The Great Escape by Paul Brickhill Page A

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