4pQonT

EZRA POUND 253
"doan yu tell no one I made it"
from a mask fine as any in Frankfurt
"It'll get you offn th' ground" 17 [.]
One afternoon, eight of the prisoners, driven almost mad by the
harsh treatment, tried to make a break for it. As they dashed past
Pound's death cage, they were mowed down by automatic rifle fire.
The guards continued to rain bullets into them as they lay helpless
on the ground, only a few feet from Pound. The horror of this
scene had a lasting effect upon him. "After that," he said, "I
needed a five-year rest cure. But I didn't bargain for a life
sentence."
On the evening of November 17, 1945, two lieutenants took
Pound away. He supposed that, at last, he was being led out to be
executed. Instead, they put him in a jeep and drove him to a landing
strip, where he was put aboard a C-54 Army transport. The
next morning, under heavy guard, he was taken from the plane and
lodged in the District Jail in Washington, D.C.
Two days later, Omar Pound, who was serving in the U.S.
Army in Germany, arrived in Pisa to see his father. He had heard
from a fellow soldier, a former inmate of Pisa, about the old man
in the cage ("he had the same name as yourn"), and obtained an
emergency furlough.
The District Jail held many critics of Franklin D. Roosevelt during
the two years previous to Pound's incarceration there. Two
other poets, George Sylvester Viereck and Ellis O. Jones, accused
of sedition, were still locked up there when Pound arrived. Viereck
asked permission to visit with him, but he was refused.
During his months of captivity in Pisa, a blackout had been
placed on news of Pound. Not only his family, but his friends as
well, were unable to find out what had happened to him. T. S.
Eliot finally discovered that he was imprisoned in the D.T.C., and
wrote some indignant letters to the authorities. He also contacted
some of his fellow writers, and asked them to protest. Robert
Graves wrote a sneering answer which was typical of the responses.
He said, "I never interfere with the domestic affairs of
another nation." Yet many of these same writers who refused to
help Pound leaped to the defense of the Communist poet Boris