The Great Escape (26 page)

He went to the door by the trap and waited till Crump called for him. Davison, at the trap with another list, checked his name and gave him the patter: “All right, now sit down here on the edge of the trap. Feel that ledge a foot below with your feet. Stand with your right foot in the far corner. Feel the top rung of the ladder with your left foot. Got it? All right now, let it take your weight. It’s quite strong. Turn your body and down you go.”

At the bottom Crump showed them how to lie on the trolley and hold their kit. When they reached Piccadilly the hauler there had the trolley from Leicester Square, and the escaper crawled on, rolled along on the next stage, and changed trolleys again for the last lap.

The haulers were all experienced tunnelers like Noble and Rees and Birkland, so that everything underground would go smoothly. As each hauler pulled ten people past him, the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth men successively relieved them, and the old haulers continued on down the tunnel and out. The controller outside the hole behind the ferret fence got twenty men out, and then the twenty-first relieved him, and so on.

It wasn’t long before Crump realized that they were falling badly behind schedule. Barring hitches, Bushell had aimed at getting a man out every three or four minutes, but the first hour soon settled those hopes. Only six people were called in that hour. The suitcases were the trouble, and it looked as though they were going to be the trouble for some time.

The first thirty-seven were all going by train, and they nearly all had suitcases, made mostly out of cardboard or plywood and rubbed with boot polish. Nearly all of them found trouble in handling the cases on the trolleys. Some of them dropped them and some got the corners dangerously wedged against shoring frames. Trying to hold them out in front, several men overbalanced on the trolley platform, lifted the wheels and derailed them. The derailing was the worst.

The tunnel was so cramped that the men on the trolleys couldn’t do anything about getting the wheels back on again. The hauler would feel the rope tighten and then jib altogether, and usually he knew what the trouble was. He had to crawl down the tunnel and get the man on the trolley and take his weight on his hands and toes while he fitted the wheels back on the rails. Then the hauler crawled backward to his halfway house, started hauling again, and like as not the trolley would be derailed again before it reached him.

Crump turned once to see who was next and was surprised to see not a man but a suitcase. In fact, not so much a suitcase as a trunk. Behind it grinned a strange face which he recognized after a second or two as Tim Walenn without his great mustache, which he had shaved off for the occasion.

“Where the hell d’you think you’re going with this?” Crump demanded with a blend of wonder, exasperation, and amusement.

“Home, I hope,” Tim said soothingly, “but I expect to the cooler, actually.”

“You’ll never bloody well get that thing through,” Crump said.

“Don’t worry. I’ll cope.”

“Not a hope,” said Crump. “Can’t be done,” and they argued for a couple of minutes.

In the end Crump sent the case up on the trolley by itself, and Tim followed after.

Nerves were affecting a lot of them. Even some of the veteran diggers who had been riding on trolleys for months found themselves fumbling and getting stuck.

Rockland and Muller, the two Norwegians, went through very smoothly, Muller with a parting affectionate glance at the pump he had designed. They both looked very smart in plus fours. Neely, a Fleet Air Arm man, was another who went through smoothly.

A little after midnight the men in the hut heard the sirens and groaned. There had been no air raid alarms for a fortnight, and Roger had been praying that this would be a free night too. As the wail of the sirens died, the stooges at the windows heard faintly the rumble of the first bombs dropping on Berlin, sixty miles away, and almost in the same moment a German over in the kommandantur switched the power off, and all the lights went out.

Down in the tunnel it was Stygian, terrifying blackness, and everything stopped at once. Further progress was impossible. In the halfway houses, the confinement, the stuffiness, the fear of moving in case of a fall combining with the blackness gave rise to claustrophobia, and nerves were at snapping point again.

Wings Day, who had just been about to set off for Piccadilly, stayed and helped Crump light the fat lamps stored in the shaft and took them up on the trolley with him. His nerves seemed steady as a rock, and Crump watched with thankfulness as he receded into the tunnel, a moving, flickering pool of light.

