The Great Escape (21 page)

The moon faded and digging started again. Floody made a new record of twelve and a half feet in one day. Then they ran into a soft patch and Floody was buried again, badly. A couple of hundred pounds of sand slipped from the roof, and Floody was nearly unconscious from the force and weight of it. Crump had a little trouble dragging him clear, yelled back, and Canton came crawling up from the halfway house. Together they dragged Floody out, and he recovered quickly and insisted on staying to clear the mess.

There were other falls, too, just as dangerous. A bedboard slipped out of a pile at the top of the shaft, fell nearly thirty feet, and got Cooky Long on the head as he was coming out of the tunnel. They brought him up concussed, green and sick, and he was two days in his bunk.

A day or so later a metal jug fell from the trap and hit Floody on the head — luckily not a direct hit from the rim but a glancing blow on the side, otherwise it would have split his head open. As it was, he had a wicked contusion, and his head was in bandages for days. He told Pieber he’d tripped and cannoned into a door, and Pieber was very sympathetic.

Langford dropped a bedboard and nearly brained Crump, who cursed him for a couple of minutes.

“I suppose you think I bloody well did it on purpose.” Langford called down, and then apologized. Langford lived in the trap room and ruled it with a rod of iron. The trap was his baby. Nerves were getting very frayed. The volatile Johnny Marshall had a couple of outbursts; in fact everyone did, even the limping, good-natured Johnny Bull.

By February 10, they had finished the second halfway house. It was nearly under the outer wire and Crump named it Leicester Square. There were about 130 feet to go for the woods, and Johnny Marshall again wanted them to start digging gradually up so they would finish near the surface. Floody opposed him, and there was a heated debate in the committee. Roger settled it by saying they would dig straight on. On a long uphill haul, he still wouldn’t trust the trolley ropes.

Wings Day was doing an occasional digging shift on “Harry.” Floody wouldn’t let him dig too often because Wings, like Roger, had a notorious record as far as the Germans were concerned and was supposed to keep in the background as a sort of over-all controller, lending his advice whenever it was needed.

Pop Green was another one of the old brigade who wouldn’t be out of it. Pop had won an M.C. in the 1914– 1918 war and got into this war as a tail gunner by lying about his age. He was about fifty and had been one of Fanshawe’s penguins since the days of “Tom.” He still insisted on being a penguin and used to collect his kit bag of sand weighing about fifty pounds from Langford and stagger down the corrider with it. Fanshawe tried to make him take an easier job, and Pop refused in terms that hadn’t been used to Fanshawe since his midshipman days.

Pop shared a little room with the Dodger at the end of 104 — next to the room which sheltered “Harry’s” trap. Bushell thought it would be a good idea to help divert any suspicion if they boldly had Pieber in to tea, nonchalantly rubbing shoulders, so to speak, with the trap. It was a fair assumption that if the Germans were invited in they would tend to believe that nothing sinister could be going on in that area. So Pieber was invited; and about the time he was due to arrive, the Dodger, that amiable and nerveless Anglo-American, sighted the Kommandant striding majestically in the compound; so he invited the Kommandant too, and the four of them spent a pleasant half hour in innocuous chit-chat with the trapdoor only 10 feet away behind a wooden partition. The duty shift of tunnelers was down below and George Harsh was standing by to see that nothing went wrong, glowering, tugging on his gray mustache and muttering curses.

At the end of February, Himmler had another victory in his campaign for more ruthless treatment of prisoners. Keitel issued the order known as “Stufe Roemisch III.” It said that every escaped officer prisoner, other than British and Americans, was to be handed over on recapture to the Gestapo. Recaptured British and American officers were to be kept in military or police prisons, and the High Command would decide in each case whether they were to be handed over to the Gestapo. The recapture of the officers must be kept secret, and they were to be officially reported as “Escaped and not recaptured.”

We came off appell one morning and found the tommy-gunners around 104, Rubberneck and the ferrets inside. Floody, Crump, Harsh, and Roger walked around and around the circuit telling each other airily that Rubberneck didn’t have a hope, and all of them feeling butterflies in their stomachs. Rubberneck came out three hours later, looking his usual lugubrious self.

Adolf was making himself a nuisance again. He came in on the late shift and wandered restlessly all over the camp and in all the blocks, causing a near-panic in 104. The German-speaker delayed him in the corridor and Langford got the trap closed, but dispersing was held up and George Harsh had bitten his fingernails right down and went around muttering horrible threats. Adolf was still the friendless one. No contact was able to inveigle him into his room for a brew. Adolf might exchange a few words with them, and then he shut his stolid mouth and gloomed off.

It seemed like an Act of God when, for no accountable reason, he suddenly developed a friendship for a tall red-bearded Scot called Jim Tyrie who spoke fluent German. Tyrie took him into his room in 103 for a brew, and Adolf settled down there comfortably for a couple of hours. He went back the next night and made it a habit.

Valenta had cultivated Walter, the bookfuehrer, a thin obergefreiter with glasses who came in the compound nearly every day and often helped Pieber count the appell. He was harmless, rather a gentle type, and the told Valenta that Rubberneck was getting the idea there was a tunnel somewhere in the compound.

