Free The Great Escape by Paul Brickhill

runner warned Axel. By the end of the week, Axel and the ferret were walking up and down together chatting for an hour. Gradually they got on to the war, Axel staying always on neutral ground, regretting the bombing and the suffering on both sides.
    “It’s ridiculous,” he said. “Here are we, two ordinary people talking as civilized people, and if I put a foot over the warning wire you have to shoot me.”
    The Keen Type laughed.
    “I have shot no one yet,” he said mildly.
    “But you would!”
    “Only in the leg,” said the Keen Type, “and with regret.”
    “That doesn’t make it any more civilized.”
    “The bombing is not very civilized either” — this rather resentfully.
    “We didn’t start it,” said Axel, and veered off what could only be a bitter subject. “What are you going to do after the war?”
    The ferret laughed without humor. “Why worry now? I don’t think it’s ever going to end, and if it does I probably won’t see it.”
    “Look,” said Axel, “when it’s over we’re going to need the co-operation of Germans who weren’t mad Nazis. You won’t be an enemy then.”
    The ferret considered the delicate implication but did not answer. Neither did he think to deny, as normally he automatically would, the clear inference that Germany was going to lose.
    Axel took him to his room for the first time next day for a cup of coffee. “X” gave the room a little extra ration for this, and whenever they wanted hot water for a brew they could claim time on the stove, no matter how many other pots were on it.
    The others in the room, Dave, Laurie, Nellie, and Keith gave Keen Type a casual welcome. He sat among them with a hot brew, a biscuit, and a cigarette. It was more comfortable than padding around the dust of the compound, and it was interesting to hear the British and American point of view. It was a soldier’s privilege — his only one — to grumble, but you couldn’t grumble in the German Army unless you were tired of life and wanted to go to the Russian Front. Keen Type had a lot that he hadn’t been able to get off his chest, and now he had a sympathetic and safe audience, and he spoke with more and more freedom.
    “What can we Germans do?” he said, after a week, sitting with his coffee and nibbling a piece of chocolate from a food parcel. “Against Hitler and the Gestapo — nothing.”
    “I’ll tell you what you can do,” Axel got up and sat down on the bunk beside him. “You can realize that the war is lost, and nothing you do can help that. The sooner it’s over the better. We’re not going to be enemies forever. Start regarding us as friends now.” He added quietly, “We won’t be forgetting our friends.”
    The duty pilot checked the Keen Type into the compound just after appell the next morning, and the runner slid off to warn Axel. Then he saw that the Keen Type seemed to be following him so he shied off. The ferret went straight into 105, knocked on Axel’s door, and put his head around the corner. “Keen Type here,” he said with a friendly grin. “Can I come in?”
    He stayed a couple of hours, and then he excused himself, saying he’d better put in an appearance in the compound or Glemnitz would be wondering what he was doing. He was much more leisurely this time in his patrolling. He reported to Axel’s room every day after that for a brew, and when he reluctantly went out into the compound again he had a new benevolence. After a while Roger took him off the danger list.
    Valenta had detailed a German-speaking contact to every ferret and administrative German who came into the compound. The contact made friends with his man, fed him biscuits, brews, and cigarettes, and listened sympathetically to his grumbles and worries.
    Funny people, the Germans. When you got them in a bunch they were all Nazis (they had to be), but when you got the little people by themselves and worked on them for a while they didn’t have any morale underneath. Inside