The Great Escape (34 page)

They cut a trap under Dowse’s bed and worked in the dark all the time as in the first tunnel at Dulag. No such luxuries as fat lamps at Sachsenhausen. The soil was firm, unlike the sandy stuff at Sagan, so they didn’t have to shore it, which was just as well because there was nothing to shore it with. There were also, as far as they knew, no microphones buried around the wire, so they were able to make it shallow, running about six feet deep.

Appell was at 6 A.M., and one man went below immediately afterward and dug. The others dispersed the sand under the hut. The tunnel wouldn’t have lasted a week at Sagan, but at Sachsenhausen, free of ferrets, they kept at it for four months until in August it was nearly a hundred feet long and they calculated they were outside the compound wire. Their security had been perfect. The other people in the little compound still didn’t dream that the tunnel existed.

Then Day came across a sheet from a weeks-old German newspaper in the latrine, and his blood literally seemed to run cold as he read a story at the top of the page, a report of the fifty from Sagan being shot trying to escape again or avoid recapture.

The five of them held a grim little meeting in Dowse’s room. It was not a long meeting, and the vote was to take a chance and carry on. Having taken the tunnel so far, they couldn’t bear the thought of not using it. It was rather a courageous vote.

They waited for a suitable time, and early in September there was a moonless night with the added cover of a drizzle of rain. About 11 P.M. they surfaced outside the wire, helped each other over the nine-foot outer wall, and dispersed into the darkness.

Wings Day, the old campaigner, still had a little of his money left from the Sagan break. He had sewed it into his coat, and the Gestapo had not found it. One of the Irish soldiers in the compound had given him the address of some people in a town south of Berlin who might help him.

Day and Dowse were traveling together, and in the darkness they asked a man the way to the nearest railway station. Only then did they notice he was in police uniform. Suspiciously he asked them who they were, and they ran off into the darkness. At dawn they found the railway station and caught the first train to Berlin, changed trains there, and reached the town they were aiming for. That night they sheltered in the cellar of a bombed house, but someone must have seen them going in because some people surrounded it and then men came in with revolvers and the police arrived.

They spent a couple of nights handcuffed in a Berlin Gestapo jail waiting for the firing squad and thought the time had come when they were taken out and put in a car. For an hour they drove out of Berlin expecting all the time to stop, be taken out and shot, and they were considerably surprised when they pulled up at Sachsenhausen again. There each was chained to the concrete floor of a dungeon in solitary confinement. They spent nearly five months in unspeakable conditions. Churchill and James had been caught also and were in cells near them.

The Dodger had an extraordinary time. He had gone off on his own from Sachsenhausen, aiming for Luebeck, and jumped into a coal truck of a goods train trundling roughly in that direction. At dawn he jumped out of the coal truck miles from the danger area of Sachsenhausen and slept all day in a thicket by the banks of a stream. At night he found a near-by siding and was going to try “jumping the rattler” again when he was caught in the beam of a watchman’s torch. Not waiting to answer the challenge, he vanished into the darkness and went back to his hide-out.

All the next day he walked northwest in pouring rain and just outside a village met two friendly French slave laborers who sheltered him in a barn for a week, bringing him food every day. On the seventh day they said an untrustworthy Pole had seen him and he must move. They took him to a near-by café used by slave laborers, where an old, stone-deaf German served them with gallons of beer, and they talked openly in front of him. The Frenchmen hid him in another barn, and he was seen by a Russian whom the Frenchmen didn’t trust, so they took him out the next day and put him for the night in a rabbit hutch. Again an unreliable Russian came across him so the Frenchmen took him to a hayloft, and there he spent a week, bedded down in clover hay listening to the pigs underneath. Once or twice he saw the German farmer walking by with his shotgun under his arm. The Frenchmen brought him food every day, and the German farmer must have seen them.

On the seventh morning the Dodger awoke to find the farmer looking at him from behind the hollow end of a pistol. The local policeman came around shortly after. He had been a Luxemburger, and when he got the Dodger by himself he apologized for having to hold him. He had to arrest him, he said, or be shot himself, but made up for it as far as he could by feeding him on hot oatcakes made specially by his wife. He brought out the
German Police Gazette
, and in it the Dodger saw a picture of himself, an unlovely and villainous one taken over four years earlier when he had first been captured.

It was the adjutant of Sachsenhausen himself who arrived by car with guards and handcuffs to take him back. In a cell along the corridor from Day and the others, they chained him to the floor, and the months passed in wretchedness. The five men heard nothing of the war except for scraps the guards told them about the “wonderfully successful” German offensive in the Ardennes. They made it sound as though the war might go on forever.

