The Eagle's Cry

by Richard Townsend Bickers

  Critchley raised a smile. “And a good poke.”

  “If you’re strong enough for that, you’re strong enough to escape.”

  At last the message came. They were to stroll about on the playground at dusk, before the curfew whistles went and they had to go indoors until dawn. If they saw a scrap of newspaper on the bottom strand of wire in the north-east corner, they would know that everything was ready. When the curfew sounded they were to make for that spot and there would be someone there to cut the wire and guide them to a safe hiding place.

  For the rest of the day Demon and Butler had difficulty in concealing their excitement. Critchley had a flush on his cheeks and his head kept twitching nervously.

  At sunset, when it was cool, they left the building. The Red Cross had supplied them with toothbrushes and razors, which they put in their pockets with soap, spare socks and underclothes. They had an assortment of money: marks and drachmae and some Egyptian notes. They saw the sheet of newspaper fluttering in the light breeze and with rapid pulses they began to stroll round the playground, determinedly not looking again at that significant corner.

  There was only one sentry on duty at any time. This evening he was an uninterested middleaged private with a rifle slung carelessly over his shoulder. To their dismay he had his eyes on them and began to saunter in their direction. They ignored him. He whistled and beckoned to them. He was standing near the corner from which their escape was to be made.

  “That’s all we need,” Butler said, “a friendly Jerry.”

  “Leave him to me.” Denton said, in German, “Good evening, friend. What can we do for you? Would you like a cigarette?”

  “So you speak good German. Ja, a cigarette for later.”

  “Give him a cigarette, Happy.”

  The soldier tucked it into a pocket. “So, what do you miss most of all here as a prisoner? I bet I know!”

  “Good food, of course. And a bottle of brandy ... or wine.”

  The sentry grinned. “Not women?”

  “What’s the silly ass saying?” Critchley asked.

  “He asked if we miss having women.”

  “He’s not kidding. What is he, a sadist? Or a pimp?”

  The German fumbled in a pocket and produced a sheaf of postcards which he flourished in front of them. They saw at a glance that no self-respecting Cairo pornographer would have bothered with such poor material. “If you want, I can smuggle a woman in for you. A real good lay, I promise. How much can to spend?”

  Butler nudged Denton. “Over there, Skip.”

  Denton glanced in the direction in which Butler was looking. Behind the sentry, a man, barely visible in the dusk, waited. At any second the curfew would sound.

  Conversationally, Denton said “when I hit him, run.”

  The sentry said impatiently “Well, aren’t you interested? Is it a boy you prefer?”

  The whistle sounded from the Guard Room.

  Denton hit the sentry in the belly with a left hook.

  The sentry coughed, reached, gasped and jerked forward. Denton’s knee took him in the testicles and he screeched, doubled up and clutched his throbbing parts. Denton’s right landed on the side of his jaw and he went down heavily. By the time Denton began to move, Butler was already on his way to the gap in the wire. Critchley was limping after him. He had not limped for several days. Denton overtook him, grabbed his arm and tried to drag him along.

  “Look after yourself, Geoffrey.” Critchley halted, swaying, then turned to look back at the sentry.

  “Come on, you damn fool, Ian.”

  Denton took hold of his arm again but Critchley gave him a hard shove that made him stumble. Butler was at the wire, looking at them. Denton ran to join him. The dark-clothed Greek outside the wire was urging them to hurry.

  Denton paused to look over his shoulder. He had lost a lot of weight since being captured and his punches had lacked the force of yore. The sentry was scrambling up, unslinging his rifle, shouting the alarm. Critchley was limping towards him with his hands up. The sentry slammed the butt of his rifle into Critchley’s stomach and sent him sprawling: then raised the rifle to his shoulder. As the first shot rang out, they dodged through the first fence. By the time the German fired again they were on the street and running.

