Death In Captivity (6 page)

‘And why is it you who reports this, and not Colonel Lavery?’

‘As you are well aware,’ said Colonel Baird, ‘I am in charge of all escaping enterprises in this Camp.’

‘And if you want to make anything out of it,’ he added, ‘go ahead.’

‘It is not I who will want to make anything out of it,’ said Captain Benucci. ‘If a man has been killed it is a matter for criminal process.’

‘What do you mean –
been killed?
’

‘Been killed or died – what difference for him? He is dead. In any event I suggest that you, by your own admission, are his murderer.’

Colonel Baird slowly turned dark red. Then he said, in a voice which he made not even a superficial effort to control. ‘Will you explain what you mean by that?’

‘I take the words from your own mouth. You are the organiser of these childish enterprises. You encourage men to risk their lives in underground burrows and in suicidal attempts to climb the walls. If they fail, as they must, and men get killed, then you are responsible.’

‘I see,’ said Colonel Baird. ‘I thought for a minute you were being personal.’

The two men were standing in the bathroom of Hut A. The trap-door was open. The body of Coutoules had been recovered and removed. The room seemed to be full of the dark blue uniforms of the carabinieri. Behind Captain Benucci was the chief interpreter, Tenente Mordaci, known to the camp as Dracula on account of his gross figure, his large red lips and his habit of wearing a long, silk-lined cloak; with Mordaci was his assistant, Paoli, a youthful, girlish-looking Under-Lieutenant, who was known as ‘The Boy’ and whose alleged relationship with Mordaci was a source of unfailing ribaldry to the prisoners.

Outside, one party of soldiers was beginning to break down the roof of the tunnel and another was roping off the area. Photographs were being taken.

‘You tell me, Colonel,’ went on Captain Benucci, ‘that the diggers – the nameless diggers – of this tunnel – came to you this morning and reported this matter to you. They say that Coutoules was the last man in the tunnel last night – and must have been pinned down by a fall of sand – unknown to his friends.’

‘Yes.’

‘That they became alarmed when they found that Coutoules was missing this morning – reopened the tunnel, and discovered his body.’

‘Yes,’ said Colonel Baird again. He felt that the less he said at this juncture the better.

‘And Coutoules was a member of this – tunnel-digging gang?’

‘Yes, he was.’

‘Curious. I should not have thought, from what I have observed, that he was of that type.’

‘Life is full of surprises,’ said Colonel Baird. ‘Do you want me anymore?’

‘Not at the moment,’ said Captain Benucci.

They hated each other with the instinctive hatred of different sorts of animal.

Colonel Baird walked thoughtfully back to his own quarters. There was something about the way in which the situation was being handled that he did not like at all. It was difficult to put a finger on it. Previously, when an escape attempt had ‘broken’ or had been discovered before it could ‘break’ the Italians had behaved in a different and much more predictable manner. There was a purposefulness about their moves this time, an altogether un-Italian lack of excitement. It almost looked as though what happened had not come as a complete surprise to them.

Colonel Baird liked it not at all.

When Byfold and Goyles got back to their room they found Tony Long sitting at the table. ‘Hugo and Grim are out too,’ he explained. ‘We only got seven days this time. Just petty criminals. What on earth have you been up to whilst I’ve been away?’

Goyles and Byfold told him what had happened.

‘Thank God Colonel Baird stuck his toes in over our tunnel,’ said Long. ‘It should be through in six weeks – less if we hurry. The other scheme’s not unpromising either.’ He reported the results of his and Baierlein’s observations the previous night. ‘Both cell windows are wide open,’ he said. ‘It took two months to do but it’s a beautiful job. The stone that holds the bottom of the middle bar has been loosened so that you can slide it right out. The bar then drops away from the top socket and leaves you quite enough room to squeeze through and get out on to the roof. Grim was too hefty, but Hugo and I did it easily. Once up on the roof you need a short wooden ladder. Pick your moment when the gate sentry’s in his box, and it would be money for old rope.’

‘The real difficulty,’ said Byfold, ‘would be making sure that we all got put in the cooler at once.’

‘There’s a bigger snag than that,’ said Goyles. ‘The first part’s all right, but what about the next. We should need all the usual kit – money, food, and so on. How are we going to get it into prison with us?’

