The Tunnel (2 page)

The crew in the aircraft overhead would be thinking of the flarepath and boundary lights of their own aerodrome, and all the well worn routine of the homing bomber. The final circuit before landing. The friendly WAAF driver on the dispersal truck. The sleepy ground staff waiting to bed the aircraft down for the rest of the night. Then the interrogation, and eggs and bacon in the mess.

Whatever they were thinking they were going home; while he was alone in the middle of a pine forest in Germany, slow and earth-bound, ill-equipped for a journey that would last at best for several days.

The forest appeared to be endless. During the past few hours he had crossed several roads, lying for minutes listening before daring to cross; but always the forest lay ahead, silent, vast and uninhabited.
‘Lebensraum,’
he muttered to himself, ‘I thought they needed
Lebensraum!’

He was feeling tired now, and the heavy fleece-lined flying boots were chafing his heels. He had formed some sort of plan for the journey westward and had decided on a twenty-mile walk every night, with a good rest during the day. He must walk only at night. He remembered Pop Dawson at the end of one of his lectures: ‘I can’t tell you much about Germany – except that you won’t get help there. Walk by night and lie up somewhere during the day. Try to reach an occupied country as quickly as you can.’

Until now Germany had existed for Peter only as area on the map, its towns targets and its rivers navigational aids. It had been a vast sea of blackness to be crossed as secretly as possible, a sea patrolled by night-fighters and erupting sudden bursts of flak and blinding violet light. He had known there were towns and cities there, women and children, villages and farms. But to the bomber crew Germany was primarily a chart, their target a pinpoint to be found and bombed impersonally as one would bomb a target on the bombing range at home.

He kept going until morning, walking and running alternately and making long detours across farmland to circumvent villages. At first, in the wooded country, the soil had been dry and sandy, but later he came to a more open plain, flatter and with much water. The villages were larger and more spread out, and it took longer to get round them. Once he took the risk of following the road over a level-crossing. As he ducked under the second bar he heard a voice shouting at him from a signal box which stood at the side of the track. The German words came unexpectedly out of the night, and in his panic he could not remember a word of the language. He hurried on without speaking and, once out of sight of the railway, ran for nearly a mile in his panic to get away.

When he could run and walk no longer he settled down under some bushes on the bank of a stream, to lie up until the next evening. It was not an ideal hiding-place but dawn had come suddenly. The eastern sky was already pale, and he was afraid he would not find a better place before full daylight.

At first he had been able to sleep, his head on the warm collar of his sheepskin flying jacket. Later, wakened by the cold, he had been unable to keep his legs warm. It was damp under the bushes, a dampness that seemed to strike upwards through his battledress trousers and eat into his hip-bone as he lay on his side on the sloping ground. He took off the short Irvin jacket and lay on this, cold everywhere now but protected from the damp. By his watch it was nine-thirty, the day was grey and overcast, and he wondered how he would spend the hours until darkness.

His hiding-place, concealed from the road by the thick bushes, seemed quiet enough, but he decided that the next day would be spent well away from the road. He would light a fire and boil some water. He lay for some time thinking of hot water; in bottles, in baths, in a central heating plant. No man could live without a fire, he decided. It would have to be a thick wood, well away from the road, and a fire made of dry twigs so that there should be no smoke.

At lunchtime he ate one of the cakes of concentrated food, and sucked two of the Horlicks tablets. He refilled the water-bottle from the stream and again disinfected the water. He spent the next half-hour in removing the flying brevet and flight lieutenant’s ranking tapes from his uniform, putting them in his pocket to prove his identity if he were captured.

