The Sound of His Horn (2 page)

The cat jumped onto the arm of my chair and, tucking its forepaws under its chest, settled down with me to stare at the glowing coals.

A footfall and a cold draught roused me, not from a doze, but from contemplation of a long succession of memories that followed each other through my mind as involuntarily as the images of a dream. Alan had come in again. I heard him quietly bolting the outer door. I got up to put on the light, but bumped into him at the sitting-room door. He gasped and seized me by the coat; then, as I spoke, he gave a short relieved kind of laugh, and relaxed his hold.

"I forgot the cat," he said. "Is she in here? I thought you'd all gone to bed."

His voice sounded unsteady. I put on the light and was shocked to see his face quite white from the start I had given him. Full of contrition, I apologised for lurking there in the dark. He muttered with obvious embarrassment that I should take no notice, and came over to the fireplace, making a show of looking about him for the cat, but moving nervously and jerkily, taking too long to recover from the start.

I thought it better to say something and struck straight into the evening's main topic:

"I shouldn't wonder if it's just dawned on Elizabeth tonight that there might be something in the humanitarian case against hunting. It was what you said, of course; or the way you said it. Made her look a bit thoughtful, it seemed to me." He turned on me sharply.

"She's hunted all her life. Why should anything I say make any difference?"

It was as clear as daylight to me then that he and she had argued this matter before--and with some heat. I could guess they had squabbled, and trivial as a difference of opinion on such a matter between two lovers might seem to me, I could see its importance to them, in a life where hunting was taken seriously. But why should Alan not want her to hunt now?

"Oh, I don't know," I replied. "I should have thought your opinion counted for something--a good deal more than Frank's, anyway. And there was a time when every word you uttered was an oracle to her."

He stooped and put another log on the fire, as if he had quite forgotten that he had been about to go to bed. Then he stood with bent shoulders for some time silently watching the log smoulder and smoke. At length, without looking at me, and in a controlled voice he said:

"My mother's been talking to you about me and Elizabeth, hasn't she?"

"Well..." I said. "About you.... She's a bit worried. Thinks you've got something on your mind, I believe. Personally I don't see any difference in you, except that you seem to lose your tongue at times, and, if you don't mind my saying so, your nerves aren't in any too good a state. I don't think you're very fit, and you ought to be in this farming life. It isn't the bottle, is it?"

He laughed. "I've been thinking these three days you've been here that we're just the same pair of blokes that we were before, really. Seeing you has been good for me. I know I haven't altered after all."

"Well," I said, "character and affections ought, no doubt, to remain constant, but there'd be little hope for man if experience didn't alter behaviour and opinions. You've had six years of war and imprisonment. I can well understand a man having different views about all sorts of things after that."

"Yes," he said. "You'd understand. Or at any rate, you'd be interested. Look here!" He straightened up abruptly and turned round. "You're not tired, are you? Mind if I tell you something? Let me fill your glass, then sit down and I'll tell you a tale."

He poured out some beer for us both and switched off the light, then stirred the fire till it broke into flame.

"I can tell it better like this, by firelight," he said as he settled himself in the armchair opposite me, "and if I bore you you can go quietly to sleep without my noticing it."

We filled our pipes and I waited.

"I've not told this to anybody," he began. "Not to my mother, or Elizabeth. And before I tell it to you, I want to make the point that it is a tale: just a tale, you understand, that I'm telling you because I think it'll entertain you; I'm not asking you to listen so that you can tell me what my trouble is. I know that perfectly well myself, and there's nothing anybody can do about it It's just a question of waiting to see if it happens again. It hasn't recurred in three years; if I get through another year without it happening I shall take it that it won't happen again and I shall feel I can safely ask Elizabeth to marry me and all will be well. She can ride to hounds and I shan't quarrel with her over that--so long as she doesn't expect me to; and she won't."