Whilst they were thinking that one out, it might be an opportunity to snatch a moment to introduce them.

They formed one of those close, prisoner-of-war friendships which, if analysed, would have been found to be based on community of interests and dissimilarity of character.

Their own accounts of how they came into captivity afford a sufficient commentary.

Roger Byfold was a regular soldier. He had left Sandhurst at about Munich-time to join a Lancer Regiment already under orders for the Middle East. He had been there when war was declared. He was a tank man and a professional soldier, and desert warfare had suited him down to the ground. Indeed, he had done very well at it, as the white-and-purple ribbon on his battle-dress bore witness, until one day everything went wrong: ‘Just a normal patrol. Can’t help thinking it must have been Friday the thirteenth and I never noticed it. First my wireless went dead. Then I broke a track. Told the rest of the troop to complete the
recce
and pick me up on the way back. I heard afterwards they lost their way and were lucky to get back themselves. Got out and mended the track and found we were in a mine field. First news of this was when we blew the other track off, and half the suspension with it. Nothing much left to do. Waited for the troop all day. When they didn’t turn up, we tried to walk back. Got picked up by the Krauts early next morning.’

‘Bad luck,’ everyone agreed, ‘but just the sort of thing one expected in armoured warfare.’

Henry Goyles was a schoolmaster, the son of a solicitor. He was a good bit the oldest of the three. When war broke out he joined the ranks of a Gunner Regiment, where his precision of thought and speech, his occasional absence of mind, and his large round steel spectacles had earned him the name of ‘Cuckoo’ – a name which had followed him through the Army and accompanied him into captivity. He must have been quite a good gunner, because in 1941 he got one of the few and much-coveted commissions into a regular Horse Artillery Regiment, and he reached his battery in time for the Auchinleck offensive. If he was frequently frightened in the course of the next three months he managed to conceal it as well as most, particularly when he could devote his mind to a purely technical problem.

This was eventually his undoing.

‘It was rather an advanced sort of O.P.,’ he explained. ‘We got there before first light, in Bren carriers, and then everybody who had come with us seemed to fade away. I was just thinking that we were rather out in the blue, and perhaps we ought to pull back a bit, when suddenly I saw a most beautiful target – the type of thing you get on the ranges at Larkhill, but never expect to see in real life. It was a German Staff car, which had broken down, just behind a sort of hump. They thought they were hidden, but I could see them all right. A pin-point target, you understand, with flank observation. Really, a fascinating problem. Being out to one side, you could see the effect of the charge zone very clearly. I bracketed for line, and I bracketed for range and I worked out the angle and the factor and then I put over a beauty – I think it landed on the radiator cap. I had noticed someone come up behind me just before I gave the order to fire, and I turned round and said, “What about that for a shot?”’

‘And,’ concluded Goyles sadly, ‘it was a German with a tommy-gun.’

‘Very bad luck,’ everyone agreed, ‘but just the sort of thing which was always happening to forward O.P.s.’

Tony Long, the youngest of the three, was a born irregular. He took to any form of special service like a duck to water. To look at him you might have thought that he was one of those serious, polite, hard-working, athletic boys who make the best regimental officers. To a certain extent, this was true. What you would never have guessed was that he was at heart a bandit and a killer. He had arrived at Campo 127 after three years of miscellaneous and improbable enterprises.

‘The last one really was rather mad,’ he said. ‘I landed on the coast of Sicily with one sergeant and a bag of bombs. I had to blow up two railway bridges. Moreover, I did blow them up. Unfortunately, something went wrong on the last one and we brought down a good deal of bridge on top of ourselves. When I came to I found the sergeant was dead and I had broken an ankle. I got picked up two nights later.’

‘Extremely bad luck,’ everybody agreed. ‘But what else can you expect if you go about behaving in such an unorthodox way?’

‘You want to do what?’ said Colonel Lavery, surprised for once out of his usual calm.

‘Just a precaution, you understand,’ said Benucci.

‘Everybody’s finger-prints?’

‘We must take everybody’s. Otherwise the check will not be complete.’

‘The orderlies too?’

‘Everyone,’ said Benucci firmly.

‘I don’t think you can do it,’ said Colonel Lavery. ‘I don’t think the Geneva Convention allows it.’

