The Great Escape (18 page)

He made himself a stock of paper patterns of various sizes by cutting them out of sheets of German newspaper. It greatly simplified the business of reshaping clothes. If he didn’t have time or cloth to make you a suit himself, he would — if he was in a very good mood — lend you his paper patterns. He usually did the cutting for the difficult suits himself.

One man who wanted to try to hack his way through the wire at night had the idea of traveling outside as a German railwayman and asked Guest if he could make him a porter’s uniform. Guest ran a ruler over him.

“Come back at one o’clock for a fitting,” he said.

The man reported back at one, had his fitting and collected the finished uniform, complete with cap, at 5 P.M. He would probably have got a long way in it if the searchlights hadn’t picked him up on the wire as he was trying to cut through.

Al Hake had his compass production line in a room in 103. He made the compass castings out of broken gramophone records, heating the bits till they were soft as dough and then pressing them in a mold. Artists painted the points of the compass accurately on little circles of paper, and they fitted neatly into the base of the casings. He sank a gramophone needle in the center of the base for the needle pivot. The direction needle itself was a bit of sewing needle which he rubbed against a magnet.

With great delicacy he soldered a tiny pivot socket to the center of the magnetized needles. (The solder came from the melted joints of bully-beef tins, and he dug resin for the soldering out of the pine trees, and after the trees were cut down, out of the resinous wood of the huts.) Valenta even got him some luminous paint for the needles so they could be used at night without the danger of striking matches.

Glass for the compass tops he took from bits of broken window. If there weren’t any broken windows handy, he broke one himself and then cut the pieces into circular disks under water so the glass wouldn’t crack or chip. He made a little blow lamp out of a fat lamp and some thin tubing rolled out of old food tins. Through the tube he blew a gentle jet of air against the flame, playing it around the rim of the compass case, and when it was melting soft he pressed in the glass and there it set, tight and waterproof.

He was finishing one a day, and they were so beautifully done you’d have thought they were bought in a shop. I think the neatest thing about them came from the inscription he had carved in the bottom of the mold for the casings. When you turned the finished compass over, there on the base was professionally engraved, “Made in Stalag Luft III.”

As they turned their stuff out — maps, compasses, clothes, and forged papers — Roger dispersed them behind the false walls and down in “Dick.” It occured to them that though the Germans searched the huts with Teutonic, but not particularly imaginative, thoroughness, they never thought to search the huts of the outside earth latrines, so he hid a lot of the bulky clothing up in the roof of one of them.

They kept two or three of Tommy Guest’s creations, including a German uniform, behind a wall panel in the room which Chaz Hall and Cornish used as a passport photograph studio. It was safer to have them right on the spot. Hall produced a striking shot of “Unteroffizier” Roger Bushell of the Luftwaffe, looking out of the picture with that sinister drooping eye. Later Roger had one taken as a businessman, and that was the one he eventually used on his passes.

Von Lindeiner flatly refused to allow any communication with the Americans in their new compound, so Massey put a semaphore signaler in an end room of 120, standing well back from the window so that he was outside the field of view from the goon-boxes. The Americans spotted him in about two minutes, and put their own signaler in a window. They chattered away every day for half an hour exhanging compound gossip. He used to send the B.B.C. news over for a while, but the Yanks didn’t take long to get their own radio going.

Ellan, our radio man, was collecting more stuff through the contacts with an eye to making a transmitter if the need should ever arise. One had to be a shade prudent about that. If Rubberneck came across a transmitter or the signs thereof, the other seven in his room could look forward with confidence to a bullet in the back of the head, preceded by a little gathering in a sound-proof Gestapo room to discover what had been going on.

Johnny Travis made them a bolt hole by putting a tall locker against the thin wooden wall in Ellan’s room and another locker in the same spot in the next room. He put detachable panels in the backs of the lockers and another detachable panel in the wall so that stuff could be passed through in emergency.

The summer lingered on, and the weather stayed good for escaping. That was probably why Rubberneck kept the ferrets up to the mark. He got the idea (only too justified) that a foolish little ferret known as “Young ‘un” had been wooed from the path of duty. I don’t think Rubberneck ever proved that “Young ‘un” brought in contraband, but he had him sent to the Russian Front, and even the Keen Type smartened up after that. The Ostfront was the bogieman.

The woodchoppers came back and cleared the rest of the wood outside the west fence, and a new compound started to go up there. That ruled out “Dick” for good, except as workshop and store, leaving only “Harry.” Roger kept it sealed down. He wouldn’t risk his last tunnel while Rubberneck was so active. Autumn was suddenly on us, and Roger faced the fact that there was no chance of breaking out “Harry” safely before winter and that they would have to wait till the spring.

“Don’t get the idea we’re sitting back till then,” he said. “We want ‘Harry’ finished by the time the weather’s right again.”

He was moody and irritable in the next few weeks, and it was worse when a man came in on a new purge whom Roger had known before he was shot down. The new man had been an engine mechanic on his squadron. Now he was a squadron leader. Bushell never did take kindly to rusticating in a backwater while the rest of the world went ahead.

