The Great Escape by Paul Brickhill Read Free Book Online Page A

easy as hiding a haystack in a needle. It was the worst enemy.
    “You’ll never get a tunnel out of here,” said Glemnitz once, “till you find a way of destroying sand.”
    Fanshawe had been thinking solemnly about this for a long time. “You don’t have to destroy it,” he said (to the committee, not to Glemnitz). “You ought to be able to camouflage it.”
    Everyone, he said, ought to dig gardens outside the huts so the yellow sand would be turned up naturally. Glemnitz couldn’t be very suspicious of that. He’d watch them, but if the level of the gardens didn’t rise, he wouldn’t suspect any tunnel sand was being dumped there.
    “We can save the gray sand of the garden topsoil and mix a bit of tunnel sand in the gardens,” Fanshawe explained. “Then we can spread the rest of the tunnel sand in the compound and sprinkle it with the gray stuff we’ve saved from the gardens.”
    “Sounds possible,” Roger said, “but how are you going to spread the yellow stuff without being spotted? It’ll look pretty bloody obvious.”
    Fanshawe had done his heaviest thinking about that. “With trouser bags,” he said cryptically, and out of his pockets he dragged what can only be described as a gadget. It consisted of the two legs cut off a pair of long woolen underpants, and to the tops he’d tied each end of a piece of string. He explained that you looped the string around your neck under your tunic and the underpants leg could then hang suspended down inside the leg of your trousers. He had a pin stuck in the bottom of each trouser bag and a string tied to each pin. Those strings, he explained, led up inside the trousers to the pants pockets.
    “I don’t usually wear these things,” he said apologetically. “It’s just an idea. You fill the bags with sand at the traps and you wander around the various spots and then you pull the string in your pockets; out come the pins and the sand flows out of the bottom of your pants. If you’re not a complete clot the ferrets’ll never see a thing.”
    For a conservative citizen like Fanshawe, R.N., the idea was indecently brilliant.
    “By God, we try it immediately,” said Roger.
    “I have already,” said Fanshawe. “It works.”
    The penguins (there were about 150 of them) made themselves trouser bags complete with pins and string, cutting up long underpants with sadistic joy. Our clothes came through the Red Cross, and they, bless their maternal hearts, thought mainly of long woolen underpants. They were the only things we had plenty of. It’s bad enough rusting behind barbed wire thinking of Dorothy Lamour without the final degradation of long underpants. You feel so hopelessly celibate.
    In the deepening hole under “Tom’s” trap, Floody and Marshall were scraping up the yellow sand into metal jugs and passing them up to Minskewitz, who acted as “trapfuehrer” for “Tom.” Minskewitz had blankets spread around the hole so none of the yellow stuff would be left on the floor. He had the trap door drill down to a fine art, and whenever George Harsh stuck a warning head around the corner he had the men out of the hole and the trap back on and sealed in a shade under fifteen seconds. Beside him in the corner he kept his tin of dirt and cement paste to seal the edges. The penguins took it in shifts, walking up with their trouser bags, stopping a moment by the trap while Minskewitz filled them, and then wandering casually out into the compound.
    Jerry Sage, the lanky Yank from Washington State, organized the dispersal divisions as though he were planning the invasion. A tough curly-headed fellow with a permanent ferocious grin and pointed ears, he’d been a paratroop major in North Africa, and the Germans had only cornered him after he’d been walking about behind their lines for two weeks sniping at people with a tommygun.
    For his diversions he used to get about forty men having unarmed combat drill — a milling mass of bodies, dust rising in all