The Great Escape Read Online Free Page B

won’t get away with it again. I’m telling you that if you get out once more and they catch you I think they’ll shoot you.”
    “If I get out again they won’t catch me,” Roger said, and went off into another tirade about the Gestapo, upsetting Von Masse so much that he forgot to search him — which was what Roger had banked on. He brought his suit into the compound, planning to use it on his next break.
    This was a changed Roger — not the old boisterous soul who thought escape was good, risky sport like skiing. When he skied he used to take one course straight down at uniform, maximum speed, swearing like a trooper. Now he was moodier, and the gaze from that twisted eye was more foreboding. In Berlin he’d seen the Gestapo torturing people, and he did not tolerate Germans any more. By now he’d been behind the wire nearly three years, and his frustrated energy was focusing on the people responsible. He cursed all Germans indiscriminately (except Von Masse), but inside it was a clear, cool-headed hatred and it found sublimation in outwitting them.
    With Buckley and Wings Day gone, he took over as Big X.



Chapter 1

    It looked like a long war, and the Germans were building a new compound at Sagan. In the pine woods across the
Kommandantur,
gaunt Russian prisoners had felled some trees to clear a patch and workmen were putting up the long, wooden huts.
    “You will be happier there,” said Hauptmann Pieber, the lageroffizier, who had stopped by the wire to welcome Roger to Stalag Luft III. Pieber, who had known Bushell at Barth, was a kindly little man with dueling scars on his cheeks and a sentimental heart. If he’d been lageroffizier in hell and had seen you brought in screaming he’d have blinked tenderly behind his glasses and wished you a felicitous sojourn.
    “Most of you will be going to the new compound,” he added. “It will be a happier new year for you. You will have taps in your huts and even lavatories.”
    “A change,” said Roger sarcastically, “is as good as a holiday. When are we moving?”
    “I think March,” Pieber said, and Roger, eyeing the snow that hung on the ugly wire, was thinking of summer, the escape season.
    He called on Wally Floody, and the collected Fanshawe, Crump Ker-Ramsay, and the others.
    “If the bloody Goons don’t rupture themselves, we’ll be in the new compound by spring,” he said. “We’re going to get cracking on schemes now. My idea is to dig three major tunnels simultaneously and get about five hundred men on the job. The Goons might find a couple of them but we ought to make it with at least one. What d’you think?”
    The conference lasted two hours with all of them shooting out ideas, some wild, some good. When it broke up they had the basic points decided — three tunnels thirty feet deep with underground railways and workshops, mass forging of passes, a tailor shop, mass-produced compasses and maps, and a huge intelligence and security organization. A year ago it would have seemed impossible, but they had been learning the hard way for a long time and now they knew what they could do.
    Roger took the details to Massey, the senior British officer, and the group captain, resting his game leg on his bunk and drawing on a pipe, listened with satisfaction but made a disturbing suggestion.
    “Look, Bushell,” he said. “You’ve been out twice now and nearly made it. The Gestapo think you’re a saboteur and would be happy to get something more on you. Lie low for a while and leave it to the others. I don’t want you getting a bullet in the back of the head.”
    “I won’t, Sir,” said Bushell. “This is going to be a long job, and if we get out they’ll have forgotten about me. I’ll worry about that when the time comes if you don’t mind.”
    “You’ll be worrying before then if they think you’re working on tunnels. You’ll be off to Kolditz,” Massey said.
    “They’re not catching me this time.” Roger was quite confident.