Free The Deserters: A Hidden History of World War II by Charles Glass Page B

a “mad, ferocious grin” as he ordered the new SUSs to strip and throw their clothes and belongings onto blankets. Henderson made a demonstration of examining item after item, then instructed them to wrap everything in the blankets and raise them over their heads.
    When Henderson barked the order for the naked and sweating men to run back and forth across the square, humiliation gave way to physical pain. The weight pressing on Bain’s arms was almost impossible to bear, although he was a physically strong twenty-one-year-old with a prizefighter’s physique. For those with less stamina, it was worse. Henderson shouted, “Get them knees up! Straighten them arms! Left-right, left-right, left. . . . Right . . . wheel!” This went on relentlessly until the sun had nearly set, when Henderson ordered a halt and marched them to their cell.
    Three other prisoners were already inside, squatting against the far wall and scouring a rusty bucket. The airless space, fifty feet long and only eight feet wide, reeked of urine. Henderson told the men to dress and take two blankets each from a pile in the corner. A diagram on the wall explained how the blankets were to be folded for inspection. Each man was issued a “chocolate pot” for body waste. When Henderson locked them inside, each convict claimed a portion of the floor as his bed. Bain and two others, “Chalky” White of the Middlesex Regiment and Bill Farrell from the Durham Light Infantry, whispered to one another in violation of the rules. Bain was afraid that someone was watching through a small hole in the door, although he did not hear anything. “Of course you didn’t,” Chalky whispered. “The bastards wear gym shoes at night.” Farrell said their guards were worse than those in civilian prisons.
    Chalky asked him, “You been in civvy nick then?”
    “Aye. Armley in Leeds. Six months.”
    “What was that for?”
    “Minding my own business.”
    The first lesson of prison, Farrell explained, was never to ask a man his crime. He admitted, though, that his offense was stealing lead from a church roof. Chalky said he had served fifty-six days in the military “glasshouse” at Aldershot, but he did not say what he had done. Suddenly, the door opened and a new voice shouted, “SUS’s . . . stand by your beds!” This was Staff Sergeant Pickering, who introduced himself as “a proper bastard.” Lights out was in three minutes, Pickering shouted, after which he would be listening at the door. “If I hear as much as a whisper I’ll put the whole lot of you on the peg. That understood?”
    Bain lay on one blanket and pulled the other two over his aching body. From a corner of the cell, a man with diarrhea squatted noisily over his “chocolate pot.” All Bain could do was wait for “the brief mercy of sleep.”
    •   •   •
    Bain had not had a peaceful sleep since he witnessed his friends’ looting their comrades’ corpses at Wadi Akarit. In his mind, he had not run away, because he was no longer there. “I seemed to float away,” he recalled. A psychiatrist later told him he had suffered a “fugue.” From the Latin for flight, it meant a sudden escape from reality.
    No one noticed his departure from the Roumana Ridge, until some minutes later a jeep stopped him. Still dazed, Bain stared at a lieutenant. The lieutenant asked him, “Are you going back to rear echelon?” It was as simple as that. Bain got in, and the lieutenant took him to a camp in the rear.
    From the camp, he walked without a word into the desert, still carrying his Lee-Enfield rifle. “All he cared about was moving back, away from the front, away from where the dead Seaforths were disposed on the sand and rocks in their last abandonment, in their terrible cancellations, their sad mockery of the living.”Along the route he had traversed as a fighting soldier, he wandered in the opposite direction as a deserter. Trucks carrying men and supplies to the front ignored