The Sound of His Horn Read online

  We were dive-bombed and sunk off Crete in 1941, and I had two years in a camp in Eastern Germany: Oflag XXIX Z. Very familiar it all grew to me, that very little world: barbed wire, of course, jerry-built huts, too cold in winter, too hot in summer, the messy washing-places, the smelly latrines, the light sandy soil, the black pine-forest in the distance and the goons on the sentry-perches: all the little contrivances and tricks and studies and inventions that seemed so important to us--well, that were important when your world was reduced to such dimensions.

  I flattered myself that I stood prison life a good deal better than most people. I'm never really unhappy anywhere if I can find something to do with my hands, and it's surprising what a busy artisan you can turn yourself into in such circumstances if you have a bent that way. I'm really proud of some of the things I made out of old tins. I kept my mind working objectively, too. I set out to re-learn my Greek. It would have been more sensible, perhaps, to learn German, but I suppose the Greek appealed to me because it seemed so clean and fresh and had nothing to do with the camp.

  Well, I mention this just to indicate that I was a fairly cheerful prisoner. Of course, I missed getting my right amount of exercise, but, considering the low diet, I probably did well enough on the gymnastics we organised. Then, I had no particular family troubles. I got letters from my mother and Elizabeth as regularly as anyone got letters, and as long as those two were all right I had nothing more of that sort to worry about. True, you might say that the enforced company of one's own sex alone is a deprivation that might set up mental strains--but I don't know: it was the same for me as for everybody else; one thought of the pleasures of dalliance, of course, but I think it helps you to take the holiday from them more philosophically if you've had a normal fair share of those pleasures before you go into the bag. It seemed to trouble the boys most; not chaps of my age.

  No, looking at it quite honestly and objectively--and a prison camp is a good place in which to measure deviations from the norm of behaviour--I would have said that I'd have been one of the last to go off my rocker. But there it is. I did. Of course, it may have been the shock--the electric shock or whatever it was that I got: I'm coming to that. But there again, I'd had far worse shocks before. I'd been torpedoed twice in three months in the North Sea, not to mention the odd bomb. Those jolts shook my body far more than the shock I got at the fence at Hackelnberg, but they did not unhinge my mind.

  Ah well! You'd not believe the times I've been over the evidence for my sanity during these two years, and the care with which I've sifted it to find the little flaw, the sign of hidden weakness, and I never can find it. I ought to; I ought to be able to find out why I went out of my mind for a period, because, don't you see, that would be the best proof of sanity--not my own sanity alone, but the sanity of all this order that we believe in, the proper sequence of time, the laws of space and matter, the truth of all our physics; because you see, if I wasn't mad there must be a madness in the scheme of things too wide and wild for any man's courage to face.

  And it's ironical to remember that I was looked on as the steadiest, sanest, most reliable old horse in the whole camp. There was the Escape Committee--the best brains among the senior officers: they could judge a man better than most of your psychiatrists. They, with all their experience of crack-brained schemes, would have spotted my flaw if anyone could have done. On the contrary, I had a part, as adviser or assistant, in pretty well every attempt at escape that was made. I became a sort of consultant to planners, the chap whose expert advice was sought before a plan was put up to the Escape Committee for sanction.

  Escape, of course, was the medium, as it were, in which all our thoughts existed; our little occupations and amusements were the surface waves of life and the study of escape the sea that buoyed up all we did.

  In practice all escape plans were variations of one method. There was only one way of solving the basic problem of passing the wire. That was moling--tunnelling. I had a hand in the planning of many tunnels and was a member of many different combines for digging and hiding the earth; but there was not one successful escape from Oflag XXIX Z up to the time when my partner and I made our attempt.

  I won't go into all the details of the planning and the digging. They'd prove just the opposite of what I'm trying to prove to you by this story, because that tunnel was exceedingly well planned and well dug. The whole camp backed us to succeed.

  We did it on a night towards the end of May, an hour before moonrise. The exit of our tunnel was a hundred yards beyond the wire, leaving us a fifty-yard dash to a tongue of the pine-forest. The simplest application of the principles of tunnelling, we argued, was the likeliest to succeed. Most plans failed because the tunnel was not taken far enough beyond the wire. The labour was so heavy and the time so long that once you were under the wire the temptation to stop digging and risk the longer dash was too strong to be resisted. We resisted it, and succeeded at least so far as to gain the black concealment of that tongue of pine forest without the alarm being given. We had used the old cover of getting our confederates inside to start a fight in one of the blocks in order to distract the guards' attention: a very old trick, but it worked.

