Castle of the Eagles
Page 14
*
As soon as Leeming had confirmed the existence of the well passageway, he immediately informed General Neame and Air Vice-Marshal Boyd. Neame decided to put together a team to conduct a reconnaissance of the shaft. As well as himself and Boyd, the team was made up of Leeming, Sergeants Baxter and Bain, General O’Connor and the irrepressible Sergeant Price.3 This last man was brought on to the team as it was felt by Neame that hailing from the Rhondda Valley in South Wales, Price must know something about mining, and would be invaluable for such subterranean work.
Sitting above the well head was an extremely old ornamental iron pulley, originally used to raise buckets of water from the well deep below. Everyone was a little wary of the pulley arrangement, which clearly hadn’t been used in decades. The compact Boyd would be the first man down. One morning, just before dawn, when the castle was dead quiet, the team crept over to the well head with a long length of rope that had been hidden since the abortive white wall attempt, and wound it on to the ancient pulley. One end of the rope had been fitted with several ‘holdfasts’, or loops, where the person being lowered could put their feet.
‘Right, away you go, John,’ whispered Neame to Boyd, his breath steaming in the bitterly cold air. ‘And good luck.’
Boyd nodded, his face set in a determined expression. He climbed over the well head and attached himself to the rope. Sergeant Baxter and several of the young orderlies took the strain on the other end, ready to pay it out through the pulley as Boyd was lowered.
‘Okay, lower away,’ hissed Neame, and Baxter’s team started to let out the rope. Boyd disappeared jerkily into the gloomy well shaft, the others crowding around the opening, monitoring his descent.
‘I’m … spinning!’ came Boyd’s startled cry after he had been lowered ten feet. Unable to let go of the rope to touch the walls, Boyd had started to rotate out of control on the rope.4
‘Bring him back up,’ said O’Connor urgently to Neame. Neame gave the order and a rather dizzy Boyd was hauled back to the surface.
‘Try again?’ asked Neame a few minutes later.
‘Of course,’ replied Boyd stoutly. ‘If someone gives me a stick, I can hold it as I hold the rope and stop this confounded spinning by touching the sides.’ A stick was quickly fetched and Boyd was lowered once more.
‘Good grief!’ hissed O’Connor at the sudden banshee scream that had started to emanate from the ancient pulley as Boyd passed twenty feet.
‘Stop!’ whispered Neame to Baxter. Neame leaned over the well head and hissed at the dangling Air Vice-Marshal: ‘Just hang on, Boyd, and we’ll try again.’
‘Right, lower away,’ Neame said to Baxter. Sergeant Price was operating the old iron wheel attached to the pulley, but each half-revolution produced a squeaking noise loud enough to wake the dead.
‘Stop!’ ordered Neame again. There was a hurried discussion as Boyd, whose arms were beginning to ache from the effort of clinging on to the rope, dangled twenty feet above the pool of black water in the bottom of the well.
‘I’ll fetch some oil, sir,’ said Sergeant Bain. ‘Just hold on a minute.’ He dashed off indoors and returned a few moments later with a bottle of hair oil to be applied to the well’s moving parts.5 However, by this time the reconnaissance attempt had already gone on longer than expected.
‘Pull him back up!’ ordered Neame, and an exhausted Boyd was brought back to the surface. Round one had definitely gone to the ancient well, but, determined not to be beaten, the team agreed to have another go at dawn the next morning.
*
Attempt number two was much more successful. The offending well pulley had been carefully overhauled by Sergeant Bain to prevent any repetition of the appalling caterwauling of the previous morning. This time, General O’Connor was selected for the operation. He was an ideal choice, being small and wiry and full of guts.
O’Connor was lowered without incident. The rest of the party couldn’t see him reach the bottom, for it was dawn, with little light. But after some swaying the rope suddenly went slack. A very tense ten minutes dragged by, as Neame and the rest of the ground level team waited in virtual silence. No Italian appeared, but it was growing lighter and soon the castle would come alive. Suddenly, the rope coming taut broke everyone’s silent reverie. O’Connor was back on. Neame gave the order to haul him up.
