Capricorn and Cancer

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Capricorn and Cancer Page 14

by Geoffrey Household


  Fantle’s sole concern with Europe had been to drop explosives on it—useful enough at the time, but leading to contempt for the languages spoken underneath. Thus it was easy to maintain a cordial atmosphere in spite of him. When the Senior British Officer started off a protest with: Tell that dam’ organ-grinder, Tarmer had been able to insert some compliments and a proper respect for rank. Translating the other way round—for the Commandant’s interpreter spoke Italian-American which Fantle wilfully pretended he could not understand—it delighted him to make Colonna sound terse, cool and British.

  When either of them accused him of making sentences too long or too short, he sold the myth that it was impossible to be polite in English or precise in Italian. Since eyes could express themselves without any interpreter he had no hope of persuading the Commander and the Senior British Officer to like each other, but at least he ensured as much tolerance as could be expected from two different animals separated by the bars of the cage.

  ‘It may have been my fault that we couldn’t work up enough resentment,’ Tarmer said.

  ‘You couldn’t help it! In a place like Medina Fort one was forced to have some military manners.’

  It was a little gem of seventeenth-century fortification—nothing but a museum piece until it occurred to some imaginative Fascist official that a stronghold designed to keep the enemy out would be equally effective to keep him in.

  The heart of the fortress where the prisoners were confined—housed partly in huts, partly in the renovated and white-washed quarters of old blue-and-gold artillerymen—was a blunt-angled pentagon measuring about three hunded yards across. Formally delimiting this area was an inner perimeter of low wire. A prisoner who stepped over or vaulted the wire could officially be shot at. He never was. The Italians, with their sound grasp of essentials, realized that the momentary infringement was not worth the trouble of cleaning a rifle.

  They could afford to be generous. Beyond this inner perimeter a stone glacis sloped down to the broad, green ditch around the fort. The far bank of the ditch was a thirty-foot sheer wall, topped by a further fifteen feet of heavy wire fence. The prisoners had at last been forced to admit that the smooth, well-fitted ashlars of the wall were unclimbable.

  ‘Anything is climbable,’ said Bill Avory, still smarting from the accusation made by his older self against his younger self.

  ‘But not in a hurry,’ Tarmer replied.

  He remembered the ropes, pitons and ladders which they had ingeniously made. Time to use them, however, could not be fabricated. The whole circuit was commanded by five watch-towers, one near each angle. At night the great ditch was flood-lit from the towers. An escaping prisoner had as much chance as an actor on a stage of avoiding interested—almost friendly—observation.

  Bill Avory had been convinced that the only way to get out was by the gate, nonchalantly strolling past the guards at the barrier, over the seventeenth-century bridge and across the barrack square of the garrison. He was very nearly successful, disguised as the monk who came in for cocoa; but the Italians had guessed somebody would try that one. They were so delighted to have foreseen every detail of Lieutenant Avory’s plan that they returned him to the cage in fairly comradely fashion and with snatches of song. Colonel Colonna was bound to punish, but saw to it that bread-and-water and solitary confinement meant wine-and-rolls and a card party in the afternoon. Cavalry panache appealed to him. He was fascinated by the cherry trousers of the 11th Hussars which Bill still wore, even under his home-made cassock.

  As soon as three goats were turned loose in the fort ditch, all plans for escape immediately took this new factor into consideration. During the day the animals were free to browse where they pleased; at night they were penned under the bridge. Inevitably they became pets. The convention which prohibited the crossing of the inner wire was being continually violated.

  Colonel Colonna, very bothered lest his orders to shoot might possibly be obeyed, protested politely to the Senior British Officer. Fantle retorted that the wire ought to be put in reasonable repair, thus preventing officers from crossing it to feed the goats or to retrieve articles of clothing which the goats were eating. To this the Commandant replied that it was unsoldierly to use the wire as a washing-line.

  Tarmer thought so, too. He was a Guards Officer, and his training occasionally overwhelmed him. He therefore translated the bit about the washing-line correctly. The Senior British Officer snorted that the Commandant wouldn’t know a soldier if he saw one. Tarmer, pulling himself together, interpreted this as a mere harmless comment that gentlemen in captivity could not be expected to keep up the high sartorial standard of Italian officers. Colonel Colonna at once sympathized, shook hands all round and allowed a manly tear of pity to sparkle for a moment in his eye.

