The Great Escape (16 page)

One of the ferrets (we learned this later) remembered seeing a couple of prisoners coming out of 123 with Red Cross boxes. He told Glemnitz, and the wagons rumbled over and wrecked the gardens around 123 too. Glemnitz wandered thoughtfully through the block, but apparently decided that the two searches it had already had were enough and wandered away again. Red Cross boxes, after all, were a common sight in the camp.

Von Lindeiner issued an order in the afternoon that no more of the boxes were to be taken into North Compound. The rest of the day passed quietly and tensely, but in the evening Roger sent Minskewitz across to seal down “Tom’s” trap with cement again. He had decided “Tom” had gone far enough. It was 260 feet long and still 40 feet short of the wood, but it was about 140 feet outside of the wire and clear of the pools of light around the goon-boxes.

Roger — and most of the committee agreed — thought it was reasonably safe in the circumstances to break out at that point and crawl to the edge of the wood. It was too dangerous, and in any case there was no time, to try to go any further. Across the south fence the last hut of the new American compound was up, and the roofers and painters were at work. The barbed wire was strung around the fence, and the goon-boxes were in position. As far as the contacts could learn, the Americans would move within two weeks.

Floody thought it would take about four days to dig up to the surface. Fanshawe was worried about dispersing the sand, but said he’d fix it somehow, even if he had to eat the stuff.

“You don’t have to worry for a couple of days anyway,” Roger said. “I want to shut things down for three days and try to divert Glemnitz somewhere else. There’s a faint chance we can get him to think the whole thing might conceivably be a hoax. There won’t be any convincing him, but it might relieve the pressure a bit.” He turned to Jerry Sage. “I want a big gang of stooges,” he said, and explained his idea.

Sage went down to his block, 105, stamped into the corridors, and bellowed, “I want fifty volunteers right away.” He knocked on all the doors and repeated it. After a while two or three men appeared.

It appeared that everyone else was either peeling spuds, playing cards, reading, sleeping, or just not in a volunteering mood. Sage barged into the first room, and there were knocking and trampling sounds. A couple of bodies came hurtling through the window, followed by a couple more. A fifth man escaped through the door. Sage went from room to room, his progress marked by thuds, noises of running, and more bodies tumbling out of windows. “When I call for volunteers,” he bawled, “move!”

When he’d infiltrated about fifty people into 103, he handed each man a Red Cross box, and at short intervals he sent them walking in twos and threes across the compound to 119. Rubberneck noticed them within ten minutes and stood off at a distance watching. He had a word with Adolf, and Adolf went out of the gate at a fast walk.

Glemnitz was striding into the compound in a quarter of an hour followed by a dozen guards and half a dozen ferrets. Poker-faced, he marched them straight to 119; they hustled everyone out of the block and searched it for four hours.

One of Valenta’s contact men, a reliable-looking soul who placidly smoked a pipe, took Glemnitz aside that evening and told him he was being ribbed. He hinted vaguely that there was actually no tunnel, and that the whole thing was a camp stunt to pull the German legs and tie up their men for weeks searching fruitlessly for something that wasn’t there. For the next two days a couple of contacts trailed Glemnitz and Rubberneck, and now and then flashed sardonic grins at them. One of them made the mistake of laughing openly at Rubberneck, and the sensitive Rubberneck lost his temper and had him sent to the cooler.

The bluff campaign partly fooled Glemnitz. Only partly. He was sure there was a tunnel — he took that for granted — but he thought the Red Cross boxes being taken out of 123 might have been a blind, like the Red Cross box trail out of 103. He had a night conference with his ferrets. Herman, flushed with victory, told his contact about it later.

Glemnitz thought there was probably a tunnel in one of the huts along the north fence. It was a less obvious spot than 123, and he had great respect for P.O.W. cunning. He ordered searches of 104 and 105, and then at the last moment he changed his mind and ordered one last search of 123. Floody was sending a shift down that morning to start digging up for the surface, but when we came off appell the cordon of guards was around 123.

Floody walked grimly over to 110, collected Bushell and George Harsh, and they took up position in a room of 122, standing silently by the window, watching, getting occasional glimpses of the ferrets as they moved about inside 123. For two hours they stood there, frozen-faced, and hardly exchanged a word. Bushell said briefly once, “If we get away with it this time, we’ll make it. They’re bound to concentrate on the other huts.” There was something about the tension in that room like the heavy stillness before an electrical storm, and it spread to other people in the camp. Nearly everyone now had a fairly accurate idea of what was going on. Many months’ work by many people, many hopes, were hanging on this, and for two hours, time seemed to be motionless, as though it, too, were waiting.

About eleven o’clock Herman was jabbing his probe around the concrete floor by the chimney listening for hollow sounds when the spike suddenly stuck in the cement. Herman, startled, wiggled it and pulled it out with a jerk. A little chip of concrete came away with it. Herman was short-sighted, and it was only when he got down on his hands and knees that he made out the faint outline of the trap and let out a shout of wild triumph.

Glemnitz was beaming with a loathsome joy. Even Rubberneck looked happy. They stood in the doorway of 123 waiting for Von Lindeiner and Broili. Behind them the trap was still unopened — because they didn’t know how to — but they had scraped the edges clear, and a ferret had gone for a sledge hammer. A group of us stood about twenty yards off eyeing them stonily and then gave it up and wandered away rather then give them any more satisfaction.

When Von Lindeiner came, they smashed the trap in, and Rubberneck went down the shaft and looked up the tunnel. He wouldn’t go into the tunnel. Only one ferret ever had the nerve to do that, a grinning little gray-headed fellow with a flat face called Charlie Pfelz. Charlie was everyone’s friend, including the prisoners’. He was always stationed at East Camp.

