The Great Escape (7 page)

Down by the gate, the “Duty Pilot” sat with his runner, watching everyone who came into the camp, noting on his list the time they came in and the time they went out. He sat there every minute of every day without a break, never moving till the next man came to relieve him. All over the camp there were warning points to relay his sign messages. Near him was a little cement incinerator, an innocent-looking Red Cross box, and a coal scuttle. If the coal scuttle alone was lying carelessly on the incinerator, it meant there were only a couple of administrative German staff (pretty harmless) wandering about. If the Red Cross box was tossed up too, it meant ferrets in. There were various combinations and positions.

Over by the back of 110, a man lounging on a stool with a book kept his eyes on the incinerator, and if the box and scuttle position flashed a danger sign he got lazily up and rearranged some shutters. Across by a corner of Block 120, a man casually blew his nose, upon which George Harsh, looking out of a window of 123, put his head around the door and said pithily, “Ferrets. Pack up.” And then the trap was on in seconds, the wires folded down, and sand and cement paste smoothed into the cracks.

Every factory had its own stooges watching in case a ferret got through the general screen. There were nearly three hundred stooges altogether rostered in shifts. The organization needed them all.

The whole scheme was taking shape so smoothly that Roger one morning said thoughtfully to Floody and George Harsh, “You know, this time it might really be home for Christmas for some of us,” and for once they didn’t laugh.

Floody had dug only six inches into the dirt under “Tom’s” trap when he came to the yellow sand. The gray dirt was only a thin layer over the surface of the compound, and everywhere underneath was the bright yellow subsoil. Whenever the ferrets saw it they knew there was a tunnel, and the heat was on till it was found. With three tunnels going, there would be about a hundred tons of yellow sand to disperse, about as easy as hiding a haystack in a needle. It was the worst enemy.

“You’ll never get a tunnel out of here,” said Glemnitz once, “till you find a way of destroying sand.”

Fanshawe had been thinking solemnly about this for a long time. “You don’t have to destroy it,” he said (to the committee, not to Glemnitz). “You ought to be able to camouflage it.”

Everyone, he said, ought to dig gardens outside the huts so the yellow sand would be turned up naturally. Glemnitz couldn’t be very suspicious of that. He’d watch them, but if the level of the gardens didn’t rise, he wouldn’t suspect any tunnel sand was being dumped there.

“We can save the gray sand of the garden topsoil and mix a bit of tunnel sand in the gardens,” Fanshawe explained. “Then we can spread the rest of the tunnel sand in the compound and sprinkle it with the gray stuff we’ve saved from the gardens.”

“Sounds possible,” Roger said, “but how are you going to spread the yellow stuff without being spotted? It’ll look pretty bloody obvious.”

Fanshawe had done his heaviest thinking about that. “With trouser bags,” he said cryptically, and out of his pockets he dragged what can only be described as a gadget. It consisted of the two legs cut off a pair of long woolen underpants, and to the tops he’d tied each end of a piece of string. He explained that you looped the string around your neck under your tunic and the underpants leg could then hang suspended down inside the leg of your trousers. He had a pin stuck in the bottom of each trouser bag and a string tied to each pin. Those strings, he explained, led up inside the trousers to the pants pockets.

“I don’t usually wear these things,” he said apologetically. “It’s just an idea. You fill the bags with sand at the traps and you wander around the various spots and then you pull the string in your pockets; out come the pins and the sand flows out of the bottom of your pants. If you’re not a complete clot the ferrets’ll never see a thing.”

For a conservative citizen like Fanshawe, R.N., the idea was indecently brilliant.

“By God, we try it immediately,” said Roger.

“I have already,” said Fanshawe. “It works.”

The penguins (there were about 150 of them) made themselves trouser bags complete with pins and string, cutting up long underpants with sadistic joy. Our clothes came through the Red Cross, and they, bless their maternal hearts, thought mainly of long woolen underpants. They were the only things we had plenty of. It’s bad enough rusting behind barbed wire thinking of Dorothy Lamour without the final degradation of long underpants. You feel so hopelessly celibate.

In the deepening hole under “Tom’s” trap, Floody and Marshall were scraping up the yellow sand into metal jugs and passing them up to Minskewitz, who acted as “trapfuehrer” for “Tom.” Minskewitz had blankets spread around the hole so none of the yellow stuff would be left on the floor. He had the trap door drill down to a fine art, and whenever George Harsh stuck a warning head around the corner he had the men out of the hole and the trap back on and sealed in a shade under fifteen seconds. Beside him in the corner he kept his tin of dirt and cement paste to seal the edges. The penguins took it in shifts, walking up with their trouser bags, stopping a moment by the trap while Minskewitz filled them, and then wandering casually out into the compound.

Jerry Sage, the lanky Yank from Washington State, organized the dispersal divisions as though he were planning the invasion. A tough curly-headed fellow with a permanent ferocious grin and pointed ears, he’d been a paratroop major in North Africa, and the Germans had only cornered him after he’d been walking about behind their lines for two weeks sniping at people with a tommygun.

For his diversions he used to get about forty men having unarmed combat drill — a milling mass of bodies, dust rising in all directions, and the penguins in the middle being flung over someone’s shoulder with the sand dripping out of their pants. The yellow stuff was shuffled into the sand, and the gray soil from the gardens sprinkled over any parts that showed. Sometimes Sage had volley-ball games going with a mob standing around cheering, and the sand was shuffled in among them. More sand was poured down the deep privy pits.

