The Great Escape by Paul Brickhill

exceptionally rude word and was calm again. I’ve watched Roger flare up in passion over some little provocation, but when big things went wrong he had this bitter calm.
    “How soon can you start digging it out?” he asked.
    “Crump and Conk are on it,” Floody said.
     
    They had “Dick’s” shaft dug and framed again in four days. Leaving Johnny Bull to carry on, Floody and Crump went to hack out the chambers at the base of “Harry.”
    Wings Day arrived at North Compound that day. The Kommandant at Schubin had been severely reprimanded after the tunnel break there, and when Wings was caught the German gave him a solid stretch in the cooler and purged him to Stalag Luft III as soon as he could. Nothing could have pleased Wings more. He stalked through the gates under the usual tommygun escort, looking more like a hungry and unfriendly hawk than ever, and asked the way to Roger’s room.
    It was an epic meeting. Roger told him briefly what was going on and, without telling him what was there, suggested he go and live in 104, Room 23. He took him across and Wings walked in and saw the open trap with Floody and Crump just climbing out.
    “Oh God,” he groaned, “not here,” and dashed off to find a peaceful room. It wasn’t that he didn’t like tunnels any more, but when you live in a room with a tunnel, the tunnel is the boss. The stooges are always about, inside the room and out, and there is usually a diversion team standing by to beguile any ferret who gets too close. If you live with a tunnel, you can’t walk into your own room when you want to, or out again either. You’re a servant to a great ugly hole in the ground.
    Crump went back down “Harry” with Johnny Bull to put the last touches to the workshop chambers, and at the bottom, with his ear cocked, he was thinking of his narrow squeak in “Dick” when he heard the sinister “crack” again. He and Johnny Bull shot out of the trap above like champagne corks with dust puffing up behind them as the sand thundered down. When it had settled, they found all the chambers and half the shaft full. Doggedly they started digging it out.
    Jerry Sage had a victory that week. A few hundred yards away there was an
Arbeitskorps
camp, and every morning the good young Nazis tramped to their work along the road outside the wire with shovels over their shoulders, just like a newsreel, always smartly in step and singing Nazi marching songs. Jerry got two hundred men every morning smirking offensively through the wire singing with horrible voices the marching song from
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
, the one that goes, “Heigh-Ho, Heigh-Ho, it’s off to work we go,” and after four days the Germans changed their route.



Chapter 4

    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