Free The Great Escape by Paul Brickhill Page B

not forget that you are our prisoners. Do not expect too much.”
    “Don’t forget you’ll be our prisoners one day,” Axel said, with flippant menace, though the Keen Type did not need much reminding. Axel had been wedging the thought into his mind for a couple of weeks.
    “It’d help us all,” Axel went on, “if we knew when we were going to be searched. We could have things a little more orderly, and you wouldn’t have to waste so much time going through all the mess. Be a help to you too.”
    “You ask too much,” said Keen Type, shaking his head in fright at the thought.
    Axel carefully brought up the subject again the next day, but it was a fortnight before he got Keen Type to tell him what huts were to be searched in the next few days, and after that it was easy. Roger nearly always got at least a day’s notice of searches, and it was just a question of smuggling verboten stuff out of the hut next on the list, usually to the hut that was last searched. That was the safest spot of all. Once the ferrets had searched a hut it was usually immune till all the other huts had been searched and its turn came up again. It suited us.
    “There’s madness in their method,” said Roger with satisfaction.
    The contacts got more than information out of their German friends. There were a lot of things we wanted, and a prisoner’s opportunities for shopping are limited. If Plunkett wanted maps or Travis wanted some tool, Roger passed it on to Valenta, and Valenta told his contact men. Once a contact had his German well trained, it wasn’t difficult.
    A bearded young man called Thompson worked in the kitchen block and was practically blood brothers with the little German clerk who checked the rations there. He was a nice little German who’d been a juggler in a circus before the war and traveled around the world a couple of times as a steward on boats and had no illusions about any nation, including his own.
    Sitting over a brew one day, Thompson had a tantrum and smashed his cup on the floor.
    “I’m going nuts in this place,” he moaned. “I’ll be no bloody good when the war’s over. I’ll be wire-happy in a strait jacket.”
    “I would rather be here in your shoes than at the Russian Front,” said the little German philosophically. “You are better off than some. There’s an old Arabic proverb that says, ‘I cried because I had no boots till I saw a man who had no feet.’”
    “I’d rather be flying again,” Thompson said dolefully, “even if I did get the chop. At least I wouldn’t be sitting on my arse all day being useless and thinking too much. I want something to do.”
    “You can study your German,” said the little clerk grinning. “Your grammar sometimes amazes me.”
    “Reminds me too much of being in here,” said Thompson. “I’d like to take up drawing again. I used to do it at school, and it was very soothing.”
    The little German nodded approvingly.
    “Only I haven’t got anything to draw with,” said Thompson plaintively. “Look, could you get me some drawing paper and nibs and Indian ink?”
    The German looked doubtful. “You’re not allowed to have pens,” he said.
    “They’ll never know. I won’t leave them around, and if the ferrets did find them, they’d only confiscate them. They only cost a couple of marks, and I could pay you with some coffee and chocolate.”
    The German promised to think it over, and Thompson prodded him for a couple of days till one day the little clerk produced three drawing nibs, a little bottle of ink, and a dozen sheets of cartridge paper. He was nervous about it but went off happily with some cigarettes and coffee stuffed in his pockets. Thompson delivered the drawing materials to Tim Walenn in his forgery factory.
    “It was a piece of cake,” he said. “I’ll get him to bring in some more in a couple of weeks.”
    The first time was always the hardest, but once a man had done it, overcome his scruples, and found it easy and