The Great Escape (19 page)

Another one was to be taken away by train for treatment, but at Sagan Station, as the train came in, he wrenched himself away from the guards and jumped onto the tracks right in front of the engine which had no time to pull up. Over in the East Compound, a man could suddenly stand it no longer, jumped over the warning wire, and ran for the fence. He was tearing his hands to pieces on the barbed wire when the machine guns put him out of his anguish forever.

It was about this time in East Compound that Eric Williams and two of his friends escaped through the most brilliant and ingenious tunnel yet devised.

They made a vaulting horse with covered in sides and parked it every day by the warning wire in exactly the same place. While a team of men had vaulting drill over it, Williams and his colleagues, who had been carried to the spot inside the horse, were tunneling underneath. Being able to start by the warning wire instead of under a hut gave them a couple of hundred feet less to dig to freedom. After weeks and weeks of dogged and courageous work, they broke through outside the wire one night and all three of them got back to England by way of Sweden. That effort (described in Eric Williams’ brilliant book,
The Wooden Horse
) is already acknowledged as one of the classic escapes of history
.

By the middle of 1943, Germany was finding it hard to cope with the millions of prisoners and slave laborers within her borders. Himmler was pressing Hitler to give him full control of all prisoners of war. In October, Keitel, Chief of the High Command, issued the “Igel Order,” which laid it down that all prisoners in transit henceforth should be chained.

About two months after Italy fell, Von Lindeiner sent some workmen in to fix a loud-speaker in the compound so we could be dosed with German radio. They were stringing up several hundred yards of wire to connect it to the master set in the vorlager and while they worked dumped a couple of reels of wire behind them. Roger got the news in the theater where he was rehearsing and sent Canton off with a gang of diversionists to collar some of the wire. They hid behind a near-by hut, planning a disturbance to divert the workmen while one of them sneaked up and grabbed some of the wire.

At that moment the compound gate opened and Red Noble wandered in, carrying his blanket over his shoulder, just out after his latest spell in the cooler for trying to sneak into a hut that was being searched. He wandered up the dusty path, and a quiet gleam came into his eyes as he spotted the wire about fifty yards in front. Changing course just a fraction, he scooped up a coil of wire, tucked it under his blanket, and walked on. The workmen, ten feet away, didn’t notice a thing. A minute later, two of Canton’s men started fighting, and the workmen downed tools to watch. The fight didn’t last long. Neither did the other reel of wire.

That night it was all smuggled down “Dick.” There was over eight hundred feet in the two coils — more than enough to light “Harry” when work started again.

The committee’s joy was tempered with doubt and worry.

“There’ll be a hell of a row,” Floody said. “Rubberneck will know bloody well why we’ve taken it, and we might be starting a new bunch of searches just when we’re getting them to relax a bit.”

Roger, strangely enough, wanted to take a chance.

“I don’t think he’ll necessarily assume we’ve got anything going underground,” he said. “He knows we’d pinch the stuff on principle anyway, and in any case I think ‘Harry’ is pretty safely stuck down. It’s worth taking a risk. It’ll be pretty handy if we get away with it.”

As usual, Roger got his way and, as it happened, the foolish workmen were too frightened to report that they’d lost the wire. Later they were sorry they didn’t.

A German general came in to look us over that week, a great plump character with red slashes down the side of the riding breeches, a large bottom, and white lapels on his greatcoat. He drove into the compound with Von Lindeiner in a big shiny Mercedes and about a hundred scruffy prisoners clustered around to gape at that strange sight from another world, a motorcar. Von Lindeiner, knowing his prisoners, told them to keep their distance, but that jolly and benevolent extrovert, the general, wouldn’t hear of it.

“
Ach no,
” he said. “Let them see how Germany can make motorcars. My chauffeur will keep watch.” And away they marched on their inspection, Von Lindeiner still looking doubtful.

The chauffeur didn’t know much about prisoners either. He did his best, but as soon as he hauled a man out of one door there were half a dozen more scrambling in the other doors, looking in the tool kit and crawling underneath. A couple of the German speakers started firing questions at him about the car, offered him cigarettes, and others milled around him, smiling, innocent and admiring.

They drifted away after a while, with admiring comments, the general’s gloves, his torch and map case, all the portable tools in the tool kit, and a German Army handbook they found in the glove box.

I do not know what happened later between the general and the chauffeur, but I expect it was a fairly testy and one-sided conversation. The chauffeur probably caught the next train to the Ostfront, but there were no reprisals in the compound. The general, it seems, was too embarrassed to make any official fuss because the book that vanished from his glove box was a secret military handbook — and generals are not supposed to lose such things, particularly to enemy officers.

Von Lindeiner came into the compound the next day and had a private talk to Wings Day (Massey was in hospital having his foot treated).

“We know you have all these things,” Von Lindeiner said. “Let us not argue about that. If you will return to us the book, we will say nothing about the other things and no further action will be taken. But we must have the book. You understand the situation.”

“I am most surprised to hear about this,” Wings said politely (and not very truthfully). “I will have some inquiries made, and if one of my officers has forgotten his principles in his zeal, I will see what can be done.”

Von Lindeiner withdrew, a little prickly.

There wasn’t any point in hanging on to the book. The German speakers had been through it thoroughly, and it was only one of those fatuous military tomes that lay it down oracularly and pompously that if you have your right arm shot off above the elbow you may salute with your left arm.

It was Roger’s idea to have a special boot-heel stamp cut for the book and, after this has been applied, Wings handed it back to Von Lindeiner. I’d love to have seen the general’s face when he got it back. The boot-heel stamp was right across the cover — “Passed by the British Board of Censors.”