On February 3, they came to the Dodger’s cell, took the chain off his ankles, and led him outside. A young German officer helped him into a car, climbed in after him, and off they drove to Berlin. What followed had the air of a dream. The young officer took him into a shop and bought him a complete outfit of civilian clothes: suit, shirts, socks, shoes, hat — the lot. Then he took him to a flat, introduced him to the S.S. major, his wife and child who occupied it, and showed him into a delightfully furnished bedroom.

“This will be your room,” said the young officer, and to the man they had chained in a dungeon, none of it was real.

“Tell me,” the Dodger asked the young officer, “what is all this about?”

“You will find out in due course,” said the officer. “Now change into your new clothes. You will feel much more comfortable.”

“Look here. I’m an officer,” the Dodger said. “Will you, as an officer, give me your word I can wear these things without compromising myself?”

“Yes,” said the German decisively. “I do.”

A few hours later a thickset man in civilian clothes arrived and greeted the Dodger warmly. Dr. Thost had been London correspondent for the
Voelkischer Beobachter
in 1938– 1939. Now he was a fairly high official in the German Foreign Office. He put the Dodger in a car and drove him off to the Adlon Hotel, Berlin’s finest.

“Will you please tell me what this is all about?” asked the Dodger, blinking unbelievably at a sparkling chandelier in the foyer, one of the few parts of the hotel not bomb-damaged.

“You will know soon,” Thost promised. He took him up to a private room and introduced him to a large, fleshy man with a booming voice and an expansive, enveloping smile.

“This is Dr. Schmidt,” said Thost. “Dr. Schmidt is Herr Hitler’s interpreter.”

“Have a drink, my dear fellow,” boomed Dr. Schmidt, spilling over with bonhomie. He handed the Dodger a glass.

The Dodger looked at it.

“Scotch whisky,” boomed Schmidt. “Not much of it left, I’m afraid.”

The Dodger looked cautiously at Dr. Schmidt — the same kind of look that is in a small boy’s eyes when he gazes first, suspiciously, upon Santa Claus, not knowing what to expect.

“You are going home, my dear sir,” said Dr. Schmidt, as if the news made him happy. “No doubt you will be seeing your kinsman Mr. Churchill when you arrive.” And then, confidentially and solemnly, “I want you to remember three things. One…no unconditional surrender. Two…ethnographical boundaries, and three…the balance of power in Europe. For Britain’s safety, it must be maintained.” He nodded vaguely toward the east where the Russians were preparing their assault on Berlin. “You know what I mean.”

And the Dodger at last understood.

Thost took him to lunch in a smart restaurant the next day and in the afternoon drove him to Dresden. They gave the Dodger his own room in a hotel there. He was taken to meet the chief of police, and at lunch the chief spoke graciously about the traditional bond between the British and the Germans. The Dodger met a lot more pleasant people who all thought the same. You wouldn’t have thought they’d chain a dog in a dungeon, or even, for that matter, shoot fifty British bunny rabbits.

Thost took the Dodger (grinning grimly to himself) to the circus, and they were watching the lady on the tightrope when the sirens went and the first of the three great air raids on Dresden started. In an hour the center of the city was a sheet of flame. Thost and the Dodger got out of the danger area, and Thost escorted him to an administration headquarters outside the city where an S.S. General greeted him warmly.

“Major Dodge,” said the General. “I am so glad to see you are safe. I have been on the phone to Herr Himmler and you are going home.”

At the headquarters he met Frau Von Kleist, wife of the field marshal who had been relieved of his post. The Dodger was able to get a few words with her alone.

“Why don’t you people put up the white flag?” he asked.

“That’s what my husband thinks too,” she said. “But we can’t. We’re not allowed to.”

Back in Dresden they found their hotel in ruins. Thost took him on a bus to Weimar, where they were bombed again but spent several days in the town. The Dodger toyed with the idea of escaping again but couldn’t quite see what good it would do. On the other hand, staying with Thost, observing the country and the people, and getting back with Schmidt’s message might be of some conceivable benefit.

At last they struck off southeast through Regensburg to Bayreuth, and there someone overheard them talking in English in an
estaminet
. Thost and the Dodger knew nothing about it until the police arrived, handcuffed them, and marched them off as spies. Thost, the high offical, was livid with rage and almost speechless for a while until he got his voice back, and then the air was quivering with his protests, which the police stolidly ignored. They were thrown into a cell and spent two days waiting for execution. At night they could hear the American guns, and the Dodger, so patient since 1940, felt only bitterness. With freedom just by his fingertips it seemed so unfair that death should come like this from the little officials, when the German Foreign Office itself was bowing to him as a mediator.

Thost was sweating with fright and fury, and that was not without humor, but the most sardonic touch was the manner of their release. The local Gestapo freed them after a message had penetrated to Berlin and the answer had come back clearing the “spies.”