The Camp That Isn't There

The Camp That Isn't There

I never stood on this ground. Neither did the friend who helped me look at it. What we actually did is smaller and more literal than a walk, so I'll say it plainly: she worked the Street View pixels, frame by frame, and I read the satellite from above. Two screens. Nobody's feet on the lane. That difference is the first honest thing, and it goes first.

Here is what the screen shows. Follow the lane out of Peel toward Patrick and there is no gate. Just green. A flat field, a farm behind it, a hedge, and past the hedge the sea. No ditch, no bank, no rectangle in the ground where you'd want one.

And here is what I found, hours later, sitting at a screen and dropping a peg on that lane. The mapping car went through here once, in April 2010, before the little centre opened, before the plaque. It caught the bend, the wall, the hedge, and nothing with a man's name on it. So the road I'm looking down is the road a place shows when it thinks nobody is watching. I drag the peg along it hunting a ghost. A field looks back. The satellite agrees: no earthwork, no outline. Twenty-four and a half thousand men were kept on this ground, and the ground has let go of every one of them.

That's the place. Now the man.

On the twelfth of September, 1915, a batch of six hundred and sixty internees came ashore at Douglas breakwater off the s.s. Connaught. The Peel City Guardian watched them. It was six o'clock in the evening by the time they were landed, and then they were marched down the South Quay to the railway station and carried by rail to St John's, and after eight o'clock it was dark, and the road from St John's out to Knockaloe they did in stops and starts, counting and recounting the men the whole way because the country was black and the escort did not trust the dark.

Somewhere in that column, in the dark, being counted, was a thirty-one-year-old German named Joseph Pilates.

He had a label already. The card that went ahead of him is a small thing, one index card, and it is still there in the Red Cross archive. His name is on it in ink, in a clerk's hand: Pilatus. Not Pilates. Pilatus. The clerk heard a German name and wrote down the Roman one, the one with the governor in it, the one that was already a word before it was ever a man. And that was the name that traveled with him until someone caught it.

The card is where the record gets interesting, which is to say where it gets thin. There is no service number on it. No date of birth. No camp. The reverse is blank. All it says, besides the name, is angl. B. 11, double-underlined, a reference to a list. That is the whole of what the Red Cross kept on him: a wrong name and a list number.

The centre on the site calls 14001 his index number, as if that were the number that tagged him. But the card that was supposed to tag him does not carry it. The Manx Museum's own catalogue of the island's glass plates is more precise about where these numbers come from. On one of those plates, a photograph of the men inside a hut, someone wrote his prisoner number: 16626. And the Red Cross record, behind the card, carries a different number again: 14001, the information bureau number, the number Geneva filed him under. So there it is, the collision, and I want it said plainly rather than left as a gap: the Centre calls 14001 his index number, and the index card in the archive carries no such number. The famous number is repeated everywhere and is not written on the card at all. The reproduction I read is exact about that. One number on the plate, one number behind the card, and the card itself holding neither.

I keep holding the numbers apart, because the pulling of them together is the whole story of how a place remembers a man like this. One man, and the paper cannot agree on him. The Red Cross card says Pilatus, and carries no number. The Red Cross information bureau indexed him as 14001. The museum plate says Pilatos 16626. Three labels, and not one of them is the name the man used for himself. We have spent a century deciding which of them was his. The answer is: none of them. The one that was his is the one that isn't on any of the paper.

Before Knockaloe there was Lancaster. He was moved there first, and I want to be careful here, because there's a strong pull to make it grander than it was. Some retellings put him in Lancaster Castle, in stone, in a cell. The centre's own research says otherwise: he was held about twelve months at a temporary camp in a derelict waggon works. Not a castle. A factory with no work in it. That is worse, in its way, and truer.

Three and a half years at Knockaloe, in the end. Camp 4. Arrived the twelfth of September, released the sixteenth of March, 1919, which the small plaque in the walled garden now states, so that a visitor in the garden can put a date on him.

Here is the part nobody writes down. The winter. The wind off the Irish Sea comes at that island flat and cold and does not stop, and the huts sat in it, and the men sat in it, and the mud under the huts never dried. A camp of twenty-four thousand men with nothing to do is a slow machine for breaking people. He was thirty-one when he walked in and past forty when he walked out. That is the ground the story actually stands on, and it is a cold one, and I am not going to lift him out of it.

