The Great Escape (8 page)

In a gaggle of men noted for beard stubble, shaven skulls, and general spectacular scruffiness, Travis stuck out like Beau Brummel. He’d got his R.A.F. uniform through in a Red Cross parcel, and he pressed his pants every night under his bunk and ironed his tunic with a tin of hot water. He polished his boots, wore a silk scarf, brushed his hair and begged, borrowed, or stole enough razor blades to keep his pink face as smooth as a baby’s bottom. He had a theory that if he went around looking immaculate the ferrets would never bale him up in the compound, as they sometimes did to people, to search for things no model prisoner should have, even to the extent of looking into embarrassing parts of the body.

The idea seemed to work because they never tackled him, which was just as well because he was in the middle of tooling up the engineer’s section and usually was a walking toolshop, with pliers and chisels and hacksaw blades stuffed in his pockets. He had nearly a dozen tin bashers and woodworkers now. One of the ace carpenters, Digger McIntosh, had been shot down and badly burned on the suicide raid on the Maastricht Bridge in France in 1940 when the Germans first broke through. He was just going into his fourth year in the bag. Another, Bob Nelson, had been shot down a hundred miles behind the German lines in the desert and walked right back to the lines, keeping alive by licking the dew off rusty gasoline cans. He’d been within three hundred yards of safety in our lines when a German patrol caught him.

Valenta’s intelligence men had bribed a couple of pliable guards to bring in some bits of file and hunks of apparently useless metal, and the engineers sat hour after hour filing away till they had a couple of cold chisels, a couple of wood chisels, screw drivers, wirecutters, and even an augur they filed out of a thin rod of steel. McIntosh made a winding frame for this so they had a drill for boring. They filed thin metal strips into blades and knives and fitted some of them into wooden frames so they had planes and spokeshaves.

Some of the knives were so good you couldn’t tell them from the genuine article, but they didn’t get that way by accident. Travis spent ninety hours filing one of the knives he made. Their fingers were getting into shreds until Guest’s tailors made some gloves for them. It wasn’t humanity so much as necessity, because when you don’t get enough to eat, sores take a long time to heal. One of the Germans brought in a broken gramophone spring, and they filed teeth on it, strung it on a wooden frame, and made a saw.

Willy Williams got a lot of materials within the camp: bedboards and wall battens and soft metal tie-bars off the angles of the huts. He had men pulling nails and screws out of the huts till it was a wonder some of them didn’t fall down.

Every second day, a gang of about thirty ferrets and guards poured into the compound after morning appell, threw everyone out of one of the blocks, put a screen of tommygun men around it, and searched the thing from top to bottom, turning everything upside down, sticking their dirty fingers into the sugar and barley to see that nothing was hidden in them, and emptying paillasses on the floor. They used to do a different hut each time and take about three hours on the search, leaving behind chaos and usually all the things they were trying to find, such as Travis’ tools.

Ted Earngey, “Little S” in 110, cut out bits of the inside of books so the chisels and pliers fitted flush inside and were never noticed unless the book was opened; and the ferrets, fortunately, never went in for literature.

The outer hut walls were double, with about four inches in between, and in the little end room opposite Roger’s, Digger McIntosh moved a wall out about nine inches so neatly you’d never know anything was wrong unless you measured the room dimensions (and I don’t think the ferrets even knew the room dimensions, except that they were exceedingly small, which we knew a damn sight better than they did). Digger put a concealed trap door in this wall and Earngey parked a lot of material behind it. Digger did the same to another wall in 120.

He made concealed trap doors in the double walls of other rooms, so Roger Bushell had a dozen equipment hide-holes throughout the camp. One was in his own room.

Travis was always short of a good hammer till the honey wagon, a great horse-drawn cylinder on wheels like a neolithic oil tanker, trundled into the compound one day to pump out the earth latrines. A stooge sidled up to it while a couple of diversionists staged a fight on the other side to entertain the mustachioed old peasant who drove it. At the height of the battle, the stooge yanked out of its socket the great iron spike that held one of the wheels on the hub, and retreated. The fighters patched up their differences, the driver went on with the pumping, and then giddyapped his horses to take his load away.

At the first corner, down by 101, the wheel came off, the cart wobbled for a moment, and crashed on its side, spilling unspeakably.

Watching from afar, Travis balanced the iron spike in his hand. “It’ll make a bloody good hammer,” he said, holding a handkerchief to his well-scrubbed nose, “but I’m not quite sure it was worth it.”

It was about this time we were building the camp theater just beyond the ends of blocks 119 and 120. Under the parole system the Germans had lent tools for the work, and it was galling for Travis to see all the tools he wanted so close at hand; but the parole system was inviolate and no one ever broke it.

