by David Fraser
‘Only ten minutes! Wait till you’re over sixty!’ The Meisters strode off, a trifle unsteadily. Krebs, a kind-hearted man, thought of offering to telephone to the Forest Gate to request a stay in closing time but he knew there was no hope. Gate time was rigid. All he’d get would be a balling out from the Obergefreiter at the Forest Guardroom for making such a grotesque suggestion. What the hell did it matter that the elderly Meisters had a longer walk in the twilight – unnecessarily? What did that matter to Krebs, the Obergefreiter would yell. Anyway, why couldn’t the two boozy old buggers have left their bicycles at the Main Gate?’
So it would go on. Krebs looked at his watch. In three minutes the guard would fall in, the gate would be locked, evening sentries would be posted, evening routine would begin. Krebs thought again of Rotnase with an inward chuckle tinged with envy. A walk in the night air would probably do them a lot of good! And it was perfectly true that they could have moved their bicycles to the Main Gate once they knew what and where the trouble was – and it was presumably on this side of camp. Come to think of it, why hadn’t they?
Krebs picked up the telephone and asked to be connected to the Forest Gate. His mind never worked particularly fast, but something told him he would be happier if he could with complete certainty report to the Gefreiter of the guard that the Meister brothers, whose names were on his log sheet, were walking round by the lane to collect their bicycles at the Forest Gate. He could do so already, of course, but nevertheless –
He did not recognize the voice that answered the telephone. Not one of his mates.
‘Krebs here, Main Gate. Just to check that two bicycles, property of the electrician brothers Meister, are outside the Forest Gate. The brothers are walking round by the lane to collect.’
‘Wait.’ After ten seconds the voice returned.
‘No, no bicycles.’
‘Poor old devils,’ said Krebs. ‘They must have had their machines stolen! Thanks.’ He felt sad.
‘It’s not my responsibility to guard their damned bicycles. Anyway, why leave them here? They must have been drunk as usual. They’ve not been in this way. They’ve not booked in.’
‘Not booked in?’ said Krebs feebly. He felt the beginning of nausea. It was in the stomach now and moving northward with each second. The voice from the Forest Gate was still snapping.
‘Not booked in! They must have entered by the Main Gate. So why leave bicycles here? Stupid old boozers.’
‘Thanks,’ said Krebs again. He rang off. The Gefreiter in charge of the guard moved out of the guardroom in a purposeful way. The light shone on the top of his steel helmet. In sixty seconds the guard would parade and the gate would be locked. Krebs marched up to him and stood stiffly to attention, right palm pressing against trousers, heels together, left hand holding sling of carbine over shoulder in regulation manner, logsheet held between fingers of right hand. He spoke to a point in the middle of the Gefreiter’s helmet.
‘Permission to check the gate list from earlier hours of duty.’
‘What the hell do you want to know, Krebs?’ said the Gefreiter irritably.
‘I wish to check at what hour the brothers Meister, the electricians, entered by the Main Gate.’
‘I can tell you that. They’ve not been in at all. They were in yesterday and left in the afternoon but they’ve not been through the Main Gate today. Now get out of the way, Krebs, it’s time for parade.’ He shouted over his shoulder. Men turned briskly out of the guardroom, the day’s duty over. Krebs stood as if turned to stone. The Gefreiter walked over to him menacingly. A fist in the stomach would stir him up, he thought. He began to roar.
‘Krebs –’
‘I have checked with the Forest Gate. The brothers Meister have not entered by that way either. Their bicycles are not there.’
‘Krebs, what in God’s name –’
‘Well,’ said Krebs, still rigid and hearing his voice as from a very great distance, ‘they’ve just gone out, you see.’
Chapter 20
The Gloaming outside Oflag XXXIII swallowed them. They moved deliberately, unhurried, simulating at first a little tipsiness, listening with hearts beating for the shouts behind them, for the alarms to go. They walked for three minutes down the lane, lengthening the stride but not running. 350 yards. Then, at a point recognized from their planning, they dived into the forest to the right of the lane, found a path running north-west they knew existed and started running as they had not run in life before. Ten minutes later they stopped.