  Ten

  Weak and unfit, they panted as they trotted along the pavement. After a furlong they both began to feel their heads reel and their knees wobble from the strain of the long-unaccustomed exertion.

  “How far?” Denton gasped.

  Their guide gave the customary and useless reply of “Not far now.”

  Three hundred yards ... four hundred ... the pace had slowed, they began to stagger, put out a hand to find momentary support from the wall of a house, pause to suck in enormous, laboured gulps of air.

  Something over a quarter of a mile and the guide was at an open door. They tottered in after him and leaned against the wall, sobbing for breath.

  Kathia’s arms were around Denton, helping him along.

  “Geoffrey! Thank God ... come, one last effort ... only a few stairs ...”

  A man was helping Butler. They stumbled up a staircase and into a back room where they collapsed onto the two beds.

  “What happened to Ian?” Kathia’s face showed concern.

  “Couldn’t make it ... sentry ... I knocked him out ... but ... not hard enough ... Ian distracted him ... gave us time to make it ...”

  “Did he want to?”

  There was a hard look in her eyes that Denton had never seen before, a cutting harshness in her usually soft voice.

  “He wanted to, all right.” But did he? Denton wondered. “The sentry clubbed him with his gun butt ... right in the guts, where he’d been wounded ... might have bust him open again ...” The thought brought a wave of nausea. He felt sick already from the gigantic effort he had just had to make.

  “We’ll get him out. I only hope he doesn’t talk ...”

  “Ian won’t let us down ... I’ve been worried ... thought Jerry would give you a bad time ... British Embassy ... how are your people?”

  “We’re all safe and well. We’ll get you away from here tomorrow. To Piraeus. In a few days a caique will take you to Alexandria.”

  “Miraculous. Can you get Ian out in time?”

  “We’ll get him out. Don’t worry.”

  “Suppose he’s sick again?”

  “That could make it easier. He won’t be closely guarded.”

  “The Huns will tighten security now.”

  “Whatever they do, we can do better.”

  She was full of confidence. From the moment he had seen her on the concert stage she had been the sheet anchor of his hopes and she had not disappointed them. She was running a risk for him that could cost her her life; and torture.

  “We can never thank you enough ...”

  “Don’t try. You aren’t the only ones we’ve helped.”

  “We?”

  “Every Greek is on your side.” An evasive answer that he had to accept.

  The next day, with rough civilian garments over their uniform shirts and shorts, they went by tram and bicycle, via another safe house, to a cottage in Piraeus. Nobody showed any interest in them. They had false identity papers. Denton spoke Greek well enough to pass for a native. Butler knew enough — Denton had been coaching him in hospital—to deceive a German. It was almost a disappointment that they did not have to use their skills.

  Kathia came to see them soon after they arrived.

  “We have a caique with a good engine and sails. Five other escapees ...”

  “Escapers.”

  “All right, five other escapers are going with you. Two Greek fishermen who want to join the British Navy. An Australian sergeant and two British soldiers. There will be enough food and water for two weeks, but you should reach Alexandria in ten days.”

  “When can we leave?”

  “The Germans are very alert just now. We’ll have to let things quieten dow
n.”

  “I’m in no hurry to leave you.”

  “I know, Geoffrey. But we’ll get you away as quickly as we can.”

  He wished he could see her on his own and not always with Butler and at least one of the other Greeks present. A married couple owned the cottage. Their son, a youth in his late teens, lived with them. Father and son were fishermen and Denton wondered if it was their caique in which the escape was to be made: but he knew better than to ask.

  Two tense days dragged by and on the third Kathia turned up once more.

  “We have to move you again.”

  “Something wrong?”

  “Nothing to worry about. The Germans are going to make a search in Piraeus. They’ll seal it off for twenty-four hours.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “Home ... I mean to my home.”

  “But that will put your parents at risk.”

  “My father is in good standing with the Germans. They are being very correct in their behaviour towards the Diplomatic Corps. There is more to it, also, that I’ll explain to you when we are alone.”

