The Tunnel (9 page)

Wally was still stirring his tin on the top of the stove. ‘Just a minute, Pete – we’re making a brew here. Be something to drink with the cheese. Bring me a cup, Teddy.’

The engineer handed him two of the large pottery beer mugs from which they had drunk their tea earlier in the morning, and Wally poured out the thick milky liquid.

‘What is it?’ Peter asked.

‘Junior’s escape tablets. He managed to get ’em through the search. What sort of time did you have in the cooler, Pete? Did you have a visit from the chap who said he’d shot us down?’

‘Yes – he said you told him we were lost.’

Wally laughed. ‘Sorry, Pete, I thought it would save a lot of awkward questions. He got pretty annoyed with me. I told him we were flying an Anson.’ He handed Peter one of the steaming mugs and, opening the bottom of the stove, raked out half a dozen potatoes which had been roasting there.

‘Mac seems to have been pretty busy,’ Peter said.

‘—Commissariat, that’s me!’ Mac handed the hot potatoes round among the sergeants. ‘You’ve got to have a syndicate in a place like this.’

He’s ruthless, Peter thought; ruthless and loyal to his group. He could see that Mac would get all there was to get out of captivity, and return to civilian life as hard and ruthless as ever, but more experienced.

‘We’re being moved to Lamsdorft in a few days,’ Wally said. ‘We’ve all decided to stick together.’

‘Good show,’ Peter said. ‘I haven’t heard what’s happening to me.’

‘You’ll go to an officers’ camp.’ Mac said it without bitterness. ‘You look after yourself, Pete – no one else will.’

‘I’ll look after myself,’ Peter said. ‘Have you thought about escaping?’

‘Not a hope,’ Mac said. ‘Lie low till the war’s over.’

‘I’m going to study,’ Wally said. ‘Get some good out of it. We’re lucky to be alive. Now’s the time to catch up and get ready for a job when the war’s over.’ Peter looked at the big, roughly carved head with its mop of unruly hair, and decided that Wally would come through, too. More opinionated perhaps, more humourless, but he’d come through all right.

‘Then an old chap with glasses came in,’ Wally continued, ‘that was after the chap who said he’d shot us down. This one was an old chap in civilian clothes with a Red Cross badge in his buttonhole. He had a Red Cross form that started off quite normally, asking for your rank, name and number – then went on to ask other things like your squadron and your bomb load. I got as far as rank, name and number and then, when I realized what it was all about I tore the bloody thing up. The old chap was livid – thought he was going to have a fit or something. He didn’t look too strong anyway. I made it up to him by telling him that I learned to fly on Tigers.’

‘Och, I had the same wee fellow.’ Teddy, the engineer, came from Glasgow. ‘He asked me if I’d like to broadcast to my people at home, but I told him they hadna got a wireless set.’

‘Where were you captured?’ Peter asked him.

‘Och, I hadna got a chance. When I heard the skipper say bale out, I went to get ma parachute. I cuid have sworn I’d left it there on its rack at the rear of the aircraft. But when I got there it wasna there. And it was getting bluidy hot there, in the back of the aircraft. So I thought for a bit, and decided I’d left it by the front escape hatch when I got aboard. I’d meant to bring it up with me but forgot all about it. I scrambled down to where I’d left it, but the flames were right across the aircraft by then and I had to crawl along the floor. There it was, though – balancing on the edge of the open hatch. I cuidna get down there quick enough, I thought it was going to fall out. I cuidna get out quickly enough either – the rest of you had gone hours before, except for Wally yonder and he was sitting there as calm as you like holding her steady. I must have baled out at about five hundred feet, because I knocked myself unconscious, and when I came round there were soldiers standing over me.’

Peter turned to Wally to ask the question he had wanted to ask ever since he had entered the room. It still seemed impossible that the pilot could have escaped alive from that burning aircraft. ‘How in God’s name did you get out, Wally?’

‘I didn’t. I was just thinking of crash-landing when I suddenly saw a lake – so I ditched instead.’

‘Just like that?’

‘I was flying upwind anyway and the lake was pretty big.’

‘So you just ditched,’ Peter said. He knew that if it had not been for the lake Wally would never have survived. If it had not been for Wally, sitting there in his blazing aircraft, facing almost certain death so that his crew might escape, none of them would have survived. ‘So you just ditched,’ he said, ‘in the middle of bloody Germany!’