  Over-petting was thereupon reduced; but the habits, characters and potentialities of the three nanny-goats were recorded by the escaping clubs with the devotion of psychoanalysts. The camp had time for patience, and one could never say that any scientific study was wholly useless.

  The goats were of marked individuality. Each reflected its upbringing—or at least seemed to do so when scrutinized by rampant imaginations. Tecla belonged to the Commandant’s wife; she was black, supercilious and inclined to bleat at the harsh necessities of her life. Lucia was a gentle, modest job in brown and white, owned by a neighbouring priory. Beatrice, who belonged to the camp doctor, was pure white but a liberal; she disliked the Church and the Military.

  Fra Giuseppe—the monk who came in for cocoa—used to milk all three. Indeed it was almost certainly he who had conceived the economical thought of pasturing goats in the green ditch. When attending to Lucia and Tecla he always looked round to see that Beatrice was fully occupied. Her horns were slightly deformed; when her head was lowered, they pointed forwards. She tended to be attracted by any bent backside clothed in black, whether cassock or breeches.

  ‘Fantle used to swear that the anti-Fascists were always ready to help us,’ Avory said.

  ‘Like hell they were! We never saw an anti-Fascist except the doctor.’

  A genial and comforting soul! But it would have been absurd to ask him for help in an escape. He would have replied at once, with sound common sense, that they were much better off where they were than wandering round the countryside.

  ‘Even Mussolini wasn’t anti-Fascist,’ Tarmer went on. ‘He was just pro-British.’

  So far as one could judge the political opinions of a goat, that was the literal truth. Mussolini’s pro-British sympathies were obvious from the day he was introduced, black, weighty and gambolling with anticipation, into the fort ditch for the sake of roast kid and the future of the milk supply.

  The prisoners at once christened him Mussolini, and the name stuck. Their guards, watching with approval the potency and cavortings of the animal, failed to see any grave insult to their Head of State. Disrespect there might be, but they themselves were far from reverent—though showing more subtlety than could be expected of the enemy.

  ‘Just imagine the row in a German camp if everybody had started to call a billy-goat Hitler!’ Avory exclaimed.

  ‘There you are, you see! Germans go blind with anger—which must have been a great help when one wanted to get away from them. Your man who made that crack about the casual climate of Italy didn’t know that it made escape harder, not easier.’

  Mussolini adored the prisoners—possibly because he took the cheering of the enemy as more of a compliment than the sardonic encouragement of unfrustrated guards. He recognized affection in the voices, and looked to the British for approval of his revolting preliminaries, his tender approach and his decisive attack. During the days of Mussolini’s attention to Lucia, Tecla and Beatrice the camp’s morale had been high and joyous. There was something fresh to talk about, something to exaggerate and a new and promising source of noise.

  Noise in the ditch—plenty of it at the right place—was essential to the escaping scheme registered in the names of A
vory and Tarmer. The plan was born from a tunnel dug practically single-handed by a vast Marine who had been picked up by an Italian destroyer while optimistically trying to swim from Kithera to Crete. His tunnel ended, as they all knew it would, where the massive masonry of the fort met bedrock. But there or thereabouts he dug up the remains of a cross-bow.

  This inspired Avory to a flight of imagination which Tarmer carried into the world of reality by finding a mechanic to work on it.

  ‘I wonder what happened to Tommy Robins,’ Avory said. ‘He was as good on materials as you are on men. Getting the feel of them, I mean.’

  Pilot-Officer Robins had manufactured from old car springs two cross-bows of formidable power. Tested for silence, weight of projectile and range, they were accepted by the committee of four as fully developed secret devices and stored for use when the perfect occasion arose.

  The target was the cable which sagged from post to post above the high wire fence of the outer perimeter. A rocket-shaped grapnel, with four deep hooks at one end and a rope at the other, was to be shot like a whaling harpoon across the ditch and over the cable. A hearty pull on the rope should then either break the cable or drag it off the insulators. Immediately after the watch-towers had been plunged in darkness a second grapnel would be fired over the fence. The hooks were bound to catch somewhere at the top of the wire, and the party would then climb wall and fence by means of the hanging rope.