‘Five past six,’ panted Robert. They felt as if they had run half across Germany. It had been clear enough to see the ground and neither had stumbled, but all around them great beech trees reached towards the darkening sky and the light was thickening fast. They knew that a road ran north and south across their planned line of escape, two miles from Oflag XXXIII. They walked now, fast, listening, ready to sprint at any hint of close pursuit.
They walked for another fifteen minutes. There was still around them a great silence.
‘The road must be pretty close.’
They had agreed to cross it with circumspection. It looked from the map to run straight through the forest. Patrols could reach it with speed, headlights probably illuminate it for a considerable distance. Beyond the road and roughly parallel to it after a further quarter mile was the river. They pinned hopes on the river.
‘There!’ Robert paused and pointed. The road appeared, slightly raised above the forest floor, about fifty yards ahead.
At that moment they heard the unmistakeable sounds of the camp alarm.
They had hoped for an hour. They had been given twenty-five minutes. It might well have been less, but time had been wasted after Krebs blurted out his report, wasted on a fruitless attempt to locate the brothers Meister at home, wasted on an unnecessary and noisy emergency visit to the prisoners’ lines.
Twenty-five minutes gave at least some hope.
They’ll have the dogs out,’ muttered Anthony. ‘We’ve got to risk the road. Race straight over it.’ They began running again, broke cover and dashed towards the grey, cobbled way. There was no sound of vehicles, of man. There was no light but the fading November day.
‘Over!’
They sprinted across and into friendly woods beyond. After another hundred yards of running through open beechwoods the ground began to fall away steeply. They paused, Anthony holding up his hand and bending double.
‘Stitch.’
‘You must keep going.’ Then Robert grabbed his arm.
‘Listen.’
Anthony had straightened up.
‘I can’t hear dogs.’
‘I thought I did, but there’s a good deal of wind.’ It was a cold, dry evening with a slight breeze from the north. They both hoped that the fact they couldn’t hear the sound of dogs meant the hounds were still leashed. They both knew it might not be so.
‘Come on!’ They strode on.
They knew the river could be forded. Only heavy rain, they calculated, would upset their hopes of wading, of getting across without a detour, and the weather had been good. Once a safe distance the other side they planned to remove and bury their workmen’s overalls, clean make-up from faces, and continue in dry civilian clothes cobbled together by the camp tailors and carried in their rucksacks – rucksacks which were also the product of the tailor’s shop.
And water would kill scent. It was, of course, possible that dogs would be taken to a point opposite the ford and start hunting, scenting from there. But there were, according to the map, several fords. They built some hope, too, on the fact that the river itself might be too far from Oflag XXXIII to be within the area of immediate search. And there might not, at first, be an immediate presumption that they had gone west. Meanwhile –
‘What’s that?’ It was Anthony, sharp-eared. There was no doubt of it now.
The deep, excited calling of the tracker dogs! Distance was impossible to assess.
They began running again. The sl
ope grew steeper, the light became worse. Robert lost his footing and slithered down three yards of sheer bank. Then he exclaimed.
‘Tracks! In fact a lot of tracks.’
They were at what appeared a junction of several tracks. Two great piles of timber showed the activities of foresters. There were, clearly visible, the ruts of cart wheels and the hoofmarks of horses, going in several directions.
‘Let’s hope they’re recent,’ gasped Anthony, ‘and strongly scented.’ He had never had a good wind and he wished he were in better condition. This must be a track intersection marked on their maps, studied assiduously. Unbelievably, they were on course.
‘By my reckoning this track, half-right, will take us down to the ford. If it were light we’d see Bensdorf on the far bank.’ Bensdorf, according to Hermann during his interminable gossiping about the locality, was a small, farming community, with neither military presence nor light industry to attract security precautions.
