The Tunnel (14 page)

He was met at the top of the slope by the British adjutant, a short man who always manoeuvred to obtain the advantage of the higher ground, so that he could look down on the sallow bespectacled German as he returned his morning salute.

The prisoners stood in fives and slowly the guards walked up and down the ranks, counting them. It was said that the guards could only count in fives. Another guard went through the barrack block to count the
krank im Zimmer.
The officer stood watching, the rain dripping from the shiny black peak of his service cap and soaking into the olive-green of his cape. The prisoners waited like a herd of passive cattle, wet now, but knowing that the rain would stop sometime.

The guard who had counted the sick in bed reported to the
Obergefreiter,
who in turn reported to the
Feldwebel,
who reported to the
Lageroffizier.
The
Lageroffizier
saluted the British adjutant, and the prisoners were dismissed. They would not be bothered again by the Germans until the afternoon
appel.

Back in the barrack block, John took the breakfast things to rinse them under the cold water tap in the washhouse, while Peter stayed behind to sweep the floor and scrub the wooden table. Otto and Loveday lay full length on their bunks. Hugo sat on the edge of his, studying his hair in a small hand mirror.

Peter attacked the rough damp concrete floor with a broom he had borrowed from the next door mess. It was bad enough to sweep up after people when they were not there, but when it was raining and they lay all over the place so that he had to sweep round them, it was worse. He lifted Hugo’s feet from the floor and swung them on to the bed.

‘Here, steady on!’ Hugo said.

‘How the hell d’you expect me to sweep under the bunks?’ Peter asked.

‘Shouldn’t bother, I never do.’ Hugo returned to his study.

On the other side of the table Loveday, in the lower bunk, was explaining to Otto, in the upper, exactly why it was that Poland lay so far behind England in the forward march of civilization. Otto listened politely. He had spent some months in a
Gestapo
gaol where, it was rumoured, torture had been used to extract information. He never spoke of it, but for Peter he still retained that aura of mystery which cloaked all those to whom violence had been done. He would have liked to talk to Otto intimately, to hear his story, but Otto never encouraged intimacy. He lived quietly within the secret reclusion of his past experience, giving himself only to Alan Loveday, whom he treated with a tenderness that the others could not understand.

Saunders usually spent the morning walking round the circuit or watching a football match. He was not a reading man. Wet mornings were a trial to him, and now he came and stood awkwardly by the table. ‘Pete, d’you mind if I light a
Stufa
?’

‘For God’s sake!’ Peter was angry at first, but saw the look in Saunders’s eyes. ‘Oh, all right – but mind you clear the mess up after you. You’d better open the window, too.’

Saunders took the
Stufa
from under his bunk. It looked like a rusty battered coffee percolator. The top section held water, the middle was fitted with a patent draught-forcing arrangement of his own invention, and the bottom, made from a Klim tin, was the firebox. The
Stufa
burned small shavings of wood that Saunders had cut from a plank with one of the table knives.

Soon the mess was full of smoke which quickly spread to the adjoining rooms.

‘PUT THAT BLOODY THING OUT!’ The shouted protests came from the nearby messes.

‘Nearly boiling.’ It was Saunders’s boast that he could boil half a cupful of water before anyone else knew that the
Stufa
was alight. ‘OK, chaps, it’s out now.’ Shaking with suppressed laughter, he put the
Stufa
back under the bunk, closed the window and sat down at the table, preparing to shave.

‘SHUT THE BLOODY WINDOW!’ someone shouted from the next mess.

‘It’s all right, it’s all right,’ Saunders said. ‘I’ve shut it.’

‘You’re not shaving here, are you, Saunders?’ It was Hugo speaking from his bunk.

‘Why not?’

‘The washhouse is the place for shaving.’

‘I can’t shave there, it’s fully occupied.’

‘What d’you mean?’

‘I mean it’s fully occupied. If you’d had the energy to go and wash this morning you could have seen it yourself. You’re no more sick than I am.’

‘I’m sick of you turning this mess into a gentlemen’s lavatory.’ Hugo put the mirror back on the shelf above his head. ‘Also, it may surprise you to hear that I had a cold shower and a shave before any of you were awake this morning. I just didn’t feel like going on
appel,
that’s all.’

‘Lucky we don’t all feel like that,’ Saunders said.

