Escapes! (4 page)

One more moat lay between them and the road. Latude tested the slope with his feet, and realized with horror that it was much steeper than the first one, and the water much deeper.

He and Allègre looked at each other. Neither of them could swim! But there was no going back. Side by side they plunged down the bank into the icy water. Latude soon lost his footing on the steep bank, and the water rushed over his head. He groped blindly forward. Suddenly he felt Allègre thrashing wildly near him, then gripping him in panic, pulling him down. Latude's mind raced frantically — he hadn't come this far only to drown!

With a kick he freed himself of Allègre. Then, with flailing arms, he grasped a root on the opposite bank. Reaching back into the water, he felt Allègre's hair and closed his fist around it, pulling him up. The two men gasped for air, clinging to the slope. Latude spotted a large object floating away — the case of clothes! He reached out and grasped it by the edge just before it moved out of reach.

They scrambled up the bank and collapsed onto the road above. Panting, Latude looked back at the stone walls looming behind them.
Behind,
he thought with sudden joy. They were outside! Free!

In the distance a church bell sounded five o'clock. Shivering, Latude fumbled to open the case. He could have wept with happiness — it was dry inside! Forcing their frozen limbs to move, he and Allègre tore off their wet clothes and pulled out the dry ones. With stiff fingers, the two men struggled with the clasps and buttons.

Then, in the pale light of morning, they set off down the rue Saint-Antoine, free men.

Latude stared into his empty coffee cup, now and then glancing up through the café window. Across the street, he could see the post office. A dozen times he'd made up his mind to get up and go in, but still he remained rooted to his seat. Would the police be waiting for him there?

He'd been on the run for nearly three and a half months. Allègre had escaped out of France first, disguised as a peasant. He'd sent Latude a message telling him he was safe in Brussels, confident that the French police couldn't touch him in an Austrian domain. Latude had followed him there, but soon learned that Allègre had been arrested. So he
wasn't
safe, even outside France. He fled even further, to Holland this time.

Now he watched the people come and go from the Rotterdam post office, not far from the city's bustling seaport. In desperation, he had written to his mother in France, asking her to send him money under a false name. By now her letter would be waiting for him. He wondered if he had been foolish.

But if I had the money, he thought, I could go so far away they'd never find me. How big was the risk? Only a few seconds in a post office. He would do it.

His jaw set in a firm line, Latude stood up and strode across the street toward the office.

“A letter for Monsieur D'aubrespy?” he asked the clerk.

“Just a moment, sir.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Latude saw a figure move. Then a hand clapped on his shoulder. Before he turned around, he knew it was all over.

Latude lay on a bed of straw in a dungeon deep beneath one of the Bastille's towers, shackles on his wrists and ankles. Moat water seeped in and soaked the floor. Rats roamed fearlessly, eyeing his rations of bread and water.

By the winter of 1781, Latude's letters were no longer sent to anyone.

With a few coins he'd managed to scrounge, Latude bribed a guard to take one last letter to a councilor at Parliament. But the guard carelessly dropped it outside in the snowy road, forgetting all about it.

A woman trudged through the snow on an early morning errand. She spotted something in the slush at her feet and stooped to pick it up.

It was a letter. Water had erased the address. Madame Legros turned it over — the seal was broken. She peeked inside for an address so she could deliver it.

Her eyes ran down the desperate plea for help on the page inside. She raised a shaking hand to her mouth as she read the long signature: “Masers de Latude, prisoner for 32 years at the Bastille, at Vincennes, and now at Bicêtre, on bread and water, in a cell 10 feet underground.”

Forgetting her errand, Madame Legros raced back to the small shop she ran with her husband.

It was two years before Latude saw the woman who was working to free him. Madame Legros knocked on the doors of anyone she thought could help, pleading with their servants to let her in for a few moments.

Surprisingly, a few people did let this unknown woman inside, and listened to her story. Word spread of her cause, and she found more and more supporters — some of them powerful. When the queen herself was moved to pity, it was only a matter of time. On March 23, 1784, King Louis XVI issued a new
lettre de cachet,
this time freeing Latude forever. He was given no apology or reason for his long imprisonment without trial, only a small pension, which he used to live with his new friends, Madame and Monsieur Legros. He had been a prisoner for 35 years.

Five years later, the Bastille was stormed by an angry mob. The French Revolution had begun, and the downfall of France's monarchy and ruling class was close at hand. For revolutionaries, the Bastille was a symbol of power used badly. In 350 years it had held nearly 6,000 prisoners. Only seven ever escaped.

Days after the storming, revolutionaries began to tear down the massive prison, stone by stone, while crowds of people watched. One of them was Latude.

“From here there is no escape...”