Once during the afternoon he was nearly discovered by some boys who were playing along the banks of the stream. They were playing soldiers, but he could not make out whether the enemy were the English or the Russians. In his day it had always been the Germans. The leader of the band, a tall fair youth in abbreviated shorts – who, anachronistically, carried a sword although all his followers made the popping noise of tommy-guns or the bang of hand grenades – had disposed his men, the Germans, among the bushes on Peter’s bank of the stream, while the enemy were forced to occupy the bare sloping banks on the other side. At first there was much scouting and manoeuvring for position during which Peter, pressed close to the ground in his hiding-place, prayed that they would not find him. Later, when the two armies engaged, he was able, from his vantage point under the bushes, to see most of the action. The troops were throwing clay pellets now and the British – or the Russians – were in full retreat. Half-way up the slope the fair-haired boy caught one of the enemy, a small dark child, and began to belabour him with the sword. At first Peter thought it all part of the game, but the beating was real, and the captured member finally departed for home blubbering, with blood from his nose streaming down the front of his woollen jersey. There was something frightening in the child’s crying, a knowledge of persecution deeper than that of English boys, and Peter, crouching in his hiding-place, renewed his determination to stay there until it was fully dark.

He lay under the dripping bushes and imagined what he would have been doing at this moment, back at the aerodrome. It was nearly teatime. After playing squash with his brother in the afternoon he would now be lying on his bed reading a book. The batman would have stoked the cast-iron stove, and the small room at the end of the long wooden hut would be warm and quiet with the black-out curtains drawn. Only occasionally, when a Stirling on night-flying test took off or landed, would the hut shake and the room be full of noise.

He would be reading by the light of a bedside lamp and the glow from the open stove would fill the room, playing on the cream walls, on the striped Indian blanket that hung above the bed and on the few books in the dark oak shelves. From the dressing-table the photograph of Pat, strange in her stiff uniform, would look with smiling eyes at the clutter of goggles, maps, shotgun cartridges and squash balls. It had been so sudden. He felt appalled at the chaos that had been left behind for his friends and relations to clear up – unanswered letters, unpaid bills. He knew that his room would be locked by now; that perhaps already the padre had gone through his things, thrown away those which in his opinion would cause grief to the mourning family. At first he resented this intrusion into his privacy, but saw the wisdom of it and shrugged his shoulders.

Grief to the mourning family. He thought of his mother with three sons in the RAF. One already killed, himself missing, Roy still flying. What did she think of at night when she heard the bombers flying out? He too had had his share of grief, he supposed. First his brother, then Pat. But he had refused to mourn. What was mourning, in the end, but selfishness. Mourning one’s personal loss – that was all – pretty childish, crying after the milk was spilled.

He had been glad of the flying and the danger after Pat had died. He remembered receiving the telegram on the airfield and the rush to catch the train. How he had sat for hours in his corner seat, sending his mind ahead of the crawling train. The vision of his wife’s crushed body below the rubble of the hospital, the slow maddening hours on Crewe station, where he had telephoned and been told that she had died.

As soon as darkness fell he came out of his hiding-place and hobbled up to the road. He was so stiff that he could hardly walk, but he soon got into his stride and set out strongly, glad to be on the move again.

In making a wide detour to avoid the first village he stumbled into some barbed wire and tore his trousers from the thigh to below the knee. His first reaction was one of unreasonable anger, followed quickly by an excess of misery quite out of proportion to the damage done. He hastily tied the corners of the tear together with a piece of string that he found in his pocket, and slogged on once more, seething with a bitter hatred of the German farmer who had filled his ditches with barbed wire.

He stopped later by the bank of another stream, and bathed his feet in the cold water while he laced together the edges of his torn trousers. His feet were blistered now and he had worn a large hole in the heel of each of his socks.

Just before midnight he was surprised on the road by some soldiers and girls on bicycles, but he was able to dive into a ditch without being seen. They sounded happy and warm, laughing and talking as they passed him, and he decided to steal a bicycle as soon as he could. With this in mind he explored the barns and outhouses of the next farm he came to, but he was heard by a dog which began to bark. Fearing discovery he slipped away, and took once more to the road.

As he walked the country became more and more waterlogged, and whenever he had to make a detour round a village he found himself floundering, often waist-deep, in dykes and water-meadows. By now he was plastered from head to foot with mud. His flying boots were filled with water and flapped soggily round his feet.