They didn’t wait to finish tooling up before they started on the three air pumps for the tunnels, working in a room of 110 that had been set aside as a library and with stooges at the windows and doors watching for ferrets. Travis and Jens Muller, a Norwegian, had designed a new-type pump with accurate working drawings of every part, and in the library the engineers were hammering and bashing, filing and sawing at bits of tin and wood, kicking up a great racket.

There were eight of them in there one day just after appell, going hammer and tongs (literally), the floor littered with verboten tools and gadgets and woods shavings, when three ferrets heard the din and crept up under cover of 103. A stooge spotted them and relayed the alarm, and in the ten seconds it took the ferrets to get to the library window everything was out of sight in the wall panels and the shavings swept under a blanket. The ferrets looked in and saw two bored prisoners hammering out a baking dish with the heel of a boot.

It was a fairly close shave all the same. Bushell sent for Jerry Sage and that urbane and tolerant character, the Artful Dodger.

“I think, Roger,” said the Dodger, “that if you want a really noisy diversion this time we ought to have music while you work.”

Every day after that about a hundred prisoners gathered outside the library window and raised their voices in community song, accompanied within by the muffled anvil chorus and without by a lean and lugubrious Yank called Tex — on a leaky accordion.

The singers all thought it was part of the camp social program for their benefit, and one day a squadron leader stuck his head sourly through the library window and said, “For Christ’s sake, keep quiet in there. I can’t hear myself sing.”

With new purges, the camp was now about eight hundred strong, but only about a dozen knew everything that was going on. The rest knew little more than the job they were doing themselves. It was safer that way. They wouldn’t talk if they couldn’t talk, and it only needed a couple of words to wreck everything. Even the diversionists, most of them, knew how they were diverting and whom they were diverting, but not why they were diverting him. “X” told every new prisoner that no matter what silly sight he saw in the compound he was to ignore it and carry on as though nothing were happening.

“It’s like this,” Russell in 103 said to a new prisoner. “If you see me walking around with a tree trunk sticking out of my arse, don’t stare. I’ll be doing it for a good cause.”

The three pumps were finished in about ten days and smuggled down the shafts. The bellows were kit bags ribbed with wooden frames carved out in arc sections, mortised, glued, and screwed in circles and fitting tightly inside the bags. The tops of the kit bags were sealed around a wooden disk, and they had fully automatic double inlet and outlet valves of leather-lined blades of wood working off a spring-loaded camshaft (the spring coming from a set of chest expanders).

The pumper sat in front, grabbed the handle of the pump, and pulled the kit bags in and out like a giant accordian, as though he were rowing. The bags folded in and out on runners. When the pumper pushed, air was shoved out of the exhaust valves and when he pulled, it sucked in through the inlet valves.

The pumps weren’t any good without air lines, but the engineers had been making these out of powdered milk tins from Red Cross parcels, collected after use by the “Little X’s.” The tins were about four inches in diameter, and the engineers peeled off the bottoms, leaving a clean metal cylinder. Where the lids had fitted, the tins were a shade smaller in circumference, and this section fitted very neatly into the base of the next tin. The joint was wrapped tightly with paper and was strong and airtight enough because once the pipe lines were laid they were never touched. They made yards and yards of the piping and smuggled it down the shafts.

The intake pipes for the three tunnels led from airbricks in the foundations well under the huts and camouflaged so the ferrets crawling under there wouldn’t notice. To get to an airbrick for “Dick,” Floody tunneled about ten feet through rubble under the washroom floor. The pipes then led down to the intake valves on the pumps, and another pipe led from each exhaust valve to the spot where each tunnel was to start. Above in the shaft an outlet pipe led off underground to the nearest chimney.

Crump and Floody tested every pump by holding a piece of smoldering rag in front of the airbrick were the inlet pipes started. The man down below kept pumping, and after a while the black fumes came puffing from the outlet pipe. They examined the piping in between but there was no trace of any leaking fumes.

From that moment on, the trapfuehrers shut the traps on top as soon as the diggers went down. They could work indefinitely below then, sealed and safe from prying eyes above. As the pumper worked, fresh cool air from under the hut flowed into the bottom of the shaft, and the stale air, rising as hot air always does, drifted up through the outlet pipe into the chimney, drawn beautifully by the chimney whenever there was a breeze on top.

Sometime about the third anniversary of the day he was shot down, Roger Bushell was sitting on his window sill, leaning against the frame with his hands in his pockets, staring moodily across the hot compound when Valenta came in.

“You’re early,” said Roger. “The others won’t be here for half an hour.”

“They’ll be here in a few minutes,” said Valenta. “That new ferret’s in again.”

“What’s he doing?”

A little grimly Valenta said, “He dived straight under 122 with a torch.”