Death In Captivity

by Michael Gilbert

  He had come to the conclusion that if he had any sense he would cut straight off into the darkness. Nevertheless, as he crawled back along the tunnel, made some last adjustments, closed the trap, and got into bed, he felt obscurely pleased with himself and he slept soundly until eight o’clock – and was one of the few people who slept at all that night.

  On roll-call that morning, each Hut Commander had made to Colonel Lavery the agreed sign that meant ‘All well – so far’. The Italian Orderly Officer left the camp at ten minutes past nine. At a quarter past nine Major Gibb posted a news bulletin on the Intelligence Board. It was evidently intended to be the first of many, for it had a large letter ‘A’ in the top left-hand corner.

  After that, time stood still.

  As Goyles realised, one thing alone had saved them that morning, and this was that the sentries themselves had something else to think about. Some whisper of the coming Armistice was already in the air. It was known, too, that there were German forces in the neighbourhood. The soldiers on the walls must have been wondering what the immediate future would bring forth. Otherwise, being trained guards, they could not have failed to notice the signs that were displayed before them – the purposeful coming and going of prisoners – the steady dribble of men towards one hut – men who went in, but never came out again – the crowds round the notice board – the self-conscious groups, who suddenly realised that they might be attracting attention and scattered for no apparent reason.

  Serials ‘A’ and ‘B’ had run to time. Serial ‘C’ had congregated in the hut when the first hitch occurred. The mouth of the tunnel was showing signs of collapse. Against such a contingency Goyles had had two complete sections of boxing cut and fitted and painted black. The tunnel had been cleared and whilst Serial ‘C’ sat on the floor of the hut and sweated through a hideous hour the new sections had been installed. After that the pace had been increased and some time had been made up until an irresponsible pair in Serial ‘D’ had tried to take out a home-made cooking stove. They were now under open arrest in the kitchen.

  Lunch had been a nightmare meal. Half the places had been empty. The occupants of the other half had eaten with little appetite.

  ‘It’s the first time in a prison camp that I’ve ever seen food sent away from a meal,’ said Long.

  ‘Did you see Rolf-Callender?’ said Byfold.

  ‘No – I missed him – he was dressed as a girl, wasn’t he? What was he like?’

  ‘Gorgeous,’ said Byfold. ‘I hope he got through the tunnel without wrecking his corsage. He said he was making for the Vatican City.’

  ‘Should give the Pope something to think about,’ said Long. ‘How are we doing?’

  Goyles looked at his list. ‘Half-way through “E”,’ he said.

  That’s half the camp. They ought to give Lavery a gong for this.’

  ‘If the whole camp gets out,’ said Byfold, ‘you can make it a knighthood. It wouldn’t be excessive.’

  4

  At eleven o’clock that morning Joseph Rocca, farmer, received a fright. He went straight home and reported it to his wife. Together they considered the matter, and came to the reluctant conclusion that they should do something about it. Joseph got on to his bicycle and rode downhill towards the village. There he stopped to consult with his brother. His brother proved sceptical. A second brother and a cousin were summoned. They thought there might be something in it.

  ‘You must ride to the camp and tell the Commandant,’ they said, ‘it is your duty.’

  ‘It is uphill to the camp,’ pointed out the first brother, ‘and it is now half-past twelve. Let us eat.’

  At two o’clock Joseph arrived outside the gate of the camp and attracted the attention of the guard. He had, he said, information for the Commandant. He was allowed inside the wire and given a seat. A messenger went away, and came back to say that the Commandant was having his siesta. Could Signer Rocca wait? Joseph hesitated, but, having come so far, he decided he would wait.

  At half-past three he was taken in to see Colonel Aletti whom he knew slightly. Signor Rocca was a well-known local farmer, and the camp purchased provisions from him. ‘This morning at ten o’clock—’ he began.

  The Commandant listened patiently. At the end, he smiled and said, ‘See for yourself.’

