Wars look better after 40 years, when the old men who were soldiers forget how frightened they were. Perhaps it is merely that survival itself takes on a golden haze: we were being shot at, but we were young, and the bullets missed. Even so, it seems strange that anyone would look back fondly at time spent as prisoner or guard in a military prison. “Why would they do this for us?” wondered Gerhardt Clauss, 61, a former German infantryman who was seeing the tiny north-woods town of Stark, N.H., for the first time since 1946. Clauss, now a prosperous businessman in north Germany, shook his head, surprised by the brass band, the drill team and bagpiper, the signs announcing GERMAN-AMERICAN FRIENDSHIP DAY. On the other hand, why had Clauss, four other former prisoners and an assortment of wives, friends and children come all the way to Stark? Partly, of course, just for a pleasant tour; life had long since eased for Clauss and the rest, and a vacation trip to the U.S. was quite normal. But Stark, even with its maples and birches blazing red and yellow on this early fall Saturday, is no more than a spare, work-worn village, well to the north of the usual tourist route through the White Mountains. To come here takes $ some effort. All through the afternoon of speeches and band music, the Germans, who were honored guests, and the American men of the same age who had been MPs at the prison camp, and a few old townspeople who remembered those days tried to say exactly why this reunion meant so much to them. Using an unfamiliar language, as some tried to do, was not really the problem. It was that the situation was unusual, and the ordinary formulas of memory and friendship did not quite fit. Camp Stark, the only prisoner-of-war stockade in New Hampshire, operated from the spring of 1944 to the spring of 1946. Some of the 250 prisoners were captured in North Africa early in the war and were members of a division formed of leftist political dissidents routed out of German prisons and sent to fill out Rommel’s army. But those who returned to Stark, tracked down over the past four years by Allen Koop, a professor of American and European history at Colby-Sawyer College in New London, N.H., had been ordinary soldiers, 18 or 19 years old, captured by U.S. troops in Normandy in June and July of 1944. Some 300,000 German prisoners were shipped to camps in the U.S. during the war, and most of those who were able-bodied were trucked each day to work on nearby farms. Agriculture in New Hampshire produces little but rocks, and those sprout without help. The work to be done at Stark was up in the steep, wooded hills, cutting pulpwood for the Brown Paper Co.
