The Commandant said something, and Mordaci translated. Byfold gathered that the Commandant was asking what his answer had been.
He therefore said slowly and loudly in his best Italian, ‘All that has been suggested is quite untrue.’ The Commandant looked up at him for a moment, but said nothing. He seemed to be almost asleep.
‘You still refuse to admit,’ went on Benucci, ‘that you were a member of this tunnel gang.’
‘It’s obviously not much use denying it,’ said Byfold. ‘You seem to have made up your minds about it. I suppose it hasn’t occurred to you that I don’t even live in that hut.’
‘Indeed,’ said Benucci, ‘and you never visit it either – after dark?’
Byfold had nothing to say to this. It seemed silly to say that he had visited the hut once only after dark, in order to play a rubber of bridge. Also he had been afforded a sudden glimpse of the care with which the case against him was being constructed – a fractional lifting of the curtain – and it gave him a cold feeling in the pit of his stomach.
‘You must not imagine we are blind, Captain,’ went on Benucci. ‘Because we do not always take action, it does not mean that our sentries have not got eyes – and tongues.’
The Commandant asked a question and Mordaci translated.
‘The Commandant asks if you were a friend of Coutoules.’
‘No. Certainly not. I hardly knew him.’
‘Then you disliked him?’
‘I didn’t dislike him – I hadn’t much time for him.’
Mordaci did his best with this idiom and the Commandant nodded, and asked another question.
‘Why was Coutoules disliked?’
Byfold, who had seen this one coming, answered it more or less truthfully. ‘It was thought that he had been giving away information about the prisoners to the authorities – to you.’
Mordaci again translated, and Byfold was interested to see that the Commandant looked genuinely surprised. Benucci remained impassive. Either the suggestion was not news to him or, possibly, he had a better command of his face.
‘Thank you,’ he said, ‘that is all, Captain Byfold.’ He motioned with his hand and one of the carabinieri threw open the door.
As the two guards hustled him out Byfold saw Benucci lean across and say something to the Commandant. He seemed to be pleased with himself. The Commandant had relapsed into a stupor.
Colonel Lavery refrained from saying ‘I told you so’ when Colonel Baird reported to him that evening.
‘They seem to be making a dead set at Byfold,’ he said. ‘It’s easy to be wise after the event, but if I’d thought they were going to push the case so hard I’d have taken some elementary precautions.’
‘I don’t think it’s just Byfold,’ said Colonel Lavery. ‘I think the truth of the matter is that they want a scapegoat—’
Baird said, with unusual bitterness, ‘Since when have they become so fussy about a death. And I don’t only mean escaping. You remember last winter when the Red Cross parcels didn’t arrive for two months and we had to live on a minus quantity of Italian rations. How many prisoners did we lose then, from starvation and near-starvation? And young Collingwood, with blood-poisoning, that they wouldn’t even let a doctor look at until it was too late. If they want to investigate anything let them start on that.’
‘I expect that the approach of the British Army is making them progressively more tender-hearted,’ said Colonel Lavery. ‘What are you proposing to do now?’
‘I suggest we wait and see if the case against Byfold comes to anything. It may be just bluff. Something for the record, as you suggest. Meanwhile, we push on as fast as possible with Tunnel C.’
Colonel Lavery looked anxiously at the home-made calendar on the wall. It said ‘July 5th’.
‘How soon do you think you can be ready?’
‘It isn’t just a question of digging,’ said Baird. ‘If that’s all it was we’d have non-stop shifts and be out inside a week. It’s the shoring-up of the tunnel, and, above all, the old, old problem of getting rid of the sand. I’ve got an idea about that. If it comes off we might be out in just over three weeks – say twenty-five days.’
‘I hope you’re right,’ said Colonel Lavery, ‘because if my reading of the situation is correct, that could be all the time we’re going to get.’
‘Life,’ said Rupert Rolf-Callender, ‘is getting perfectly intolerable.’
‘Grim,’ agreed Terence Bush.
‘They’ll be asking us for another bed-board soon.’
‘It’ll be a nice change if they ask for it,’ said Rolf-Callender. ‘Last time they just took it. I can’t lie on my bed now without bits of me sagging through the boards. I feel like a lot of shopping in a string bag.’