‘The Geneva Convention governs the conduct of the captor towards his prisoners of war,’ agreed Benucci. ‘In this case it is not a question of prisoners of war. An unexplained death has taken place. Indeed, the matter has ceased to be entirely under my control.’

‘How do you propose to set about it?’

‘It should not take very long. The pads have been prepared and if you will issue the necessary orders, I will have it carried out at roll-call this evening.’

‘I shall report the whole matter to the Protecting Power,’ said Colonel Lavery.

‘Really,’ said Rupert Rolf-Callender to his friends in Hut A. ‘I mean to say – finger-prints. What next?’

‘If you feel so strongly about it, why didn’t you refuse?’

‘Really, Terence, I couldn’t start a brawl.’

‘If you want my opinion,’ said Captain the Honourable Peter Perse, ‘it’s all on account of this stupid tunnel. I always told Duncan it would be discovered, and of course it has been, and now there’s going to be nothing but unpleasantness, you see if I’m not right.’

‘I’ve never known them behave quite like this before,’ said Terence Bush. ‘Usually they strafe the hut a bit when a tunnel’s discovered and then forget about it. They haven’t done a thing this time except shut up that actual bathroom – they haven’t even turned the showers off.’

‘I don’t think they’re really worried about the tunnel,’ said Rolf-Callender. ‘It was finding that chap in it.’

‘How did he get there?’

‘As a matter of fact I can tell you that,’ said Bush. ‘He was put there. I got it from Chris Martin in Hut C. Apparently Colonel Baird got a lot of them to put up a sort of gym display to cover up carrying the body across and Chris was in it. They put Coutoules on Byfold’s back and galloped him across.’

‘Do you mean to say,’ said the Honourable Peter with some indignation, ‘that they simply dumped him on us. Why can’t Hut C stick to their own rotten bodies? Here we are, cut down to one bathroom between eighty of us—’

‘Shocking.’

‘What can you expect,’ said Rolf-Callender. ‘Those cloak-and-dagger types are all the same. It isn’t as if they’d got a chance in a million of getting anywhere. If they had, one might do something about it. But no one’s ever got out of this country yet and no one’s ever going to. All that happens is that they dig these footling holes in the ground, which get discovered, and everyone else is made uncomfortable. If they
do
get out they spend about three nights in the open and then get caught and come back and have thirty days in the cooler and think themselves no end of chaps.’

‘In any case,’ said the Honourable Peter, ‘we’ve only got to sit tight a few more weeks and the Eighth Army will catch up with us. Is anyone going to spin the wheel tonight?’

‘Not tonight,’ said Rolf-Callender. ‘Have you forgotten? We’re rehearsing tonight. We’ll use the dining-room after supper’s been cleared away.’

‘We shall probably find someone starting another tunnel there,’ said the Honourable Peter bitterly.

Baierlein, Overstrand and Grimsdale were walking round the perimeter of the camp, just inside the trip wire, which guarded a six-foot forbidden zone at the foot of the wall itself. Every fifty yards inside the wire, a notice board bore an imaginative piece of English prose which ran ‘Passage and Demurrage strictly forbidden’. If anyone stepped over this wire the sentries had orders to shoot at them.

Baierlein and Grimsdale were busy reporting to Overstrand the results of their recent imprisonment. Their conclusions were much the same as Long’s had been.

‘It’s easy enough,’ said Baierlein, ‘provided you’re a stock-sized person, to get out on to the roof. If Grim’s going to do it, it will mean loosening another bar.’

‘What about the gap between the roof and the wall?’

‘Ten feet,’ said Baierlein. ‘You’d need a short ladder for that bit, but you could make it out of the double bedsteads in the cell. They’re enormous things – the side pieces are over ten feet long. That isn’t the real trouble though—’

‘It’s the kit,’ said Grimsdale. ‘What’s the use of getting over the wall if you find yourself dressed in battle-dress, with no food and no money and no papers in the middle of Italy.’

‘I had wondered,’ said Baierlein, ‘if we mightn’t arrange to have the stuff brought in to us. I know we shall get thoroughly searched when we go into the cooler, and it would be risky to smuggle much escaping kit in with us. One might get away with money, maps and compasses, but nothing really bulky.’