Germany, 1941

C
OLDITZ — THE NAME WAS ENOUGH
to send a chill through the boldest prisoner of war. During the Second World War, the Germans turned this medieval castle into their greatest
sonderlager:
the highest-security, most heavily guarded camp for captured enemy soldiers. Hermann Goering, Hitler's second in command, had personally declared the camp absolutely escape-proof. Here the Germans sent the troublemakers from every other prisoner of war camp — especially those determined to escape. As the war raged on outside, Colditz was home to hundreds of Allied soldiers — Polish, British, Canadian, French, Belgian. And in 1941, they were joined by 68 Dutch.

“For you the war is over,” the new prisoners were told by the German guards who herded them through the castle gates at gunpoint. As the young Dutch lieutenant Hans Larive looked around him, it wasn't hard to believe. During their march through the town below he had admired the fairy-tale castle high on a cliff. But that illusion disappeared with a closer look. Inside, the castle's high, gray stone walls blocked the sun. Glancing up from the damp courtyard, he spotted pale faces peering down through the barred windows all around him.

“Appell!”
barked a German officer — time for roll call. The Dutch snapped to attention, forming neat ranks in the courtyard. With sideways glances they watched the other prisoners drift in. One by one they came, or ambling in pairs. Some wore torn uniforms ragged from battle, some were half-dressed — one seemed to be in his pajamas! The Germans' frustration mounted as they tried to impose order, but every time they thought they'd finished counting they spotted an officer wandering out of his place or lined up with the wrong nation.

Larive was surprised by the chaos, but then slowly he understood the game the other prisoners were playing. Keep the guards frustrated and confused: it was a kind of psychological war. The French and British seemed to be the worst offenders of all. He watched as the British were lined up closest to the armed guards — obviously this was the “bad boys'” place during roll call. The Germans seemed to eye the Dutch with relief. They were so disciplined and quiet — at least there was one country they didn't have to worry about!

Or so they thought. From the moment Larive arrived he watched for a chance — any chance — to get out. He had to rejoin the fighting! But as the days passed he learned that this was no ordinary camp. Everything about Colditz was a cruel reminder that escape was out of the question. Constant roll calls made sure no one was missing. Prisoners and their quarters were searched day and night. There were as many guards as prisoners, and they kept the inmates in check with guns and bayonets, with searchlights to spot them, microphones to listen in on them, dogs to sniff them out.

And yet one thing kept Larive's hopes alive — the memory, still fresh in his mind, of a strange twist of events that had followed his capture. After escaping from another German camp, Larive had been caught near the border of neutral Switzerland. He was then taken for questioning by a Gestapo agent, a huge bull of a man who began by shouting threats. But when the agent had learned that Larive was Dutch, he relaxed. He had worked in Holland before the war and liked it there.

“The only clever thing you did was to get off the train at Singen — all the rest was stupid,” he had told Larive.

“Why?”

“You must have known that Singen was the last station where anyone could get off the train without showing an identity card.”

In fact, it had been a lucky guess. The “Bull” had then asked Larive why he hadn't just walked across the border.

“I didn't know how to get through the defense line,” Larive admitted.

“Defense line!” he stormed. “Defense against whom? The Swiss? What a crazy idea. There are no defenses at all. You could have walked straight across.”

To Larive's amazement, the Bull even got out a map and showed him where the Swiss border jutted into Germany, and the road he could have taken to walk across it. How could he talk so carelessly? Larive wondered. Then he realized: of course, the Germans believe they will soon win the war. Where I'm going there's no hope of escape, and I'd be a fool to get shot trying. Larive had nodded and listened — and memorized the map.

Larive settled into the prison's dreary routine, but he kept wondering if there wasn't more than met the eye at Colditz. He watched officers milling about the courtyard, lying on their bunks. So much time on their hands, he thought — surely enough time to plan escapes.

He had guessed right. Colditz was a maze of a castle, and Larive soon heard rumors of out-of-use passages and hidden rooms where prisoners worked on one scheme after another — from tunnels to disguises. The place is seething with escape plans, Larive realized, his pulse quickening at the idea. In fact there were so many in progress that the different “countries” began to cooperate so they wouldn't mess up one another's schemes by mistake.

Larive and the other Dutch wasted no time fitting in. They would need to choose a leader for their own escape “team.” The obvious choice was the burly, quick-minded Captain Machiel van den Heuvel, whom the British quickly nicknamed “Vandy.” It was an important job, but there was a catch. The escape officer was not allowed to escape himself — he would mastermind escapes for others, and always stay behind. Vandy accepted.

Larive and Vandy soon discovered that the Germans had made a mistake when they locked up all the troublemakers in one prison. Now every kind of escape artist — from lock pickers to explosives experts — was in one place. Some had gained valuable experience on their failed escape attempts. Larive was one of them.