‘You look perfectly disgusting,’ agreed the Honourable Peter Perse who slept underneath him. ‘There’s another of those damned penguins.’
Through the open door of their room in Hut A they watched in disapproving silence as a large subaltern – a stranger, from Hut C – waddled down the passage. Waddled is the exact description of his gait, since he seemed to find his legs unnaturally heavy, and lifted them one after the other with just the tentative deliberation of a young penguin learning to walk. The ends of his long drill trousers were tied tightly round his ankles, and the calves of his legs seemed to be suffering from a form of shifting elephantiasis.
‘Where does he put the sand?’ asked Bush, when this remarkable figure had passed out of sight.
‘In
our
tunnel,’ said Rolf-Callender.
‘What?’
‘It’s a fact. The Eye-ties have posted a sentry on the outside end, but they just sealed down the bathroom end and left it. The bright boys have got the trap open again and are filling the tunnel up from this end.’
‘Do you mean to say,’ said Bush, ‘that those types from Hut C are digging sand out of
their
tunnel and putting it into
our
tunnel?’
‘It’s all very well talking about
our
tunnel,’ said the Honourable Peter, who was a fair-minded man, and also enjoyed provoking people. ‘I can’t remember you doing much about it when it was actually being dug.’
‘Maybe not,’ said Bush, ‘but if this caper is discovered – God, there’s another of those penguins’ – he got up and shut the door pointedly – ‘if it is discovered, it’s this hut that’s going to suffer. With Benucci in his present frame of mind I can see him shutting off the water
and
the electric light.’
The others agreed that this was highly possible.
‘We’re definitely interested,’ said Overstrand to Desmond Foster, ‘but we’d like to know a little more about it first.’
‘Particularly that bit about the lights,’ said Baierlein.
‘All right. You know Tim Meynell?’
‘The sewer rat?’
‘That’s him—’ They referred to an enthusiast from the Royal Engineers who had dug a way for himself from the camp latrine into the main sewer and had propelled himself along it on an inflated rubber mattress in a number of indescribable journeys of exploration. He had never succeeded in reaching the open and the only result so far of his pioneer work had been that his friends ostentatiously walked up-wind of him.
‘Well, he went down last week to have another look at the main pipe – he’s got an idea of forcing a grating inside the Italian quarters – and he reckons he was just about here’ – Foster demonstrated on a plan of the camp which he had drawn – ‘when he suddenly ran into this new electric cable.’
‘New?’
‘Oh, definitely. He’d been that way two months before, and it wasn’t the sort of thing you could miss seeing. A great insulated cable, obviously new.’
‘That sounds very interesting,’ said Overstrand. ‘You think—’
‘Well, it’s pretty obvious, isn’t it? Between the time he was down before, and that time, those four chaps got away over the wall by fusing the lights. You know how it was done.’
‘They cut the overhead wire with a pair of shears on a stick, didn’t they?’
‘Yes. And it’s hard to guard against that sort of thing. There are too many places where you can get at the overhead wire – from the roof of the theatre for one, or anywhere along the south wall, if you’re prepared to take a bit of a chance on it – or from the cooler. Obviously, if they wanted to prevent it happening again, either they had to change all the overhead wiring or else—’
‘Or else,’ said Overstrand bitterly, ‘or else, like the triple bastards they are, they might install an alternative
underground
wiring to all the sentry boxes, so that the next lot who tried to fuse the lights and rush the wall would only fuse
one
of the systems – the other would come into operation, and the results would be sticky.’
‘Just the sort of clever, slightly sadistic thing Benucci would think up,’ agreed Baierlein. ‘It’s got his signature all over it.’
‘And you think that this cable is the alternative system?’
‘It looks like it, doesn’t it?’ said Foster. ‘It was put in a few weeks after the last attempts, and you can see from its direction’ – he demonstrated again on the plan – ‘it runs out from the main towards the outer wall. I don’t see what else it can be.’
Overstrand and Baierlein turned this over for some time in silence. They were walking with Desmond Foster round the perimeter, since this offered the only chance of complete privacy to conspirators.
‘The idea being, I take it,’ said Overstrand, ‘to cut
both
systems at the vital moment.’
‘Yes.’
‘I think it sounds rather hopeful,’ said Baierlein. ‘It’s got just that element of the unlikely that brings a scheme off. Have you thought about the ladders yet?’
Foster looked the least bit embarrassed.
‘As a matter of fact we have,’ he said, ‘only you must most solemnly promise not to say a word about it to anyone. There’s going to be a certain amount of feeling about this, when it’s found out, but I don’t see what we could have done. There simply wasn’t another piece of wood in the camp of the right length.’
‘Of course we won’t say anything,’ said Baierlein. ‘What’s it all about? You sound as if you’ve robbed a church.’
‘Well, it’s not quite as bad as that,’ said Foster. ‘I’ll tell you.’
‘Are you coming out for a kickabout this afternoon?’ said ‘Tag’ Burchnall. ‘We thought we might start with a scrum practice and have a pick-up game afterwards.’
‘I hope there’s not going to be any nonsense about allowing baseball on the rugger pitch,’ said Rollo Betts-Hanger. ‘I hear the Sports Committee has been approached.’
‘Baseball. Surely we haven’t sunk to that!’
‘I don’t know,’ said Betts-Hanger. ‘It’s quite an interesting game when you look into it. People in America get quite keen on it, I believe.’
‘I’ve no objection to them playing baseball, as long as they don’t do it on the rugger pitch.’
‘Someone was arguing,’ said Billy Moxhay, ‘that July wasn’t the right month for rugger. Perfect nonsense, I thought. Rugger’s an all-the-year-round game. As I pointed out, the only reason chaps don’t play rugger during the summer in England is because the ground’s too hard. Here the ground’s hard all the time, so it makes no difference.’
‘Quite right,’ said Burchnall. ‘Has anyone seen Jerry?’
At this moment the door burst open and Jerry Parsons arrived at a gallop. His face was red and he appeared to have lost his voice. His friends stared at him in amazement.
‘I say,’ he said at last. ‘Do you know what?’
‘End of the war?’
‘Revolution in Italy?’
‘Extra issue of Red Cross parcels?’
‘No, I say, this is serious,’ said Parsons. ‘They’ve simply gone and pinched them—’
‘Pinched what?’
‘The rugger posts.’
A horror-struck silence was broken by Burchnall.
‘This is the final, ultimate limit,’ he said. “They can’t do it. I’ve a good mind to go straight to the S.B.O.’
At about five, o’clock that afternoon – the 5th of July – a garment of comparative peace lay over the camp. The sun still held much of its noon power, and most of the prisoners were lying on their beds in their huts or toasting themselves quietly in the open.
A jazz band was practising in the Theatre Hut, and a lethargic class was being lectured to in the open space between Huts D and E, on the Logistic Problems involved in Hannibal’s campaigns.
Even the sentries seemed to feel the weight of the afternoon and they were dozing as openly as they dared on their platforms.
The history don was lying back in his deckchair, and wishing that he could have been spending the afternoon in a punt on the Cherwell. He was watching, with half his attention, a large covered lorry of the Italian Army type, which had stopped in the road outside the main gate and was now manoeuvring backwards and forwards in an apparent endeavour to turn in the narrowest part of the road.
It had got halfway round now, and was facing directly towards the outer gate.
It started to move.
The sentries on both gates ran forward and threw the gates open. The van accelerated.
A towel was whisked out of a window. The professor jumped to his feet and dropped his book.
The van was inside the camp now, and coming on fast.
In one of the end rooms in Hut C a bell rang three times urgently. Four men left their bunks with a jump and disappeared through the door. As the last of them reached the kitchen, they could hear the Italian Army lorry squealing to a stop outside, and a high-pitched scream of orders as the hidden carabinieri leapt from the back of it.
‘They’ll have to take their chance,’ said the leader of the four, and as he spoke the stove was already on its way down.
There was a thumping of feet outside the hut, and the passage door burst open.
The stove was back in position now and one of the men was doing some quick work with a broom.
‘We shan’t be able to get out of here,’ said the leader. ‘Pretend to be hanging up clothes – and for God’s sake, Peter, push that wire further down inside your shirt. I can see the end of it from here.’
There was a second of silence, followed by a mutter of Italian voices, among them Benucci’s.