  Then, we had resisted the temptation also to try to plan the next stages in detail. Both of us, Jim Long and I, had our own ideas of the best way to travel in Germany in war-time and we agreed to go our own way about it. Stettin was the place to make for: there we should make contact with someone in the underground escape organisation and get a Swedish ship. That was the broad outline, and we left it broad. Vague and hopeful you may say, but the result proved that it could be done. Long traveled to Stettin on the train, stayed a week in a sailors' lodging-house there, was smuggled on board a Swedish ore ship and got clear away. I wasn't so lucky.

  We both approved of travelling by train, but we differed on where to board the thing. Jim, who spoke both German and French very well, proposed to walk to the nearest station to the camp, show the faked French worker's papers he had, buy his ticket and trust to the very ordinariness of the proceeding to carry him through. My own plan was to get as far away from the camp as possible before boarding the train. I picked on Daemmerstadt, which I reckoned I could reach in two nights' walking, lying up in the woods during the intervening day. I was going to travel as a Bulgarian Merchant Navy officer going to join his ship at a Baltic port: my Royal Navy uniform a little altered would pass, I considered, as something almost any German would believe to be the fashion in the Bulgarian Merchant Navy, and our document boys had provided me with a convincing set of papers, including a very outlandish and Balkan-looking one in Cyrillic characters. My major risk was that I might be tackled by someone who knew Bulgarian, but I calculated that the odds were in my favour. For the rest I had four days' rations contributed by our supporters, a button compass which the Germans hadn't found when they picked me up on the beach, some German money and a good sketch-map provided by the Escape Committee.

  Jim and I said goodbye hurriedly in the dark of the trees while the hullabaloo of the sham fight was still going on inside the camp. The dogs were barking like fury and some of the goons were shouting, but no one turned a searchlight on our side of the wire. Phase Two of the operation seemed to have succeeded perfectly.

  I had memorised my map and had my course very clear in my mind. The first part of the first night's journey would be the worst: it meant steering due east through the pine-forest, off the tracks, for a distance that I estimated at three hours' walking, until I dropped into a by-road, which I should follow for four or five miles, going roughly north-east, then swing east again to avoid a village, and go by small lanes on a zig-zag course across a wide plain, very thinly inhabited, to another belt of woods, which, I reckoned, I should reach by the first light There I intended to hide and rest The following night I should continue through alternate forest and clearing until about dawn I should come to the railway just south of Daemmerstadt.

  I had no illusions about the difficulty of push
ing through forest at night, and I had tried to get in as much road-travelling as I thought was safe. I felt I might risk an encounter with peasants or the civil police on the small country roads, for the news of our escape would possibly be late in reaching them and I was cheerfully confident of being able to give a passable imitation of a foreign first mate who'd been on the booze and missed his train, or got out at the wrong station and was setting off to find the right one. I've met a number of such in my time.

  There's something to be said for pine-forests. They're infernally dark, but they're much freer of undergrowth than broad-leaved woods. It was not at all easy going on that first leg of my hike and I began to feel that I had underestimated the effect two years of prison fare had had on my strength, but, though it took me nearer five hours than three to reach my road, I did reach it, and, what surprises me more when I look back on it, pretty well at the exact spot where I had reckoned I should. True, I had my compass, but I think I must have had more than my due of what they used to say was the most useful of the Mariner's Aids to Navigation--a bit of damn good luck.

  It was a relief to be on the road and to have something to check my position by. I rested a little and ate something, but I dare not take it easy if I was to get into the forest again by daylight. Well, you can imagine the ache of that night hike for yourself: it was worse than any of the trips we ever did together in the old days. Every time I saw a car's headlights I had to creep into an orchard or crouch in the ditch till it was past, and those changes from straight rhythmic slogging became more and more of an agony as the night went on. Once or twice, when I forced myself to get up out of the ditch again, I thought I should never get my legs to work or beat down the burning pain of my blisters again. I can tell you, by the time the sky was turning grey I didn't much care how soon they recaptured me. All I really cared about was stopping walking and getting a drink.

