A Prisoner Looks Back

"On the whole, I would say that captivity had a beneficial effect upon all but the most unteachable."

So, after two years in a German prison camp, a young British officer summed up the days behind the wire that many soldiers regard as completely wasted.

Commando Captain Robin Campbell, D.S.O., sociable, absent-minded son of one of Britain's top-flight diplomats (Sir Ronald Hugh Campbell, now Ambassador to Portugal), was wounded and captured in the brilliant but unsuccessful 1941 raid on Field Marshal Rommel's headquarters in North Africa. Exchanged (because he had lost a leg), he summed up his prison-camp experience in an article for London's literary review Horizon, reprinted in Boston's June Atlantic Monthly.

Prison life, wrote Captain Campbell, is perfect for reading and writing, leads men to review the bases of their lives, overhaul their values. Said he: "I fancy that many people would benefit by a year of enforced inactivity and freedom from small anxieties and distractions" to examine their own and others' conduct.

Racket at Home. Many prisoners agreed that "politics were a dirty racket and all politicians hypocrites. . . . Many prisoners are passionately curious about postwar planning and a copy of the Beveridge Report was a best-seller in the Camp."

The trouble is that imprisonment goes on too long, "breeds a dreadful staleness" while "an exclusively male community seems to lack emotional drive and spontaneity." Prisoners are always hungry: there is never enough to eat, although light diet makes for fitness, up to a point. Red Cross parcels are lifesavers but monotonous. The total lack of privacy makes a man develop "a kind of reptilian insensitiveness--like crocodiles in their tank at the Zoo, which walk over each other without either appearing to notice the other."

Innocent Arrogance. The British "have one enormous advantage over prisoners of other nationalities--they expect to be well treated ... are genuinely astonished and indignant if they are not cared for as honored guests." Wrote Campbell:

"Their standards of food, sanitation and comfort are so high and their astonishment and disgust when expected to put up with lower standards so unfeigned and unrancorous that the Germans, unwilling to admit that their own standards are lower, are shamed into making improvements.

"It is quite impossible for the Germans to put across any Herrenvolk stuff in the face of the innocent arrogance of British soldiers, who are impenetrable to the idea of German superiority and simply think it uproariously funny. This baffles the Germans."

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