The Tunnel (13 page)

‘What’s the latest news from the Middle East?’ the commander asked.

Once again Peter felt his inadequacy. He knew nothing about the Middle East. Flying had been enough for him – flying and forgetting about flying when he was not on duty. ‘I’m not very well up in the Middle East,’ he said. ‘There’s an army chap in our mess though – he was captured there. He’ll know more about it than I do.’ He couldn’t know less, he thought.

Conversation languished. He did not like to ask them any more questions and by now they apparently thought it useless to ask him any. They began to talk among themselves about the international rugger matches. It was not until they had been talking for some time that he realized it was the camp matches they were discussing and not the real thing. ‘D’you play rugger here?’ he asked.

‘Where do you play?’ Simpson asked.

‘Full back.’

‘Right – we’ll give you a trial as soon as the snow clears. Have you played recently?’

‘About a month ago.’

‘Splendid! We’ll fix you up with boots. Got any longpants?’

‘Longpants?’

‘Pitch is a bit stony. Advisable to wear something over your knees – get gravel-rash, y’know.’

‘I’m afraid I haven’t got any,’ Peter said. He wondered what he had let himself in for.

‘I’ll lend you a pair,’ Simpson said.

Conversation languished again.

‘Well, I’ll be getting back.’

They all stood.

‘Thanks very much for the dinner.’ He wanted to ask them all back, but realized that he only owned a sixth of the mess.

‘Don’t forget, as soon as the snow clears,’ Simpson said.

‘Come and see us again sometime,’ the commander said. By the way he spoke, it sounded a long and difficult journey.

Back in his own mess he found that the others had returned from their dinner parties and were sitting round the table drinking cocoa. ‘You are just in time,’ Otto said. ‘We have a cup for you.’ He poured the cocoa from the tall metal jug.

‘It’ll make you sleep,’ Loveday said. ‘I’ve just been telling these individuals to get to sleep. They need all the sleep they can get. The most important thing about …’

‘What sort of party did you have?’ John asked.

‘I never knew I knew so little,’ Peter said. ‘I’ve made a date for you to go along and tell ’em all about the Middle East.’

‘That’s OK,’ John said. ‘We had a lecture on it the day before I was captured. I’ve got myself into an amateur dramatic society.’

‘I’ve got myself into a rugger match – played on concrete,’ Peter said.

‘We were wrong about that adjutant, Pete.’ John came and sat beside him on the bunk.

‘Which adjutant?’

‘The permanent staff chap at
Dulag.’

‘In what way?’

‘The chaps in the other mess were telling me. It’s hush-hush, so don’t spread it around, but he’s working for us. He lets the Germans think he’s a deadbeat and ready to work for them, and all the time he’s getting information which he sends back to England.’

‘How does he send it back?’

‘God knows, but he does. But what a rotten sort of job to have.’

‘You certainly need guts for a job like that,’ Peter said.

‘All the new chaps have got to parade for a short-arm inspection in the morning,’ Saunders said. He was standing half undressed, by the side of his bunk.

‘What on earth for?’ Hugo, already in bed, looked down at him in astonishment.

‘Chaps in the other mess told me.’

‘They pull the leg, I think,’ Otto said.

The lights flickered on and off twice.

‘Five minutes,’ Loveday said. ‘In five minutes the lights go out, for the night.’

Peter lay in the darkness trying to sleep. The sack of wood shavings was lumpy under his back. He was so near the roof that, if he raised an arm, he could touch its wooden beams. The air up here was acrid with tobacco smoke and thick with the sour smell of overcrowded living. He thought of the men in the mess he had just left; of how they had forced themselves to live in harmony, to make their unpleasant surroundings as bearable as possible. Perhaps we shall be able to do the same, he thought – smooth down the sharp edges, practise a little self-discipline. But that in a way was defeat. Far better to get out of the place, back to the danger and the freedom of the war. He would talk to John about it in the morning. There must be a way of getting out. The group captain had told them that a tunnel was being dug. How many men would they need for that? Perhaps there would be room for one or two more. Yes, he would find out all about it in the morning …

From time to time there was a crash and clatter as someone leaped in wooden clogs from an upper bunk, the scuff-scuffle of the clogs on concrete as the leaper hurried to the latrine, the creak of the opening door and the sudden stench.

All around him he could hear the snores and the heavy breathing of his ninety-odd fellow prisoners. At times a prisoner would shout or mutter in his sleep, sometimes scream in terror – a scream that would be cut short as his neighbour jerked him into waking. At intervals round the room sudden glowing cigarettes told their story of sleeplessness and boredom.

