The Great Escape Read Online Free PDF Page A

“We’re flat out for security, and I don’t think there’ll be any slips.”
    Massey looked at him doubtfully and then said, “Well for God’s sake be careful. I think you’d better keep in the background as much as you can and try and look like a reformed character. Stick to the brains part of it, and as far as the actual work is concerned I’ll see you have the whole camp behind you. Let me know of anything or anyone you want, and I’ll make it an order.”
    He said it a little wistfully, resigned to the fact that he had no chance of escaping himself. He’d won his M.C. flying in the first war, but had smashed his foot when he’d been shot down then. The same foot had been damaged again when he got his D.S.O. in Palestine in the thirties, and he’d bent it a third time when he bailed out over the Ruhr in this war. He shouldn’t have been flying really, but he wanted to make one last trip before they made him an Air Commodore. Now, when he could move, he hobbled with a stick, his foot swaddled in an old flying boot.
    Roger collected his specialists, and one by one he walked them miles around the circuit while he told them what he wanted. The circuit was a beaten track around the compound just inside the warning wire. You could walk there for hours till you were numb and didn’t worry about home or the war or even the more important things like sex or liquor. You could also talk there without being overheard. The ferrets had a habit of hiding under the huts or in the roofs or outside the walls at night with ears agape.
    Pounding the circuit Roger told Tim Walenn he wanted two hundred forged passes, and Tim, who never swore and was the politest man I ever met, pulled on his great long mustache and said, “Jesus!”
    “Maybe He’ll help you,” said Roger ruthlessly. Walenn said earnestly he didn’t really think it could be done, as all the printing on every pass had to be hand-lettered, but Roger said flatly he wanted them and wouldn’t argue.
    He told Tommy Guest they would need eventually two hundred full outfits of civilian clothes, and Guest, appalled, said it was impossible. Apart from the materials and manufacturing, there would be nowhere to hide them till a tunnel was ready.
    “Make your own materials,” Roger said. “Most of the boys who get out will have to convert their own duds to civvies. I want you to co-ordinate the thing; make some yourself and show the rest how.”
    “And how do we hide all this stuff?” Guest asked, resisting to the last.
    “We’ll fix that when the time comes,” Roger said.
    Al Hake, phlegmatic Australian, lifted his thick black eyebrows when Roger told him he wanted two hundred compasses. He said he’d see if he could get a mass production line going.
    Roger told Des Plunkett he wanted a thousand maps, and Plunket said he’d be quietly confident if he could get some jellies to make a mimeograph.
    Travis nearly had a fit when Bushell described all the railways, air pumps, pipe lines, and underground workshops he had in mind. He said he’d start tooling up.
     
    Roger had another conference with Massey, and Massey went to the Kommandant and suggested a few P.O.W. working parties might go over and help in the new compound. A good co-operative spirit, thought the Kommandant, and benignly agreed. So the working parties were marched over, and with them, in the guise of innocence, marched Roger, Floody, Crump, and “Hornblower” Fanshawe. They mapped the layout of the new camp, tramped out distances, measured angles and more distances by rough trig, and surveyed the area outside the wire. Back in their own compound they put it all together and worked out where to dig the tunnels and how long they would have to be.
    One of them showed such interest that a kind German surveyor showed him most of the plans, and the prisoner limped back to the old camp stiff-legged and thoughtful. Down the leg of his pants he had a stolen copy of the underground sewage system. They