When John came back with the breakfast things, Peter had finished the floor and was scrubbing the table with a nail brush.

‘There’s a hell of a mess in the washhouse.’ John seemed amused. ‘Go and have a look.’

‘I’m too busy,’ Peter said.

‘Go on – have a look. I’ll finish the table.’

‘Ah, well, if you insist. I’ll get some more water while I’m there.’ He took the metal jug from the shelf and made his way down the long room, through a small lobby just large enough to house the brick cooking stove, and into the washhouse which they shared with the next door barrack.

It was a simple brick-built room with whitewashed walls and a concrete floor. There were long cement troughs with rows of dripping taps, and wooden benches on which some prisoners were washing their clothes. Beneath a rough shower made from a length of rubber hose and a punctured tin, a naked figure danced under ice-cold water, while his laundering neighbours, cursing, clutched their washing and retreated from the broadcast splashes.

The place was even more crowded than usual this morning, and more noisy. Above the tumult of shouting, singing and slapping of wet clothes on the wooden benches, Peter heard a cautious tap-tap-tap. In one corner of the room a man was breaking through the concrete floor with a chisel made from a window-fastener.

Tyson and the bearded commander were washing their shirts on one of the benches near the door.

‘What’s all this in aid of?’ Peter asked.

‘The crazy gang from the next block.’ The commander’s beard bristled with indignation. ‘How can a man do his dhobying in a row like this?’

‘They haven’t a chance,’ Tyson said. ‘Just making a bloody nuisance of themselves.’

‘It won’t be for long, that’s one thing. They’ll have the goons round here like flies round honey.’ The commander slapped his washing with a hand the size of a spade. ‘A damn’ fool effort like that won’t last for long.’

When Peter arrived back in the mess Saunders was carefully sorting out his ‘rubbish,’ the mysterious blanket covered bundle he had brought from
Dulag-Luft.
At first the rest of them had been enthusiastic, about the cooking utensils – saucepans made from old cans, and baking dishes from rolled-out jam tins - that it had contained. They had not been so enthusiastic about the mass of raw material which he had brought along. There were short lengths of wire, pieces of string, tins of rusty nails, nuts and bolts, a penknife with a broken blade, bunches of flattened-out tins, photographs torn from magazines – all the hundred and one things once jealously hoarded by the schoolboy, now valuable again in the eyes of the prisoner of war.

Hugo, impelled by moral indignation, had gone for a walk. John was reading through the argument between Otto and Loveday, which had now progressed to religion and psychology – the ultimate goal of all Loveday’s arguments.

‘What’s going on out there?’ Saunders asked, looking up from his litter-covered blanket.

‘Some chaps from the next block starting a tunnel,’ Peter told him.

‘Then we shan’t have any peace until it’s discovered,’ Loveday said.

‘Can’t say we have much now,’ Saunders muttered, ‘chaps nagging at you all the time.’

‘It’s stopped raining, Pete,’ John said. ‘Let’s go for a walk.’

‘I haven’t time, I’ve got to get the lunch ready.’

‘’Morning, chaps!’ A stranger stood at the doorway of the mess. D’you mind if I stooge from your window? We’ve got a
dienst
on in the washouse.’

‘There you are,’ Loveday said. ‘What did I tell you?’

‘OK, John,’ Peter said. ‘Let’s go for a walk.’

Out in the compound, the prisoners were taking exercise. Round and round, just inside the wire, pacing the eternal treadmill of the path they had worn with their restless feet; parallel to that other, fainter pathway a few yards outside the wire, worn by the feet of their guards.

On the circuit, as it was called, the prisoners walked according to their mood; some in groups of three or four, talking loudly or chaffing one another; others in twos, deep in discussion or reminiscence – perhaps planning an escape. Some walked alone, hands in pockets, heads sunk on chests, blindly miserable, locked in a prison within a prison, desperate in their loneliness. These walked with their eyes fixed on the ground before their feet. There was no point in lifting their eyes. If they lifted them they could only see the wire, and the wire reminded them of their captivity. So they mooched slowly round with their hands in their pockets, and their eyes un-focused on the ground; ignoring the existence of the wire.