* * *

2

'I am not mad, most noble Festus.' No. But I have been. Not just unbalanced, or queer, but beautifully barmy; certifiable beyond the shadow of a doubt. I'm all right again now. Really all right, I believe. Only, having slipped into the other gear very suddenly once, I know how easily and swiftly it can happen, and sometimes an unexpected thing frightens me for a moment--until I've made sure that I am still on this side of the wall, so to speak.

It's not unknown, of course, for a man in a prisoner-of-war camp to go round the bend. It can happen to anybody, and not necessarily to the highly strung ones, or the ones with most worries. I'd seen them before it happened to me. We called them happy. I think I know the reason for that peculiarly indifferent air they have: they just don't know what's going on in this world while they're so busy in the other. And you feel extraordinarily sane, you know. I am sure, in my own case at least, that I was twice as active in mind, twice as sensitive to what was going on while I was round the bend as I was after I came into the straight again and was back in the cage once more.

I was glad it was a different cage they put me back in. None of the fellows there knew that I had been off my head, and the psychiatrists passed me as perfectly normal when we all got out. Of course, I didn't tell 'em what I'm telling you.

We were dive-bombed and sunk off Crete in 1941, and I had two years in a camp in Eastern Germany: Oflag XXIX Z. Very familiar it all grew to me, that very little world: barbed wire, of course, jerry-built huts, too cold in winter, too hot in summer, the messy washing-places, the smelly latrines, the light sandy soil, the black pine-forest in the distance and the goons on the sentry-perches: all the little contrivances and tricks and studies and inventions that seemed so important to us--well, that
were
important when your world was reduced to such dimensions.

I flattered myself that I stood prison life a good deal better than most people. I'm never really unhappy anywhere if I can find something to do with my hands, and it's surprising what a busy artisan you can turn yourself into in such circumstances if you have a bent that way. I'm really proud of some of the things I made out of old tins. I kept my mind working objectively, too. I set out to re-learn my Greek. It would have been more sensible, perhaps, to learn German, but I suppose the Greek appealed to me because it seemed so clean and fresh and had nothing to do with the camp.

Well, I mention this just to indicate that I was a fairly cheerful prisoner. Of course, I missed getting my right amount of exercise, but, considering the low diet, I probably did well enough on the gymnastics we organised. Then, I had no particular family troubles. I got letters from my mother and Elizabeth as regularly as anyone got letters, and as long as those two were all right I had nothing more of that sort to worry about. True, you might say that the enforced company of one's own sex alone is a deprivation that might set up mental strains--but I don't know: it was the same for me as for everybody else; one thought of the pleasures of dalliance, of course, but I think it helps you to take the holiday from them more philosophically if you've had a normal fair share of those pleasures before you go into the bag. It seemed to trouble the boys most; not chaps of my age.

No, looking at it quite honestly and objectively--and a prison camp is a good place in which to measure deviations from the norm of behaviour--I would have said that I'd have been one of the last to go off my rocker. But there it is. I did. Of course, it may have been the shock--the electric shock or whatever it was that I got: I'm coming to that. But there again, I'd had far worse shocks before. I'd been torpedoed twice in three months in the North Sea, not to mention the odd bomb. Those jolts shook my body far more than the shock I got at the fence at Hackelnberg, but they did not unhinge my mind.

Ah well! You'd not believe the times I've been over the evidence for my sanity during these two years, and the care with which I've sifted it to find the little flaw, the sign of hidden weakness, and I never can find it. I ought to; I ought to be able to find out why I went out of my mind for a period, because, don't you see, that would be the best proof of sanity--not my own sanity alone, but the sanity of all this order that we believe in, the proper sequence of time, the laws of space and matter, the truth of all our physics; because you see, if I
wasn't
mad there must be a madness in the scheme of things too wide and wild for any man's courage to face.

And it's ironical to remember that I was looked on as the steadiest, sanest, most reliable old horse in the whole camp. There was the Escape Committee--the best brains among the senior officers: they could judge a man better than most of your psychiatrists. They, with all their experience of crack-brained schemes, would have spotted my flaw if anyone could have done. On the contrary, I had a part, as adviser or assistant, in pretty well every attempt at escape that was made. I became a sort of consultant to planners, the chap whose expert advice was sought before a plan was put up to the Escape Committee for sanction.

