Be Shot For Six Pence

by Michael Gilbert

  “What did you do?”

  “I went back to school, of course, and learned History and Geography. Now that is enough about me. Tell me about you.”

  “Like you,” I said, “I come of rich and dishonest parents. The only difference is that in England we make our rich men work. My father worked very hard indeed. He still does. It brought him a certain amount of public honour. When I grew up he wanted me to go into politics.”

  “Politics? That is defilement.”

  “I entirely agree,” I said. “I can only say that it used to be thought to be all right. I’m afraid my father didn’t realise quite how times had changed. So I decided for him that I would go in for the Law and I was called to the Bar. Since I found no work at all I had plenty of time to indulge in my hobbies.”

  “Which are?”

  “Rock climbing and girls. You would be surprised how complementary the two pursuits are.”

  “I do not wish,” said Trüe, with dignity, “to hear about your sexual conquests.”

  “I can assure you that I had no intention of mentioning them. I was going to talk about peaks I had climbed.”

  “Be serious, and talk to me about the War. You had adventures in the War.”

  “How do you happen to know that?”

  “Lisa told me. And so did Colin.”

  “Well,” I said. “It’s a long story—”

  So it was. The odd, sealed, chapter in my life. It had started on one Christmas day and ended on another, and had lasted exactly three years.

  I was a ‘Calais’ prisoner and by Christmas 1940 I was, I suppose, as happy as any prisoner of the Reich. My selfish, self-sufficient, temperament found a lot of satisfaction in the life of a prisoner of war. You don’t need me to explain it to you. It’s all in the books.

  On that particular day I got drunk and decided to make a speech. I was helped on to the canteen table and spoke my mind for five minutes. It went well. I made the speech again, in Hungarian. This was an indiscretion. Finally, I delivered it in German.

  The next morning before I had begun to recover from my hangover, I was on my way to Bolen, in Poland.

  Bolen was not a pleasant place; I shared a room with the only other two English-speaking prisoners in the place; a tall mad, Flight-Lieutenant who circled endlessly in his Spitfire over Berlin, picking off prominent Nazi personalities; and a South African, whom I suspected of being a stool-pigeon, though what quarry he hoped to trap in that miserable, damp, snowswept, God-forgotten corner of the Eastern Reich it is beyond my imagination to conceive.

  My only friend was a Pole, a brave and delightful seventeen-year-old boy called Karol. With Karol I climbed out of the camp, in the spring of 1941, and walked right through to his home, a farm in Southern Poland, near Wadowice. Here the desire to escape died on me; and I spent a very happy five or six months working in the fields by day and, in the evenings talking to Karol and his family, in my rapidly improving Polish. Long talks, in which we rebuilt the world for our pleasure. They were, I think, the nicest family I had ever known.

  I passed as one Stefan, a distant cousin, from Warsaw. This was all right for a time, and I even got some sort of identity documents out of the local authorities. The trouble, as usual, started with neighbours; and specifically, I think, but have no sort of proof, with a girl who had made a proposal to me which I had rejected; more out of fastidiousness than lack of appetite.

  I was suddenly bundled into a cabin in the woods with a week’s food and told to lie low. I lay up, safe but badly troubled, for a week, and then crept back at dusk, to the farmhouse. It had been burned out, and the farmer, his wife and Karol nailed up outside it like jackdaws on a keeper’s wall. There was nothing I could do about it. I set out, through the forest, for Czechoslovakia.

  It was late summer, and because I did not, at that moment, greatly care whether I lived or died, I made that crossing safely and on my own. It was considered at that time, by refugees and lawless folk, to be one of the most closely guarded frontiers in Europe. There was, of course, an active Czech underground. But because the spectres of Karol and his family still walked behind my shoulder I refused to attach myself for long to any group or family. This may also have ministered to my safety. Resistance workers, like game birds, are easier to shoot if they will sit still. I could not now make out for you any sort of itinerary, but through that autumn I lived in a dozen different towns and cities and stayed with half a hundred people; people who have run together, in my mind, and faded into one composite blur. When a whole country is in opposition, when the active resisters are tens of thousands, they acquire a recognisable personality, fanatical, humourless, reliable, cold, twisted. Living amongst them I reached a stage where I could recognise a resistance worker in the street; could smell one in the dark.