He thought about the adjutant at
Dulag-Luft –
still carrying out his duty, but in the most unpleasant way. Bearing the scorn and contempt of his fellow prisoners but all the time doing a hundred times more than they were doing to win the war. He thought of all the traitors of this war, who might, in reality, be spies. How unreasonable to judge, how impossible to give an opinion without being certain of all the facts. He offered a silent apology to that brave man, doing his lonely duty, despised by everyone, even by the Germans he was fooling.

Below in the darkness he heard John sigh and turn restlessly on his bunk. ‘Are you awake, John?’ he whispered.

‘I’m just wondering how long I can stick it before I have to go to the lats,’ John said.

‘It’s shock.’ Loveday’s voice came didactically from the opposite bunk. ‘It gets ’em all that way. You’ll get over it in time.’

PART TWO

Before the war
Oflag XXIB
had been a boys’ reformatory. When the Germans marched into Poland it was used as a concentration camp, and after the fall of France its barbed wire defences were strengthened to hold French prisoners of war.

The camp was built on sloping ground and was enclosed by the usual double barbed wire fence some twelve feet high, guarded at intervals by watch towers armed with machine-guns and fitted with searchlights. The two fences were six feet apart and the space between them, up to a height of about four feet, was filled with coiled barbed wire.

Some time before Peter’s capture, when the French military prisoners had been released to work in German industry,
Oflag XXIB
became a prison camp for British aircrew. Then there had been a number of escapes. The French had been kept in by the threat of reprisals on their families, but the British were not handicapped in this way. They were prisoners of long standing, and they knew the ropes. Before they had been there many weeks a good number of them had already been outside the wire. They did not stay out for long and by the time the Kommandant had sent for the help of the ferrets from their previous camp the punishment cells were already full.

The ferrets completely rewired the compound. They set a new trip-wire thirty feet inside the main fence, and told the prisoners that they would be shot at if they stepped across it. They built more sentry boxes raised on stilts above the wire, and buried seismographs in the earth under the wire. The seismographs were connected to a central control room where any vibration below the earth’s surface, caused by tunnelling, was recorded with an ink pen on a revolving paper cylinder. The prisoners were locked in their barracks from dusk until dawn and during the hours of darkness savage dogs roamed the compound, sniffing at the doors of the barracks, discouraging the prisoners from venturing outside.

To the right of the compound gates at the bottom of the slope, the White House turned its blank and forbidding face towards the road that led to the railway station. Next to it and along the wire which lined the road was a narrow compound reserved for Russian prisoners who worked on the surrounding farms. This compound, inside the main camp, formed yet another barrier between the British prisoners and the world outside.

Behind the White House on slightly higher ground, was another building, once the home of the school staff, now used as the camp hospital and cookhouse. A small church stood in a compound of its own, an angular red-brick church in which a number of prisoners worshipped every Sunday. On the left of the hospital and separated from the road by the Russian compound were the stony football pitch and the latrine, known even to the English by its German name –
abort.
Inside the
abort
were two long deep trenches covered by rough wooden seats for forty-eight people. In the mornings the
abort
was always crowded and a long queue stretched halfway round the football pitch, almost to the hospital.

The rest of the compound was on steeply sloping ground, and terraced into this slope were the squat and ugly single story brick barracks in which the prisoners lived a hundred to a room.

The gates of the compound were open now and a thin line of guards, their heads bent to the rain, rifles slung across their backs, filed in past the White House and struggled their way up the mud-covered slope towards the barrack blocks. It was early morning, and the rain fell inexhaustibly from a solid sky, hammering on the roofs of the sentry boxes, relentlessly pounding the sodden ground into a sea of sticky mud. Rain dripped from the barbed wire and ran gurgling into the deep ditch which had been dug outside the wire to discourage tunnelling.

Inside Barrack No 4 the air was damp from the water that seeped up through the rotten concrete floor, from the moisture that oozed from the walls, from the rows of washing, from the breath of a hundred prisoners.

Peter woke slowly and thrust his head from under the thin German blanket. He was fully dressed, even to his issue RAF greatcoat. He wore a woollen skullcap on his head and mittens on his hands. The coal issue had been stopped again and they had gone to bed early, huddled fully dressed beneath their blankets. A film of water lay on the grey blanket over his head, and the woodwork of the bunk on which he lay was damp.

It was his turn to be stooge. Loveday and Otto had insisted on taking over the duty for the first few weeks in order to give the newcomers time to settle in. They had settled in all right. The last two months seemed more like two years.