Glemnitz sent for him, and Charlie came over and vanished into the tunnel with his torch. It took him half an hour to go right to the end and crawl back again, and Glemnitz’s grin slipped a little when Pfelz bobbed up again, still grinning, and told them how close the tunnel had been to success.

Bushell was in a vile mood all day but snapped out of it toward evening, and he, Wings Day, and the committee had a three-hour session to plan the next move. It was a dispirited gathering. Roger said he wanted to keep the other two tunnels sealed until all the fuss had died down.

“No risks at all from now on,” he said. “I know if we don’t get on to them soon it’ll be winter. That’s O.K. by me. I’d rather keep them safe through winter than risk losing them.”

Depression comes easily in prison camp. Some of the older prisoners had been working on tunnels for three and four years, and they were still stuck behind the wire, becoming obsessed, a few of them, with the hoplessness of it all.

“It makes you wonder,” Tovrea said to Crump, “whether we’ll ever break one of these things out.” Tovrea would be one of the experienced tunnelers going to the new American compound.

“Don’t let it bother you,” Crump said. “‘Tom’s’ only the ninety-eighth one they’ve found.” Crump had been keeping score since 1941.

There was a mass meeting in the camp theater the next afternoon.

“As most of you know,” Bushell announced, “we started this project with three separate schemes, knowing we might lose one or two — and prepared to lose them — to make pretty sure of succeeding with at least one. We’ve still got two up our sleeves, and the Germans probably think we’ve shot our bolt. We’re going to lay off the other two for a while to make sure they think this. Then we’re going ahead. I don’t think they can stop us this time.”

Wings Day hit the best note. “The Kommandant,” he said, “wants to retire as a general. It’s our job to see he’s retired — but not as a general.”

After the first flush of joy, the ferrets didn’t quite know what to do about “Tom.” Usually they flushed out tunnels with a hose, but “Tom” was too long and too strongly shored. Finally Von Lindeiner rang the Army engineers, and they sent a tiny little man with a happy but cretinous face. He pottered about “Tom” for two days and laid gelignite in it. Everyone cleared out of 123 and waited expectantly while the little man pushed the exploder. He wasn’t a very good engineer. The charge roared out of the tunnel up the shaft. A great mass of 123 roof flew into the air, the concrete floor disintegrated, and the chimney ponderously tilted on one side. The little man went away in disgrace, and workmen came in to repair 123. Even in death, “Tom” had done his part for the war effort.

Glemnitz made the mistake of talking too loudly in the compound to a ferret, and one of Valenta’s German-speakers overheard him saying that he didn’t think there would be any more trouble in North Compound because the prisoners must have used every scrap of available wood to shore the tunnel. If they ever tried another big one in the future, he would notice bedboards gradually disappearing.

Roger heard about it within an hour and sent Willy Williams around every room organizing the biggest bedboard levy yet. Within two days he had collected nearly two thousand and stored them down “Dick” and behind false walls. Roger reasoned that if Glemnitz considered he’d broken the major effort he wouldn’t be watching bedboards for a while. When he
did
start checking them again, he’d be reassured by the fact that none were disappearing. Meanwhile the tunnels could be shored from the hidden stocks.

Roger set an example by giving up every one of his bedboards and persuaded Bob Tuck, who shared his little room with him, to do the same. He got Travis to make them both a string bed — a net of plaited string slung between the side frames of the double-decker bunk. For once Travis’ handiwork failed. Roger climbed into his top bunk the first night, the string gave way, and he crashed through onto Tuck below. The weight smashed Tuck’s strings, and they both went through onto the floor. It took them all the next day to mend them both so they would hold.

A week later the Americans were marched out to their new compound, laying bets they would break a tunnel out before us. Jerry Sage and Junior Clark, and a lot of other good men went with them. Though he came from Atlanta, George Harsh stayed with us because he’d been in the R.A.F. Apart from the fact that he was such a fanatical watchdog, it was good to have him around because he was such a character, pulling at his great gray mustache, glaring furiously at the Germans, and mumbling ingenious American curses.

He used to sit on the edge of his bunk, massaging his mustache, dreaming about food, and after a few minutes he’d explode, “Goddamn, I’m a hungry sonofabitch. Why did I ever pull that rip cord!”

“How
were
you shot down, George?” a new boy asked him, and George eyed him gloomily.

“I was sitting on a barn door over Berlin,” he said, “and some bastard shot the hinges off.”

Glemnitz also went with the Americans. Von Lindeiner had detailed him to look after security in their new compound, and we hardly ever saw him in North Camp after that. We grieved not.

Actually it didn’t help. Rubberneck was as smart and more unbending. He also wanted to be a feldwebel instead of an unteroffizier and started riding the ferrets hard. He threatened the Keen Type with the
Ostfront
for loafing in Zillessen’s room, and the Keen Type wasn’t much good with information after that. Instead of slackening off after the break, the ferrets were more of a nuisance than ever.

Smarting after his four days in the cooler, Adolf found a new conscientiousness and began haunting the forgery factory wherever they went. He was a somber little man with a thin face, a blue chin (what there was of it), and a black tooth-brush mustache that gave him a faint, caricature resemblance to that other, more notorious, Adolf — hence the nickname. Roger had toyed with the idea of opening the tunnels again after a few weeks, but with the ferrets so keen and one tunnel already gone, he decided to hold off indefinitely. All the other factories worked steadily on.