Love's Obsession (10 page)

Jim Stewart was listed as a battle casualty on 31 May 1941, only four months after he had joined the regiment. Not until 31 January 1942, does Jim's military record confirm him as a prisoner of war, although it seems his father and wife knew earlier, in September. It had been an especially traumatic time for Eleanor who, sometime in 1941, had also suffered a miscarriage.
38
Captured prisoners were transferred to the Greek mainland, where they were held at a transit camp at Salonika. Officers were subjected to abuse, forced to lie on the ground, their men ordered to urinate on them. It would be several months before they would get clean clothes, unimaginable for someone used to silk pyjamas.
39

By 19 June, 450 officers and several thousand men, all prisoners from Crete, filled transit camps in northern Greece. All had marched to or been transported there in cattle trucks—thirty or forty men to a truck. Camp conditions were ‘past all belief', the daily rations were one-ninth of a loaf of bread, three-quarters of a Greek Army biscuit, a ladle of soup and two cups of herb tea. Dysentery crippled everyone. Finally, with relief, they heard they were being moved to Germany. Cattle trucks with no sanitation trundled prisoners for seven days and nights to Lübeck from where they walked to their prison, Oflag XC. On parade, German officers inspected them to determine whether any were Jews, while the German guards shot anyone who looked like they were planning escape. Going to the fence to fetch a football or hanging out washing on the barbed wire could get you shot. The RAF bombed them! Despite the fierce cold, prisoners' blankets were withdrawn and they were issued with a single cotton one.
40
Jim claimed he never recovered from the cold of that winter of 1941.

Jack Hamson was a fellow inmate of Oflag XC. He may have known Jim at Cambridge or met him later on Crete, but their bonds were strengthened during their time as prisoners of war, and Jack become one of Jim's few post-war confidants.

Some months later Jim was moved to Oflag VIb—Warburg. This was a squalid camp, set in the middle of a flat muddy plateau, with dingy, damp and badly constructed huts. The lavatories and washing rooms were fetid; fleas lived on everyone. Prisoners complained of the coldest winter they had ever experienced, with forty degrees of frost. Two thousand inadequately clothed soldiers were forced to stand in the snow for roll call twice a day.

This perpetual cold increased our hunger and we were always more than ready for the one bowl of watery soup which the Germans provided at midday. This was collected and eaten in one of the two communal dining huts; Warburg was the only camp where our midday meal was eaten outside our rooms.
41

As the number of prisoners grew, Germany decided to rationalise its POW camps. Officers were concentrated into two oflags—older prisoners went to Spangenberg (Oflag IX A/H) while those under thirty-five, about two thousand in all, came to Oflag VIIB at Eichstätt. Stalags housed ‘other ranks', who were put to work in labour gangs. Under section 29 of the Geneva Convention officers were not allowed to work and although their protection was ensured, they missed the opportunity for activities outside the wire that might have relieved the sickening monotony of prison and the agoraphobia that developed.

Jim would spend nearly four years as a prisoner of war but he could not have known this at the time. His future depended on the progress of the war, and his experiences on Crete gave little comfort.

Eichstätt is a cathedral city in Bavaria, situated to the north of the Danube between Nuremburg and Munich. From his camp in a pleasant river valley, Jim looked toward the spires of the city and the dreamy fairytale castle on the hill. Physically, Oflag VIIB was pleasant. Its stone buildings overlooked a river, and after the perpetual mud of Warburg it was a relief to have the Lagerstrasse, a tarmacked parade area, that doubled as a football ground and tennis courts. Half the officers were housed in stone barracks but others lived in recently constructed huts on a lower level near the river that ran just outside the wire. These huts, dubbed ‘The Garden City', were perpetually cold and damp.

An aircraft factory close by the camp guaranteed that prisoners were not just in enemy hands but liable to be bombed by their own side. Allied air raids were common. On one occasion German guards shot two officers who left their barracks to look at the planes. On another, groups of prisoners were handcuffed in tit-for-tat retaliation for the handcuffing of German prisoners captured during a British raid on the Channel Islands.