  “What news of Ian?”

  “He was rather badly hurt, but they haven’t been able to get any information out of him.”

  “When can you ...”

  “Very soon.”

  Denton and Butler were taken away from Piraeus in the back of a lorry with three Greek workmen and a load of bricks, timber and paint, ostensibly on the way to a building and decorating job. When the lorry drove away from the Pefkoses’ house before curfew, the two Englishmen did not go with it.

  There was the luxury of hot baths after the tepid showers in hospital and the even more primitive arrangements of their hiding places; of delicious food after their rough diet of the past days; of soft beds and fine linen.

  Mr. and Mrs. Pefkos treated them both like favourite nephews. It took more than opulence to awe Butler — nobody under the rank of air commodore could do that — but they took pains to make him feel at home. Kathia’s father talked encouragingly about the future. The Germans, he said, would over-reach themselves in Russia and that would be the beginning of their ultimately certain defeat. The Allies would hold the Germans in North Africa long enough to assemble a big enough force there to drive them out. The Americans would have to come in before much longer. “I give the war another two years at most,” he concluded.

  Cold comfort, Denton felt like saying but refrained. It was little over a year since he first went into action and already it seemed like a decade of hardship, danger and misfortunes.

  Butler, self-effacing in this sophisticated company, listened attentively and kept his own counsel. This old ponce seemed to know a hell of a lot, he reflected. Where did he get this cast iron certainty from? He knew bugger-all about fighting. Was Denton just being polite when he agreed with him all the time? Crafty sod, the skipper. He was after that bint, all right. He’d agree with anything the old tailor’s dummy said, to keep on the right side of him ... and the mother ... and have it away with the daughter. Even Ian couldn’t have been smoother.

  That night Kathia came to Denton’s room. Sitting on his lap in an armchair, wearing her nightdress and dressing gown, her arms around his neck, she was loving, beloved and confiding.

  “The Germans treat us well not only because of my father’s position but also because of our family connections.” She kissed him. “You see, my maternal grandfather was German. He died when my mother was fifteen, so my grandmother came back to Greece. Mother was born here, not in Germany. Grannie came home for her birth, to make sure she would be a Greek citizen as well as a German! There are no people in the world more deeply patriotic than we are. I think you know that.”

  “Xenophobic is the word, darling.”

  “Maybe. My German grandfather was an influential man. He was chairman of a shipping line, director of a bank and a great donor to charities. In fact he founded a famous children’s hospital that was named after him, the von Schönberg Children’s Hospital in Hamburg. Even the Nazis respect his memory. You know how thorough the Germans are. They have dossiers on all prominent Greeks, so of course they know all about our von Schönberg connection. Hence they are as courteous and deferent to us as they can be. Besides, early in his career Father was a second secretary at our Berlin embassy and some of his German acquaintances from that time are very important men now.”

  “Doesn’t that make you and your parents very vulnerable? Won’t the Germans make claims on you?”

  “So much the better if they do. If they compel me to work in their civil administration here, I could learn a lot that would be useful.”

  “Suppose they make demands on you that would mean collaborating with them, and threaten to take reprisals on your German relations if you don’t co-operate?”

  “I’m afraid that would be tough on our von Schönberg relatives! We would never collaborate, even if they put every surviving von Schönberg in a detention camp.”

  “How would your mother feel about that?”

  “She is a Greek. Anyway, that’s enough about serious matters. There are more important things ... darling, I have missed you.”

  “I’m going to hate leaving you.”

  “We’d better make the most of the little time we have.”

  She stood up and began to take off her silk dressing gown. In the softly lit room her skin glowed like honey when her nightdress slid to the floor.

  Denton, standing close to her, watched but made no move to shed his pyjamas. Blood was pounding in his head and his mouth felt dry. She had surprised him by coming to his room. Nothing she had said, not even the passion with which she had kissed him, had prepared him for what she was doing now.