“What, in winter?” Valenta said innocently, fishing for more. “Where the hell does he think we can hide the sand?”

Walter shrugged and spread his hands expressively.

“I would not know,” he said. “It is nothing to do with me. I think you can expect more searches.”

“Where?” asked Valenta, and Walter nodded toward 110.

Roger cleaned out his wall panel that night. There wasn’t much bulky stuff in it, but there were some list of names. He hid most of them behind a panel in another block, but, a little carelessly (unusual for Roger) he carried the rest in his pockets.

There was no search next morning but halfway through appell Rubberneck walked on to the appell square with half a dozen guards. They split up and approached various squads, one of them being the inhabitants of 110. Roger, conscious of the papers in his pockets, had a sudden instinct of what was going to happen and his heart was bumping a little. He shoved his hands in his pockets and muttered out of the corner of his mouth, “Conk, stick around.”

Canton, Piglet Lamond, and McIntosh moved up close to him, and as they did so, Rubberneck and Eichacher, an English-speaking German, reached the squad. Eichacher had a word with Bob Tuck, who was at the front, and then turned and called, “Squadron Leader Bushell, please. Come out and follow me.”

As he shouldered forward in the crowd, Roger pressed the papers into the hands of those around him, and they passed them on to the others down the line. Rubberneck didn’t notice a thing.

In 104 squad, another ferret had called out Floody and George Harsh, and they marched, a forlorn little group, across the square. Rubberneck stopped by Wings Day.

“
Komm!
” he said.

Half a dozen armed guards fell in around them, and they were marched off to their huts. Rubberneck stripped them all naked and searched them, finding nothing. Poker-faced, he let them go and marched out of the compound.

Walter had been right. Rubberneck searched 110 the next morning and, probing above a window in a room on the east side he sprang a secret wall panel. It was empty. No. Not quite. Rubberneck pounced on a little piece of paper lying in it. There was some writing on it. He passed it to Eichacher.

“What does it say?” he asked.

“It says,” Eichacher translated a little nervously, “‘sorry. Too late!’”

It wasn’t a very wise thing for the roomfuehrer to do. Rubberneck was a bad man to goad, and judging by his next move, he was ready to do anything to unearth the tunnel he was beginning to suspect.

Floody called Bushell out of his room.

“For God’s sake, come and look at the circus.”

In the vorlager just outside the fence a little procession was walking along the wire. Rubberneck was there, Broili in his shiny black boots, one or two other German officers, and a few ferrets. Leading them was an old man in a cloth cap and a ragged corduroy jacket. He held a rod in front of him and was looking at the ground over his drooping mustache.

“What the hell…!” Roger said.

“A bloody diviner.” Floody was hugely amused. “Ever heard of a tunnel diviner?”

“I never thought I’d live to see the day,” Roger said shaking his head.

The old diviner had started opposite 101, and now he was opposite 103. A couple of times he stopped and cocked an eye pensively at the sky while the rod gently waved in his hands. Once he turned back a few paces, Rubberneck and Broili stepping devoutly aside, watching, it seemed, a little self-consciously because Rubberneck was swiveling an occasional eye sideway at the compound. A few prisoners stopped on the circuit and gaped at them open-mouthed.

“No, I never heard of a tunnel diviner,” Roger said after a short silence, “but I think we ought to be in this. The old boy might imagine he’s found something and start a panic.” He moved down to the wire, Floody after him, and they muttered to the spectators by the warning wire. A few seconds later, groans and catcalls started to rise, followed by wild, shrill laughter. People came running up to see what all the excitement was, and the chorus of derision swelled. Rubberneck wouldn’t look across any more, but his face was scarlet. The old diviner looked up in offended dignity, then Broili spoke to him and he dropped his eyes again.

But he was a rattled man. He doddered on, passing over “Harry” opposite 104 without a tremor, dithered for a while round 105 (where there was nothing), and continued on to the end of the compound, followed behind him by the Germans and along the warning wire by a hundred derisive prisoners. He tried again on the return journey but the ectoplasm didn’t seem to be working. It was the first time the ferrets had ever tried diviners.

And the last.

“It’s not really funny,” Roger told the grinning committee later. “It means we’re going to have that sod Rubberneck on our tails. Everyone’s got to be doubly careful from now on.”

Harsh sent out a special security warning and threatened he would personally bash to a pulp any stooge who slipped up or anyone talking about escape where they might be overheard. Langford noticed the white-washed cement facing on the wall behind “Harry’s” trap was a little scarred where the open trap had leaned against it. He carefully “whitewashed” it again with a solution of foot powder, smearing it on with a shaving brush.

As a further blind for himself, Roger took on another part with the camp theater. In addition to his escape work and his language classes, he started rehearsing every night the part of Professor Higgins in
Pygmalion
. The fact that Rubberneck had still suspected him enough to search him personally was making him very cautious.

Roger expected Rubberneck might put on a couple of snap appells during the day. That had happened once at Barth when the Germans suddenly ran into the compound and a couple of people down a tunnel didn’t have time to get up again. The count showed they were missing, and the tunnel was found because of it. He sent an order around that in the event of a snap appell, everyone was to dawdle as much as possible, and Floody fixed an emergency procedure for the men underground.