Nearly two thousand young officers were housed in the camp. Routines developed. With little to do, many gambled in a room set aside in the hospital. The
chemin de fer
games got out of hand, men lost vast sums of money and were forced to write home telling their wives to sell the family home to repay debts. The most senior British officer eventually took charge and the War Office issued a directive forbidding gambling, although gentler occupations like cards and backgammon were allowed. In a diary entry that today seems surreal, one prisoner records that he ‘settled down for an afternoon of bridge'. Prisoners organised stage shows and concerts. Female impersonators were popular and the YMCA sent musical instruments.

Some prisoners used their time to study. Camp officials set aside a room and POWs rushed each morning to secure a desk. One read for the Bar, others learned languages, yet others gave lectures, and some sat for exams through London University. Not everyone approved of this dedication. Hugo Ironside, a second lieutenant in a tank regiment, was one of a group of prisoners involved in persistent escape attempts. Collectively they were known as the Eichstätt mob. They dug a tunnel towards the wire and might have escaped had the Germans not been alerted by an Englishman who threw a tin containing a note warning the Germans of the escape attempt over the wire. Too many prisoners, Ironside thought, had ‘got into a rut. They were studying this and studying that and they just didn't like their peace being disturbed'.
42

Monotony, frustration, anxiety, and cold. The younger prisoners suffered most. No one knew how long they would be incarcerated or how their lives would finally emerge. Some had careers unlikely to survive the years in prison. Marriages, too, became casualties. Personal relationships were widely discussed and privacy impossible. ‘After years of continual, unrelieved contact with one's brother officers, it was not surprising to find that one's nerves were getting frayed; one was apt to go off the deep end about the smallest things. I found it fatal to share a room with really good friends.
'
43
The one lesson that prison life taught was the love of simple things.

The drab monotony of that life and the continual pangs of hunger seemed to open my eyes and make me see the small and commonplace things of this world for the first time … I was not alone in this appreciation of everyday things; I saw a marked fondness for animals and birds. We were not allowed to keep dogs but the Germans permitted cats in the camp to keep down the rats and mice. Before many months had passed at Eichstatt there must have been at least two hundred cats in the camp.
44

Long-haired cats doubled as useful decoys: ‘when prisoners were moved from one camp to another, wireless valves etc. could be strapped to their tummies & escape the notice of the guards.' Jim had always loved animals but attributed his special fondness for cats to his time as a POW
45
—in the bitter winters, their company warmed him.

Only in writing did some men find true solitude. The War Prisoners Aid section of the YMCA distributed diaries to British prisoners, hoping that men would find some solace in recording their thoughts and sorting their ideas. In his four years in prison Jack Hamson poured over 85,000 words into four prison notebooks. Introspective, philosophical, analytical, he struggled to understand himself and his experiences in Crete. Others used their notebooks to plan for the future, some wrote poems and songs, some kept journals or wrote long lists of renovations they planned to make to their homes, of things they would do when freedom finally arrived.

Jim Stewart wrote long, long lists. From Oflag XC, in September 1941, he had written an almost cheerful, light-hearted letter to his friend Alfirios Westholm, looking to the future and not the past.

This is the end of my war. Pendlebury was killed. I intend to do some reading when books can come from England which takes a long time. Can you do me a favour? Ask the Swedish Red Cross if it can send me some food parcels weekly and get payment from my father (A Stewart, Box 2829N, General Post Office, Sydney, Australia) through the Swedish Consul in Sydney. Do you think that we shall be able to cooperate on the Corpus after the war? There is a danger I may have to leave archaeology, and Vounous—no money!
46

As the years passed his mood darkened and at the end of 1943 he told Westholm:

I'm glad you are out of it all, and I hope your children will never know the misery of it. I've had a lot to think about during these years. One thing I believe, that Archaeology is so unimportant, so divorced from modern life, that it is worth taking seriously. In comparison life and death seem unimportant; perhaps even ideals.
47

Prisoners could send and receive letters, although all passed through the hands of the censor. Friends and colleagues wrote intermittently but Eleanor wrote regularly. For nearly five months she had not known if he were dead or alive. Jim and Eleanor numbered letters to ensure they were read in correct order. On 10 May 1943 Jim wrote his sixteenth letter to his wife. A surviving envelope from Eleanor, who returned to England around this time, was posted from Devon on 12 June 1944. It was her seventy-seventh letter to him.

