unbroken-laura-hillenbrand

fight.
Early the next morning, as the officers were marched off to
labor, the Bird stood by, watching them go. He was smiling.
——
It was a short walk into slavery. The officers were taken to
the riverbank and crowded onto a barge, which was heaped
with coal destined for the steel mill. Six men were given
shovels; Louie and the rest were given large baskets and
told to strap them to their backs. Then, on the guards’
orders, the shovelers began heaving coal into each man’s
basket. As a cubic foot of loose coal can weigh as much as
sixty pounds, the bearers were soon staggering. Once the
baskets were full, the bearers were ordered to lug the loads
off the barge and up the shore to a railroad car, where they
wobbled up a narrow, steep ramp, dumped the coal into the
car, and returned to have their baskets refilled.
All day the men shoveled and hauled. The guards kept the
basket men moving at a rapid clip. By the time the guards
finally let them stop, the men were utterly exhausted; by
Wade’s estimate, over the course of the day, each basket
bearer had carried well over four tons of coal.
So began a daily routine. Each time the men finished
clearing one barge, they were pushed aboard another, and
the hauling went on, punishing their bodies and numbing
their minds. Somewhere along the way, as he and the
others bent under their burdens and plodded along, Tom
Wade began reciting poetry and speeches. Louie and the
other slaves shoveled and walked in time with
Shakespeare’s soliloquies, with Churchill’s vow to fight in
the fields and in the streets and in the hills, with Lincoln’s last
full measure of devotion.
The barges were eventually empty, but the officers’ life in
slavery had only just begun. In a mass of POWs, Louie was