They found the ford and waded across. From time to time they heard the sound of dogs, but not perceptibly nearer. They skirted Bensdorf, found a straight farm road going northwestward as their little compass told them (another standard product of the evasion section of Oflag XXXIII) and marched on as fast as they could. After an hour they found a copse, changed and scrabbled away the earth to get rid of their overalls.
‘Food?’
‘No, we must get on. It’s still only about five miles –’
By the beneficence of whatever providence cares for escapers the night remained dry. They stepped out, limbs aching but walking on air. Afterwards they swore to each other, probably with exaggeration, that they had covered twenty miles that first night. And then, before dawn, came the bliss of finding that there was indeed another noble forest, a Stadtforst, where the map had promised it. They found a camping place, had their first meal of biscuit and chocolate and lit a fire to brew some tea. Then, in most friendly fashion, a November sun came out and they slept, each in turn keeping watch with drooping eyelids.
‘If our escape is going to be like this the whole way to the Rhine, or wherever the British Army’s got to,’ said Robert, ‘it’s going to be all right. I’ve seldom felt so happy.’ His joy was remarkable, and sincere – and not the least remarkable fact, thought Anthony, was that Robert Anderson had confessed so simply to happiness, without a frown. He laughed.
‘It won’t all be like this. It can’t be. There’ll be nightmares ahead. It’s all gone much too well.’ But they did not believe it.
It was their sixth day. They had walked by night, carried forward for the first forty-eight hours on a mood of exaltation after the miracle of the escape, the smooth outpacing of pursuit. Now, five days and nights later, they lay some thirty yards inside a young fir plantation, a typical daylight lair.
‘One’s invisible like this,’ Robert always said confidently. It was essential to reach the safety of woods at least an hour before dawn. Then, as light thinned in the grey, eastern sky they would choose the haven for the day. A careful fire was generally lit if dry wood could be found, reducing tell-tale smoke to a minimum. On one glorious occasion they had washed thoroughly by a stream. There had been one day when they had felt vulnerable and lit no fire, the forest’s silence broken by periodic, distant calls of woodmen. Once there had been a terrible moment. Moving freely after dawn in the depths of a wood searching for an ideal camping site Anthony suddenly froze. Ahead was one of the raised platforms which pepper the broad tracks in every German forest; but this platform was manned. The guardian or sportsman was looking the other way and they backed, silent and afraid, into the cover of the friendly trees.
Now it was the sixth day. As they lay in the dark of the trees, chilly and aching, they took stock of their problems.
The first of these was food.
They had brought in their rucksacks as much biscuit, chocolate and tea as they could carry: and on two days they had managed to scavenge some vegetables and some late apples. But it was later in the year than they had originally intended. Every day was a little colder, or so it seemed. There had been several cruel downpours, without the chance of drying clothes in sun the following day. Food was necessary to maintain health, strength, warmth and morale. And food was running low. Anthony and Robert knew that they were near the end of both supplies and tether. They knew they would soon be forced to go shopping, with all that entailed in terms of risk. They had broken camp openly, disguised. Thereafter, however, their plan had been to move by night only, to lie low, to avoid contact. It had worked. But now resources were all but spent; and there was a long way to go.
For the next and greatest problem was speed and distance.
‘The fact is,’ said Robert, ‘that we’re just not making enough ground.’ They had been over-optimistic. Now, with five night marches behind them, they were, they knew, a few miles south-east of the outer suburbs of the city of Hanover. At this rate it was going to take a mighty long time to reach the Rhineland, where their hopes lay.
Anthony said, ‘We’ve agreed the first thing is to get some more food, some reserves so that we can walk when we need to. When we’ve done that I think we ought to think again.’ Robert nodded impatiently. They had been over this ground a day and a night before. Anthony continued, knowing it was contentious –
‘Then – after shopping – I favour taking a train.’
