He also learned, to his surprise, that if enemy agents had been landed on the Welsh coast by U-boat, in June of this year, then they had arrived there without the authority or assistance of the Bureau of Espionage.
Boxer might have guessed all this, of course and might even have occupied the bumpy journey inland by putting two and two together, but he remained mystified, for he had already forgotten the details of his little chat with Major General Haussman, and in any case he had plenty of other things to think about, for the lorry was being driven at breakneck speed and it was all he could do, manacled as he was, to remain in an upright position.
It would be interesting to follow Boxer through his tour of Occupied France, Occupied Belgium, Occupied Holland, and, ultimately Germany itself, but it would be a long and tedious journey, and would not teach us anything new about Boxer.
In the two or three months that followed his capture he was treated as a special prisoner, inasmuch as he was subjected to more interrogations than was usual in the case of captured private soldiers; he was also distinguished from other prisoners of war by manacles and comparative isolation.
The manacles did not worry him overmuch. He was of a mechanical turn of mind and soon learned how to slip them off whenever he was alone. Moreover, once out of range of the explosive Captain Engelstein, nobody took the handcuffs very seriously. Neither, in fact, did his interrogators seem to take him seriously, despite the special report that accompanied him wherever he went, and although he did not recall much of his conversation with the General, or link it in any way with the special treatment accorded him, he made no further attempts to amuse himself at the expense of subsequent interrogators. Variations of his original narrative would have put too severe a strain upon his imagination.
It was not until he was drafted to a working-camp, and treated as an ordinary prisoner, that his originality began to flower again, for here he found several kindred spirits who had persuaded themselves that the shortest route back to their favourite pubs and girl-friends was a route signposted with acts of sabotage.
This, indeed, was the favourite pastime of British prisoners in the camp near Augsburg, to which Boxer was sent in the spring of 1943, and Boxer, everybody soon decided, was eminently suited for the role of Jolly Saboteur. His wide, vacant grin seemed to hypnotise the elderly guards and the civilians about the place for it seemed that Major General Haussman was not alone in mistaking his mildness and joviality for clownish stupidity of a high order. That was why everyone gave Boxer so much rope, and when his natural amiability was supplemented by the hoarded contents of Red Cross parcels, which included packets of Virginian cigarettes and chocolate, there was simply no holding him back.
At the Augsburg camp the prisoners were employed on a busy railway siding, sited at the foot of a long gradient that connected a sawmill with its goods depot.
The engines used in transporting the timber were operated by German civilians, but the coupling and uncoupling of the wagons was left to prisoners.
Nobody connected Boxer with the mysterious uncoupling of a long train of empty wagons shortly before dusk one evening, and nobody blamed him when fifty-seven trucks slid away from the stationary engine and rumbled at gathering speed down the long incline, to pile into an ungainly pyramid at the Augsburg siding.
The driver and fireman of the train had last seen Boxer and all the other prisoners at the main siding, when they had set off on the final trip of the day, and there were no prisoners up at the sawmill, since it was after dark when the engine arrived and all the prisoners were then being paraded for lock-up.
The act of sabotage was therefore credited to parachutists and the fireman and driver were sent to haul trucks across the white plains of the Ostfront. Boxer obligingly helped to clear away the wreckage, and tidy up the siding, and was later included in a batch of men sent to live in wired billets adjoining the mill itself. Here they worked at felling timber and hauling it back to the mill, pending the repair of the depot.
It was very pleasant down here in the springtime. The work was hard but the life was healthy and agreeable. Sometimes the smell of sawn pines would remind Boxer of the building sites in and around the suburb at home, and he would experience a pang or two of homesickness, not so much for the Avenue, but for his lost boyhood, and for Berni.
He had, however, received some reassuring news of Bernard, via his father. It was sad to reflect that henceforth Berni would have to face life with one arm but that, Boxer reasoned, was better than losing an arm and a leg, and in any case Pop had written to say that there was hope of Berni being repatriated in the next exchange of severely wounded prisoners. This would mean, of course, that old Berni would never be able to join him here in Germany, but there were compensations, amusing compensations some of them, such as the elimination of Little Willie, the short-tempered overseer.
Little Willie had arrived from Munich to keep a fatherly eye on the prisoners in case those fiendish parachutists began fresh mischief, and Boxer had no trouble at all with him, for the overseer reserved his spite for smaller men, men like ‘Tich’ Hoskins. Hoskins, who was a friendly little man, was sent to the cooler for twenty-one days, after something had gone wrong with one of the circular saws.
Boxer was fond of Tich, who reminded him a little of old Berni, and when Tich had been cuffed, harangued and marched off, Boxer made up his mind that it was time somebody did something about Little Willie. There was a Polish medical orderly on the camp who was known to be bitterly hostile to the Jerries, and Boxer sought him out and had a little talk with him. He came from the Medical hut with a small packet of powder, concealed in the toe of his sock.
That night Little Willie was found outside his quarters on hands and knees, vomiting at irregular intervals, and groaning piteously between spasms. Everyone thought he was drunk and two of the guards carried him off to bed, but in the morning Little Willie was much worse, and the next day he was hurried off to Augsburg military hospital.