‘It wasn’t Germany,’ Wally protested. ‘It was Holland.’

At lunchtime Peter found himself a place next to John Clinton, who was now one of the few men in khaki. The North Africa people had changed their khaki drill for RAF ‘other ranks’ blue serge, and the scene reminded Peter of his early days in Training Command. The conversation was almost entirely of flying, and he felt sympathy for the silent figure by his side. ‘When did you get caught?’ he asked.

‘December the seventeenth.’

‘So was I. How extraordinary. How did they bring you here?’

‘By air.’ The soldier grinned. ‘It’s the only time I’ve ever flown, I’m afraid.’

‘Some of these chaps haven’t done much more,’ Peter said. ‘The more they talk the less they’ve flown.’

‘I thought it was rather like that. I always thought it wasn’t done to talk about flying in the mess.’

‘That was the 1914 war. Who’s that other Army bod at the head of the table?’ The man had intrigued Peter ever since he had entered the room. His face looked as though it had been hacked from red sandstone with a blunt chisel. He had one cauliflower ear, and was dressed in camouflaged paratroop’s overalls.

‘He’s an MO,’ Clinton told him. ‘He’s got a bed in our room. Most extraordinary character. He’s brought a bag full of surgical instruments.’

‘Useful chap to have around. I wonder if he’s got any food tablets.’

Clinton lowered his voice. ‘We’re thinking about a tunnel from our room. We wondered if you’d be game.’

‘You can count me in.’ Peter looked at the doctor eating in silence at the head of the table. He seemed a determined, methodical sort of chap; a man with a certain inflexibility. ‘He doesn’t look much like a doctor,’ he said.

‘He started life as a boxer,’ Clinton told him, ‘then he decided he had to be a doctor, so he took his degree. When the war started he was working for a mission in the East End. He’s the most gentle creature I’ve met.’

‘He looks it.’

‘No – I mean it. He’s so strong that he’s gentle with it, like an enormous dog.’

When the lunch was over Clinton introduced him to the doctor who suggested a walk round the huts. The man was certainly built like a boxer and walked with a rolling jerk. He had discarded the jumping jacket and was wearing a khaki sweater in which he looked like an American footballer or the hero of a strip cartoon.

He seemed doubtful about the tunnel. ‘I’ve been talking to the German MO,’ he explained. ‘He says that if I put in an application I can be moved to one of the POW hospitals, on the staff. I’d travel there on my own with one, or possibly two guards. I think I’d have more chance that way than by staying with you chaps. The only thing is that, if I don’t make the jump, once I get to the hospital I shall be on parole and unable to escape. I’m rather worried about it. I don’t know what to do.’

‘What about the tunnel from here?’ Peter asked.

The doctor laughed. ‘That’s really Clinton’s idea. We haven’t a hope, really. We haven’t time. The German MO told me that we’ll all be moved in a few days. I think you’d do better by jumping off the train than by digging anyway. A tunnel would take too long.’

‘We shall have plenty of time where we’re going.’ Clinton said it with surprising bitterness.

‘I had a long train journey, coming here,’ Peter told them. ‘It’s not as easy to jump off a train as you might think. They watch you pretty closely. Besides, even if you got away you’d be in uniform. I’d say you stand a better chance to dig a tunnel from the permanent camp. Get out in the proper clothes and take your time over it.’

‘I’m not going to a permanent camp,’ Clinton said. ‘I must get away before then.’ He sounded almost desperate.

‘Oh, I don’t know …’

‘I must. There are thousands of chaps in permanent camps. Escape will be pretty nearly impossible from there.’

‘I don’t suppose they all try to escape,’ Peter said. ‘I’ve just been talking to some of my crew. They don’t even seem to want to get away.’

‘They will.’ Clinton was striding at a terrific pace along the beaten path which ran round the compound inside the wire, walking as though he could walk away from his captivity. ‘They’re just numbed now. Most of us are. Now is the time to try to escape. Before it is too late.’

‘I’ve been talking to the adjutant again,’ Peter said. ‘He still recommends waiting until we get to the permanent camp.’

‘He should be court-martialled.’ Clinton was almost running now. ‘We must strike while the iron is hot.’

