Death In Captivity (3 page)

‘Must have been pulling your leg. Why, he played for Middlesex, didn’t he?’

“The truth of the matter is,’ said Rollo, ‘that he spends so much time over this escaping stuff that he hasn’t got time for anything else.’

‘Of course, in theory, I’m all for escaping,’ said Gerry Parsons. ‘It’s one’s duty, and so forth. But the fact of the matter is – oh, it’s me again is it? – the fact of the matter is that no one ever really gets anywhere. It isn’t as if there was any chance even of getting out of this camp – to say nothing of getting out of the country – and when anyone does try, what happens—?’

“They cut off the showers,’ said Tag Burchnall. ‘You can’t trump that, Billy. Hearts
are
trumps.’

‘That’s what I mean
.
They just make everyone uncomfortable.’

‘Still,’ said Tag, ‘one doesn’t exactly want to stand in their way.

‘One wouldn’t want to do a Coutoules,’ he added.

‘I can’t think why someone hasn’t taken the little beast right apart,’ said Billy Moxhay. ‘I should have thought the S.B.O. ought to take it up. All that’s happened to the little blot is that he’s got a room of his own. I’m trumping that.’

‘You can’t trump with that card,’ said Tag. ‘I know it looks like the knave of hearts but it isn’t really. It’s been crossed out. It’s the three of clubs.’

‘I thought the other knave of hearts was the three of clubs.’

‘No, that is the knave of hearts. It’s turned down in one corner. That makes ten tricks. Game with one overtrick. Eight hundred on the rubber.’

Scores were carefully checked and eight small figs were pushed across the table.

The president of the Old Hirburnian Rugby Football Club cut, and the cards were dealt again.

At two o’clock Hugo Baierlein turned over on his bunk and sat up. He had many of the talents of a true escaper. One was the ability to sleep anywhere and wake on demand.

He got out of bed, picked up a chair, put it on the table which was under the high, barred window and climbed on to it. He manoeuvred the bars in much the same way that Tony Long had done in his cell and after a few minutes he also had the middle one loose. He then put his arm and shoulder out, reached up and scratched very gently on the iron gutter.

He waited, and scratched again, until he heard the muffled sounds which indicated that Tony Long was on his way down. He gave him a few minutes and then crossed to the ventilator.

He heard Tony’s voice, still puffed from his descent.

‘Went very well. The chap on the corner turned his searchlight at me twice. He couldn’t see me, of course; I was behind the parapet. Don’t think he was suspicious. Just jumpy. I think I’ve spotted how the gate sentry works, too. He spends most of his time in the box with his back to us, but he comes out every half-hour, just before the Sergeant arrives on his rounds. I’ve written down the time.’

‘Good,’ said Baierlein. ‘I’ll make a note of that myself.’

‘You’ll have to be damned quiet getting up,’ said Tony. ‘You haven’t got a ruddy great dance band to cover you like I had. I’ll give you the word when to start.’

Five minutes later Baierlein was on the roof. It was cold enough to make him feel glad of his double layer of underclothes. He was lying alongside the low parapet which divided the flat roof. His wrist-watch was strapped with its luminous face on the inside of his left wrist. In his right hand he had a tiny black notebook and pencil. His job was to note down every movement of the sentry on the main gate and of the pair on the north-west guard platform.

He faced the prospect of approximately two and a half hours of immobility.

Under the full Italian moon, which paled even the arc-lamps round the perimeter, the camp lay black and sharp. Every few minutes a searchlight from one of the guard platforms blinked its frosty carbon-blue eye and swept across the enclosure.

Baierlein lay safely in the long black shadow of the parapet. His eyes were on the gate sentry. He saw exactly what Tony had meant. The chap was too slack to stand his post properly. He preferred to lounge in the comparative comfort of the box. Only, every half-hour, just before the Sergeant of the Guard announced to the world the start of his rounds by throwing open the guard-room door, the sentry left the box, crossed the gateway, and stood facing the Punishment Block.

In that position alone was he a danger.

