The Deserters: A Hidden History of World War II by Charles Glass

him, and in his “trance-like state” he paid them little attention. He found cans of meat that had been abandoned by Italian troops, and he chanced upon a Gurkha private who invited him to share his tea and chapatis. Later, as he walked east along the desert road, an RAF supply truck stopped.
    The driver introduced himself as Frank Jarvis and offered to take him to Tripoli. It did not take long for Frank to realize Bain was not a straggler: “You’re on the run, John? You can trust me, mate. I wouldn’t shop you.” He would have to leave Bain outside Tripoli, before the RMP checkpoints where Bain would be arrested. “You might be able to scrounge some grub at the Transit Camp but you’ll get picked up sooner or later,” Frank warned. “Unless you dress up as a wog or something. Kip up with an Arab bint.” John fell asleep for a few hours, until Frank stopped to brew tea. While they drank, Frank took some English cigarettes from a can he had picked up at the docks. “You scared?” he asked Bain, as they lit up. “I’d be fucking scared I don’t mind telling you. They reckon the glasshouses out here are fucking terrible. Worse than in Blighty. And that’s saying something.” John said he had not thought about it, adding, “Nothing could be worse than action.”
    Several miles before Tripoli, Bain got out of the truck to walk into town. Frank handed the young deserter three tins of corned beef and some hardtack. As he was about to drive off, he said, “You’d better take these, mate.” “These” were the precious English cigarettes.
    Walking alone with rifle and pack on his back, he reached Tripoli after dark. It occurred to him that the city had a port, from which he could stow away on a ship. He imagined that friendly sailors would hide and feed him on the voyage to Britain. There, all would be well. “His reverie was abruptly smashed by the squeal of tyres as a fifteen- hundredweight truck skidded to a halt in the gutter at his side,” he wrote. The truck was driven by the military police. He was under arrest.
    The army appointed a lieutenant to represent him at his court- martial. At a brief meeting before the trial, the lieutenant prompted Bain for excuses, “troubles at home perhaps,” that he could use on his behalf. The defendant was no help, saying only that he was sick of the business of war. The court-martial convened a few days later in Tripoli and convicted him of desertion “in a forward area.” The crime was not as serious as deserting “in the face of the enemy,” but it was enough to earn him three years at hard labor in the harshest prison in North Africa.
    Mustafa Barracks provided Bain with long hours to reflect on the life that had brought him to his desertion and imprisonment. He remembered the town where he spent much of his childhood, Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire, “as a kind of amulet against despair, a dream of rural sweetness and light, an arcadian landscape in which music and poetry and the possibility of romantic love were ubiquitous presences.” Like all childhood fables, Bain’s was inhabited by an ogre. His was his father, a tough veteran of the Great War and a brutal disciplinarian who did not permit his sons to wear underwear because it was “sissy.” Also “sissy,” in the old man’s view, were books, poems and classical music.
    James Bain had married Elsie Mabel, a woman three years older than he was and a few notches up the social ladder, just after the Great War. While Bain had left his Scottish regiment as a private, Elsie’s uncle had been an officer.The couple had three children, Kenneth, John Vernon and Sylvia. John was born in Spilsby, Lincolnshire, on 23 January 1922, while his father earned a livelihood photographing visitors on the beach at Skegness. When John was three, his father in a chimerical bid to break out of poverty moved the family to Ballaghaderreen in the Irish Free State and opened a photography studio. On the ship from Liverpool