Here is what he did with the time. It comes down to us in his own telling, so take it as his telling.

He watched the cats.

The camp was starving. The blockade was slowly shutting England's mouth, and the rations that came to Knockaloe were thin, and the men who ate them were going thinner and quieter and greyer, sinking into the thing that happens when you are held with nothing to do. But the cats were fine. Lean and springy and quick. The cats, when they had nothing else to do, stretched. All day. Leg out, reach, hold, release. Keeping themselves alive without knowing they were doing it, because the body knows to keep itself when the mind has quit.

He watched the cats and worked out a series of movements, and then he stood up in front of the dejected men around him and started making them do the movements too. Clumsy at first. Then less. He stood over them and pushed them through it, a boxer and a circus tumbler running calisthenics in the mud of a prison camp, and by his own account the men who trained with him ended the war in better shape than they started it, and when the influenza came through after the war, not one of his men went down with it.

You can take that last part or leave it. He said it. It is unfalsifiable and it has the shape of a man selling his own method. But the thing underneath it is true and checkable in another way, and it is the thing that matters: he took the one thing the camp could not take from him, his body, and he made it into the one thing he could give away. Not a business. Not a brand. The last thing a held man owns is the movement of his own leg, and he gave that away in the mud, in the wind, because it was all he had that the wire couldn't reach. And what he gave away walked out of the camp and outlived it.

The camp is gone. The camp is a field. The buildings were leveled, the railway lifted, the huts sold off or burned, and the whole apparatus of it has sunk back into green. And out of that ground, one day, a movement walked out.

Which brings me back to my question, the one I carry around and don't have an answer for yet: what makes a place feel like it remembers you?

Knockaloe does not remember Joseph Pilates by welcoming him. It never welcomed him. It held him against his will, for three and a half years, and then it took itself apart and turned into a field so completely that the ground itself has no memory of him, no ditch, no post-hole, nothing you could trip on. If a place remembered you by keeping you, this place did the opposite: it forgot him so hard that the only marker left is a plaque in a small walled garden that gets the number of his countrymen wrong: twenty thousand, it says, where the camp held closer to twenty-four thousand.

So it doesn't remember him that way. It remembers him by the one thing it couldn't keep. The camp held his body and could not hold his practice, and the practice walked out through the gate and kept walking.

A place remembers you by what it refuses to let go of. Knockaloe let go of Joseph Pilates. The only thing it could not let go of was the thing he made there, and the thing he made there left.

So what's left isn't a chain of studios or a name on a mat or a mogul's future. It's a body. A man in the wind of a hundred-year winter, moving his leg out, holding it, bringing it back, because it was the one thing the wire couldn't take. And somewhere in the century since, another body, in another city, in other weather, does the same movement without knowing where it came from. Two bodies doing the same slow thing in two different climates. That's the memory. Not the place holding on to him. The movement outliving the ground it started in.

He is in the ground nowhere. The card still says Pilatus. It still carries no number for him, only the list mark, angl. B. 11. And every time somebody lies down on a mat and rolls their spine off the floor, they have just picked up something a clerk in Geneva mislabeled in 1915, and carried it one more street.

Sources and notes

Images (all openly licensed, credited by name, license, source; this PDF is released CC BY-SA 4.0) – “General view of the Knockaloe POW camp,” 1916, author unknown, from Der Krieg 1914/19 in Wort und Bild. Public domain. – George Kenner, Knockaloe, 8 June 1918, photographer unknown. CC BY-SA 2.0 (Flickr). – Richard Hoare, geograph 2020: “Site of Knockaloe Internment Camp,” “Panorama of Knockaloe Farm,” “The former engine house,” “Knockaloe Centre for WWI internment,” “Road to Patrick village,” and “Joseph Hubertus Pilates,” the plaque in the Barbed Wire Garden. CC BY-SA 2.0. – Jon Wornham, internee graves, Patrick churchyard. CC BY-SA 2.0.

Open seams, labeled straight – The collision is named in the text rather than smoothed: the Centre calls 14001 his “index number,” while the ICRC card he was indexed on carries no 14001, only the list mark angl. B. 11. The Manx Museum catalogue calls 14001 the Red Cross information bureau number. Three sources, three labels, no reconciliation manufactured. – The plaque's “20,000” figure against the ~24,500 men usually cited for Knockaloe is attributed and left as it stands.