  I passed now for a Danziger. My Polish was quite good enough for this. A very few people knew who I was; enough to save me from getting my throat cut if a real Danziger had turned up to denounce me.

  Although my moves were zig-zag and haphazard, I found myself drifting to the south; and by November I was ready for my next move, which was into Hungary. It was a trip which took a lot of arranging, and in the end three of us set out, too late, and ran into snow conditions in the South Tatra Mountains that we were not equipped to deal with. The route we chose would have been easy enough for a well equipped team but we had the wrong clothing and boots, one bad axe between us, and practically no rope. I was the only mountaineer in the party and when I realised how things were, I insisted that we turn back. In the end the three of us sat down, in a corrie, and argued it out. When they saw I was adamant the other two drew guns and informed me, in the friendliest way, that if I would not take them over they must shoot me. That is one way of winning an argument. We went on. I bore them no ill-will. The Gestapo had their tickets, and it was worth any risk to them to get across. At least, I hope it was, because less than twenty-four hours later the rotten rope between us parted like a piece of string at the wrong moment and they both fell four or five hundred feet on to the rocks. I reckon they slept more softly than they would have done in one of Heydrich’s prisons. I reached Hungary that evening, with bad frost-bite in both hands.

  I managed to get to one of my ‘safe’ addresses. It was a retired dentist, who lived in a pepper-pot villa in the foothills with six dogs. I stayed there for three months. My right hand got better, but my left hand worse. In the end a doctor came out and took off the middle finger. As soon as I was ready to move I started drifting south again.

  Hungary was quite different from Czechoslovakia. The Germans were the big influence all right, but they weren’t in military occupation. That didn’t come for another eighteen months, when they walked in at the front door at almost the same moment that the Russians came in at the back; and then things really did get lively.

  At the time I crawled in over the northern frontier, Hungary was an artificial oasis of phoney peace. In a lot of ways it was much trickier for me than a country under occupation. There was no resistance movement to help me. When I left the friendly dentist I drifted down to Buda and hitched up with the floating population of spivs, expatriates and little criminals. The fact that I spoke Hungarian was a help. I made money by giving language lessons. By that time I was competent to teach in English, French, German and Polish. I told a complicated story, involving an American father, a German grandfather and a Polish grandmother. It wasn’t my story that kept me out of gaol. It was the fact that I kept on the move. Sometimes I would find a bed in one of my new friends’ flats. The real trouble was that each block of flats (back at school again!) had a ‘housemaster’ whose duty it was to report all strangers to the police. That made it terribly dangerous to stay in any flat for more than one night. When I couldn’t find a bed, I slept in the open air. If I hadn’t anything else to do by day, I went into one of Buda’s many Turkish baths. I found a sort of restful anonymity in nakedness.

  It couldn’t last. The onset of winter drove me under cover.
Beds grew scarcer. In the end, because I had no alternative, I stayed for a whole week with a known criminal. That was asking for trouble. I was arrested in the first days of November.

  I spent a week in the Tolonzhaz (which was the House of Detention) and was then moved over to the Margit Prison for a proper going-over. In the interval, presumably, somebody had been making enquiries about me. The trouble was that I had told too many stories. When I now reverted to the simple truth, that I was a British officer, a prisoner of war, who had escaped from a prison camp in the Reich nearly two years ago, it just got a big laugh.

