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‘death’s proletariat’ 

... Itwas the Germans—you’d hardly call them Nazi—

Polite and battle-hungry happy men

—O I would like to meet those chaps again.

It then makes an extraordinary journey in fifty-five stanzas to the intensity of a
moment that will haunt him, and leave him paradoxically unfulfilled, for the rest
of his life:

I saw the moments and the seasons swim

Precisely through me and I saw them show

Huts, hills and homes, and distance, and my dream

Of little footsteps shrieking in the snow

As they tip into darkness, all grow bright

And smother everything in transparent light.

I watched. A tender clarity became

That moment mine, as clear as through a hand

Bones shadow out into a candle’s flame.^64

‘The Transparent Prisoner’, like Campbell Hay’s war poetry, speaks for the wider
reaches of the conflict and its aftermath, reminding us of the fate of thousands—in
Stalin’s Gulags, for example, or in the concentration camp of memory itself—whose
suffering did not end with the declaration of peace.
Not all of those who took part could write about it straightaway. Thirty-three-
year-old Robert Garioch Sutherland, in the Royal Signal Corps, was captured in
charge of an electricity generator outside Tobruk in 1942, and spent the rest of
the War as a POW, being moved from camp to camp in Africa, Italy, Austria,
and Germany. Published thirty years later, his memoirTwo Men and a Blanket
(Edinburgh: Southside, 1975) is a low-key testament to how to survive the real
enemies in such captivity: namely, perpetual hunger, boredom, and most of all,
the cold (hence the book’s title). It all comes back to him years later, sitting at the
seaside:

Cantie in seaside simmer on the dunes,

I fling awa my doup of cigarette

whaur bairns hae biggit castles out of sand

and watch the reik rise frae the parapet.

Suddenlike I am back in Libya;

yon’s the escarpment, and a bleizan plane.^65

Or again, in ‘The Prisoner’s Dream’ written in 1955, Garioch remembers a winter’s
night in captivity and the rare treat of eating a whole onion—it may have been
Christmas or New Year—followed by a strange dream of returning to Edinburgh

(^64) Burns Singer, ‘The Transparent Prisoner’, inCollected Poems, ed. James Keery (Manchester:
Carcanet, 2001), 141 and 148.
(^65) Robert Garioch, ‘During a Music Festival’, inComplete Poetical Works,ed.RobinFulton
(Edinburgh: Macdonald, 1983), 67.