He tried to travel as nearly due west as he could, but the road was erratic, running straight for miles and then stopping suddenly at a farm where he would be forced to take to the fields and blunder on until he found another road. He did not take to the country more than was necessary because of the waterlogged nature of the ground. Ten minutes on the road were worth hours of crawling in and out of ditches, and he sometimes walked for miles north or south in order to keep to the road.

He hummed to keep his spirits up, and tried to remember what he could of the German language. He had not learned German at school; French and Latin had been considered sufficient. He got as far as
‘Gute Nacht’
and rehearsed this in case anyone spoke to him. He was lonely now, and wished that he had met another member of his crew. Even after a day and a night he was lonely, with a nagging feeling that he should declare himself to the Germans – that it was dangerous for him to live and move in the country unrecognized. It was almost as though he needed contact with another human being to prove to himself that he had in fact come out of the aircraft alive.

He did not walk so far tonight. His feet were sore, and his right shoulder and hip were stiff from the fall he had taken on landing. He was hungry, too, with a hunger that was almost a pain. He had abandoned his plans for the fire in the depths of the wood – the flat plain on which he now walked was treeless – and he settled down for the day in the loft of a barn behind a farmhouse.

The barn was better than the bushes, it was dry. He made himself a bed in the soft clover-scented hay and soon fell asleep. Later in the morning he was awakened by hunger and the sound of a horse and cart in the yard outside the barn. He lay still, listening to the rough German voices, until the cart was driven away and there was no longer any sound of life from the yard outside. It was not until the cart was gone that he realized that he had been lying stiff with fear, and that his knees were fluttering uncontrollably.

As quietly as possible he got to his feet and crept across the half-empty loft towards the square hole in the floor through which he had entered. It was an old barn, the broken wood floor roughly patched with sheets of tin, and it was difficult to move without making a noise. He lay for a time on the dry powdery wood, looking down into the barn below. Everything was quiet. There were two stalls in the barn, one obviously used for the horse, the other as a store, with piles of fodder and a heap of roots. Carefully he climbed down the ladder and searched the barn for oats; but there was nothing but hay and the roots. There were swedes, yellow and unhealthy-looking. He chose two of the smallest and took them back with him to the loft. When he tried to eat them they were coarse and hot and fibrous, and caused a thirst that made him curse himself for not filling his water-bottle the night before. He felt tempted to forage round the farmyard for water, but he forced himself to stay where he was.

Several times during the day a man wearing khaki breeches and a short black coat came into the barn. To Peter, peering through a hole in the floor, he looked as though he might be a French prisoner of war. Each time the man came to the barn he seemed more French, but Peter resisted the impulse to reveal his presence and waited impatiently for the evening.

As the day passed he began to feel the cold, even in the hay. He searched the barn thoroughly for old clothes but could not find even a sack. He stuffed some of the hay inside his battledress blouse, and fell asleep again.

Soon after dark he started on his third night’s walk. His feet were badly blistered and his calf muscles had set, so that he had difficulty in walking. His tongue was like leather and he was sick several times – a thin bile that made him feel as though he had a hangover. He drank some water from a ditch by the side of the road, and thought bitterly of the chocolate he had left uneaten in the aircraft.

As he loosened up he walked more easily, but he was light-headed and careless. More than once he passed people on the road, not being quick enough to dive into the ditch before they saw him. Must pull m’self together, he thought, mustn’t get caught. He ducked his head in a stream and felt refreshed.

This night he walked straight through villages. He was too tired to go round them. I’ll rest up on the border, he decided, and stalk the last mile or so. For the present he felt impelled to move forward as fast as he could, his mind already grappling with the problem of crossing into Holland – an unknown country occupied by the Germans, yet holding out some hope of help from a friendly people. He tried to remember what he had been told of this border, whether it was guarded or merely submerged into the giant stronghold of Occupied Europe, but his memory told him nothing. He slogged on, driven westward by the compulsion that had driven him ever since he had landed.