Dave Dawson with the R.A.F.

by Robert Sidney Bowen

The other guard laughed and nodded his head vigorously.

"The very best, of course!" he cried. "We shall let him go and talk with some of his friends. Come along, you!"

A big hairy hand shot out and fingers of steel were curled around Dave's arm. He was almost jerked off his feet as the guard yanked him forward. He kept his balance, however, and was led to the far end of the short corridor into which they had entered. There the guard stopped, gave Dave a warning look, and took a ring of keys from his pocket. He selected a key and opened the door in front of him. Then, faster than moving light, he spun around and hit Dave across the back of the neck.

Stars flared up in Dave's brain, and he saw a sea of blurred faces as he went stumbling through the open door. He fell down a short flight of steps and landed hard on his hands and knees on a rough board floor. For a moment he stayed where he was, waiting for his head to clear. Then the hushed murmur of many voices and a cloying cloud of countless human smells brought his head up and made him get to his feet. He found himself in a huge, long room that contained at least a hundred others in as pitiful looking state as himself.

"There's another one of your comrades!" he heard the guard shout just before he slammed the door.

For a moment or two the hundred pairs of eyes searched Dave's face, and his heart ached as he realized why they were doing so. Here was a storehouse filled with war's driftwood, helpless refugees whose families had been either crushed or broken up by the onward rushing machine of war. Each man there was now searching his face and hoping in his heart to recognize a long lost brother, or father, or some other male relative.

Presently though, they dropped their eyes and went on with whatever they had been doing before he had been hurled into their midst. Nobody made any effort to speak to him, and he understood why. They were not shunning him, or anything like that. They were simply letting him alone with his own sorrows, as they wished to be let alone with theirs. What could they speak about, anyway? Each man's story was the same. There was no real difference. Each had been caught up in the toils of war—and here he was.

Dave swallowed the bitterness that rose in his throat and went over and sat down on a long row of hard wood benches that ran along one side of the wall. An old man sitting there, staring unseeingly at the floor, didn't so much as raise his eyes as Dave sat down. Save for the slight movement of his chest, caused by his breathing, he could have been a man dead. Perhaps in a way he was dead, too. His spirit had been killed by the Germans. Only the physical side of his body remained alive.

Dave flashed him a sympathetic glance, started to speak, but thought better of it. After all, what was there that even he could say? Certainly nothing that could give good cheer and heart to this poor old man. Then he thought of the case of emergency food still strapped in place about his waist, and his hand moved impulsively toward the inside of his shirt. He checked the movement, however. The old man looked half starved, but so did everybody else in the place. To take out his specially prepared emergency rations would start a riot, at least.

Then, too—and he felt a little ashamed as he thought of it—there was the matter of his own welfare. In a roundabout way he was fighting for these poor helpless derelicts of war, and for that reason among others he was forced to think of himself first. Right now he was in a tough spot. He was locked up in a Nazi detention prison. Perhaps fate had laughed in Freddy's face, too. Perhaps right now he also was eating his heart out in some other prison nearby. Yes, Dave was a Nazi prisoner, and he didn't dare even think of what would happen if he were exposed—if, for example, he were searched and his secret supply of food discovered, or the small compass, and pocket knife, and one or two other little things he had brought along just in case.