Colleagues sent books and Jim arranged payment through his father or his bank. Winifred Lamb was delighted to hear he was giving lectures on Cyprus.
48
‘To be a prisoner while others work is a bitter thing', he complained to Alfirios, ‘yet one learns co-operation'.
49
Crawford and Myers both sent parcels and, as someone who had experienced prison in the first war, Crawford advised Jim to use his time to learn German: ‘how well I remember those bloody queues', he added.
50
Jim collected German articles and publications and kept detailed bibliographic lists. He filled prison notebooks, neatly labelled by topic, with his reading—Luristan Bronzes, the Prehistoric pottery of China, Aegean Architecture, four notebooks on the sources of European and Near Eastern history. Bibliographies and notes. Notebook after notebook, seldom dated but occasionally named. When he ran out of notebooks he used flattened out cigarette packets—Sweet Caporal, Capstan Navy Cut, Players—and odd scraps of cardboard or paper. He read widely and voraciously. Lists created order, promised normality, even comprehension. It seems astonishing that one of his few surviving letters to Eleanor should be little more than a list of personal possessions in a trunk.

The site of Vounous continued to occupy his thoughts and in one notebook marked ‘Oflag IX' he summarised Dikaios's publication of the 1931−32 excavations at Vounous, listing pottery types and seeking patterns. Regardless of incarceration, Jim was well supplied with reading matter. He wrote to Westholm offering to send him one of his copies of Dikaios's Vounous volume. He had two.
51

Aside from reading, Jim spent his internment developing, expanding, modifying and refining his ideas on the need for more archaeological work on Cyprus. ‘Plans and more plans,' he told Eleanor, ‘clouds across the moon'.
52
The general idea remained the same, but instead of a British expedition he now envisaged his work being done by a military company of the Cyprus Regiment, a company devoted to archaeological work and, naturally, commanded by himself.

Neat blue writing fills three prison notebooks. He outlines the political and scientific aims of his scheme, the way he plans to sell the idea, and specifies overall organisation and personnel. Almost thirty pages of foolscap constitute a further two appendices. He transcribed letters he had written to fellow archaeologists, pasted in their replies, and bound the pages with thin grey string. It was a way to create order, an imaginary future he could control.

Some people think before they speak, choosing words and phrases in progress along a well-considered pathway. For others, speech is a form of thought, a way of working out problems, solving issues, clarifying ideas. Jim wrote in order to think, and his written arguments are directed as much to himself as others. His writing is surprisingly clear and uncluttered, with few changes to the text, and almost no additions or deletions. And yet the writing is a sort of conversation. Arguments pile on top of each other, but rather than hide the underlying intent they expose it. As any diarist knows, the more you write the more your real thoughts reveal themselves. So, too, with Jim's elaborate proposals.

Jim argued that his proposal was only in part archaeological. For some years he had written of the ‘propaganda' benefits of archaeology, something he believed that both the Italians and Germans understood. His experiences during the war convinced him that the Cyprus Regiment had been badly let down, mostly by English officers, and he argued that useful occupation for demobilised soldiers would avert further tension on the island. He detailed the ‘political' aspect of his proposal in a prison notebook, in which he vented his personal and military frustrations and argued the case for an archaeological survey of Cyprus from a geopolitical standpoint. It is a far-sighted document, but it fails to disguise the self-promotion and self-interest of the author.

The plan is typically ‘Stewart', grand and extravagant, wide-ranging, almost visionary, but ultimately self-serving. His survey, he argued, would be comprehensive. He maintained that everything on the island should be recorded; as with coins and books, so with archaeological sites. He wanted to collect and control it all. The plan saw archaeology as much more than a scientific pursuit and recognised its political, social and economic dimensions. Jim appreciated the need to conserve sites as well as excavate them and spoke of the tourist potential of archaeology and the vital importance of documenting, photographing and publishing. He understood the value of anthropological work as well as field archaeology, but it was all beyond the scope or comprehension of any existing institution and certainly beyond the capacity of a single person.