  The two men stood at the window of the Commandant’s office and looked down on the camp. All was peace. Groups of prisoners lay out, listening to lectures. A game was in progress on the sports field. The sentries paced the walls.

  ‘They looked like prisoners,’ insisted Joseph. ‘Five of them – large men – definitely of Anglo-Saxon type – a sort of criminal look, you understand.’

  ‘All were present at roll-call,’ said Colonel Aletti. ‘None have been through the gates or over the walls. They could hardly dig their way out in broad daylight.’

  Signer Rocca felt that honour had been satisfied. He shook hands with the Commandant and departed. Lieutenant Paoli, who had been present at the interview, was not so sure.

  As soon as he could, he excused himself, and wandered into the camp. Once he was inside, every police instinct that he possessed told him that he was right. There was a current of feeling which hit him as soon as he got inside the gates.

  Every group that he passed shouted a silent warning at him. He wandered slowly towards Hut C. Here the feeling was stronger still. He considered for a moment whether he should fetch some assistance and start an immediate search. Something was going on. That was plain. But what? Better to make sure first. He opened the door of Hut C and walked slowly down the corridor. He made his way to the kitchen and opened the door. The time was exactly four o’clock.

  5

  At twenty minutes to five, Colonel Lavery, accompanied by the Adjutant, came out of the Senior Officers’ Hut. He made his way slowly across to Hut E and went in. He walked down the corridor, noticing that every door was propped open with a chair or a bench. It had been the duty of the last man out in every room to wedge the door open. The two of them left the hut and walked to the next one. They visited each hut in turn.

  It had been their custom, for some weeks, to make an unofficial inspection of this sort during the evening meal.

  As they passed the notice board they stopped for a moment to look at the bulletin. It was Bulletin No. 12 and had the words ‘Rear Party’ in small letters across the top. At the bottom an unknown hand had scrawled ‘A Rividierci’. Colonel Lavery smiled.

  He and the Adjutant turned together and made for Hut C.

  ‘Is it just my guilty conscience,’ said the Adjutant, ‘or do things feel not quite as they ought to be? The compound’s often empty at this hour—’

  ‘It’s the silence,’ said Colonel Lavery. ‘No one talking, no shouting, no jazz bands; I believe even the sentries are beginning to cotton on to it.’

  They disappeared into Hut C and shut the door behind them.

  In the first room they found Colonel Baird. He had gone early into the hut to avoid attention and had stayed there all day.

  ‘Operation crawl completed,’ he said, as he stood up. He added, ‘Would it be in order for me to congratulate you?’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Colonel Lavery.

  They went down the passage. All doors were open except for the kitchen. Inside they found Long, Byfold and Goyles; also a bundle on the floor wrapped in an army blanket, that jerked from time to time like a fresh-landed salmon.

  ‘Paoli, sir,’ said Goyles. ‘I think he’s quite all right, really.’

  ‘Better be sure about it,’ said Colonel Lavery. ‘Some of us are going to be recaptured.’

  He smiled for the first time that day. ‘We don’t want another murder trial. After you, Baird.’ He turned to the other three – ‘There’s no means of shutting this trap behind us, is there? I’d like to give them the maximum trouble.’

  ‘I’m afraid not, sir,’ said Goyles.

  Five minutes later he was at the edge of the wood. He turned to look back. Fr
om where he stood even the top of the camp wall was invisible, but he could see, half a mile away across the valley, the road which came down the hill in a series of loops to the village which lay at the camp foot.

  He felt Byfold’s hand on his elbow.

  ‘It’s them, all right,’ said Long.

  Like six grey mice, each with his flickering tail of white dust, the German armoured cars crept down the hill.