Wings carried the lamps right through the tunnel, leaving one in each halfway house. When he got to the far end he found the hauler there had vanished. When the lights had gone and his relief did not arrive the hauler had apparently thought that something had gone wrong or that the Germans had entered the hut and found the tunnel, so he decided to leave. It was just lucky that Wings was experienced. He hauled through his partner and stayed to pull the next hauler up before he continued on his way. By the time men were moving slowly through again, a good thirty-five minutes had been lost, and, but for Day’s coolness, the time lost would have been a lot more.

There was one cheerful side to it. The camp boundary lights and searchlights were off too, leaving everything in blackness, and the guards by the wire were watching closely all the time into the compound, looking for optimists trying wire jobs in the darkness. The exit controller took advantage of it to speed up the departure.

The stoppages had already dislocated the plans of most of the escapers. The train travelers all had certain trains to catch and apart from four or five of the early ones they had all missed them. Some were able to catch later trains, but the delay meant they wouldn’t be as far away as they had hoped to be when the alarm was raised.

Up above it had been time for camp “lights out” at midnight and Torrens ordered “lights out” procedure. All the blackout shutters were opened (they had to be, because it was the usual practice), all fat lamps were doused, and everyone in the rooms had to stay in a bunk. No movement was allowed except in the dark corridor, and there was little enough movement there. The whole floor was covered with bodies huddled in blankets trying to snatch a few minutes’ sleep before their turn came.

Not many were sleeping. They were too keyed up. Nearly all of them were hardarsers, and they knew they weren’t going on any picnic. The trek across snow-clad country would beat most of them, and there were bound to be a few Gestapo beatings.

By the windows the stooges saw the hundfuehrer and his dog several times within a few yards of the window of room 23. The stooge whispered a warning, and everyone froze out of sight but the German never came near enough to look in.

Crump had had his fingers crossed for hours praying there would be no falls but about one-thirty the luck gave out. Tom Kirby-Green was halfway between Piccadilly and Leicester Square when he moved position slightly on the trolley and the rear wheels rose and came off the rails. He tried to squeeze himself off the platform and back to fix it, and his burly shoulders caught on a damaged box frame and tore it out. The roof collapsed and down came the sand, bringing down about three more feet of roofing, and more sand crashed down.

It was a bad fall. In two seconds Kirby-Green was buried from legs to shoulders and the tunnel was blocked. Wrapped in all his escape kit the big man couldn’t move, but luckily his head was clear and he could breathe.

Up in Leicester Square, Birkland, who had been hauling him, felt the rope tighten and stop. Looking down the tunnel he could not see the dim light of the fat lamp in Piccadilly and knew that the tunnel was blocked. He crawled down to the accident and slowly pulled Kirby-Green clear, then made the big man crawl over him up to the halfway house. Birkland started patching up the tunnel, working like a sweating madman in almost total darkness, feeling where the boards had come away and then probing for them in the fallen sand.

It was a dangerous job in the darkness, with a constant risk of more sand coming away, burying him alone there and wrecking the tunnel. As far as he could judge there was already a dome about three feet high over the fallen roof. He got the side boards in place again and then some of the roof boards and started packing the fallen sand on top. It was a solid hour before he had finished, soaked in sweat and sand and breathing heavily with exhaustion.

Just as he was finishing the sirens wailed again, sounding the all clear and over in the kommandantur a German switched on the current and the tunnel was flooded with light. The cable, luckily, had survived the fall. Birkland found himself, as usual, left with a pile of sand that could not be packed back above the roof. He did the only thing possible and spread it out over the floor of the tunnel for several feet between the rails, then crawled backward to Leicester Square, and the shuttle service started again.

About a quarter to three the last of the suitcase carriers went through, and the rate speeded up a little as the blanket brigade started. They all carried a single blanket rolled and tied tightly and slung on a string around their necks. It left their hands free so they could hold themselves more steadily on the trolley.