Nobody connected Boxer with the overseer’s sudden illness, for no one recalled that Boxer had been in the habit of giving Little Willie bars of chocolate in return for an extra long mid-morning break in the clearings. Someone might have remembered, had it not been for the serious outbreak of fire at the mills before Little Willie’s replacement arrived, but all else was forgotten in the closing-down of the manufactory and the transfer of prisoners to the Earberg area, where they were set to work on road-making in summer-heat, and sometimes referred nostalgically to Little Willie and the Augsburg pine forests.
Boxer did not remain in the road-gang very long. After a month or so he changed identities with a lieutenant in the Gunners, who suggested the switch when the British officer prisoners passed the road-makers on the way to baths each Monday.
The switch was easily arranged and Boxer found himself with a brand new identity, henceforth being known as Lieutenant A. S. C. Burne-Cookham, R.A., or ‘Algy’, who shared a hut with fifty-one other officers.
Every one of these men seemed to regard Boxer as a fine sportsman, who had done Algy, their comrade, a great service by consenting to change places with him, but Boxer found it difficult to regard the change in this light. Outside the wire he had been operating a concrete-mixer in blistering summer heat, whereas inside it there was nothing to do but lounge, play rounders, read magazines, or indulge in what the officers called ‘stooging’ for their escapes.
Boxer was astonished at the amount of time these keen types devoted to the planning of escapes, particularly as hardly any of these escapes resulted in more than a few days’ freedom for the escapers, some of whom were eager to face terrible risks to get outside the wire.
Almost invariably the venturesome were back in the cooler, turning over the problems of yet another bid to get out, and some of their endeavours involved an immense amount of physical toil. There were, for instance, no fewer than five tunnels under construction, and for a spell Boxer worked in one of them, but the Escape Committee soon recognised the fact
that, muscular and willing though he was, he was of far more use to them as a diversionist, particularly when what they called ‘a wire job’ was coming up, and the alert sentries in the elevated look-out towers had to have their attention engaged for a few moments.
Boxer, it was discovered, had a whole repertoire of diversional tactics, some of them picked up during his pre-war tours in the company of stunt men and professional acrobats, and others acquired during his captivity.
One of his popular turns was a fifty-yard stroll past the look-out towers walking on his hands, a feat which never failed to attract the astonished gaze of the sentries. Another, and somewhat similar trick, was his comic ‘crab-walk,’ a style of progression that fascinated all who witnessed it. For this diversion he would point his toes inward and form a curious diamond-shaped aperture with his long legs, walking thus along the extreme inside edge of the trip wire, balanced on the sides of his feet.
No matter how many times the guards saw this performance they never ceased to be intrigued and amused by it. They looked down into the compound and shook with laughter while, higher up the wire, enterprising young men went to work with homemade cutters and sawed their way out to a brief spell of freedom.
Boxer’s summer season in Oflag vaudeville came to an end with the sudden reappearance of an emaciated Lieutenant Burne-Cookham, R.A., who had been recaptured in the Schaffhausen Bulge after more than five weeks on the run.
Side by side in front of the glum Commandant, the two men were seen not to be very much alike after all and Boxer was marched out of the camp to the accompaniment of cheers and good wishes. He spent a month in cells, before being transferred to a ‘Naughty Boys’ camp, near Cassel.
He welcomed the change, for he had not altogether approved of the officers’ preoccupation with tunnels and wire-jobs.
They tried to persuade him that it was a soldiers’ patriotic duty to escape, and get home in order to continue the war, but Boxer’s rapidly developing powers of reasoning told him that it was surely folly to go all the way home in order to fight one’s way all the way back to Germany again! If one was already here, then surely it was more logical to stay and look around for some way in which Hitler might be harassed? Even if opportunities were limited now they might not always be so, and in any case it was refreshing to stick around and bait poor old Jerry. He rose to a bait more spectacularly than even Boxer’s schoolmasters had risen in the old days, and it was a pity that old Berni wasn’t here to share in the fun. Life in Germany, Boxer decided, was really one long, rewarding game of knocking-down-ginger!
The new camp to which he was sent was a lively one, for here were assembled, in a single, mediaeval building, all the other ranks who would have qualified for Colditz, the famous Bad Boys’ Camp, had they been officers.
The inmates welcomed Boxer with open arms and it was here that he earned the nom-de-guerre of ‘The Gaffer’, awarded in recognition of his leadership, enterprise and, above all, his remarkable ability to acquire contraband articles. Whether it was his light touch, or whether he still relied on that ingenuous, split-melon smile, his fellow prisoners were never able to determine, but almost every day Boxer would deliver some useful article to the Guards’ Sergeant Major in nominal authority over the prisoners.
One day it was a civilian’s Homburg hat, the next a coil of wire, the day after a pickaxe, and the day after that a wad of German marks, or a railway time-table.
