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looked it over back in the compound, and there were two beautiful, tailor-made tunnels leading out to near-by drainage areas. If only the pipes were big enough, it looked like happy days. Roger didn’t take anything for granted, and the tunnel chiefs carried on their planning.
    Wally Valenta was training men who spoke German for the intelligence branch. Day after day, “Junior” Clark, George Harsh and Tom Kirby-Green padded around the circuit devising security on a scale they’d never tried before. Security was going to be one of the keys to the whole thing. Clark was chief of security and known as “Big S.”
    On the face of it, proper security looked impossible. There were going to be half a dozen Germans in the compound all the time wandering around with torches and probes. We had to hide the proposed forgery and map factories, compass and clothing factories, metalwork and carpentry shops, the sand we dug out and the tunnel traps…. We even had to hide the security stooges themselves because nothing stuck out to the ferrets’ eyes more than some character self-consciously sitting around in the same spot every day and all day trying to watch, give signs of approching ferrets, and look innocent all at the same time.
    Junior Clark and George Harsh were both Yanks of totally different types. The Yanks were just getting going in Europe, and a lot of them were being chopped down as they experimented with the dangerous business of daylight bombing. The ones who didn’t die were being trundled dolorously behind the wire to join us, and there were about a hundred of them with us at that time. Clark was a gangling redheaded youngster in his twenties and already a lieutenant colonel. George Harsh was well into his thirties and as gray as a badger. He looked like a Kentucky colonel and was a wild, wild man with a rambunctious soul. He’d join the R.A.F. a couple of years earlier and had been shot down as a rear gunner over Berlin. Tom Kerby-Green was a big, black-haired Englishman who looked like an overgrown Spaniard.
    Roger controlled every phase of the growing organization, holding daily conferences with the departmental chiefs, presiding over them as charmingly incisive but slightly sinister chairman. He had a mind like a filing cabinet, and that was one of the reasons he was so brilliant at organization. Once he’d chosen his man for a job, he never roughly interfered with him. He listened to his problems, made suggestions, and when they’d thrashed it out and a decision had been made, he gave the man concerned full brief to carry it out. With that twisted eye taking everything in, he was a potent influence enveloping every detail of the planning. He wandered around in a battered old R.A.F. tunic, scarf around his neck and hands in pockets, a tall, brooding figure, with that steady and disconcerting gaze. Every day he went to Massey, and they talked over the master plan.
    By the end of March, the new compound was ready. So was the X organization.
     
    We moved on April Fool’s Day, a straggling line of seven hundred scruffy prisoners carrying all our worldly possessions. Most of us wore all our clothes, festooned ourselves with cooking pots, plates and mugs, and the gadgets made out of old tins, and carried cardboard Red Cross boxes with what food we had and a few beloved personal things like photographs and nails and bits of string. Mother wouldn’t have known us. There weren’t enough razor blades to shave every day so some of us were shaven, some had felonious stubbles, and a few had beards ranging from the farcical to the flamboyant. Here and there a bottom beeped pale and unashamed out of obsolete pants, and the air was blue to the noise of happy cursing. A change, as Roger had observed, was as good as a holiday.
    Henceforth the old home was known as East Compound and the new one was North Compound. First the Germans searched us, but no more efficiently than usual. People clustered around and harried them,