Baierlein glanced at the watch face, and made a meticulous note in his book. It was for moments like this that he lived – and was nearly to die, once or twice, before he finally hobbled across the Swiss frontier at Gottmadingen eighteen months later.

On the guard platform on the north-east corner Ordinary Soldier Biancelli stamped his feet and prayed for his relief. He hated guard duty at the best of times but he hated it still more now that, in place of his friend, Moderno, he had this unspeakable, unsociable, Marzotto beside him. His dislike was not personal. It was the dislike of a member of the ordinary corps for the member of a privileged corps. He, Biancelli, was a soldier. A soldier of the king. Marzotto, although he styled himself ‘of the Regiment of Carabinieri Reali’ was a policeman. He took his orders from Captain Benucci, who took them from some Colonel of Carabinieri at District Headquarters, who took them, in the long run, from II Duce.

Biancelli was distressed both by his discomforts and his responsibilities.

In the old days it had been simple. If you saw an English prisoner escaping you shot at him. Now things were more complicated.

He looked sideways at Marzotto, who avoided his gaze.

As an ordinary soldier he was not told much about how the war was going, or what was happening in the camp he was guarding. But he could not help being aware of certain undercurrents of feeling, certain possibilities.

He stamped his feet again and watched the sky lightening imperceptibly towards morning.

The camp came to life slowly. In Hut C the first sound was usually the clatter of the orderly cook as he hurried along the passage to light the kitchen stove and heat the coffee which, with a slice of Red Cross biscuit, made up the normal prisoner-of-war breakfast.

At eight-thirty the Italians were due to open the huts and conduct their morning roll-call. It was an operation which might take anything from fifteen minutes to an hour according to the temper and efficiency of the Italian officer conducting it and the degree of co-operation which he succeeded in obtaining from his charges. During roll-call no one was allowed to leave his room.

Opinion varied from hut to hut as to whether it was better to heat the breakfast coffee before or after roll-call. There were advantages either way. In Hut C, at that time, for reasons which will appear, the cooking was done as early as possible.

Immediately roll-call had been concluded and the last Italian had left the hut, quite a lot of things happened. None of them, in themselves, was significant or suspicious; but the total would have added up to the same answer in the mind of any experienced prisoner.

Certain officers, lying on their beds beside windows, hung out towels to dry. One prisoner fixed his shaving mirror to a nail beside the window and seemed to be experiencing some difficulty in tilting it to the exact angle he required for the mirror could be seen, for some minutes, winking like a semaphore in the morning sun. In a room in Hut C a tall Major, wearing the green flashes of the ‘I’ Corps, sat at a table filling in what appeared to be a chart of the inter-related Royal dynasties of England and Hanover, and a stream of visitors came and went with items of information which he found helpful in his strange, self-imposed task.

All over the camp, from each of the five big living huts, from the Senior Officers’ quarters, from the Orderlies’ Billet, from the barber’s shop, from the canteen, and the shower baths, the quiet, invisible, network floated out, like a thousand spiders’ webs of gossamer over an early morning field. A subaltern in the Royal Corps of Signals – in peace time a professor of history at Oxford – who was sitting in a deck-chair against the wall of the camp theatre, found himself reminded of Oman’s description of Craufurd and the Light Brigade at their watch on the Portuguese frontier. ‘The whole web of communication quivered at the slightest touch.’ He himself had a tiny part to play: the outer main gate was under his observation. If it opened he would drop his book. If anyone dangerous came through he would stand up.

The gate remaining shut he was able to continue his reading in peace.

The object of all this organisation, the heart of the labyrinth around which this watchful maze of attention had been constructed, lay in the kitchen of Hut C.