One morning he turned up with half a ladder, that had to be returned because there was no room to stow it in the contraband cache under the washhouse floor. The Sergeant Major was impressed by the yield, and promised to recommend Boxer for a medal after the war. This promise must have inspired Boxer to even greater efforts, for the following day he turned up with an Iron Cross, whereupon the Sergeant Major, wiping the perspiration from his brow, exclaimed:
“All I can say is, thank Christ you weren’t in my unit when we quartered in the Tower! God Almighty, you’d have walked off with the perishing Crown Jewels, and flogged ’em in Houndsditch!”
And here, for a year or more, we must leave Boxer, in no way oppressed by captivity, but finding in it the means to keep everyone around him happy and amused. He missed Bernard, of course, so much so that he tried hard not to think about him, but it was rather pleasant sometimes to be able to act on one’s own initiative, and discover exactly how one could get along without prefacing every proposal with a “Whatdysay, Berni? Whatdysay?”
CHAPTER XXVIII
‘La Gloire’
“ONE OF THE first things one has to learn about the pursuit of La Gloire, is that it can be a tiring and tedious business,” said Claude, rolling a cigarette to and fro between thin lips, and slamming home the magazine of the Sten gun.
Esme agreed, quoting Jim Carver, veteran of World War One.
“I had a chap next door to me in the Avenue, the father of the girl I’m engaged to as a matter of fact. He served right through the Quatorze…” (Esme had dropped into the French habit of distinguishing the two conflicts as ‘Le Quatorze’ and simply ‘La Guerre’) “and I once asked him what war was really like. I never forgot his reply. He said: ‘If you could reduce the time I spent as a soldier to an hour, I was scared stiff one minute, frozen stiff nine minutes, and bored stiff the other fifty’!”
The Frenchman laughed and laid the Sten gun on Esme’s bed. “Your prospective father-in-law is a realist,” he said. “Now you must get some sleep. I will call you when Maurice arrives and when we are ready to move.”
He shook hands and as he left the attic, and descended the uncarpeted stairs to the room above the watchmender’s workshop, Esme reflected that Claude was right about La Gloire. It had indeed been a tedious business, in spite of constant movement, and constant alarms.
Most of the time he had spent in Northern France Esme had been cooped up in attic bedrooms like this, attempting, by one means or another, to pass lonely hours until his journey into the south-west could be arranged.
He realised, of course, that enormous care had to be exercised by these people, each of whom was risking his or her life by contact with him. He had learned, from Claude and his deputies, something about the expanding network of the French underground movement, of its passwords, daggers, forged passes, secret conclaves and all the trappings one had associated in pre-war days with light fiction. By now he was aware from personal experience how difficult and dangerous was a simple movement from district to district in France, where German troops were stationed in every small town, and Vichy agents, informers and collaborators were established inside every Government department. He knew all this, but it did not check his impatience to begin his journey home, to be able to walk the streets by day or night, free of the nagging fear of sudden arrest, and the betrayal of friends that might follow his arrest.
Sometimes he almost wished that he had been captured that first day in the marigold shed near the scene of the crash. He reasoned that, if this had happened, then at least he would have been among his own kind, able to come to terms with life and await the end of the war. He would also have been in a position to acquaint Judy and old Harold that he was alive. Situated as he was now this was out of the question and he did not care to reflect on Judy’s wretchedness, or Harold’s silent grief, for surely they must suppose him dead now that news of the surviving members of his Lancaster had had time to filter back to Air Ministry Casualties.
His admiration for the Resistance people was extreme, but sometimes, in the loneliness of his hide-outs, he could not help feeling that their heroism was wasted, for all their efforts over the past two years had resulted in nothing more than the smuggling home of a hundred or so evaders, trained men like himself, capable of re-entering the struggle, and what was a hundred men in a war of these proportions? How could their sacrifices and ingenuity affect the outcome of the war by a single day? Was it really worth risking their lives to prevent the capture of a few stray airmen, or to damage a section of railway track? Did it really matter to t
he war effort if he got home again, or if a small local factory continued to manufacture haversacks and respirators for the Germans?
During one of these pessimistic moods he discussed the subject with Claude, the Group Leader. They always talked English, for Esme found it cheering to converse in his own tongue with someone who had actually known the Avenue, and had waited at the ’bus stop, at the foot of Shirley Rise, on sunny mornings when the hawthorn was in blossom along the golf links hedge.
“You are regarding it too closely, or perhaps not closely enough, my friend,” Claude had told him. “We do not do this so much for you as for ourselves! It is not as important to us that you should get home but that we should risk our lives trying to outwit the Boche! You see, my friend, we Frenchmen helped to murder Western civilisation, 1940. Yes, my friend, we did it by sloth and by cynicism. You have read Oscar Wilde, of course?”
“His plays?” queried Esme.
“No, no, his plays are gilded trifles,” said Claude, impatiently, “for he wrote them before he had learned truth through suffering. I refer to his great work, ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’.”
He pronounced it ‘Reeding’ and Esme grinned.
“It’s ‘Redding’, like ‘bedding’,” he said, for Claude was always anxious to have his pronunciation corrected, “but what’s the connection, Claude?”
“It is what happened to us in 1940,” said Claude. “You remember?—
‘Yet each man kills the thing he loves
By each let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word,
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!’”
Esme protested, for it seemed to him monstrous that this gallant young man should continue to feel so humiliated by his country’s collapse.
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