Barbed Wire Ballads
Music and poetry helped two Canadian soldiers endure captivity, hunger, and forced labour in a Second World War German POW camp.
Music and poetry helped two Canadian soldiers endure captivity, hunger, and forced labour in a Second World War German POW camp.
ALF BINNIE WAS NINETEEN IN 1939 WHEN HE LEFT MONTREAL FOR LONDON, ENGLAND. He was looking for adventure. He found it as a pilot in a Wellington bomber in No. 218 Squadron Royal Air Force, but that adventure did not last long. After flying missions over Le Havre and Boulogne, France, and Hanover, Dusseldorf, and Wilhelmshaven, Germany, Sergeant Binnie was shot down over Alkmaar, the Netherlands, on March 12, 1941.
“The Germans placed me in a naval hospital … and treated me to 3 1/2 months solitary in a cell and 3 operations on my thigh,” he later wrote in a letter to a fellow veteran. “Infection was finally halted which saved amputation of the limb.”
After recovering, Binnie was sent to the POW camp Stalag IX-C, a sprawling complex composed of many separate sub-camps, headquartered in Bad Sulza, Germany.
Eighteen months later, Canadians captured during the August 19, 1942, raid on Dieppe, France, began to arrive at the overcrowded camp. Among them was another Montrealer, Corporal Robert Prouse of the Second Canadian Division, who had been a private detective before the war.
It is not known whether Binnie and Prouse ever met, but the two men did share the same world of forced labour, hardship, and deprivation. And they each had a creative talent that helped them get through the hardest times. Binnie played jazz guitar. Prouse sketched, wrote
poems, and kept a secret diary that became the basis of his memoir, Ticket to Hell via Dieppe, published internationally in 1982.
In that memoir, Prouse recalled a twenty-one-day incarceration in solitary confinement that he served as punishment for an escape attempt: “Alone in the cell, the time seemed endless and the only really active thing was my mind…. My main pastime was writing poetry.”
During the Second World War, the German army and air force operated dozens of Stalags (short for Stamm
lager), holding hundreds of thousands of prisoners of war. At Stalag IX-C, as many as forty-seven thousand prisoners were confined under crowded conditions. In his book, Prouse described a sub-camp where he was held: “The camp at Molsdorf consisted of a large group of huts surrounded by barbed wire and overlooked by a machinegun tower equipped with a search light. Guards patrolled the perimeter with police dogs, while other guards intermingled on the inside. It was dusty and dirty in the hot weather and a sea of mud when it rained.”
The prisoners worked in salt mines and stone quarries. “They gave them very little to eat, which was very hard on them. Mostly, just soup and hard bread,” Alf Binnie’s widow, Joan Binnie, said in an interview in 2013, four years after her husband’s death. “I asked Alf how they managed to exist, and he said it was only because they were so young — nineteen or twenty. He said you could take a heck of a lot.”
In addition to the meager German rations, the Allied prisoners received Red Cross packages that contained extra food and cigarettes. According to Prouse, the latter were used as camp currency: A bar of soap cost fifty cigarettes; a bar of chocolate, two hundred. Binnie, who did not smoke, saved his cigarettes and, in February 1942, used them to buy a guitar from a shop in the nearby city of Weimar. With the camp commandant’s support, the prison guards made the purchase on Binnie’s behalf, on the condition that he would play for them. The bill of sale records a price of 120 Reichsmarks. What it cost Binnie in cigarettes is not known.
Although the Red Cross sometimes provided musical instruments to POWs, this guitar was special: a finely crafted copy of an archtop guitar designed by the famous American musical-instrument company Gibson. With its pearloid pickguard and headstock, it was a classy-looking and quality-sounding instrument. “Alf was floored because it was so beautiful,” recalled his widow.
Binnie, a fan of the Romani-French musician Django Reinhardt, brought gypsy-jazz stylings to a prison-camp orchestra named Jimmy Culley and the Stalagians and to a smaller combo known as the Four Bilge Boys.
Under the Geneva Convention, which both Germany and Britain had signed, captors were required to provide intellectual diversions and recreational facilities for prisoners of war. Bands like Binnie’s were therefore allowed to exist among British and Canadian prisoners. (Conditions were much harsher for prisoners from countries like Russia that had not signed the convention.) According to Joan Binnie, the guards in Stalag IX-C welcomed the entertainments put on by prisoners. “The Germans really enjoyed anything to do with music and would sit in the front row,” she recalled Alf Binnie telling her.
On Sunday, April 26, 1942, both the orchestra and the
Bilge Boys combo performed in a revue entitled Strike Up
the Band. The orchestra played such numbers as “Smugglers Nightmare” and Cole Porter’s “Night and Day.” The Four Bilge Boys provided levity with a performance entitled “It Pays to Advertise.” After the intermission, they returned with “It Still Pays to Advertise.” Although most of the music was upbeat, the concert ended on a poignant note as a choir joined the orchestra for “The World is Waiting for the Sunrise.”
The song had been published shortly after the First World War by the Canadian songwriting team of Eugene Lockhart and Ernest Seitz. For the young prisoners of war cut off from their homes, the lyrics must have been especially moving:
Dear one, the world is waiting for the sunrise, Every rose is heavy with dew. The thrush on high his sleepy mate is calling, And my heart is calling to you.
“Alf told me, you would almost go crazy sometimes,” Joan Binnie recalled. “The music helped get through bad times.”
Just as music helped Binnie, writing helped Prouse to endure his ordeal. He recorded his thoughts, observations, and feelings on papers he kept hidden in secret hidey-holes that he’d built into his barracks while working as a camp carpenter. On his escape attempts, he carried his “scribblings” with him, concealed between two layers of leather in the soles of his boots.
Among his writings were nearly two dozen “Barbed Wire Ballads,” poems that addressed topics such as freedom, comradeship, and homesickness.
His poem “Misadventure” commemorated a fellow soldier who was shot dead while attempting a midnight escape: “The dark form now a part of night, silenced for all time/ He tried and failed, one asks no more, the sacrifice supreme.”
His poem “Land of my Birth” began: “I long for a glimpse of my homeland afar,/ Of bright Northern Lights and the twinkling stars.”
“Besides being a useful hobby for whiling away the hours and releasing pent-up feelings, [the poems] gave me a lasting record of prison life and depict some of a prisoner’s feelings and longings,” he later wrote in his memoir.
Through three years of captivity and two escape attempts,