That evening there was a concert given by the permanent staff in the main dining hall. Sitting there on the hard wooden form, listening to the competent jazz band, Peter felt that he might have been on any aerodrome in England. There were the same tunes, the same symphonic arrangments of dance numbers, the same sentimental choruses. During the interval there was a free issue of weak German beer, and the second part of the programme was more in the nature of a smoking concert, with ‘near the knuckle’ turns and the community singing of songs, at first nostalgic and sentimental, then bawdy and obscene such as
Salome
and
My Brother Sylveste.
It was a good evening, only spoiled for Peter by a song, composed in the camp and entitled
After The War Is Over,
which by its very defeatism made him realize what they had to fight against.

All one had to do, according to the song, was to wait until the war was over; then ‘the lights would be bright again,’ one would be ‘back in the local,’ and apparently no one would worry any more.

He left the hut and walked down the floodlit path to his own room, where he found the doctor sewing a scalpel into the hem of his jumping jacket.

‘I’m off tomorrow,’ the doctor said.

‘Good luck. Wish I were coming with you.’

‘You’ll get your chance.’ He looked down at the bag of instruments. ‘I’m afraid I’ll have to leave this lot behind in the train. Anything you’d like out of it?’

Peter chose a couple of the sharpest instruments. He could not imagine how he would use them, but it seemed ungracious to refuse. ‘I’ll take a couple of rolls of bandage, too, if I may – might come in handy. And some Benzedrine tablets, if you’ve got them. Might want to keep awake some time.’

The doctor gave him the bandages and the tablets, and rolled himself up in his blankets. ‘Must try to get some sleep now.’

Peter went to bed, too, but he could not sleep.

When Clinton came in he was mildly drunk. ‘These RAF chaps aren’t so bad, y’know,’ he said. ‘I used to think they were a frightful shower.’

During the next few days Peter wandered disconsolately round the camp, or chatted with his fellow prisoners. There was a good library in the sergeants’ mess, but now that he had the opportunity to read he seemed unable to settle down. It was too impermanent. There was no time in which to plan an escape, yet he felt impelled to walk round and round the camp, looking at the wire. It was fruitless and he knew it. Most of his fellow prisoners seemed to be infected by the same restlessness.

There was a room at the end of their hut, known to the prisoners as the anteroom. It was well furnished and decorated with mural drawings by one of the earlier captives. They were mostly night club and country scenes, the sort of drawing which Peter would hardly have noticed on the walls of a bar in London but which here filled him with unhappy nostalgia.

After breakfast every morning there was a mad rush for the few chairs in the anteroom, and all day long prisoners sat and explained to one another how they had come to be shot down. It became a sort of confessional in which, by talking, they rid themselves of the horror and the sense of failure that had accompanied their capture. It seemed to Peter that they had all narrowly escaped with their lives – some quietly, almost imperceptibly, as he had done; others horribly. And they all suffered from reaction in one form or another, some retiring within themselves, others overloud in anteroom debate. Some, mostly the quiet ones, awoke screaming in the night.

Some of them seemed uncertain of exactly how they had been shot down. Usually it was a tale of searchlights, flak, the weaving and rocking of the aircraft, the smell of burnt cordite, the growing fear; and then the red angry flames, the black smoke and the sickening jolt of the opening parachute.

Sometimes it came unexpectedly; the quiet stooging along miles from the target, the moon and the stars, the flickering searchlights far away on the horizon, the light-hearted conversation of the crew. Then, suddenly, there would be the hammer and din of machine-gun bullets, or the heavier, tearing impact of cannon shells, as a night-fighter closed in from behind them. Sometimes they would fight back. More often than not they would plunge towards the earth, spinning and screaming through the air, a great wake of fire and smoke following them down.

Always there was the sudden losing of fear in the face of danger, the quiet acceptance of what was to come, and the queer surprise and relief at finding oneself on the ground and away from the fire and the batter and crash of the shells.

Not all the men had come down by parachute. Some had landed in their blazing aircraft, to be thrown out on impact with the ground. Some had been dragged from the flames by their comrades; others had been saved by friendly German soldiers. One man had come down, from seven thousand feet, hanging by one foot from his parachute harness. Another, a navigator, had been held in his seat by centrifugal force while the aircraft hurtled towards the ground. Then the aircraft had disintegrated in mid air, and he had been thrown clear, retaining enough consciousness to pull the ripcord before he fainted. He woke up lying in a ploughed field, half his flying clothes burned away, but otherwise unhurt.