  Chapter 15

  ‘Over the Hills – ’

  An observer with a God’s-eye view of Italy that late summer and autumn would have witnessed strange things. In the south the dust of a moving battle; in the centre and the north, on every road, the coming and going of a German army that had belatedly made up its mind to stop and fight; and on the hills, down the thorny backbone of the Apennines, through the scrubland that borders the Po valley on its south side, in the tall forests of the Abruzzi and the chestnut groves that ring Florence, over every piece of country which height or depth or hard going put out of the reach of the mechanised Germans, a moving chain. Refugees walking south, in an effort to get back to the homes from which war or dictatorship had uprooted them; deserters of both armies creeping back to their homes; and above all, distinguishable by their size, their vigour, their Nordic colouring and their indescribable garments, a steady stream of British prisoners of war, moving from the great officer prison camps in Northern Italy, some north to Switzerland, some, more ambitious of fame or danger, towards their own lines four hundred miles to the south.

  All moved with steady purpose, for all were aware that there was a deadline set against such travel. It might be the end of October or it might be the first weeks of November, but sooner or later the snow would cover the hills; movement, except on the roads, would be difficult, and both armies would settle down along a fixed winter line which it would be perilous indeed to try to cross.

  Meanwhile, they kept going. As they went, treading in each other’s tracks, passing through defiles, crossing rivers, skirting valleys, avoiding main roads, they formed a highway of their own – something which might, in time, be looked on as a folkway like the Pedlars’ road or the Pilgrims’ Way about which people would say, in years to come – ‘That was where the prisoners went that summer’.

  Goyles, Byfold and Long took this hard road. Their bodies were as fit as conscientious training could make them, but their feet still a bit soft. None of them looked much like an Italian. They had discussed the advisibility of wearing British uniform, and had decided against it. ‘If the Germans catch us, I don’t think what clothes we happen to be wearing will make much difference to our treatment,’ said Goyles, and the others agreed. They dressed for comfort. They had corduroy or battle-dress trousers and coloured shirts. They carried their belongings in sacks. Long had a panama hat, which was voted by the others to be too conspicuous, and which he soaked for a whole night in the mud of a stream bed, after which its shape and colour passed beyond description.

  They rose early and went to sleep early, setting their movements by the sun. It would be between four and five in the morning when they slipped out of the barn where they had spent the night. That was the easiest and the safest part of the day, when everything was quiet and the most active enemy was snoring in his blankets two thousand feet below. One morning they were paid an additional dividend for their early rising: when they stood on the flanks of Monte La Croce and saw across the tops of the featherbed mist which still filled the Lombardy plain below them purest white touched with pink under the level rays of the early morning sun, the peaks of the High Alps more than a hundred miles to the north.

  They took their meals where they were offered, and though they were sometimes hungry, they never had to touch the small reserves that they carried. These were the iron rations, saved up for the day, still far ahead, which they sometimes discussed. It was for ‘when they got nearer the lines’, of course ‘things wouldn’t be so easy then’.

  By four o’clock in the afternoon their eyes were skinned for a night’s lodging – though they might have to walk for another three hours before they found exactly what they wanted. Best were lonely farm houses up in the hills, separated by ten kilometres of tracks from any made road. Here, whatever the real feelings of their hosts, they felt tolerably secure for one night at least. Once a farm had been decided on, they would perch patiently above it, waiting for the dusk. Then the descent and the entry. ‘Siamo tre ufficialle inglesi. Si, vero. Sono tedesci qui?’ The patter soon got mechanical. Even the jokes, with much repetition, ‘Sporsati? Non, vero. Questo (indicating Long) troppo giovanne. Questo (Goyles) troppo vecchio: e questo (Byfold) troppo bruto’. Then a hot meal – at its best an enormous bowl of pasta with perhaps chicken giblets and an end of ham. Once, bread boiled in water with a little salt. Then into the barn, with the loan of a blanket, and Goyles would settle himself into the straw with a sigh of thankfulness for one more day achieved. His preparations for bed had the merit of simplicity. If the farm felt secure he removed his boots. If not, he kept them on. He hung his sack of belongings by his head, put his glasses in a safe place – one of his chief worries was what might happen if he lost or broke them – and in a few minutes he was asleep.