‘It’s more than we could have hoped for,’ said a sweaty and grimy O’Connor, as he clambered over the edge of the well head. ‘Leeming was right. There is indeed a doorway. It’s ancient, and I’d say about five feet high and three feet wide.’
‘Is there a passage, sir?’ asked Leeming excitedly.
‘Yes,’ replied O’Connor, grinning. ‘It runs straight out from the well in the direction of the garden for between twenty and thirty feet. But there’s a snag.’
The others all grimaced or glanced at each other.
‘The passage is blocked by a brick wall,’ said O’Connor. ‘It looks quite new compared with the ancient stonework in the passage. But the good news is that the wall looks to be only a single brick thickness. I think we could break through without too much trouble.’6
Neame turned to Leeming, his face beaming.
‘Because of you, John, we may have a way out to freedom. Bloody good show!’
Neame grasped Leeming’s hand fiercely in his and shook it vigorously. What lay beyond that damp red-brick wall was anyone’s guess, but Neame and his team were determined to find out.
*
‘John, can I have a word,’ said General Neame casually to Leeming, after the well team had dispersed and the castle had come alive.
‘Do you know that large cupboard built into an alcove in the dungeons?’ asked Neame. The accommodation quarters in the below-ground part of the castle had naturally enough been given this name by the POWs. Leeming knew exactly which cupboard the general was referring to, as he, like all the other prisoners, had carefully explored every inch of the building in the search for possible escape routes. The cupboard was built into an alcove along one of the corridors that led to bedrooms.7
‘There’s something a bit queer about that cupboard,’ said Neame. As their resident Royal Engineer, Neame’s opinion about such things was widely respected.
‘How so, sir?’ replied Leeming, whose mind was still filled with the well passage and wall.
‘Well, I don’t know whether you’ve noticed, but the back of the cupboard is plastered.’
‘Yes, sir, so I recall,’ said Leeming distractedly.
‘Doesn’t that strike you as a bit odd?’ asked Neame. ‘After all, the alcove and ceiling are both stone.’
‘Come to think of it, it does seem a bit strange,’ replied Leeming, his mind starting to focus on this new issue.
‘I’m thinking that we should have a look at what’s beneath that plasterwork,’ said Neame. ‘How would you like to do it?’
Leeming was a little taken aback.
‘I thought I was to go with the well team, sir?’ he asked, slightly crestfallen.
‘I’ve detailed Air Marshal Boyd and Sergeants Price and Bain for the next descent tomorrow morning,’ replied Neame without explanation. ‘I’d like you, Bain and Sergeant Baxter to examine the cupboard wall this afternoon, when most of us are out on our daily walk and the castle will be quiet. Think you can manage?’
‘If you say so, sir,’ said Leeming, who thought the whole thing sounded like something of a sideshow. But the old boy must know what he’s doing, thought Leeming.
‘Jolly good show,’ said Neame, touching his index finger to the side of his nose. ‘I think that there’s more to that plaster wall than meets the eye.’
*
Later that afternoon, when the generals had left on their escorted constitutional, Leeming, Bain and Baxter slipped down to the dungeons to begin their exploration. Leeming ran the flat of his hand over the white, plastered surface of the cupboard’s back wall and then tapped it with a knuckle. It sounded solid enough.
‘Right, chaps, let’s widen the hole so that I can climb through,’ said Leeming to the two sergeants. After another half-hour of chipping away at the hard mortar and pulling aside loosened bricks the hole looked just wide enough for Leeming – who was not the smallest prisoner in the castle – to slip through.
‘Good luck, sir,’ said Baxter, before the two NCOs hoisted Leeming up and through the hole. Leeming became stuck halfway, the gap not quite wide enough, but a hefty shove from the two muscular sergeants dislodged another brick and Leeming landed in a sweaty pile on the other side.