He lay for a moment under the blankets, mustering the willpower to get out of bed. A bugle call from the German
Kommandantur
had been his alarm clock, and in a few minutes the guards would be here to unlock the doors and let him out. It was one of his duties to go to the cookhouse for hot water for the morning tea. There would be a concentrated rush of twelve stooges from eight barrack blocks; ninety-six men, all trying to get there first. Those at the end of the queue would find that the water had gone off the boil, and it would be nearly time for roll-call before they could get back to the mess, to face seven pairs of disapproving eyes.

He crawled from under his blankets, and was pulling on the wooden clogs which lay beside his pillow when the door crashed open and two guards, clumsy in their jackboots and camouflaged mackintosh capes, stood wetly in the doorway.
“’Raus, ’raus!’
they shouted.

The prisoners who were awake replied as one man. They breathed into their reply all their hatred of the German guards, all their contempt for the Third Reich. ‘—off!’ they shouted, and buried themselves once more under their shoddy blankets. It was a fruitless gesture, they knew they had to get up; but it was a gesture. It was their morning litany.

As soon as the guards had gone Peter grabbed the tall metal jug from the table, threw in a handful of tea leaves and squelched in his clogs across the muddy compound towards the cookhouse. From all directions weird figures at various stages of undress were converging on this spot. The first dozen men in the queue would stand under the shelter of an overhanging corrugated iron porch. The rest would stand in the rain.

Peter found himself behind Bandy Beecham, who was wearing rugger shorts. Bandy’s theory was that it was easier to dry your legs, than it was to dry your trousers. He seemed unaffected by the cold.

‘Coming over to the theatre today, Howard? We’ve still got two more sets to paint – the show has to be ready by Monday week.’ He looked at Peter accusingly over the turned-up collar of his cut-down issue greatcoat. Most of them had hacked their coats down to fingertip length, using the spare material to make slippers, costumes for the theatre or civilian clothes for the Escape Committee. Bandy’s coat finished in a ragged fringe below which his red and naked legs curved aggressively into enormous wooden clogs.

‘I’ll come if I can, but I’m pretty busy at the moment. Perhaps I’ll be able to look in for an hour this afternoon.’ Peter had been recruited by Bandy to help paint the scenery for the coming camp concert. As the commander had predicted, his life was now so filled with necessary chores that he found it difficult to fit them all in. ‘How did the rehearsal go?’ He wanted to show some interest, to atone for his failure to turn up the previous day.

‘Complete chaos,’ Bandy assumed his role of the harassed impresario. ‘First we couldn’t get started because they were using the theatre as a damned lecture hall, then the fairy queen had to go off to play rugger. If this goes on much longer I shall chuck the whole thing up. No one appreciates it anyway.’

‘You wait till you hear the applause on opening night,’ Peter said. ‘You’ll think it’s worth it then.’

‘If there ever is an opening night.’ Bandy retired into gloomy silence.

When Peter arrived back in the mess, he found that John had buttered two thin slices of black bread for each man and was spreading them thinly with jam. He remembered how, in the early days of their captivity, they had left the jam pot on the table for each man to help himself. He remembered how unsatisfactory this had been; how an unjust estimation of the amount taken by one’s neighbour had led to a rapid spiral upwards in the jam consumption of the mess.

He put the jug down and stirred in several spoonfuls of condensed milk. The milk, too, had once been left freely on the table. He remembered the row when Otto had discovered Hugo helping himself to a spoonful after the others had gone out to roll-call. Now everything was shared out by the stooges. It seemed fairer that way. He wondered if they would ever attain the equanimity of the older kriegies; it didn’t look much like it.

‘Come on, show a leg! Brew up!’ he chanted.

In each of the other eleven messes the morning’s stooge was rousing his charges in his own way. There was a general stirring throughout the block; groans, grunts, yawns and sleepy badinage. The men in the next mess continued the bridge post-mortem which had been suppressed by the angry shouts of their tired neighbours the night before.

In Peter’s mess there was a feeling of strain. Loveday had been riding them ever since they had arrived. At first his advice, although given in a didactic, difficult manner, had been welcome; but they had outgrown any need of Loveday’s nursing. They wanted to be left alone.

John sat reading while he ate his bread and jam. It seemed to Peter that he used his book as a defence against Loveday’s conversation.

‘You individuals read too much,’ Loveday said. ‘Reading maketh a fool, man.’

‘What did you say?’ Hugo paused in astonishment, halfway between his bed and the table; he was still continually astonished at the things the others said.

‘I said, reading maketh a fool, man.’

‘It isn’t fool,’ Hugo said. ‘It’s full – F-U-L-L. Reading maketh a
full
man.’