  After fourteen days the power of routine had asserted itself All that was past was history. All that was to come was surmise. They might have been living so all their lives.

  There were, of course, panics. Small panics, as when Goyles found, one morning that his glasses were no longer in his sack, and an hour was spent raking through the length and breadth of the haystack on which they had slept, before the glasses came to light in Byfold’s sack where Goyles must have put them in a sleepy moment the night before. More serious panics – like the sudden, inexplicable meeting with a German officer on a motor bicycle on a mountain ridge near Scai. Without a second’s hesitation or a word said, they had taken to their heels and scampered down the hillside into a wood. The German had sat, sourly unmoving, on his machine. No doubt he was used to Italians running away at the sight of him.

  If everything else failed, there were always the four hundred Rumanians. These Rumanians, deserters and killers to a man, were normally reported to be bivouacked in the nearest village down the valley. Sometimes they were Albanians, and on one occasion, Cossacks – but always four hundred. After a time they grew to expect them, and if their presence was not reported by their hosts they would enquire after them. It gave them a feeling of stability that they should be escorted down Italy by this phantom bodyguard.

  Goyles had, in his sack, wedged down among the tins of porridge, the khaki pullover, the skeletons of two pairs of socks, the motoring map and the tiny but precious piece of soap, a cheap, black-covered Italian notebook into which he would enter, as he sat over his evening meal, a few words to recall the stages they had made that day. It was both route-card and diary. Often a single word was enough to sum up the events of the last twenty-four hours. ‘Rain’ marked the thirteenth and fourteenth day. It was an exception in that autumn of fine weather, ‘Castagnacce’ was their first taste of the peculiar sweet polenta made from chestnuts instead of flour, which was their staple diet for three cloying days to the north of Monte Verdi.

  ‘Crypto-Fascist’ recalled an uncomfortable night near Norcia when, after trying and rejecting several harbours, they had chosen, against their better judgment, a lonely but pretentious building, more a villa than a farm. The master of the house, a big man, had served them the finest evening meal of their journey, and had sat down to it with them himself, dressed in a neat linen evening coat, and accompanied by two subdued daughters. Over the wine their host’s true political feelings had begun to peep through. Most of what he said went past the elementary Italian of Goyles and Byfold, but Long picked up enough to be cautious, and, that night, after being shown by their host to a fine barn where mattresses and coperte were laid out for them, they had rolled quietly off the straw, padded for a mile up the valley, and spent an uncomfortable night in a bean stack.

 
It was their rule that they moved on every day, and there was only one entry which bracketed two days – the thirty-seventh and thirty-eighth of their journey. It was a time when Byfold’s right heel was causing him a lot of trouble, and he was in some pain that evening when they hobbled down into the courtyard of the monastery of Monte Catria. The monks had dressed the hurt and had prescribed at least a day’s rest. There was, they explained, only one road which led to the outside world, and this was continually watched. They had slept that night, all three of them, with a fourteen-year-old Yugoslav boy, also a fugitive, in a huge bed. They had been further surprised to be woken, in the morning, by a black woman, who told them that she came from Georgia and would be a mother to all of them. She had darned Tony’s socks, and they had spent the day sitting about the monastery and listening to an organ recital by an accomplished young monk from Eritrea. On the second morning they had moved on, refreshed but bewildered.

  In the traffic of this unofficial highway they met old and new friends. Stopping for a midday meal at a shepherd’s hut they found before them at the table a black-bearded giant. They knew that he was English, but it was ten minutes before Goyles realised that he was talking to an old school friend, a man he had met perhaps half a dozen times since leaving school, who had made a big name in civil engineering. Goyles knew that he had been constructing airfields in the desert, but had not previously realised that he had been captured. They shared ten years experiences over the lunch table and then parted. The engineer was making for the Adriatic, where he had heard that the S.A.S. was arranging pick-ups from the beaches.