Leeming stood, letting his eyes adjust to the half-light. He was inside a stone passageway. ‘Battered but wildly excited … I crawled down the passage,’ he later recounted. ‘Ahead I could see daylight, the silhouette of an opening, a doorway.’8
Leeming reached the doorway and daylight, but for a few seconds he couldn’t process what he was seeing. Before him was a long shaft rising up high above him, while below the doorway was a pool of dark water. Then it dawned on him – he was at the bottom of the castle’s well! ‘The passage from the well led to the alcove in the dungeons.’9 It was a truly crushing moment – at a stroke two potential escape routes out of the castle had proved to be dead ends.
Leeming crawled dispiritedly back down the passage to the brick wall and struggled through into the dungeons. He told Bain and Baxter what he had found, and they commiserated with him.
‘So what are we going to do about this?’ asked Leeming, gesturing towards the large hole in the alcove wall. ‘If the Eye-ties find this, we’ll all be for it.’ Since the discovery of the white wall escape plans, the Italians were keeping a closer watch over both the prisoners and the integrity of their castle.10
Leeming’s party managed to replace the bricks, but that still left the damaged plaster to contend with. For an hour they experimented with various camouflage, including mixing powdered plaster with water, even ‘painting the bricks with mud.’ The result of these experiments was merely to make the ugly hole even more obvious to any Italian searchers. ‘Suddenly, just as we were getting desperate, Bain raced off to the kitchen and, in spite of the protests of Horsey, our cook, grabbed a large rice-pudding that stood ready for our dinner,’ recalled Leeming. ‘Back at the plaster wall, he slopped the rice-pudding on to the brickwork, then, scraping and smoothing the mixture flat, blended it to the ragged edges of the plaster round the hole.’11 As a final touch, the three men picked up bits of broken plaster from the floor, ground them to powder and chucked this on to the drying rice pudding. Incredibly, the Italians never discovered the hole.
*
Three escapes had now been explored, and all three had come to naught. The failure of the first attempt, the white wall job, had only led to a drastic tightening of security by the Italians, which would make subsequent escapes even more difficult. Major Bacci’s discovery of General O’Connor’s written appreciation and plans for the white wall escape had removed from the minds of the Italians the notion that the British generals were simply a kindly bunch of old duffers who were seeing out the duration in genteel comfort. Instead, they were now viewed as troublemakers who could, at any time of the day or night, launch a diabolical escape plan. For Commandant Tranquille and Area Commandant Bacci, not to mention General Chiappe in Florence, any successful escape by such high-profile and important prisoners would bring serious repercussions from Mussolini himself in Rome. But the British took no notice of Chiappe’s exhortation to behave themselves, and planning was soon under way for a fresh escape scheme.
*
Brigadiers Hargest and Miles, as latecomers to the castle, had a lot of catching up to do regarding amassing escape equipment. Although no definite scheme had been decided upon or worked out, it was thought wise by all of the prisoners to continue collecting civilian clothing, food and maps for the time when they would inevitably try.
Hargest and Miles had arrived at the castle with only their army uniforms and a couple of British army blankets. The Italians had stopped the practice of allowing prisoners to purchase items of clothing from the local town, so unlike the rest of the POWs who had bought every piece of civilian attire they could get away with at Sulmona, Hargest and Miles would have to make everything that they would need – apart from an old pair of navy blue RAF trousers that Air Vice-Marshal Boyd gifted to Miles.
The two New Zealanders decided to make coats out of their blankets. Pyjamas were used as a template, and the blankets were slowly transformed into passable jackets. Workmen’s caps were also fashioned from the remaining blanket material, complete with cardboard peaks taken from chocolate box lids. How well such ersatz items would stand up to inclement weather was anyone’s guess.12
Hargest lacked any civilian trousers, so he experimented in his bathtub with dyeing a pair of old battledress trousers to an unmilitary hue. He eventually succeeded using some boot polish mixed with a bottle of ink. The downside was that his hands were so stained afterwards that he was forced to wear a pair of woollen gloves to all parades for several days.13
Stashing food in a drain inspection hole beneath the other ranks’ dining room, Hargest and Miles accumulated a couple of tins of bully beef, some soup cubes and eventually five pounds of Red Cross chocolate.
