When Billy Pilgrim, the protagonist of Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, is captured by the Germans in December 1944, he gets taken first to a POW camp near the Czech border. Most of the prisoners are Russian, but coralled in the middle of them are fifty British officers, 'among the first English-speaking prisoners to be taken in the Second World War'. They are 'clean and enthusiastic and decent and strong'. 'A clerical error early in the war . . . had caused the Red Cross to ship them five hundred [food] parcels every month instead of fifty.' The Germans 'thought they were exactly what Englishmen ought to be. They made war look stylish and reasonable, and fun.' And 'each of them had attempted to escape from another prison at least once. Now they were here . . . They could tunnel all they pleased. They would inevitably surface within a rectangle of barbed wire, would find themselves greeted listlessly by dying Russians.'

LRB 6 January 2005 | PDF Download