He found some relief for his frustration in the camp theater, taking parts in nearly every play — and playing them brilliantly. One couldn’t have a personality and ego as powerful as Bushell’s without being a good actor. Sometimes he was difficult to live with, but he was mostly forgiven that except by a few who experienced his wrath. Bushell’s way with the lazy or the foolish was blunt and lacerating, and yet he had enormous charm. He was two people, really — one ruthless and autocratic, and the other the generous playboy.

“He’s got killer eyes,” Travis said, “but he’s a helluva nice chap.” They weren’t killer eyes. That was only the effect of the ski gash. They were brooding. There had been a hint of it when he was first shot down.

He wrote to his old adjutant in England, “That devil, the human mind, makes one go crazy at times. The hardest part here is being out of things.”

And to his mother in South Africa, “The most tiring job is doing nothing.”

At the time he was learning Czech, Danish, and Russian, as well as acting, teaching German, and playing rugger. Massey and Wings Day encouraged his activities because it helped to lull German suspicions. They never ceased regarding Roger as a marked man, though. Valenta had had his contacts very delicately spreading the word that Roger was a reformed character, had given up tunneling as hopeless, and was content to wait for the end of the war. Rubberneck came to believe it almost completely, and Roger certainly gave the impression of a man living a blameless life. He recovered his spirits after a while and was the playboy again. That was about the time he and Canton raided Travis’ room and emptied their sugar bowl. They filled it with sand and put a thin layer of sugar over the top. There was a roar of dismay from Travis’ room at brew time that night. They suspected Bushell immediately and tackled him. Roger turned on his best declamatory barrister’s manner.

“The bloody Goons,” he roared in outraged sympathy. “They must have pinched it during appell. I’ll tear a strip off Pieber for that.”

“I’m not so sure it was the Goons,” said Travis, suspiciously.

“Must have been,” said Roger indignantly. “Who else but the Goons would think of putting sand in its place?”

“You’re a hell of a barrister,” Travis said, eyeing him flintily. “No one’s mentioned sand yet,” and Roger bowed his head in shame.

“It was for raisin hooch,” he said disarmingly. “I was going to invite you.”

Roger still found time for escape work. With “Harry” still sealed down, he organized “wire jobs.” Anyone who wanted to try it applied to the committee and had to convince Roger he had a sound travel plan and had made up a good enough story about himself to pass casual police checks on trains and roads. The committee gave him a little money, ausweis, compass, maps, clothes if he needed them, and a pair of wire-clippers.

The man waited for a stormy night or an air raid when the boundary light were turned off, then crawled out of his hut, prayed he wouldn’t strike the hundfuehrer, made for the boundary wire, and tried to cut his way through.

A couple of dozen people tried it before winter set in, but there were too many guards and searchlights. One or two got clear, but only for a night or two. The usual form for wire jobs was out of the hut, up to the wire, and down to the guard-room with hands up and pistol in the back, then into the cooler.

Jacky Rae, a New Zealand Spitfire pilot, decided that the reason most wire jobs failed was because on a dark night the guards were always on their toes around the wire by the huts. He thought there was a better chance of making it if one could get to the wire on the far side of the appell ground where the guards wouldn’t be expecting anyone.

The area was swept by searchlights, but there was a slight dip in the ground across the appell ground where the Germans had been thinking of making a road. Rae and a Canadian called Probert got out of their hut one night and crawled on their bellies along the dip, the searchlights flashing just above them. They were so careful it took them seven hours to crawl 250 yards, but they finally made the wire and then only had about two strands to go when a guard picked them up.

The Kommandant was so angry at their audacity he gave them a month each in the cooler. Probert had claustrophobia and couldn’t stand it. He got out of his cell to go to the toilet one day and made a dash for the cooler door, but a bullet got him in the shoulder before he made it. It was months before he recovered enough to return to the compound.

Travis made the wire-clippers for these jobs out of tie bars which he ripped off the huts. He riveted them together like scissors and filed cutting notches in them. It was very soft steel, so he hardened the metal himself. In a home-made forge he heated the clippers till they were red hot, poured a few grains of sugar on the metal around the cutting notches, and heated it up again so the carbon in the sugar was baked into the metal. Then he plunged it into cold water, and the steel came out hard enough to cut wire. It was the same technique he used for making his cold chisels.

As the weather got colder, even the most incurable optimists faced the fact that it was too late now for any Second Front in 1943, and people, with varying degrees of patience, resigned themselves to another year in prison. Some who had been behind the wire for three and four years were developing little eccentricities — “wire happy” was the polite name for it. One man became convinced he was General Smuts and insisted the people in his room call him “Sir.” The German doctors took him away for treatment.

There was another one who cut his wrist on two occasions with a razor blade to finish it all, but there is no privacy in prison camp and he was seen bleeding and it was stopped. The Germans took him away to sick quarters, but he got out of his bed one night and climbed up on the roof where a guard spotted him, challenged him and, as he ran across the roof, caught him with a burst of machine-gun fire.