The Great Escape Read Online Free PDF Page B

passed articles from one to another, and the result was mildly chaotic. No one lost anything of importance. Roger, amazingly enough, got his gray suit through. Travis brought all his tools, and Walenn had no trouble with his forging pens and inks. Then the screen of tommy-gunners ranged up on each side and escorted us the four hundred yards to the new home.
    North Compound was as innocent of luxury as we’d expected. There were fifteen bare wooden huts in three rows in the northern half, and the rest was a patch of stump-studded, loose gray dirt for recreation and appell.
    The compound was about three hundred yards square and right around it ran two fences about nine feet high and five feet apart, each strung with about twenty close strands of rusting barbed wire. In between them great coils of barbed wire had been laid, so thickly in parts that you could hardly see through it. Some thirty feet inside the main fence ran the warning wire. Just outside the northern wire lay the
Vorlager,
containing the sick quarters and the long, gray concrete cooler with its barred windows. Another double fence of spiked wire sealed off the other side of the vorlager. The entrance to the compound was on the north side, so there had to be a gate in each fence and each was guarded.
    Every 150 yards behind the fences the “goon-boxes” stood up with their watchful sentries, and at night more sentries patrolled the fences and another hundfuehrer prowled inside the camp with his dog trained to go for a man’s throat if necessary.
    Woods completely encircled the compound; not pleasant green woods but gaunt pines with skinny, naked trunks, packed close together in the dry, gray earth. They were everywhere you looked, monotonous barriers that shut out the world and increased the sense of Godforsaken isolation. Just outside the wire the Germans had cut the trees back for about thirty yards so there would be no cover for escapers and so that any tunnels would have to reach a hundred feet beyond the wire.
    The huts were divided into eighteen rooms about fifteen feet square, each to be bedroom, dining room, and living room for eight people, and three little rooms for two, reserved for those who could pull enough rank to deserve them. Furniture was elementary — double-decker bunks, a deal table, stools, lockers, and a stove in one corner on a tiled base. The bunks consisted of four corner posts with planks screwed along the sides and across the ends at two levels. Short, flat boards rested across the side planks, and on these one laid one’s paillasse — a bag of woven paper that looked like hessian, and stuffed with wood shavings.
    These flat bedboards were about thirty inches long and six inches wide. If they’d been specially designed for shoring tunnels they’d have been just that shape and size!
    Each block had a washroom with a concrete floor, a lavatory, and a tiny kitchen with a coal stove that had two burners on top and a little oven. There were to be over a hundred men in the block, and they had to do all their cooking on that little stove. Actually there was a kitchen block in the compound, but that could just cope with boiling water for the brews and sometimes boiling potatoes (if there were any) or making soup.
    We got by with cooking on the little block stove because there wasn’t much to cook. German rations allowed a
very
thin slice of bread, margarine, an ersatz jam for breakfast, a couple of slices for lunch, and a couple for dinner, probably with neither margarine nor jam. Usually there were a few potatoes and once every three weeks a little minced horsemeat. Occasionally there were some vegetables or barley or sauerkraut. If Red Cross parcels were coming in (thank God they mostly did after the first couple of years), there would be an evening meal of bully beef or Spam and extra luxuries like chocolate, coffee, cheese, and jam.
    There was a mad rush for rooms, and as there weren’t enough prisoners to fill the huts yet, there