  So far, so good—always assuming that the nearest watch-tower did not notice the first projectile and its rope soaring through the air. But if the four partners were to be able to put a reasonable distance between themselves and Medina Fort by morning, there must be no suspicion that any escape had taken place. The camp, therefore, had to appear quite silent and peaceful in the accidental darkness, and there had to be a simple explanation of the scrapes and scufflings as the party swarmed up the rope.

  That was where the goats came in; the most promising way of creating a diversion was to let them out of their pen. But it was far from fool-proof. A sleepy Beatrice could not be absolutely trusted to put in a personal attack on the patrol; and those docile creatures, Lucia and Tecla, were certain to do nothing but browse.

  The constant activity of Mussolini, however, added new and exciting chances of success. A couple of days after the patriarch’s arrival, Avory called a committee meeting in one of the old galleries beneath their quarters.

  ‘If we could set Mussolini free in the ditch,’ he had said, ‘and if he got tangled up in a coil of wire or some tin cans or something in the dark, the Ditch Patrol wouldn’t look for any other explanation of noises.’

  ‘He might hurt himself,’ the Marine objected.

  ‘He might,’ Tarmer agreed. ‘And if he does I will ask the Senior British Officer to send some flowers. But the Geneva Convention says nothing about damage to goats.’

  Tarmer remembered speaking with some bitterness. That very morning Wing-Commander Fantle had declared that Colonel Colonna, his half-battalion of decrepit icecream merchants and the four half-witted apes perched up in each watch-tower were quite incapable of keeping an enterprising rabbit in a hutch. Meticulous planning could get a man out of anywhere. Look, he said, at all the empty-headed crooks who escaped from Dartmoor!

  That meticulous planning! God, they had spent hours and months of hours at it! But Mussolini—reminding them forcibly of the outside world and their own Lucias and Teclas—was an inspiration to still further planning. How to let the goats loose? Tarmer had a vision of finding a use, at long last, for the damned monk who swilled their cocoa. The full details could wait. For the moment it was enough to ask Tommy Robins to make a twenty-foot pole smoothly tapering to a short, sharp spike at the end.

  ‘Not for Mussolini?’ the Marine had implored him.

  ‘For Beatrice—through the casemate.’

  Out of the subterranean galleries opened casemates which had once held the guns to sweep attackers off the glacis. The mouths were blocked by iron bars and coils of wire, frequently checked by the Ditch Patrol. Even so, prisoners had crawled through them—but only into the glare of the lights and immediate arrest.

  One casemate, close to the bridge, was just above the pen of the three nanny-goats. It was quite possible to spoil Beatrice’s sleep and temper by working a pole through the entanglement and poking. Yet only the combination of Mussolini and Beatrice could really be trusted to raise hell. The committee pointed out to Tarmer that Mussolini was shut up out of reach in a pen of his own.

  ‘Even if we talk Fra Giuseppe into letting the nanny-goats out,’ Bill Avory objected, ‘he won’t let Mussolini out, too. The girls have to rest some time.’

  That was true enough. It looked as if Mussolini would have to be kidnapped or invited into the camp, and then concealed until the moment came to make use of him.

  No contact with Fra Giuseppe was possible on the following day. The escape committee was despondent, for Mussolini, having generously fulfilled the purpose of his visit, might at any moment be driven back to his home. Preparations, however, were complete. The cross-bows could go into action at ten minutes’ notice.

  On the next evening Fra Giuseppe was seen in the ditch, all pastoral in the last of the twilight, while the four goats walked peaceably in front of him to their respective pens. Tarmer shouted to him that parcels had arrived with a fresh supply of cocoa. He suggested, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, that Mussolini ought to come too, to say good-bye to the boys.

  ‘But he smells!’ the monk had protested.

  ‘So do we! Be a sport, Fra Giuseppe!’