  Memory, which has a complicated mechanism of self-protection, has drawn a curtain over a lot of that time. I think it lasted fifteen weeks. My most vivid recollection does not concern me at all. It was Christmas morning. Christmas of 1942. The window of my cell opened on to an interior courtyard and by a contortion I could look out of the tiny opening. (It was forbidden, under severe penalties, but I did it occasionally, to keep my will in order.) I heard the most inexplicable noise outside and took a quick look. A party of warders was standing in the middle of the courtyard watching a circle of prisoners – they were mostly old men, and, I think, Jews – going round and round, in the snow on hands and knees. It was like some ghastly children’s game, and was conducted in complete silence. When it was finished the prisoners stumbled to their feet and were whipped indoors and there was nothing left except a beaten path in the snow.

  In the new year, I was moved, with a few other prisoners. No one told us where we were going, but I was quite certain, in my own mind, that we were being taken out into the country to be quietly disposed of. If I hadn’t been sure of it, I should not have taken the risk I did. We weren’t handcuffed, but there were more guards than prisoners. As the train was rattling along, at quite a fast pace, through the wooded country, south of Buda, I threw myself through the window. The guards made the mistake of trying to grab me instead of shooting me. By the time they had got hold of their guns again I was rolling down the embankment and they had been carried past me. I don’t know how soon they managed to stop the train, but by that time I was in the comparative safety of the woods, my clothes torn to bits, but all in one piece.

  I walked through those woods, by night, for three nights. My sojourn in the Margit Korut hadn’t made me any fitter and on the morning of the third day, when I could only just crawl, I crawled into Lisa’s garden.

  Lisa’s father is a professor of toxicology and a remarkable man. He hates the Germans and the Russians, but the Russians more, because he recognises them as the real danger. He fears no one and behaves according to his lights.

  I stayed there for six months, nominally hidden at the back of the loft (which was where my bed was put) but actually living as a member of the family. I stayed six months because it took me that time to get fit. I had picked up some bug in prison which attacked my stomach. Professor Prinz injected me with different by-products of kaolin, and insisted on my taking plenty of exercise. “If you lie about,” he said, “it encourages the germs.” So I chopped wood in the back yard. It was touch and go, but in the end this novel therapy won out, and I got back my weight and strength.

  In early September I left them and walked through the country south of Pecs and down to the Drava, which is near the Yugoslav frontier. I swam the river one warm night with my clothes in a bundle on my head, and dressed on the other bank. It was my third war-time frontier crossing, and, as it turned out, much the easiest.

  The Professor, who thought on international lines, already knew a good deal about the rising star of Tito and his introductions steered me into the great man’s entourage. Here the first person I spoke to was an officer in my own regiment, who had been seconded to the Partisans. I had never really liked him before (I shall suppress his name) and I liked him even less when he assumed, without consulting me, that my one desire would be to help him fight his part of the War.

  “But my dear fellow,” he said, “you’re an English officer. Fate has sent you here.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “But I’m not playing. All I want now is to get back to England and sleep in my own bed.” (I think the truth is that I was suffering from a cumulative morale breakdown, more insidious than any physical upset and taking a lot longer to get over. I should not assert with any confidence that I’ve entirely got over it to this day.)

  In the end, and with very bad grace, I was taken to the coast and put back across the Adriatic in a returning M.T.B. Naturally nobody hurried themselves over me and it was mid-December before the wheels began to turn. I landed at Bari on Christmas Day 1943. Here I ran into someone with some sense, who put me straight on to an aeroplane and sent me back to England.

  Chapter VIII

  A JOURNEY IN THE PRESENT

  Some of this I told Trüe as we sat in the summer-house. The easy bits. When I reached England I had suffered so much at the hands of interrogators, official and unofficial, that I had got little sequences off by heart and they tripped out readily, like a favourite after-dinner story, worn a bit thin with repetition but nice and smooth.

  When I reached the end I realised that I had two listeners. Besides Trüe there was Lisa who had perched herself on the bank behind the summer-house.

  “If you’re quite finished entertaining the jeune fille,” she said, “I’ve got a message for you. Lady wants you.”

