from war shock is not a weakling, he is not a coward. He is a battle casualty.
Psychology for the Fighting Man, p. 353
A FEW MILES INTO THE EGYPTIAN DESERT east of Alexandria, the prison at Britain’s Mustafa Barracks was the final destination for soldiers convicted of crimes from desertion and disobedience to rape and murder. The base had stood, since the British occupation of Egypt in 1882, beside the Roman camp that Octavian erected after his victory over Mark Antony and Cleopatra in 24 bc. For the British, it had additional resonance: in 1801, they had defeated Napoleon’s forces there; and the barracks was an assembly point for many of the regiments sent on the disastrous Gallipoli campaign against Turkey in 1915. Like Rome, Britain used the base primarily to cow the natives in Alexandria. The prison to punish wayward troops was a later addition.
The military detention centre at Mustafa was notorious. Allan Campbell McLean based a novel, The Glasshouse, on his fifty-six days confined within its walls. A character in his book recalled that the ‘old sweats’ who had done time in many prisons reserved a special hatred for Mustafa Barracks:
Their talk always came round to the one in the desert near Alexandria. The Alex one was the worst of the lot, they said, the screws there egged on by a mad bastard of a commandant, who would have stuck the boys in front of a firing squad if he hadn’t reckoned on Rommel doing the job for him when they had done their time and got back to their units.
One blazing afternoon in the early summer of 1943, an army truck dumped John Bain and five other prisoners at, in Bain’s words, ‘the great iron-studded door that looked almost jet-black against the high white walls’. The door to 55 Military and Detention Barracks opened, and the shackled convicts marched into a square formed by two-storey detention barracks and rows of solid steel cell doors. While the men stood at attention, a Military Policeman named Staff Sergeant Hardy informed them of their new status: ‘From now on, you are S.U.S’s – Soldiers Under Sentence. You will do everything at the double. You understand? Everything. You do not move unless it’s at the double.’ So confident were the guards that escape was impossible that they removed the men’s chains. Staff Sergeant Hardy then marched them double-time into the middle of the square, where he turned them over to Staff Sergeant Henderson.
Hardy and Henderson dressed in identical starched khaki drill clothes, peaked caps and shining boots. In common with the other MPs guarding prisoners behind the lines, they had not been to the battlefront or faced the enemy in combat. This did not, however, deter them from playing tough with men who had. Henderson ordered each SUS to answer to his name and serial number. When the first, Private Morris, answered, ‘Sarnt’, the sergeant’s face seemed to Bain to contort into ‘a mixture of snarl and smile’. Henderson went into a rage: ‘Not Sarnt, you dozy man! Staff! You call us Staff … Understand? Staff’s what you call us. All except the RSM [Regimental Sergeant Major] and the commandant. You call them Sir.’
Reading out Bain’s name and number, he said, ‘I see you’re in the Gordon Highlanders. What’s your regimental motto?’
Bain answered, ‘Bydand.’
‘Staff!’
‘Bydand, Staff.’
‘Bydand. Aye. And what does that mean, Private Bain?’
‘Stand fast, Staff.’
‘Stand fast. That’s the motto of the Gordon Highlanders and they’ve always lived up to it. Till now. They never retreated. Not in the whole history of the regiment. But you didn’t stand fast, Private Bain, did you! You horrible man. You took a powder. You got off your mark. You’re a disgrace to a great regiment. My father fought with the Gordon Highlanders in the Great War. He stood fast, Bain. He didna take a powder. So I’m going to keep a special eye on you, Bain.’
Henderson detailed the daily regimen: reveille at zero six hundred hours, inspection, daily assignment of tasks, back into the cells at seventeen hundred, lights out at twenty-one thirty. Speaking was forbidden. ‘If you’re caught talking at any time you’ll be on a charge and you’ll get punished,’ he said. ‘Three days solitary on PD One. That’s Punishment Diet Number One. Bread and water.’ Bain noticed Henderson’s lips curl to expose 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 offence 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 diarrhoea 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 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