  “I ... I don’t want to leave you with child ...”

  She chuckled. “I’ve made sure you won’t.”

  When they were in bed he said gently “I’ll try not to hurt you.”

  She gave the same low-pitched, quiet laugh. “You won’t ... I’m no Victorian maiden, darling ... but I’ve never felt like this about anyone else ... darling ...”

  Eleven

  Critchley felt that he was giving the best performance of his life. The body blow with the gun butt had hurt him so badly that he had lost consciousness for a few minutes. He began to come round while two fellow prisoners, summoned by the guard commander, were carrying him indoors. He feigned continued unconsciousness until he had been laid on his bed and recognised the voice of one of the British medical officers at his bedside.

  His chief fear had been about interrogation, not further injury to his stomach and intestines. He mistrusted his ability to resist torture and was in no doubt that this was what lay in store for him at the hands of the S.S. and Gestapo. If he could not avoid it, he could at least postpone it. Then he did begin to worry about the damage the sentry had done to him. His body ached abominably. There was a throbbing in his bowels. His head ached. The pain made him sweat. He imagined all manner of destruction to his recently repaired wounds.

  He registered, through the agony and the mist of semi-consciousness, that screens had been put round his bed and there were no Germans present: so he opened his eyes. The doctor bending over him gave him an encouraging smile and began to prod and probe, making him wince.

  The medical officers were very co-operative. They sedated him and reported his condition to be much worse than it was. He began to screw up his courage to face the inevitable. He rehearsed a concocted story which might convince the Germans that he knew nothing about the escape until the two others tried to drag him to the place where the wire had been cut. That wouldn’t wash, he realised: the fact that he had a toothbrush and other items on him disproved it.

  It had been a relief to be out of the war. He would rather be in a prison camp, with his pay accumulating in his bank account at home, than being shot at by those bloody 109s and 88s. No, he wouldn’t: a prison camp would be like a monastery. The thought of years without a woman plunged him into deep gloom.

 
Four days after his failed attempt to escape — and he still could not decide whether he really had been trying to — the German second-in-command with an interpreter and an S.S. officer marched into the ward. It was too late to pretend to be asleep: an M.O. was sitting on his bed, chatting to him.

  “You had accomplices outside,” he was accused.

  “I know nothing about that.”

  “You planned the escape carefully for a long time.”

  “I ... we knew nothing about it until a few hours earlier.”

  “Who brought you messages from outside?”

  “Nobody ...”

  “Don’t lie. Who brought you messages from your Greek accomplices?”

  “We had no Greek accomplices. We were helped by prisoners who had already escaped ... who know the routine of this place ... the layout ...”

  “You are a liar. How was the escape planned?”

  “I don’t know. It was arranged by my captain.”

  “How was it planned?”

  “I don’t know ...”

  It went on for half an hour, until he was too exhausted with effort and fear to answer coherently.

  Later that day the caretaker, going his rounds with the tea trolley, slipped him a note. It was in English and block capitals. Furtively he read it. “Don’t worry. We’ll get you out.”

  His heart sank. All he wanted for the time being was to stay in bed and recover his strength. He could not face another bungled attempt. When he had fully recovered his energy and his nerve he would be ready to try again; and more determinedly than last time: now that he fully realised how unbearable years of celibacy would be.

  An hour or so after midnight pandemonium broke out all over the hospital. Fire alarms sounded, the elderly or unfit German troops who guarded the place rushed about with hoses and pumps. Flames lit one side of the building: the side remote from the wire that ran along one boundary of the playground.

  The inside of the building remained unlit: the blackout rules were stern. Critchley saw someone moving towards him with a torch. He felt himself tugged out of bed. Two voices urged him to hasten. Shoes were pushed onto his bare feet. One man was bundling up his clothes and other possessions, another was hauling him towards the door at the end of the ward. He was too sleepy and astonished to resist or speak.