There were still too many stoppages. Some of the men hadn’t tied their blanket rolls as they’d been shown, but had made them too long and the ends jammed between their shoulders and the walls of the tunnel. They had to keep freeing themselves every couple of feet and one man took seven minutes to go a hundred feet. Others had the string too loose about their necks so that the blankets dangled under the platform of the trolley, caught under the wheels, and the next thing they knew the trolley was derailed and they were nearly strangled.

Some of them had so much food and spare kit packed around them that they looked like swollen editions of Falstaff, and down at the base of the shaft Crump ruthlessly went through their corpulent forms emptying out their accessories till he thought they were lean enough. The Dodger was one of his victims. He was swaddled in so much stuff that he looked like a cocoon, but, courteous as ever and with only the most considerate of protests he submitted to Crump’s reducing treatment and then went trundling smoothly through. Pop Green was another, but after Crump’s merciless fingers had done their work he, too, went through with only minor trouble.

Men had been moving for over four hours now. There were less than three hours to first light and less than fifty had reached the far end. Now the hardarsers were going through, the procedure outside was altered slightly. At the end of the rope in the wood, men waited until a party of ten had assembled, one of whom had been specially briefed on leading them through the wood, around the west side of the camp, past a French and Jewish compound, and on to a little dirt road leading south toward Czechoslovakia.

The numbers had just passed the half-century mark when Cookie Long stuck on the trolley within twenty feet of Piccadilly. Bob Nelson, who was hauling, tried to pull him gently through, but a box frame suddenly dragged away and the sand crushed down, burying Lon. He was able to drag himself off the trolley and crawl up to the halfway house and Nelson crawled down to the fall. It wasn’t quite as bad as the first one, but working flat out it took him half an hour to clear it.

Two more prisoners were stuck soon after that but eased themselves through without further falls. As the fifty-seventh man was being hauled in the middle section a trolley rope broke, and there was another hold-up while it was mended.

Cramp climbed up to the top and saw Torrens.

“Not much more than two hours to go,” he said. “We won’t make the hundred at this rate. We’ll have to do something drastic. Blanket rolls are causing most of the trouble so from now on blankets are out. They’ll just have to take their greatcoats and nothing more.”

“It’s a bit desperate,” Torrens said.

“It’s got to be desperate,” said Crump.

The hardarsers took it with good grace. The wakeful ones padded up to the desk and asked what their chances were of getting out. By this time Crump knew that they wouldn’t be able to beat the century and told most of them to go back, forget about it, and get some sleep.

He dived back down the shaft, and without the blanket rolls, the rate immediately speeded up. Then there was another fall in the second section, and Cookie Long, who had relieved Nelson hauling in Piccadilly, crawled up to the scene. It wasn’t a bad one, and working in the usual mad sweat he fixed it in about twenty minutes. There wasn’t any more serious trouble after that, and men began to go through comparatively swiftly, as swiftly, that is, as the exit man at the far end could dare to signal them out.

About four o’clock, Roy Langlois, Number 60, went through and relieved the exit man behind the ferret fence. Lang had signaled two men out of the exit, when guards started to tramp along the road only about seven or eight yards from the hole. They were going past in ones and twos and didn’t seem to have anything in particular on their minds. Lang puzzled about it for a while and then realized that it was guard-changing.

It meant another hold-up. For the next twenty minutes guards were strolling back along the road after being relieved, and Lang only got two people out in that time. Then the last sentry tramped past, and the exodus from the hole quickened once more.

At half-past four, Lang jerked his head up in fright as he heard the sentry suddenly start shouting in the goon-box. He wasn’t looking into the compound now but leaning over the side, and for a terrifying moment Lang thought he had been spotted.

He saw the guard wasn’t talking to him but calling to one of the sentries patrolling the wire who was approaching. The patroller climbed up into the goon-box, and the searchlight sentry clumped down the steps, and to Lang’s horror turned straight across the road toward the hole.