A Kiss for the Enemy (41 page)

They talked of the Italian campaign, of the North African campaign. They speculated on how things were going in northwest Europe. They talked endlessly of Oxford, and discussed the possibility of taking their law studies further in prison.

‘I've done a certain amount,' said Anthony, ‘but not as much as I should. Perhaps with two of us – one might…'

Robert was frowning. He changed the subject. They talked of the possible course of the war. For the first heady days of September every British bulletin, eagerly and surreptitiously devoured, spoke of the great breakthrough that had taken the Allied Armies almost to the Rhine. Robert still felt something of that euphoria.

‘We may be overrun in a matter of weeks if they go on like this!' Anthony felt sceptical.

‘The winter's coming on. And the Germans must fight for the Ruhr even if they pull troops out of Italy and Russia. Mind you, before our people get here they'll probably move us again. East.'

Anthony had been in Oflag XXXIII for three months, a camp set in wooded country between Brunswick and Magdeburg. This was his third camp, smaller than some. About
one thousand officers shared the twenty identical wooden huts. Anthony and Robert were, inevitably, in different huts. The most recent batch of inmates included Robert and were housed together, while Anthony was settled in another part of the camp with a number of old-timers who had arrived with him. The two spent, however, much of every day together. Anthony explained everything to Robert – the ‘
Appels
' – roll calls where the prisoners were interminably counted off by fives to check total numbers, courses of instruction, camp entertainments.

‘The older prisoners will tell you that food was terrible at first. Now we're getting one Red Cross parcel a week. Not bad at all.'

Anthony described too, the ‘parole walks' – outings by individual prisoners strictly on parole.

‘And parole strictly honoured, I suppose.'

‘Of course. What sort of a criminal lunatic would throw everybody's privileges on to the rubbish heap, as would certainly and rightly happen?'

At first Robert showed impatience with the petty
mores
of the camp. ‘Surely I could swap places with somebody in your hut, if we explained it?' The huts were divided into rooms in each of which eight prisoners occupied four double-decker bunks.

‘Then we could mess together. Because I was in hospital I'm not with anybody from our division, there's nobody I ever knew before. It would make a big difference – after all the Germans leave the running of the place to us, we can order it as we want, it seems to me.'

Anthony told him the proposal was out of the question.

‘It would cause great offence to suggest such a thing and it certainly wouldn't be agreed. This is a very special sort of community you know. People – especially people who've been prisoners a long time – are sensitive. Very touchy.'

‘But still,' said Robert softly, ‘I suppose we could pair up for an – adventure – couldn't we? Or would that, too, run counter to protocol?'

Anthony considered him. ‘Yes,' he said, ‘I think perhaps we could.' Quietly, tentatively, they began to discuss that
difficult, controversial question among prisoners: the possibilities of escape.

In earlier life Anthony had often deferred to Robert. Robert, with strong opinions and impatient, had liked to have his own way and Anthony had often smiled and let him have it. They had always been complementary and their temperaments seldom jarred. Robert always said exactly what he thought with a candour which could be brutal. Anthony, despite his charm, could sulk and be moody but he was seldom other than courteous. In prison he had not been bored by solitude, but had often been irked by enforced companionship. He disguised this, and had the name of a ‘first class man'. Robert, a much franker personality, was from the start regarded as awkward and argumentative.

‘Talks as if he knows the bloody encyclopedia by heart,' they muttered. ‘Lays down the law.' But a few who got to know him better warmed to his openness and honesty.

And now it was Robert who had all to learn, Anthony who knew about prison life.

‘There's an escape committee in the camp, of course. Anybody who has an idea puts it to the committee. It has to be approved. Then those who thought up the idea have established a sort of copyright. If they're sensible they do
not
talk about it, except to people who need to know. Of course any escape attempt generally involves a lot of people in preparation and back-up, besides those actually making the break.'

It was characteristic of Robert's restless nature that their first serious conversation about escape took place only a few days after his arrival, in the middle of October. Anthony explained the fundamentals of the challenge. An escape could be conceived as four different problems. The first of these was how to get out of the camp itself.

Oflag XXXIII consisted of two separate compounds. On one side of a partition wire were the prisoners' huts, on the other a camp for the German guards and staff. Surrounding the whole complex was a double wire perimeter fence about ten feet high, the inner and outer fences separated by a catwalk about five feet wide. The fences were strong,
supported on poles bedded in concrete. Rolls of concertina wire were extended in the catwalk. It was a formidable obstacle.

At each corner of the camp rectangle there were watch towers, manned at all times by sentries equipped with machine guns, searchlights, and in telephone communication with camp headquarters, the guardroom and each other. By night, the perimeter wire was illumined by lights set in high stanchions at thirty yard intervals. By night, too, intermediate watch towers were manned (the longest sides of the perimeter fence measured about nine hundred yards) and additional sentries on foot were posted outside the fence at hundred yard intervals. And by night, mobile patrols operated outside the wire.

‘There are dogs, too,' said Anthony. They enjoy showing them oti to us – savage brutes, I'd not like to be brought down by one. I imagine they track pretty effectively as well. I've never come on dogs before – they're a rarity at Oflags. You could say we're unlucky.'

Two gates served the camp, each guarded at all times. Both gates were locked at the same time in the evening and never thereafter opened, as far as the prisoners could see, except for the occasional passing of the Commandant's car. It was clear that anybody, whether or not in uniform, had to present some sort of authorization to the gate sentry. One of these gates – known as The Forest Gate' because of its nearness to woods bordering the lane which ran most of the way round the outside of the camp – seemed principally to be used by administrative traffic, builders' carts and the like, or vehicles bringing supplies. The other, through which Robert and his party like all their predecessors had marched into captivity from the railway station three miles away, was known as The Main Gate'. Through it visitors, camp staff and the large number of civilian employees moved. There was plenty of coming and going at the main gate. There was a small amount of military traffic but most movement was on foot. Civilian workers seemed to arrive either by bus – a bus at morning and evening stopped in the lane outside the gate – or by bicycle. Bicycles were left in a park outside the gate: presumably by order.