In the middle of the kitchen, set in a six-foot square slab of concrete let into the tiled floor, stood the stove. It was a huge cauldron, shaped like a laundry copper, and it still hissed and bubbled from its morning coffee-making. Apart from a few shelves, almost the only other fitting in the room was a pair of hanging clothes-driers of a sort not uncommon in old-fashioned kitchens, made of slats of wood, and suspended, on two pulleys each, from the ceiling. They were covered, as usual, with prisoners’ private laundry, underclothes, stockings and sports kit. The only odd thing about them – and no doubt the matter was so obvious that it never occurred to the Italians as being odd at all – was that the racks appeared to be a trifle too well made for their function. However great the weight of damp laundry to be hung on them, it seemed an unnecessary precaution to have bolted the pulleys right through, at both ends, to the solid beams of the roof. Nor did it seem really necessary that the racks, instead of being raised by a single pulley, should be operated at each end by a small double block and tackle. The obvious is rarely apparent.

At five minutes past nine, four officers entered the kitchen. Two of them went to the clothes rack and lowered them to their fullest extent so that they hung just above the stove. They then took out, each of them, a short length of wire rope with a hook at both ends. One hook went over the pulley, the other round one of the four legs of the stove. No word was spoken; nor was any word necessary since they had been performing this particular operation twice every day for several months.

Each man took up the slack on his pulley. There was a moment’s pause. Then, in tug-of-war parlance, they ‘took the strain’.

For a moment nothing happened.

‘Ease her a little on the left,’ said the leader. ‘You’re jamming her.’

Suddenly, with no perceptible jerk, smoothly as a hydraulic press, the whole of the concrete slab came up out of the floor, with the stove fixed to it. When it was about three feet up the leader gave the sign, ropes were fastened, and, as silently as they had come, the men departed.

The stove, despite its ascension, continued to bubble and hiss merrily.

Such was the entrance to the oldest of the existing undiscovered tunnels in a camp whose Commandant had boasted that no tunnel was possible.

One had only to see it in operation to realise why it had escaped all searches. Like the African elephant in its native jungle, it defied detection by its immensity. The Italian Security Police, as they probed and searched with ant-like zeal each night, running steel spikes between bricks and tapping on floors with leather hammers, were looking for something altogether different – something smaller and slighter. A trap-door which consisted of a single slab of concrete, six feet by six feet and over two feet deep; a

trap-door which weighed nearly half a ton and needed four men, assisted by double-pulleys; to lift it was something outside their ambit. It evaded search by being too big to see.

(It might as well be admitted that only a fluke had rendered its construction possible. The Italians had made the mistake of letting the prisoners into Camp 127 a fortnight before it was really ready – a fortnight during which construction work was still proceeding on the shower baths and the drainage. Despite all their precautions it had proved possible to get hold of cement and certain tools, and the escape committee had immediately ordered the construction of this monster trap. The original base of the stove, a lighter piece of work, was taken out, broken into pieces, and dropped into the water storage tank. The new base was cast in one piece and the lifting apparatus installed. Before the camp had even been completed, therefore, the foundation stone for a way out had been well and truly laid.)

Overstrand and Byfold were already dressed for work.

It was their job, every morning, to open up the tunnel, connect up the electric lighting system, see that the hand pump and airline were in order and that the trolley, which ran from the trap-door to the digging face, was working without hitch. With the tunnel now more than a hundred feet long, these details were becoming of increasing importance. When they gave the word that all was ready, the first shift of diggers would go down and the trap would be lowered on them. They would dig for four hours and would then be replaced by an afternoon shift.

Although they had dressed for tunnelling often enough not to feel self-conscious about it, both Overstrand and Byfold might have presented, to the unaccustomed eye, somewhat remarkable figures. From the waist downwards, they were clothed in that useful army garment known to the Quarter-master as ‘pants, woollen, long’, the ends tucked into the tops of their socks, of which they wore two pairs. Their top halves were covered by skin-tight association football jerseys. (Of no known club, they were part of an issue of sports kit by the Protecting Power, and were believed to be the colours of the Zermatt Wanderers.) Both wore balaclava helmets and were shoeless.

‘Where’s Cuckoo?’ said Overstrand.

‘He’s along there already,’ said Byfold. ‘Check the security, would you?’

Overstrand looked out of the window, and noted the position of various towels, shutters, refuse bins and deck-chair loungers.

‘Seems all right,’ he said. ‘Let’s go.’