Escape, of course, was the medium, as it were, in which all our thoughts existed; our little occupations and amusements were the surface waves of life and the study of escape the sea that buoyed up all we did.

In practice all escape plans were variations of one method. There was only one way of solving the basic problem of passing the wire. That was moling--tunnelling. I had a hand in the planning of many tunnels and was a member of many different combines for digging and hiding the earth; but there was not one successful escape from Oflag XXIX Z up to the time when my partner and I made our attempt.

I won't go into all the details of the planning and the digging. They'd prove just the opposite of what I'm trying to prove to you by this story, because that tunnel was exceedingly well planned and well dug. The whole camp backed us to succeed.

We did it on a night towards the end of May, an hour before moonrise. The exit of our tunnel was a hundred yards beyond the wire, leaving us a fifty-yard dash to a tongue of the pine-forest. The simplest application of the principles of tunnelling, we argued, was the likeliest to succeed. Most plans failed because the tunnel was not taken far enough beyond the wire. The labour was so heavy and the time so long that once you were under the wire the temptation to stop digging and risk the longer dash was too strong to be resisted. We resisted it, and succeeded at least so far as to gain the black concealment of that tongue of pine forest without the alarm being given. We had used the old cover of getting our confederates inside to start a fight in one of the blocks in order to distract the guards' attention: a very old trick, but it worked.

Then, we had resisted the temptation also to try to plan the next stages in detail. Both of us, Jim Long and I, had our own ideas of the best way to travel in Germany in war-time and we agreed to go our own way about it. Stettin was the place to make for: there we should make contact with someone in the underground escape organisation and get a Swedish ship. That was the broad outline, and we left it broad. Vague and hopeful you may say, but the result proved that it could be done. Long traveled to Stettin on the train, stayed a week in a sailors' lodging-house there, was smuggled on board a Swedish ore ship and got clear away. I wasn't so lucky.

We both approved of travelling by train, but we differed on where to board the thing. Jim, who spoke both German and French very well, proposed to walk to the nearest station to the camp, show the faked French worker's papers he had, buy his ticket and trust to the very ordinariness of the proceeding to carry him through. My own plan was to get as far away from the camp as possible before boarding the train. I picked on Daemmerstadt, which I reckoned I could reach in two nights' walking, lying up in the woods during the intervening day. I was going to travel as a Bulgarian Merchant Navy officer going to join his ship at a Baltic port: my Royal Navy uniform a little altered would pass, I considered, as something almost any German would believe to be the fashion in the Bulgarian Merchant Navy, and our document boys had provided me with a convincing set of papers, including a very outlandish and Balkan-looking one in Cyrillic characters. My major risk was that I might be tackled by someone who knew Bulgarian, but I calculated that the odds were in my favour. For the rest I had four days' rations contributed by our supporters, a button compass which the Germans hadn't found when they picked me up on the beach, some German money and a good sketch-map provided by the Escape Committee.

Jim and I said goodbye hurriedly in the dark of the trees while the hullabaloo of the sham fight was still going on inside the camp. The dogs were barking like fury and some of the goons were shouting, but no one turned a searchlight on our side of the wire. Phase Two of the operation seemed to have succeeded perfectly.

I had memorised my map and had my course very clear in my mind. The first part of the first night's journey would be the worst: it meant steering due east through the pine-forest, off the tracks, for a distance that I estimated at three hours' walking, until I dropped into a by-road, which I should follow for four or five miles, going roughly north-east, then swing east again to avoid a village, and go by small lanes on a zig-zag course across a wide plain, very thinly inhabited, to another belt of woods, which, I reckoned, I should reach by the first light There I intended to hide and rest The following night I should continue through alternate forest and clearing until about dawn I should come to the railway just south of Daemmerstadt.