They had discussed it. Anthony knew that slow, stopping trains were seldom searched. It should be possible to find one going in a westerly direction, to make some distance, to leave the train and walk for a while – and then repeat the process. Obviously the last phase – the reaching of Allied lines – was a different operation which could only be planned when nearer in time and space. Neither of them disputed the likelihood that it would be the most difficult feat to accomplish.
Robert, less confident than Anthony with the German language, German atmosphere, feared contact with the world. Walking through the dark, friendly nights, resting in the enfolding woods, had suited him admirably. But he recognized that there must be a change of method, at least for a while: new system: new risk. He said,
‘Where shall we shop?’ It was an acquiescence.
Anthony was studying their map.
‘There’s a small town about five miles from here. Villingen. We ought to move into it fairly late in the afternoon, try to buy what we want. Then it won’t be too long before dark and if something nasty happens we’ve got a hope of getting to cover, even if we have to change direction.’ They pored over the map, discussed details, agreed to move through the woods nearer to Villingen and to walk into it at about four o‘clock in the afternoon. They refreshed memories of their identities, studied again their papers. They were two Dutch volunteer workmen, Jan Vogt and Pieter Joost, natives of Tilburg.
‘We’re on our way to catch a train to a factory in Dortmund, a new job. By the way, how’s your leg?’
‘It’s all right,’ said Robert shortly. Anthony knew that he had been in some pain, ever since Fritz Meister had limped out of Oflag XXXIII six days before.
‘There are shortages everywhere, it’s natural,’ said Anthony sympathetically. The woman sighed cautiously. It didn’t do to grumble.
‘You’re not going back to Holland? The English have begun to destroy it, brought the war to it, you know that –’
‘No, we’re on our way to the Ruhr, Dortmund. A new job. We’re engineers. We were in Silesia.’
‘It’s a funny way to travel from Silesia to Dortmund by Villingen!’
‘Certainly! You see we were turned off the train at Hanover, where we had to change. We had to give way to some priority movement people. We’re hoping for a place on tomorrow’s train. We thought we’d get out of town and see a bit of the country as we’ve got a day to spare. We’ve not had a day off for a long time, I can tell you.’
The woman looked at him without sympathy.
‘I’ve got a man in Russia. They don’t get many days off there.’
�
�No, I suppose not,’ agreed Anthony respectfully.
‘Best stay out of Hanover, anyway,’ said the woman, more agreeably. ‘Those swine have bombed it horribly.’
‘So we saw.’
The woman lowered her voice. Discussion of air raids could be dangerous defeatism and was carried out with circumspection.
‘We’ve been hit here, twice!’
‘A little place like this! Fancy!’
‘Not so little. There’s the factory at the end of town.’
They paid, put the austere provisions in their rucksacks and walked away fast. Villingen was bigger than the map had suggested. The factory – it would have been undesirably inquisitive to ask what it produced – was on the edge of the town by which they had approached. It seemed to have been matched by a large estate of workers’ houses, on the other side of the road, white, steep-roofed houses in neat rows. Rain began to fall heavily. Robert grunted.
‘Do you think we could find an outhouse, some roof or other? It’s rather tempting not to step out for the woods in this downpour.’ The shop, the unaccustomed shelter had given them an appetite for cover. Their previous night’s refuge was an hour’s march away, in the wrong direction. Robert developed the theme.
‘If we’re going to take a train we could do it here. The first one we see. Get clear of the place. Then we could change trains at some big place and catch something going west.’
‘That means going north, to Hanover.’
‘Or south to somewhere else. Trains through any big station are bound to be unpredictable because of air raids.’
‘I agree. Let’s take the first train to anywhere that gets us clear of Villingen. Which will probably now mean first thing in the morning.’ The woman in the shop had looked at them curiously. She had seemed puzzled at their explanations, despite the frequency with which foreign workers could be found travelling throughout the Reich. Anthony’s imagination was always vivid. Was she at that exact moment talking to the local policeman (a friend, Anthony explained to himself morbidly, a frequent visitor) –
