Prisoners of War Read Online Free Page A

might be?”
    “No sir.”
    Munson frowned. “Your father owns that big plantation out on Choctaw Creek?”
    “Yes sir.”
    “I believe I know him by sight. Drives a white Cadillac, if he’s the man I’m thinking of. I believe I’ve seen him at—” Munson never finished his sentence, interrupted by a burst of guttural syllables.
    The captain gazed at him as if wondering whether he would piss or shit himself, weep or foam at the mouth. If the son of a bitch actually knew how it felt when piss ran down your leg—how you initially assumed it couldn’t be what it was, that surely somebody had stolen up behind you and poured warm water under your waistband—he might have had the good grace to keep his eyes averted.
    You never got so scared you couldn’t be embarrassed, but he wouldn’t know that. He’d assume that if a shell burst nearby, the stain on the seat of your pants would cease to matter once you discovered you were still alive. He probably even figured that later you and your pals would float a few jokes about Hershey bars and hip pockets.
    Munson watched him for another moment or two, then rose and stepped over to the window. Three shirtless POWs who’d been painting the quarters next door were laughing, horsing around, one of them cocking a dripping brush as if intending to fling a few gobs on his buddy. The skin stretched tautly over their bodies, revealing bone and muscle.
    Munson rapped his knuckles on the windowpane. The prisoner brandishing the brush whispered something, and one of the others laughed; then they all bent over and went back to work.
    Satisfied, the captain turned and leaned against his desk. “All right, Private,” he said. “There’s not likely to be much around here that’ll surprise you. Reveille’s at oh-five-thirty. Breakfast at oh-six hundred. Prisoners return to their tents after breakfast. They shave and use the latrine, police the grounds, and at oh-seven-thirty they go to their work assignments.
    “Once the farmers begin picking cotton, we’ll need every available man in the fields. The contractors provide the prisoners’ lunches, which they’ll eat wherever they’re hired out. They leave work locations at sixteen hundred, get back here, shower and put on their German uniforms, then eat dinner at eighteen hundred. After dinner, they’re free till lights-out.
    “As of today, we have three hundred and four prisoners. Most of these fellows were captured in North Africa, though a few trickled in last week from Sicily. My own opinion is that the vast majority are probably neither strongly anti-Nazi nor strongly pro-Nazi, but most of them
were
in the Afrika Korps, so officially we assume they’re all Nazis.
    “We’ve had one or two instances in which a group of prisoners administered beatings that may have been ideologically motivated, but various factors indicate to me that they weren’t much more than pranks. We found one guy who’d been whipped pretty good and then shackled to a toilet seat with his pants down around his ankles—that kind of thing. Whoever tied him up had enough rope to hang him twice if they’d wanted to, but clearly they didn’t. Of course, we never found out who was responsible. The man who’d been beaten wouldn’t talk.
    “At the training center, they probably told you the prisoner-to-guard ratio’s never supposed to be worse than ten to one. Well, right at this minute, we’ve got eighteen MPs here, nineteen counting you. That’s about sixteen to one. It’s not going to get any better—and, in fact, it’s going to get worse. Soon. They also probably told you that the War Manpower Commission says contract labor goes out in groups of twenty men. But they didn’t have the Mississippi Delta in mind. Most of the contracts we’ve made are with these small farmers, and eighty cents a day per man is pushing them to the limit. For the most part, we’ve got the prisoners set to go out in groups of eight or ten.
    “All the groups are