a powerful sense of menace’. RSM Grant strolled among the ranks without a word, reeking disdain.

‘You will march at the double,’ 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 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, afterwards, 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 into 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 foetal 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: