The Great Escape (15 page)

“I think we’ve got a peeping Tom,” he said, and Roger collected Clark and Harsh and went to look. From an angle by the recreation ground they could just make out a vague shape behind the branches. They wandered around the circuit and spotted two more piles of branches on the edge of the woods. One of them was right at the spot where “Harry” was eventually intended to surface. For half an hour they watched quietly from a hut window and saw a ferret crawl away from behind one of them into the woods. He was carrying a case that looked like field glasses.

At two o’clock in the morning Pieber and half a dozen guards came into the compound. The people sleeping in 101, nearest the gate, were the first to find out. There were hoarse shouts of “
Raus! Raus!
” and the trampling of jackboots in the corridor. Doors were flung open, and everyone was hauled out of his bunk and paraded outside the rooms. Pieber counted them, and the guards searched the rooms.

Peiber did the same in every block, and to several hundred blinking, tousled men he was a very unpopular man. A dour and muttering Crump told him irritably that he didn’t have a hope of finding anything, and Pieber made an unfortunate essay into English.

“You think I know damn nothing,” he said indignantly. “Actually I know damn all.”

He didn’t find anything. “X” had not worked at night since a snap 2 A.M. appell at Barth the previous year had found men working on a tunnel.

In the morning, Glemnitz found more freshly dispersed sand in the gardens by 119 and walked straight out of the compound. At eleven o’clock a long column of about a hundred fully armed troops marched in and went straight to the western side of the compound. They turned everyone out of 106, 107, and 123 and posted tommygunners to cut off that area of the camp. The Kommandant drove in in a staff car with Broili and a little civilian with a bony face. The civilian seemed to be on equal terms with the Kommandant and Broili was being very respectful.

A wagon drove up, and the soldiers unloaded picks and shovels. Glemnitz marked out a narrow strip between 123 and the barbed wire, and about forty men set to work digging. By three o’clock they had a long trench four feet deep. Rubberneck and ferrets Herman and Adolf took some thin steel rods about five feet long out of the wagon and began sinking them into the floor of the trench. They hammered them down almost to the hilt hoping to hit against the roof boards of a tunnel. Von Lindeiner and the civilian stood watching them. So, from a distance, did we. Floody was making insulting remarks under his breath. The ferrets would have needed probes five times as long to get anywhere near “Tom.” Roger was standing with his arms folded, watching, not saying anything.

When the ferrets has sunk a probe as far as it would go and struck nothing but yielding sand, they pulled it up and tried a foot further on. Once they hit something about four feet down and there was a rustle of excitement among the Germans. Half a dozen shovelers got to work, slinging the sand over their shoulders out of the trench, the sweat pouring off them. As they reached the obstruction, the Kommandant leaned over the trench. It was a rock. Floody nearly had hysterics.

Just before appell, the Germans gave it up. The guards filled in the trenches and made a dignified withdrawal. It was another day lost on the tunneling, and that night Roger learned from a kitchen Goon that the bony-faced civilian was second in command of Breslau
Kriminalpolizei.
Sagan was in the Breslau Gestapo and Kriminalpolizei area.

“We’re up in the big stuff now,” Roger told the little gathering in his room. “They must be pretty sure we’ve got something big on to call the coppers. From now on anything can happen.”

“Well, it’s just a bloody race then,” someone said. “We’ll have to cut a few corners.”

“That’s exactly what we can’t do. It’s too late for that,” Roger said. “Don’t you see the implication? If they get any more evidence they’ll go crazy and bring in a few hundred troops or something. You’ll find yourselves sleeping out in the dirt while they tear up all the hut floors. We can’t afford another slip.”

Colonel Clark suggested that everything might be closed up for a few weeks till the fuss died down. He added quietly, “As far as the Americans are concerned, it’s more important that the tunnel be saved rather than risk it now in the hope that we can use it before we move.”

“Hell no,” said Floody. “You’ve put in a hell of a lot of work. Don’t miss out.”

“We’ll have our own tunnels going in the new compound soon,” Clark said.

“Too late to close up now anyway.” Roger, as usual, put his finger on the vital point. “The Goons’ll go on hunting till they find something, and the longer they go on the more chance they’ll have of finding ‘Dick’ and ‘Harry’ as well.”

“Let ‘em find ‘Dick’ and ‘Harry,’” said someone, “and they’ll probably stop looking.”

“We’re not giving anything away,” Roger snapped. “We’re going on with the original plan. The only thing is we’ve got to do it without leaving any more traces or we’ll have the damn Gestapo in. Glemnitz mustn’t find any more sand.”

And then Fanshawe achieved fame.

“Why not,” he said, “put it down ‘Dick’?”

It was so simple.

One of the northern blocks was searched in the morning and a shift was down “Tom” again. In the evening the penguins carted all the sand to the washroom of 122 where Mike Casey passed it below in jugs. Crump and two helpers dumped it at the far end of “Dick,” taking out the box frames and trolley rails as they filled it in. They took the frames and rails across to use in “Tom.”

They made twenty feet in two days without much trouble from the ferrets. Glemnitz seemed to be ignoring 123 and was concentrating on the other huts. They were searching a new hut every day, and the ferrets were diving under the blocks looking for sand. Willis-Richards saw Glemnitz himself disappear under 119 and took a cup of tea and a piece of black bread and laid them by the trap door in the base of the wall.

Leaning down, he called cordially into the darkness, “Oberfeldwebel,
do
come and have some tea. It must be very hot and dirty under there.”

A wall trap door on the other side of the hut opened and Glemnitz crawled out and walked away, his hard-bitten face flushed a delicate pink.

That evening, the duty pilot reported that Rubberneck had come into the compound soon after the appell and had not been checked out. The stooges crawled under the floors and up under the roofs of every block, but there was no sign of him. And then someone reported they’d seen him go into the kitchen block. The lageroffizier used a little office there, and a stooge found it was locked. We went around the block and closed all the blackout shutters (they couldn’t be opened from the inside). At dusk, Rubberneck emerged glowering from the door and stalked out of the compound with a dirty look at the duty pilot sitting on the steps of 112 as he passed.

A tame ferret reported the next day that Rubberneck had gone straight to Glemnitz and asked him to throw all the duty pilots into the cooler. Glemnitz refused because, he said, a new team of duty pilots would only watch the gate from various windows and he’d rather have them out in the open where he could see them.

Glemnitz never did quite know what to do about the duty pilots, and as there was actually nothing effective he
could
do he tolerated them philosophically as an innocuous irritant. He even went so far as to be light-hearted about them. Coming in the gate one afternoon a couple of days after the Rubberneck incident, he walked straight up to the D.P. and grinned benevolently.

“Put me down,” he said. “I’m in.”

The D.P. courteously entered his name.

“Who else is in?” asked Glemnitz affably.

“No one,” said the D.P., and Glemnitz’s smile died.

“Show me that list,” he said. The D.P. hedged for a while, but there was no way out and he handed it over. Glemnitz read it grimly and handed it back.

“You can mark me out again,” he said; “I have some business,” and he walked back out of the gate and over to the kommandantur where he found Rubberneck, the ferret Adolf, and another new ferret in their barrack blocks. Would they please explain, asked Glemnitz, why, if they were listed for duty till 5 P.M., they had been marked out of North Compound at four o’clock.

Four days’ cooler for Adolf, four for the new ferret, and two week’s extra duty and confinement to barracks for Rubberneck. (Oh frabjous day in North Compound!)

Partly because he couldn’t do anything about the duty pilots, Glemnitz sent in a team of men with axes and saws and they started felling all the pine trees that had been left around the huts. The trees were almost all down in about three days, and the compound looked naked without them.

From outside a watcher could obviously see any movements around the huts. Clark and Harsh spread the word that all factory and tunnel stooges were to watch from inside the huts if possible. If they had to be outside the huts they were to try to change position every day. Clark sent a standing patrol around the circuit watching the little piles of branches that the ferrets had stacked by the edge of the woods. The ferrets were still spying from them, and he broadcast a warning to all stooges that they were to consider themselves under observation all the time.

“Tom” was going ahead nicely, from eight to ten feet a day, and Floody estimated that in two days they would be under the edge of the wood. He and Roger met after appell to discuss a way of digging straight up without the sand falling in on them when Clark stuck his head through the window.

“Come and look at this,” he said, and took them over to the western fence by 123. Men were swarming along the edge of the wood with axes and saws, and a tree was falling every five minutes. They were working like beavers, and in three days the edge of the wood had moved back about thirty yards. There the woodchoppers left it for the time being.

The tunnelers and other people in the know surveyed it with frustration and fury. “Tom” was just over two hundred feet — and still now a hundred feet short of the shelter of the trees. Pieber told Valenta they were going to build a new compound on the spot.

“Bloody funny coincidence,” Roger commented acidly. The only thing to do was dig on. That was unanimous. Breaking out where they were in the open was a permissible risk for one or two, but not for a big show involving a hundred.

The dispersal problem was raising an ugly head again. Sand has been pouring out of “Tom,” and “Dick” was full now to the base of the shaft. Roger refused to let them fill the shaft because he wanted it for an equipment store and underground workshop. He wouldn’t let them touch “Harry” either. If “Tom” was found, he wanted “Harry” as it was.

The ferrets were rooting around the gardens and the dust of the compound every day, and it was too risky to dump more than small amounts of sand there. It was Roger’s idea to store it.

“Everyone keeps Red Cross boxes full of junk under their bunks,” he said. “Why not put sand in the boxes and stow them under beds all over the camp?”

“We won’t get away with that for long,” Conk said.

“Put ‘em in a couple of the unlikely blocks they’ve just searched,” Roger said. “They’ll be safe there for a couple of weeks. That ought to give us time.”

Floody backed him up, and Block X’s went around collecting Red Cross boxes. That evening the penguins picked up sand from “Tom” in boxes and stowed them under bunks in 101 and 103 which had both just been searched.

They got away with it for five days, and “Tom” shot ahead nearly fifty feet. The atmosphere in the compound was rather electric. Floody had scrapped the idea of a second halfway house as a refinement he couldn’t afford, and they went hell for leather all the way. Then Glemnitz sprang a surprise search on 103 and a ferret found the boxes of sand. Glemnitz stormed out of the compound, and the wagons were in half an hour later trundling around each side of 103, wrecking the gardens again.