The New Zealanders, like everyone else in the castle, also began to discuss and examine where to go should they succeed in escaping. The obvious choice was Switzerland. Hargest and Miles decided that they would make for the nearest point of Switzerland, the border town of Chiasso near Lake Como. The distance was roughly 230 miles. Hargest hit upon a novel way of discovering more about the region they would aim for. The Italians understood that the New Zealanders came from a mountainous country, so ‘it was natural that we discussed this type of scenery with the Italian officers, who were easily induced to talk’.14 Much valuable intelligence was thus gleaned during these innocent chats. But what Hargest and Miles really required were proper maps of the routes to Switzerland, particularly since many of G-P’s carefully made copies had been seized by Major Bacci and his men. Hargest recalled that years before he had read Garibaldi and the Thousand, about the formation of modern Italy, and that the book had contained several maps of the frontier region. ‘As we were studying the language I asked if I might have a copy of it in Italian,’15 wrote Hargest, whose ruse worked. A few weeks later an Italian-language version of the book arrived, complete with maps of the frontier. The book was passed to Gambier-Parry, who set to work producing new hand-drawn maps from the illustrations.
*
Like the Britons, Hargest and Miles spent weeks carefully exploring every nook and cranny in the castle, trying to find a weakness that they could exploit. Air Vice-Marshal Boyd often joined them. They noticed that there were some rooms in the castle that were closed off from the prisoners. Working on the idea that there must be a lower level than the subterranean rooms accessible to the POWs – proper dungeons – and that one of the closed-off rooms might be connected to those hidden levels, several exploratory excavations were made.
Miles, Hargest and Boyd first targeted a bricked-up doorway in the banqueting hall, which was in use as a dormitory. A large stack of deckchairs was used to cover the hole being cut in the wall.
As with all escape attempts, it was important that lookouts, known in prisoner parlance as ‘stooges’, be used to warn of the approach of any guards. To this end Sergeant Howes and some of the orderlies formed a system of stooges to protect the excavation. Hargest and Boyd, using woodworking tools and a meat knife, made a hole in the wall’s plaster before slowly and carefully excavating a hole in the skin
of red bricks beneath. Behind the wall was a solid oak door that had been reinforced with steel. The excavation stopped and the men returned to their rooms ‘to ponder on this apparently insuperable difficulty’.16
The next morning, the excavation recommenced. Knocking a hole through the door, which turned out to be four inches thick, was difficult and time-consuming. The prisoners bored a series of holes close together, and then used a hacksaw to join up the holes to create a space big enough for a man to climb through.17 It took several days to complete, and Boyd’s woodworking tools took a terrible beating cutting through the door’s steel supports. When the hole was large enough, the smallest and slimmest of their orderlies was lifted through to clear some furniture that was blocking the way. Then the others clambered through. What Hargest and Boyd discovered on the other side of the door ‘was a most elaborately fitted-up old kitchen, complete with a giant roasting pit; but no stairway’.18 The operation was another bust. The castle seemed impregnable. The bricks and plaster were replaced and the disappointing news relayed to General Neame and the others.
*
With the failure of two subterranean potential avenues of escape, thoughts turned back to the castle’s walls. Though the Italians had blown the white wall escalade attempt even before it was tried, the theory of somehow vaulting over the walls remained in some of the prisoners’ minds. One of those was Dick O’Connor, one of the original conceivers of the white wall job. In his opinion, an escape over the perimeter wall was still possible, regardless of how much the Italians had beefed up the defences. The million-dollar question was how. O’Connor spent weeks contemplating this problem, and began to formulate a novel solution to that thorny question.
In the meantime, some of the other prisoners were also looking at the wall, but rather than considering going over it, some were considering going through it to freedom. The keys to success, in their opinion, were rabbits.