PRISONERS AND CAPTIVES

By EILUNED LEWIS

ONE of the petitions of the Litany gathers together a small company of oddly assorted people, bound to each other by their common peril. All that travel by land or by water, all women labouring of child, all sick persons and young children. And then, a little apart from this group, asking not for safety but only for pity, the company of all prisoners and captives.

There they stand, the Elizabethan travellers in doublet and hose, looking to their weapons before mounting their horses, or stepping aboard their galleons with every prospect of scurvy, shipwrecks, pirates and maroonings ; sick people awaiting the ministrations of the barber-surgeon ; little children in stiff ruffs and farthingales, and women facing the fierce pains of childbirth without anaesthetics. But it is when we turn to the prisoners and captives that the scene darkens. Damp, ague-ridden, straw, and in the half-darkness the shape of the rack ; the fear of being forgotten in the lair of an Algerine pirate ; the livelier fear of being remembered by the Inquisition of Spain.

Time was, when we were young, that the grim prisons of the past seemed quaint anachronisms. We were taken to see them on fine Saturday afternoons (children half-price), and no doubt our elders, as they jerked their way back through the turnstiles into the pleasant light of day, were soberly thankful that such things had ceased to be. Now night has fallen again on lost mankind, and thinking of the vast, unreckoned number of captives the world over, we ask if they are all the more in need of God's pity and such help as sinful man can devise. Families and friends of prisoners of war can take

comfort in knowing that conditions in the•camps are still ordered by military convention and observe the decencies of agreed inter- national treatment. The enemy, one suspects, is more within than without ; the sense of futility, the nightmare Life-in-Death, is the fear that looks over each prisoner's shoulder.

That the spirit can triumph over captivity we know. The most poignant of St. Paul's epistles were written from his Roman prison ; the visions of a tinsmith in Bedford Gaol have been translated into more than a hundred languages, and the gayest book in the world came into the head of a man chairled to a bench in a stinking pirate ship. Was there something common to the condition of all three that fostered their genius? It is possible, even probable, that in these tragic years some saint, poet or wit, concealed as Prisoner of War, No. 4321, is sharpening the sword of his spirit.

One of the manifold duties of the Red Cross is to see that the minds of our prisoners are kept from rotting, and that whether a man be tinsmith, poet, or both at once, the right books reach him in his camp. Quite a number of them are the tinsmiths' lineal descendants, the engineers and metallurgists of today. But the list of subjects studied comprises the whole scale of human activity: physics and diamond-boring, jute manufactures and Old Provencal, campanology and orchestration, shipping and paper-making—it covers sheets of foolscap, this catalogue of things that a man would like to be doing.

From small beginnings and by way of countless obstacles, the scheme has grown and developed, and now the blue official forms and the parcels of books have become a bridge joining the prisoners to the world they have left behind. For the time being they seem dwellers on another planet, and we are surprised to find them studying hotel-keeping and advertising, just as we should be if we discovered these occupations among the Martians. There is a Stalag in Germany which boasts an English school with a syllabus of sixty-three subjects, ranging from Diesel engineering to music and first-aid. Are patience and fortitude in the list, one wonders, or are these compulsory subjects which each man must learn for himself? One of the Oflags has a university divided into six faculties, and holds classes in twenty-two languages, including Albanian and Tamil. By grace of various educational authorities on our side of the bridge, examinations can now be held in the camps, with properly appointed invigilators. Special papers in Malay and Chinese have recently been set by the School of Oriental Languages.

Most men are eager to pursue the callings they followed in civil life. An Australian captured in Crete wants to study the design of clothes, and another man asks for a handbook on boxing. On the other hand, who among us would dare label as escapist the ship's- stoker who wishes to take up pig-farming, the infantryman with a taste for hieroglyphics, and the man, requesting books on gardening and general knowledge, who adds, "Don't send me a book on humour. I get plenty here"?

Almost one thinks of them sometimes with envy as the only

people in the world today with leisure to study. Perhaps it is true to say that their lives are simplified, but there ends their advantage. Even leisure, it seems, is scarcely in the day's routine, and there are difficulties, such as delay in the arrival of books, shortage of paper and overcrowding. It is not easy to concentrate in a room containing forty men. Then with the shortening days come lengthening cares, for light is precious, and when daylight fades on the glifnmering page the differential equation, the orchestral score, and the intricacies of pig-farming look very much the same. This is a black-out which we in this country have not yet con- templated, when five o'clock may ring down the curtain on know- ledge, and only thought be left. What do they think about them?

"If I have freedom in my love And in my soul am free, Angels alone, that soar above Enjoy such liberty."

sang the Cavalier poet behind the bars of his gaol. Perhaps in the end it is the prisoners and captives who will be best equipped to carve out the new world, but we must see to it now that they are furnished with the right tools.

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