And the man who today walked slowly in his loneliness would tomorrow pace it out with the crowd. It was a terrible periodic misery that gripped them all at times, and then lifted miraculously so that they walked with their eyes raised and saw the sky again. It was difficult, when gripped by the misery, to remember that this would pass.

‘Thank God it’s stopped raining,’ Peter said. He looked at the camp, sodden underfoot but washed clean by the rain. ‘Life’s impossible when everyone’s inside.’

‘It’s pretty impossible anyway,’ John said. ‘It’s time we got cracking and got out of it.’

‘You can say that again,’ Peter said, ‘and go on saying it. Every idea we’ve had has been squashed by the Committee. We were taken prisoner about three years too late, that’s our trouble. Every possible place has been used at least once already. Look at that job they’ve just started in the washhouse. They only started it there because there was nowhere else. Even Tyson says they haven’t a hope.’

‘He amuses me,’ John said. ‘He’s always so furtive. He’s the typical cloak-and-dagger merchant – I’m sure he talks to himself in code.’

‘He knows all there is to know about tunnelling,’ Peter said. ‘He’s got it all buttoned up.’

‘He may have, but he’s still here.’

‘He’s been out several times. Once you’re outside the wire, it must be a matter of luck how far you get - absolute luck. It’s getting out that takes the ingenuity.’

‘I suppose the tunnel is the only way?’

For Peter, the next best thing to escaping was talking about escape. He began to ride his hobby horse. ‘Examine the problem,’ he said. ‘What is it? To get outside the wire. Right. There are three ways – over the wire, under the wire, or through the wire. You’ve only got three choices.’

‘The first one’s out as far as I’m concerned,’ John said.

‘I agree. You’d never get away with it – and even if you
did
get over you couldn’t take any kit with you. You wouldn’t get very far.’

‘There are two ways of going through: By the gate or cutting through the wire itself.’ John was riding with him now, knee to knee.

‘Cutting through the wire is pretty impossible,’ Peter said. ‘That leaves the gate. And there are two ways of doing that.’

‘A bluff or a stowaway.’

‘Exactly. To stow away there’s the bread cart or the rubbish cart. Bluffing is no good unless you look like one of the goons, and neither of us do.’ He looked at John with his fringe of downy beard and grinned.

‘The carts have just about had it,’ John said. ‘They’ve been tried so often that the goons examine every inch of them. There’s the night cart, too – you’d forgotten that.’

Peter shuddered.

‘A chap did it once,’ John said. ‘Bribed the Pole who was driving it only to half fill the tank and sat up to his neck in the stuff. Stark naked, with his clothes tied up in a groundsheet on top of his head.’

‘Wonder he didn’t die before he got outside,’ Peter said. ‘Did he get away with it?’

‘He was caught at the gate. Now they make the Poles fill the carts right up to the top.’

‘It’ll have to be a tunnel,’ Peter said. ‘It’s the only way.’ It was the conclusion they had reached so often before.

‘It certainly seems like it,’ John said. ‘But where? The only place we haven’t thought of is the church.’ He suddenly became excited. ‘Why not? It’s quite near the wire and I don’t believe the goons ever go in there.’

‘How should we get in? There’s a wire fence round it, y’know.’ This was no longer wishful talking; this was a possibility.

‘Go in with the morning service, stay there all day digging, and come out with the chaps from evening service. A Frenchman called Atger did it in the last war, I remember my father telling me about it. We could take enough food in with us to last all day, and work in comfort. We could make the trap right underneath the altar.’

‘How should we dispose of the clay?’

‘Oh, I expect we could tuck it away under the floor, or in the roof. Or failing that we could distribute it among the people at evening service and get them each to bring a bit out.’

‘I wonder what the padre would say.’ He felt that there must be a snag in it somewhere.

‘He needn’t know.’

‘It’s well worth trying,’ Peter said. ‘Let’s go and have a word with Tyson.’

‘Better keep this one to ourselves,’ John said.

‘Tyson’s all right,’ Peter told him. ‘I promised I’d tell him if we had an idea. It’d be silly to go into it alone, it’s too good a scheme to mess up by not preparing properly. Besides, he’s on the Escape Committee.’

‘I’d rather try it on our own.’

‘We can’t do that. Someone might be working there already without our knowing it. There probably is.’ He suddenly became despondent. ‘There’s bound to be a snag of some sort. It’s too good a place not to have been tried before.’