‘Well, that’s more than you can say for this breakfast.’ It was Saunders’s attempt to stop the argument before it was under way. He might just as well have tried to stop the rain.

‘It’s fool,’ Loveday said. ‘Thomas Babington Macaulay.’

‘Bacon,’ John said it through a mouthful of bread and jam, without looking up from his book.

‘Kindly do not address me with your mouth full, Clinton. We have all the time in the world here. There is no hurry at all. Now, what did you say?’

‘I said Bacon – Francis Bacon.’

Loveday drew himself up to his full height, his face deep red. ‘Macaulay!’

‘Bacon!’
Hugo shouted. John had retired from the argument, back into his book, as he always retired when the argument grew noisy.

‘Christ!’ The voice came from the next mess. ‘Are you chaps still arguing about food?’

‘Everybody reads too much.’ Loveday ignored the interruption and considered the argument about the authority won. There’s too much wireless, too much cinema. Nobody has time to think. Why don’t you chaps do what I do – sit down for a couple of hours every day and just think!’

‘Why don’t you do it at mealtimes?’ Hugo snapped.

Loveday was well under way now. ‘Because it’s not my time for meditation, that’s why. I can’t think while I’m eating. That’s why I don’t read with my meals.’

‘You don’t half talk, though,’ Saunders said.

‘I talk at mealtimes because it promotes digestion. And I meditate in the afternoon because then the body’s metabolism is at its lowest ebb. I read just before lunch and in the early evening because at those times the human mind is in its most receptive condition.’

‘You do read, then?’ Hugo seemed unable to let it rest.

‘I read to learn – not to escape from life. Reading for me is a communion of two minds. I only read one book—’

‘A Textbook of Psychology,’
Saunders said.

‘Exactly. And let me tell you that a careful study of this great work—’

‘On
appel!’
It was Stewart, the block commander. ‘Come on, all outside.’ He stopped at the doorway of the mess. ‘Your turn to stooge today, chaps.’

‘Right,’ Peter said. ‘When do you want us?’

‘Three o’clock in the
abort.’

‘OK.’

‘All this stooging nonsense,’ Loveday said. ‘They’ll never get out. Wasting everyone else’s time as well as their own. Why don’t they—’

‘Officer at the gate!’ It was Otto, watching from the window of their mess, the only window that looked out on to the path leading up from the main gate.

‘All outside,’ Stewart shouted. ‘Officer coming up the hill. All outside!’

‘I’m not going on
appel,’
Hugo said. ‘I’m
krank
this morning.’

‘OK,’ Stewart said. ‘Get back into bed.’

‘Come on, John.’ Peter snatched his greatcoat from the bunk and hurled it round his shoulders. John picked up his book, finished his mug of tea and collected his coat from the lower bunk.

‘Good chap, Marcus Aurelius. Listen to this.’ He read from the book.
‘They seek for themselves private retiring places, as country villages, the seashore, mountains; yea thou thyself art wont to long much after such places. But all this thou must know proceeds from simplicity in the highest degree. At what time soever thou wilt, it is in thy power to retire into thyself, and to be at rest, and free from all businesses.’

‘Free from all businesses, indeed,’ Peter said. ‘He didn’t have to live in a prison camp.’

Outside it was still raining, and a few of the prisoners stood miserably in small groups in front of each barrack block, watched by their no less miserable guards. The
Lageroffizier
was just coming into the compound, through the gate at the bottom of the slope. Stiffly returning the salute of the guard, he picked his way carefully up the muddy path.

Halfway up the slope, he looked towards the barrack blocks, and began to walk more slowly. It was a point of honour, a battle of wills. The officer refused to arrive before all the prisoners were ready on parade, the prisoners refused to wait on parade for the officer to arrive.

In the past there had been trouble on this score, and the morning
appel
had sometimes lasted long into the afternoon. This had been a punishment for all; for the prisoners, for the guards and for the officer himself. More for the Germans than for their prisoners, because the prisoners had little else to do with their time. It was, in a way, a victory for them. Eventually they had become bored with standing around, and came to a tacit understanding with their guards. It was understood that they would parade in their own time, but would be ready when the officer reached the top of the hill. But he never trusted them. Seeing the ranks still incomplete by the time he was halfway up the hill, he always became frightened and walked more slowly. He would lose face if he reached the top of the hill before the prisoners were ready. But he had to keep on walking; he would lose face also if he stopped. The stooges, watching him from the windows, left it until the last minute before shouting ‘Officer coming up the hill.’ There was then a sudden and astonishing exodus through doors and windows by half-dressed, seemingly panic-stricken kriegies. The officer resumed his normal pace and honour was satisfied.