  He was. Over the bridge, past the laughing guards at the barrier, trotting happily and poisoning the air for fifty yards around him, came Mussolini followed by Fra Giuseppe. The goat sat down with his four legs curled under him: a black, contented bulk upon the cooling paving of the fort. Somebody served him the scrapings of the evening’s spaghetti; someone else wreathed his horns with paper flowers left over from such Christmas celebrations as the camp had had. He looked straight from hell, but he was in heaven. Mussolini brimmed over with affection for human kind, and yet was continually deprived of the petting he adored owing to his penetrating odour. He shared to the full the emotions of those girls in the advertisements whom men won’t dance with.

  As soon as Fra Giuseppe had become gently inebriated by the smell of cocoa, Tarmer asked him why his Lucia had been limping and hoped that she had not cut herself on the wire of the inner perimeter while licking salt from outstretched hands. The monk had noticed no limp—reasonably enough since she hadn’t got one—but promised to have a look at her before he went home to his priory. Tarmer’s eloquent Italian rippled with anxiety for Lucia. Meanwhile the cocoa failed to appear. Fra Giuseppe at last realized that he was being subjected to gentle, almost ecclesiastical blackmail, unspoken and perhaps not even deliberate. He agreed to go down to the ditch and report back immediately on Lucia’s condition.

  As soon as the monk had strolled off towards the barrier and the bridge, leaving the delighted Mussolini where he was, Avory raced to the casemate and started to arouse Beatrice’s brisk temper. The twenty-foot pole was already through the casemate, its point free and commanding the little pen. The cross-bows were set up and loaded.

  ‘Cocoa,’ Tarmer murmured, the imagined scent of it almost as vivid as the real scent twenty years earlier.

  ‘Now?’ Avory asked in surprise, sharing step by step the train of thought except for that sudden nasal memory. ‘Wouldn’t coffee and a brandy be better?

  Yes. Yes, they would indeed. One couldn’t recover the taste of cocoa brewed in a POW camp. It was as hopeless as to try to re-enter the paradise which brown sugar had been at the age of five.

  Bill Avory beckoned to the waiter, and chuckled.

  ‘I always wish I had been watching,’ he said. ‘All I saw at my end of the pole was Fra Giuseppe unlocking the door of the goat-pen. And then Beatrice charged.’

  The monk shot out into the flood-li
t ditch with the doctor’s anti-clerical goat a yard behind him. It looked as if his initial burst of speed might carry him clear out of the operational area; but, fortunately for the plan, Beatrice caught him.

  Her butt went home just above the right knee. The desperate monk, screaming for help, swerved, spread his cassock like a bullfighter and received the next charge in the cloth. Beatrice’s horns bruised painfully but were not sharp enough to penetrate loose clothing; cloth stretched tight, however, was another matter. The monk’s excellent technique resulted in a heaving tangle of black and white. When it became possible for the eye to separate one from the other, Beatrice was dressed in the lower half of the cassock and Fra Giuseppe was embracing her hind legs in a frantic attempt to prevent her cantering away with the rest of it.

  ‘It was more than we dared hope for,’ said Tarmer. ‘We could hear the sentries cheering and laughing in the towers.’

  The monk was between Towers 1 and 2, and it was certain that the guards were looking at nothing else. The Bridge Tower to the west and No. 3 Tower to the east were unsighted by the angles of the pentagon. Tommy Robins fired the grapnel over the cable. The Marine heaved on the rope. After a moment of resistance the grapnel returned to hand, flying back into the camp on a lower and more violent trajectory than the curve of its outward journey.

  The darkness shocked by its sudden totality. Not only were the flood-lights extinguished but all the camp lights as well. There was an instant of astonished silence on the part of both guards and prisoners, through which echoed the exclamations of Fra Giuseppe, now rendered hysterical by the kicks of Beatrice and his incoherent gratitude to the saint whose miracle or the soldier whose Christian charity had put out the lights.

  The second grapnel sailed over the ditch and caught. With the interested assistance of Mussolini, escape was now nearly certain. Tarmer stood by the affectionate head, Avory at the stern. They lifted him over the inner perimeter wire and dropped him on to the glacis between the Bridge Tower and No. 1. He had an old leather shoe tied to his tail by a yard of cord. Its mysterious leaps and scufflings ought to be enough to delay and deceive the Ditch Patrol for the half minute required to climb wall and wire.

 

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