Snow fell heavily, early in December. It was too cold to be outside, so some of the stooges looking after the factories stood out like sore thumbs as they loitered around the same spots in the snow day after day, and it didn’t take long for Adolf’s watery eyes to fasten on Dean and Dawson’s stooges at each end of 110.

“Adolf, it would be bloody Adolf,” muttered Tim, ruffled for once. He was gettng an obsession about Adolf, who was tramping around the block every day, a quaint little figure with earmuffs and a blue nose, looking impassively through the windows. His expression never changed. Neither did his tactics. As soon as he saw the stooges, he was circumnavigating the block. The forgers were getting warnings four or five times an afternoon, and there was a mad rush to cover the work and look innocent while one of them stood up and held forth as though he were giving a lecture. It didn’t matter what he said. Adolf didn’t speak English.

He took to walking into a couple of the rooms, and that meant they had to shoot the stuff into the wall panel, damaging some of the work before the ink was dry and wasting time while they sorted it out again afterward.

So far, the stolid Adolf had been immune to any approaches from the contacts, but Tim got a contact to beguile him into a Christmas raisin wine party. They poured a couple of potent slugs into him, and he began to thaw and talk, his nose turning from blue to a luminous pink.

“You have some tricks going on in Barrack 110,” he said solemnly after a while. “I know. I have seen your postens outside. They are always there, and they give warnings when I approach.”

That gave Walenn an idea.

“Take the stooges away,” he said. “Adolf will think work has stopped there and won’t worry us.”

“Oh…risky,” said Cassie doubtfully.

“No more than it is now,” Tim said. “We’re giving ourselves away and losing a hell of a lot of time.”

We decided to give it a try and told the stooges to take a holiday. Adolf’s attentions stopped immediately. It was miraculous. The forgers were happy; the stooges were happy (stooging in the snow in leaky boots and on poor food is not funny), and presumably Adolf was happy too.

For a week they went forging ahead with no interruptions from Adolf or anyone else. They got twice as much work done, and it was easier on the nerves. Then one afternoon Henri Picard looked up and saw Adolf’s bony face peering through the window.

“Oh hell,” he said. “Look!”

There was a paralyzed silence, and then Tim quietly said, “Go on working as though nothing is happening.”

Adolf continued to peer through the window, but the cold outside and the warmth of the room inside had condensed moisture on the window and it was running down the glass, blurring it so that Adolf couldn’t quite make out what was going on. He must have thought they weree writing letters or studing, because after a minute his face vanished. There was a mad rush in the room, and in a few seconds all the documents were shoved behind the wall panel and the forgers had dispersed, but Adolf never came in to investigate.

“The stooges have got to go back, obviously,” Tim said.

“Correction,” said Cassie. “The stooges have got to go back — but
not
obviously.”

The problem was how to hide them so they could cover all approaches to the library room and still be able to give the pack-up in time. Hiding stooges from the ferrets also usually meant, to a certain extent, hiding the ferrets from the stooges. The ferrets, if they suspected a hut, had a habit of approaching it under cover of another, then darting around the corner and up and down, peering through the windows.

We worried over this one for a couple of days because Dean and Dawson were so exposed there couldn’t be any slips. Eventually we worked out a real cloak-and-dagger system which sounded very complicated.

The library room was midway along the western side of 110 with a door to the corridor and two windows facing west to be covered. One stooge stood by a window in an end room of 103, facing the northern end of 110, so he could see down both sides and around the near end. Another stood by an east window of 109, facing the library room so he could see past both ends of 110. The third stooge stood in the window next to the library (he couldn’t go in the actual library itself because the forgers were all around the windows). This third man could see anyone approaching from the west, and the outlooks of all stooges overlapped for double security.

When the stooge in 103 saw a ferret approaching, he opened his window. The man in 109 immediately saw this and put a folded paper against the window. The stooge next to the library caught the signal, knocked on the wall, and the stuff was out of sight in a few seconds.

With no stooges in sight, Adolf stopped hanging around 110 again. Occasionally he and other ferrets had a routine peek through the block but there was no deliberate concentration on it, and the stooges always warned in time.

Roger wrote home, “It can’t last much longer. This is definitely our last Christmas in the bag.” Grimly true for him.

On the last day of the year, the “X” chiefs threw a raisin wine party in 110, and by evening appell the world was sweetness and light. Canton and Bob Tuck charitably got on each side of a prominent tunneler and carried him on appell, his legs making walking movements about six inches above the snow. They held him up swaying, in the ranks but when Pieber came past counting, the tunneler swayed out of their grip and staggered to one side.

“Please stop moving,” said Pieber severely. “I cannot count you properly.”

“Tisn’ me moving,” said the tunneler, focusing desperately. “T’syou.”

There weren’t any more raisin wine brews after that. For two reasons.

A young squadron leader went to a hooch party in another block, and early in the morning, hours after lock-up, he felt so good he decided to slip out of the window and crawl back to his own block. He hadn’t gone far when the hundfuehrer’s dog caught him and was mauling his arm when the hundfuehrer himself walked up and emptied his pistol magazine at him. He was a rotten shot. Only one of the five bullets hit the man, low down in the stomach, and he lived, but hooch was banned after that.

The ban was hardly necessary. Freezing weather had brought sharper hunger and people wouldn’t spare a single raisin for a brew. The only vegetable from the Germans was sauerkraut. For weeks everything was sauerkraut, and the charm and novelty of sauerkraut are as fleeting as an English summer. A certain American summed it up when, for the tenth time in ten days, they handed him his sauerkraut ration.

“Jesus Christ,” he muttered disgustedly. “The same yesterday, the same today, and the same forever more.”