A curly-headed Australian called Willy Williams, who was supply chief, stripped some of the double-decker bunks and smuggled the bedposts over to 123. When Floody had sunk the shaft about five feet he stood four of these posts in the four corners of the shaft, bolted them together with cross braces, and slid bedboards in behind as a solid wall. After he’d packed sand as tightly as he could behind the lining boards, that part of the shaft framing stayed rigidly in position while he dug down another five feet, and put in another section. He framed the whole shaft like that, and as they got deeper he nailed a ladder in one corner.

When it was about fifteen feet deep Johnny Marshall took over “Tom” with three or four selected diggers, and Floody went to start “Dick’s” shaft with another team. It was strange that these two could work so well down tunnels; they were both so tall. Floody was lean as a beanpole with a large, rather sensitive mouth and eyes sunk back in his head making him look solemn and ill. Johnny Marshall lived a lot on his nerves, very intelligent and good-looking, a little thin on top and with perfect white teeth.

They dug fast because the sand was crumbly, but they would rather have dug through hard clay. Even in clay you could dig as much as the dispersers could handle and clay was safe. The sand wasn’t. It collapsed if you winked an eye at it; and it had to be solidly shored all the way. Even so, there were a lot of nasty falls, dangerous things thirty feet down a rat hole when a couple of hundred pounds of earth slips away and can smother you.

Just before sand falls like that, it gives a faint crack and there’s a shaven second to get out of the way. No one ever spoke too much down below. You were too busy listening.

“Tom’s” shaft was thirty feet deep in a couple of weeks. “Dick” reached the same mark a few days later, and over in “Harry,” Crump was getting down to the twenty-foot level.

Marshall and his gang started to excavate the working chambers at the base of “Tom.” They dug a little chamber about five feet long where a shaft man could store his gear and assemble the tunnel-shoring frames. On another side they dug a similar chamber to store sand in when it came back from the tunnel until the dispersers could handle it; and on the third side they made a chamber six feet long for the air pump and pumper. The fourth side was the west side, facing the wire — the tunnel side.

Crump left “Harry” to help Floody dig the workshops at the base of “Dick.” They were down there one day with Canton shoring the pumping chamber when they heard a crack in the shaft and Canton looked up and saw a broken bedboard sticking out of the frame about twenty-five feet up. Sand was pouring through the gap, and, as he shielded his eyes from the cascade, there was a rending sound up there; a frame burst out with the pressure behind it, and as the sand crashed down, the shaft framework began to twist and break up.

By some miracle the ladder held, and Canton was going up it like a rocket with the other two right behind. Canton and Crump shot out of the top and turned to grab Floody just in time. The sand had reached his waist and he was pinned and couldn’t heave himself any higher while the sand mounted. They were just able to heave him free. When he’d got the sand out of his eyes, Floody swore for five solid minutes. He had an imaginative vocabulary. “Dick’s” shaft was full to just below the top.

Floody found Roger out on the circuit and told him the news. Roger said one exceptionally rude word and was calm again. I’ve watched Roger flare up in passion over some little provocation, but when big things went wrong he had this bitter calm.

“How soon can you start digging it out?” he asked.

“Crump and Conk are on it,” Floody said.

They had “Dick’s” shaft dug and framed again in four days. Leaving Johnny Bull to carry on, Floody and Crump went to hack out the chambers at the base of “Harry.”

Wings Day arrived at North Compound that day. The Kommandant at Schubin had been severely reprimanded after the tunnel break there, and when Wings was caught the German gave him a solid stretch in the cooler and purged him to Stalag Luft III as soon as he could. Nothing could have pleased Wings more. He stalked through the gates under the usual tommygun escort, looking more like a hungry and unfriendly hawk than ever, and asked the way to Roger’s room.

It was an epic meeting. Roger told him briefly what was going on and, without telling him what was there, suggested he go and live in 104, Room 23. He took him across and Wings walked in and saw the open trap with Floody and Crump just climbing out.

“Oh God,” he groaned, “not here,” and dashed off to find a peaceful room. It wasn’t that he didn’t like tunnels any more, but when you live in a room with a tunnel, the tunnel is the boss. The stooges are always about, inside the room and out, and there is usually a diversion team standing by to beguile any ferret who gets too close. If you live with a tunnel, you can’t walk into your own room when you want to, or out again either. You’re a servant to a great ugly hole in the ground.

Crump went back down “Harry” with Johnny Bull to put the last touches to the workshop chambers, and at the bottom, with his ear cocked, he was thinking of his narrow squeak in “Dick” when he heard the sinister “crack” again. He and Johnny Bull shot out of the trap above like champagne corks with dust puffing up behind them as the sand thundered down. When it had settled, they found all the chambers and half the shaft full. Doggedly they started digging it out.

Jerry Sage had a victory that week. A few hundred yards away there was an
Arbeitskorps
camp, and every morning the good young Nazis tramped to their work along the road outside the wire with shovels over their shoulders, just like a newsreel, always smartly in step and singing Nazi marching songs. Jerry got two hundred men every morning smirking offensively through the wire singing with horrible voices the marching song from
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
, the one that goes, “Heigh-Ho, Heigh-Ho, it’s off to work we go,” and after four days the Germans changed their route.