The Great Escape by Paul Brickhill Page B

handkerchief to his well-scrubbed nose, “but I’m not quite sure it was worth it.”
    It was about this time we were building the camp theater just beyond the ends of blocks 119 and 120. Under the parole system the Germans had lent tools for the work, and it was galling for Travis to see all the tools he wanted so close at hand; but the parole system was inviolate and no one ever broke it.
    They didn’t wait to finish tooling up before they started on the three air pumps for the tunnels, working in a room of 110 that had been set aside as a library and with stooges at the windows and doors watching for ferrets. Travis and Jens Muller, a Norwegian, had designed a new-type pump with accurate working drawings of every part, and in the library the engineers were hammering and bashing, filing and sawing at bits of tin and wood, kicking up a great racket.
An Air Pump
    There were eight of them in there one day just after appell, going hammer and tongs (literally), the floor littered with verboten tools and gadgets and woods shavings, when three ferrets heard the din and crept up under cover of 103. A stooge spotted them and relayed the alarm, and in the ten seconds it took the ferrets to get to the library window everything was out of sight in the wall panels and the shavings swept under a blanket. The ferrets looked in and saw two bored prisoners hammering out a baking dish with the heel of a boot.
    It was a fairly close shave all the same. Bushell sent for Jerry Sage and that urbane and tolerant character, the Artful Dodger.
    “I think, Roger,” said the Dodger, “that if you want a really noisy diversion this time we ought to have music while you work.”
    Every day after that about a hundred prisoners gathered outside the library window and raised their voices in community song, accompanied within by the muffled anvil chorus and without by a lean and lugubrious Yank called Tex — on a leaky accordion.
    The singers all thought it was part of the camp social program for their benefit, and one day a squadron leader stuck his head sourly through the library window and said, “For Christ’s sake, keep quiet in there. I can’t hear myself sing.”
    With new purges, the camp was now about eight hundred strong, but only about a dozen knew everything that was going on. The rest knew little more than the job they were doing themselves. It was safer that way. They wouldn’t talk if they couldn’t talk, and it only needed a couple of words to wreck everything. Even the diversionists, most of them, knew how they were diverting and whom they were diverting, but not why they were diverting him. “X” told every new prisoner that no matter what silly sight he saw in the compound he was to ignore it and carry on as though nothing were happening.
    “It’s like this,” Russell in 103 said to a new prisoner. “If you see me walking around with a tree trunk sticking out of my arse, don’t stare. I’ll be doing it for a good cause.”
    The three pumps were finished in about ten days and smuggled down the shafts. The bellows were kit bags ribbed with wooden frames carved out in arc sections, mortised, glued, and screwed in circles and fitting tightly inside the bags. The tops of the kit bags were sealed around a wooden disk, and they had fully automatic double inlet and outlet valves of leather-lined blades of wood working off a spring-loaded camshaft (the spring coming from a set of chest expanders).
    The pumper sat in front, grabbed the handle of the pump, and pulled the kit bags in and out like a giant accordian, as though he were rowing. The bags folded in and out on runners. When the pumper pushed, air was shoved out of the exhaust valves and when he pulled, it sucked in through the inlet valves.
    The pumps weren’t any good without air lines, but the engineers had been making these out of powdered milk tins from Red Cross parcels, collected after use by the “Little X’s.” The tins were about four inches in diameter, and