Poet Robert Garioch was captured at Tobruk in June 1942 while serving in 201 Guards Motor Brigade Headquarters. He spent the rest of the war in prisoner-of-war camps in Italy and Germany. The following account is from his period in a camp called Chiavari on the Italian Riviera.
The weather began to be uncomfortably hot. Every day, the sun became stronger, and the nights were warm and stuffy. Though we wore hardly any clothing, we could not keep cool. The air became filled with flies: each man walked about, attended by a cloud of these insects. Whilst we were having a meal, we had to keep the food covered up, reaching under the cloths when we wanted to take a bit. Even then, we could hardly keep them out of our mouths. A camp like ours, crowded with people, must have seemed a paradise specially prepared for flies with all kinds of sweet and nasty things on which they could feed and breed in enormous quantities. The cook-house was full of them, and so was the stew. Each little globule of olive oil which floated on the surface of our ration of stew was sure to have a little fly stuck in it. The more fastidious of us used to pick the flies out of each spoonful, which would take practically the whole evening. The other way of approach was to shut your eyes and gobble it up: probably it would not do us any harm, but the thought of the thing was not pleasant.
We used to kill flies all day, but it seemed to make no difference to their numbers, possibly because we did not do it systematically enough. So the Camp Welfare Committee organized a Grand Fly-swatting Contest. Each man was to collect the corpses of his fallen enemies into tins, and the man who could produce the most evidence of his zeal would receive a handsome prize. We started swatting for all we were worth. We made weapons out of cardboard and pieces of wood, and laid about us with a will. There was no need to go out to seek our prey; we simply stayed in one place and banged repeatedly at the same patch of sunlit wall. One stroke would often yield a dozen flies. We filled tin after tin and took them to the welfare office, where the day’s bag was credited to our name, and the heaps of corpses were disposed of in some manner into which we did not enquire.
Fly-swatting slogans were posted up everywhere, in English and Afrikaans, to stimulate us to further effort. An alluringly gruesome poster depicted a seductive-looking female fly perched upon a heap of eggs, with statistics of the number of offspring she was capable of producing in a season. We swatted away, and hoped that our victims were females. There were pessimists amongst us, who said that all these efforts were simply a waste of time, but after some weeks of intensive swatting it did seem as though there were not quite so many flies as before.
Another trouble, however, began to afflict us, which we could not cope with, whatever we tried to do. There were many wooden bunks in each hut, and each bunk harboured its permanent society of bedbugs. When the weather became really hot, those bugs multiplied so fast that they beat us altogether. The trouble with those things was that they hid away during the daylight in all the cracks in the walls and in the bunks. As soon as the lights went out, they emerged for their nightly activities, and drove us nearly mad. Each of their bites raised a blister on our skin; and they were such big dirty creatures that even the thought of them kept us from sleeping. When we caught them, by groping about in the darkness, they squashed messily, and gave off a disgusting smell. There was nothing that we could do to get rid of them. Our efforts must have made some difference, but they still managed to make our nights miserable.
It became a matter of routine to carry out a systematic debugging, every forenoon. We got thin strips of steel from packing-cases, and poked into the crevices of our bunks. They would come out, stained with blood, and bugs would scatter in all directions. We would take all the movable parts of the beds outside, and deal thoroughly with every crack, every day: we must have killed thousands of the creatures, but still they bred too fast for us. We organized days of thorough cleansing, when we took the bunks entirely to pieces, and washed them with strong disinfectant. We used to think that the nights following these campaigns were always the worst of all. Perhaps the bugs were making up for having had a bad day of it.
One man, of a mathematical turn of mind, had the curiosity to take his bed apart, and to count the bugs which he found in several of the places where one piece of wood was joined to another. He found an average of about twenty-five in each place; and as there were one hundred and thirty-two bug-cracks in each double bunk, he calculated that he and his mate shared three thousand three hundred bugs between them.
We even took the bunks outside, and burned all the cracks by holding them over the flames of blowers: but this had no apparent effect. Then a few men began to take their palliasses outside, to sleep under the stars. This was one of the things which we were not supposed to do, unfortunately; and the Carabinieri used to go round in the middle of the night to make the men go back to their huts. We persisted, however, and protested, till at length the Commandant, who generally did all he could to help us, gave permission to sleep outside. This Commandant had been a prisoner in the last war, and sympathized with us to some extent. The regulations prevented him from doing very much, but he did make it possible for this to be a decent camp. So we abandoned the huts to the bugs, leaving them in possession, and took our bedding outside. Fortunately, the bugs, being a conservative race, went on living in the cracks as all their forebears had done, and did not think of lurking on the blankets. One or two did sometimes follow us outside: but these were easily dealt with.
It was pleasant to sleep beneath the sky on those warm summer nights, to wake up sometimes and see the stars, the same constellations that our people could see at home; and it seemed only a little way over the world’s rim to where they were still living and thinking about us, or so we hoped. Sometimes a dew would come down in the early morning, and we would wake in the midst of a mizzling mist; but it did us no harm. We went inside only for air-raids, during which we were not allowed out of the huts. We used to wake on hearing the bugle, to find that all the lights in the camp were out. Then the Carabinieri would come and move us inside among the bugs. We would hear the planes coming over, and sometimes bombs would explode a long way off, usually in the direction of Genoa. As soon as the lights came on again, and the bugle sounded, we moved outside. These raids became more and more frequent, till they happened nearly every night, so some of the men took to sleeping beneath the huts, where they could not be seen. It was not very comfortable there, however; and bugs were liable to fall on them through cracks in the floor, so most of us preferred to sleep in the open, and to come inside during the raids.