World War II Remembered

The Cage

5 Sergeant Robert Allen, a medic in the 86th Company of the 10th Mountain Division, was wounded in Italy on January 6, 1945. After several months in the hospital, he was discharged, placed on limited duty, and assigned to the Medical Division of the Disciplinary Training Center near Pisa. One night in May of 1945 we saw flakes of blue light coming from the stockade at the Disciplinary Training Center. Acetylene torches, someone said; later we heard that they were reinforcing a cage to hold Ezra Pound. (The American poet had made broadcasts from Italy to American audiences and to American troops deploring the war between Italy and the United States. The U.S. government indicted him for acts of treason.) The Disciplinary Training Center (DTC) spread over a broad field a few miles north of Pisa on the road to Viareggio. The ugly barbedwire stockade held back the slime and filth of the whole Mediterranean The Cage • Robert L. Allen U.S. Army 6 World War II Remembered Theater of Operations: convicted rapists, murderers, and traitors who had been members of our armed forces. Each “trainee” was on his way to a federal prison in the United States—unless he could “soldier out” of the DTC. By following a fantastic routine, accepting cruelty in the extreme, and turning himself into a “GI” automaton, a trainee could have his federal prison term canceled and be returned to duty. This took a lot of guts or a lot of hate, and not all men could do it. One afternoon some of them tried to run away, but businesslike short bursts from an automatic rifle in a guard tower chopped them down. (I rode to the hospital with two of them and watched helplessly while they bled to death.) Some had a try at suicide and others poured lye on their feet to earn a trip to the hospital in Pisa. Inside the stockade there was a secondary enclosure for the Medical and Dental sections, two mess halls, several areas where the trainees pitched their pup tents, and solitary confinement and death cells. The solitary cells, “boxes,” were seven-foot concrete cubes with peepholes in their steel doors. To be “boxed” meant two weeks on bread and water with a blanket and a bucket. The death cells were wire cages about ten feet square at the base and seven feet high. Condemned prisoners, later to be hanged at Aversa, paced the cages. The jailers at the DTC (the Headquarters Company, Provost, Guard, and Medical sections) lived in pyramidal tents outside the stockade. We had our own mess hall, recreation hall, and stables (the colonel liked to ride). The Provost Section men had the most to do with the prisoners. Their whim was law to the trainees and their job was to assure that life as a trainee was tougher than life at the front. It was interesting to observe how quickly many of the new men in the Provost section learned to enjoy their work. The Provost boys were in charge of Ezra Pound. A Frustrated Old Man The morning after we had seen the acetylene torches, all DTC personnel were ordered to keep clear of Pound; no one was to speak to him. I recognized him easily by the beard and the glasses. His molting, amber Vandyke was not the red beard that once bounded through the salons and cafés of London and Paris. The Ezra Pound in the cage was a frus- The Cage: Robert L. Allen 7 trated old man who had never received the recognition he desired— recognition that came to a number of his associates. He wore an Army fatigue uniform, unbuttoned at the neck. He walked back and forth on the concrete floor, making no effort to look outside. His trousers hung loose and his shoes were unlaced. (Belts and shoelaces were always taken from men in the cages.) A special guard stood outside his cage, which, at night, was brightly lighted. Everyone looked at him. The trainees marching by or working the area considered Pound with awe, taking the reinforced cage as evidence that he was a particularly tough customer. The United States authorities had taken him into custody at Rapallo, where he made his home, and brought him directly to the DTC. The weeks in the cage were hard on Pound. As shelter, a piece of tarpaper was thrown over the...