  “If it’s all that urgent, you could have given it to me without sitting there eavesdropping.”

  “But I love hearing you tell it,” she said. “Never, never, do I get tired of it.”

  “There is no need to sneer,” said Trüe. “And he was telling it to me, privately. Not to you.”

  “I am sorry if I intruded. Next time I must knock.”

  I left them at it. In the hall I met Major Piper. He was coming down the stairs and looked pleased with himself.

  “Morning, Waters,” he said.

  “If you’ve been talking to Lady, as I gather you have,” I said, “you are perfectly well aware that my name is not Waters.”

  “Matter of fact,” said the Major, “knew it all along. See you soon.”

  He tripped away down the steps into the forecourt, whiffling his stick.

  Buffoon.

  By the time I reached Lady I was in a cold temper.

  “Before you start telling me what I can do and what I can’t do,” I said belligerently, “let me tell you something. I’ve made up my mind. I’m going to see Thugutt tonight. All I want from you is a decent map and I can find my own way.”

  “Of course,” said Lady. “But why a map? I had already arranged for a guide.”

  “Oh, you had, had you,” I said, feeling deflated, and looking for some further cause of offence. “About time too,” was all I could think of.

  Lady grinned like a cat. It always pleased him to get someone on the wrong foot.

  “The delay is regretted. Normally this journey affords no difficulty at all. There are men in the frontier trade who make it six times a week. But recently there have been complications. Unforeseen complications.”

  He wandered across to the map.

  “Unofficially the frontier has been shut. Unofficially, but quite effectively Why, I do not know. The Hungarians have staged an exercise for their so-called Western Army. It has been going on for three days.”

  “Just why should that worry me? I don’t want to go into Hungary at all. Thugutt lives in Yugoslavia.”

  “That would be a valid argument if the frontier was a nice straight line and if it were on the plain. Unfortunately it is far from straight and far from flat. In fact the only easy way to Thugutt’s used to involve two crossings of the Hungarian frontier. That is now impossible. But we are not idle. An alternative route has been worked out. It involves its own hazards. I think you will find it amusing. I believe that rock climbing is one of your numerous accomplishments.”

  “When do I start?”

  “Young Franz Schneidermeister is taking you. He will be here at seven
o’clock.”

  I thought a bit about footwear and decided in the end to stick to my rubbers. It didn’t look like rain, and anyway I couldn’t have got hold of a set of nails and broken them in by seven o’clock that evening. Franz turned up to time and we set out. He was a pleasant youth, and had, as I soon noticed, all the tricks of the mountaineer’s trade, including the deceptive, short paced, shuffling stride which seems slovenly on the flat but takes you up mountains at a pace you need to be very fit indeed to keep up with.

  He didn’t talk a lot. We started by making a long cast back, into the foothills, striking almost due west, and keeping off all roads. Then, very slowly, we veered south, and began to climb. We must have made a seven mile point from Obersteinbruck (it was every bit of ten on the ground) before we halted. We had reached an outcrop of rock, shaped like a fish standing on its head; and here we rested, and Franz smoked a cigarette.

  “Harder now,” he said, with a grin.

  We turned almost back on our tracks and began to climb steeply. Night had come whilst we rested. The moon would not be up for another two hours. I kept one eye carefully on Franz’s white shirt collar, which bobbed before me in the darkness like a rabbit’s scut and the other on my footholds. It was difficult to judge, but we seemed to be running head on into a wall of rock.

  Suddenly, incredulously, I found I was treading on railway sleepers.

  It wasn’t old, disused line either. The metal rail of the single track was gleaming in the starlight.

  Franz stopped for me to catch up with him and we squatted down beside each other.

  “Where the hell does this line go?” I said. “And what construction gang of angels flew up here with it? Don’t tell me it takes us through the mountains into Yugoslavia.”

  Franz was enjoying my bewilderment.

  “It goes through the mountains—yes. But not into Yugoslavia. No. We are in Yugoslavia already.”