Anthony described the character, the routine of the camp to Robert as they walked ceaselessly round it. The weather was cold for October, but after one circuit of the wire – a distance of nearly two miles – both were warm, and with warmth came optimism.

‘Of course, getting out is the first – in many ways the hardest – nut to crack. Really, there are three main options. First, tunnelling. That means a mass effort. It takes a great deal of time, and conditions have to be right. We were working on one at my last camp. Here, for various reasons which I think are sensible, there's been no suggestion to start a tunnel. At least I don't think so, and I believe I'd know.

‘Then there's the possibility of going through or over the wire. There've been ideas about scaling ladders. Unless we could find out how to fuse the perimeter lights and searchlights simultaneously it would have to be done in thick fog. And even if we could put out the lights, we think there's some sort of standby generator, which would anyway power the searchlights. The trouble with fog – and sometimes we've had some really thick ones – is that it's unpredictable. And escapes need meticulous planning, preparation and timing. One can't just decide to go when one sees it's a foggy morning! The scaling ladders, for instance, could probably only be put together immediately before the attempt – there are periodic searches, as you know, and our friends are pretty thorough.

‘The third option is disguise. Plenty of people – soldiers and civilians – go out through the gates by day. One pretends to be one of them.'

Robert stared at him. ‘That must be the hardest option of the three, isn't it? The clothes, the identity cards, passes or whatever they have, the language –'

Anthony shook his head. ‘One can manage all that.'

He explained that in Oflag XXXIII knowledge was detailed and exact of the sort of documents every German – or foreign – traveller in the Reich needed to be able to produce on demand.

‘We've built up the knowledge over a long time,' said Anthony. ‘People bring more information from other camps
and it's centrally collated, we've not had an awful lot of other things to do.'

Similarly precise was knowledge of the papers needed to gain access to Oflag XXXIII itself: or leave it.

‘What's your chief means of getting information?'

‘Bribery. We can get pretty well anything.'

The generous supplies of cigarettes and chocolate in the Red Cross parcels which every prisoner received were strong currency when negotiating with the German guards, with whom the prisoners established, on the whole, a comfortable relationship.

‘They'll do anything for some decent cigarettes,' said Anthony. ‘They never see them otherwise. And they'll swap Reichsmarks for prisoners' money, because the British Government has undertaken to honour it after the war, so they reckon it's a stronger currency than their own! We've got masses of money. It doesn't say much for their faith in the thousand year Reich, does it! But then not many of these chaps are likely to have had that faith for a long time – if ever. They're mostly old fellows, well beyond normal military age, and all they want is a quiet life. Or they're disabled in some way. They're a decent, good-mannered lot on the whole.'

But the guards should not be underestimated, Anthony warned. Old they might be, and without heart in their job, but they functioned still under the iron discipline of the Wehrmacht. They were, with good reason, afraid of being detected in their small acts of corruption and exchange with the prisoners, and this set limits. In an actual escape, whether manning a machine gun from a watchtower, handling a dog or conducting an armed patrol, they would undoubtedly do their duty.

Robert asked about the help a man might expect from within before launching an attempt. He learned that there were highly expert forgers in the camp, self-taught over the years, models of discretion. Given time they would produce all the papers an escaper needed for his particular plan. There were tailors who would create a fair semblance of anything, from a worker's civilian clothes to a German uniform. There was an excellent make-up department. There was an information bureau which could brief on the regulations and customs with which anybody
travelling through Germany must be presumed to be familiar. And there was a comprehensive map library – including detailed plans of the area within about two miles of Oflag XXXIII itself.

‘That's the first matter, getting out,' said Anthony. ‘I said there were four main problems. The next is how to get clear of the area. Any escape, once it's detected, sets off the alarm throughout the immediate area, obviously. One's got to have a well-thought-out idea how to cover, say, the first five miles. During that time there'll be patrols and, presumably, dogs active near the camp, and every authority, railway station, policeman and so forth for miles around will be alerted. So one wants a clear cut plan for the immediate action once one's through the wire.'

The third problem, Anthony said, was connected to the second and influenced it – and was fundamental to the whole matter. Where did the escaper want to go and how did he propose to travel?

‘One can go north, try to get to a port, stowaway on a neutral ship – try to get to Sweden or somewhere like that. It's been done. From this place, that probably means Lubeck or Hamburg. Or Rostock, perhaps.

‘Or one can go south, aim at Switzerland. It's a long way, but it's been tried. The third alternative is to go west – get into France, Belgium or Holland. We've heard of men getting home from there, helped by the resistance people. Naturally, that's the direction one's drawn to at the moment. If the Allies keep the pressure up one would hope somehow, by going west, to get into British or American lines.'

There was a good deal of optimism in the camp in early October, 1944. Robert's hopes were more fashionable than Anthony's doubts. News in Oflag XXXIII was as good as the Allies' broadcast communiqués, no more, no less. There were plenty of clandestine wireless sets among the prisoners. There was, at the moment, less talk of escape than of imminent liberation as the Allies seemed set to surge forward into Germany over a beaten Wehrmacht. But in the last fortnight of the month, it seemed to Anthony, a certain change of mood set in. Men were now talking of the winter. Robert was considering.

‘One thing, Anthony. You explain it all very logically – the escape planning, the choices. But has much of this actually been tried – here? Or is it just talk? As far as I can see, as a new arrival, people seem pretty apathetic. They accept that they'll be here until the war ends. And what about you?'