  That was my second miscalculation. I had not brought a bottle of water with me so as not to have too much to carry; I had reckoned that in Europe one would never be far from some moderately potable water. It's not so: at least, it seems not to be so in Eastern Europe. I was dodging the villages, of course, and in that sandy region I suppose you don't get brooks and ponds, only wells, and those, naturally, are where the farms are.

  I reached my further belt of forest without any very serious alarm, though the sun was well up when I got there. I could see a small farm not far away, with a very tempting-looking cattle-trough in a paddock, but I daren't try to sneak down and have a drink: the day was too far advanced, and even though I could see no one about, there was sure to have been a dog. The best I could do was to limp up into the shade of the pine-trees and crawl about gathering and chewing blades of the pale grass that grew here and there under them.

  I rested all that day in the coolest place I could find; I was too parched and sick with fatigue to eat, but I slept--in the uneasy way you do when you are overstrained. The blisters and the aching muscles and the drought of your throat seem to stimulate your brain to activity, while the will, or whatever it is that selects and disciplines thought, is too weary to assert itself. You know the feeling--as if your mind were a cinema projector that has suddenly become animate, taken charge of the proceedings, kicked the operator downstairs and settled down to churn out miles and miles of film for its own devilish amusement, accelerating all the time. I can't remember any of the details of the near-nightmares I had that day in the fringes of that pine-forest, but I can remember the burden of them on my mind, the awful number and speed of them.

  Well, perhaps it was that that began it--the great physical strain and the acute anxiety underlying it all. It had not occurred to me that I shouldn't be strong enough. Perhaps I should have stuck with Jim Long.

  When it was dusk I pulled myself together and set off again. But this night it was very different. I had lost confidence in my physical ability to carry the thing through, and that was a great shock to me. It was the first time in my life that my body had refused to do something I demanded of it, and the revolt demoralised me. Instead of studying to economise my strength I perversely over-drove myself. And it's no wonder, I suppose, if I got off my course. I had to steer due north, but time and again I came to deep gulleys and ravines that made me wander far off to one side or the other, looking for easy crossing-places; sometimes I saw a light in a clearing and still had determination and courage enough to make a painful detour instead of groping straight towards it and giving myself up.

  My memory became confused; the clearings were the only things I had to check my course and progress by and I could not remember how many I had passed or identify them on the map. I used up all my matches trying to study the thing, but I was in such a state of exhaustion and distress that I could scarcely read, let alone reason.

  At length, I came into a sandy track on which the moonlight fell clear and strong. It ran somewhat east of north, but the smooth straight way and the light, after the roughness of the dark forest, were such a temptation to me that I could not resist following it. There were wagon-ruts and hoofmarks in the sand. I supposed the track must lead to a farm, but I was beyond caring. I trudged straight along it.

  Little by little, I remember, my mind became calmer, and no doubt because of the easier going, and the regular rhythm that was possible, I fell into a kind of automatic action. I began the old, childish trick of repeating something to myself to keep time with my footfalls: meaningless phrases at first, and then, verses. You know the ballad of the Nut Brown Maid? Four lines of that went thump, thump, thump, through my brain, like the dull beat of an engine carrying me on God knows how many miles:

  "For an Outlaw this is the law,

  That men him take and bind,

  And hanged be without pitee,

  To waver with the wind."

  It's still a wonder to me that under the mechanical, syllabic pounding I made of the verses I did think of the sense sometimes, and I felt a queer, new pathos in them. That coupling of outlawry and pity: I had never thought of that before. The man who wrote that ballad knew that outlaws weren't romantic heroes, all they wanted was pity. Ah, the great cruelty of outlawry in shutting the gates of common men's pity against you.

  Had that narrow track led me to a farm, I think I would have leant with my head upon the door and begged for the peasants' pity; but it led to no human habitation.

  After a very long time, I felt the dark walls of the forest recede from me. I stopped and became aware that my track had led me up on to a low wide ridge, bare of trees, covered with coarse grass as high as my knees. I have often wondered how much of that scene I really saw that night. I can say what I later knew to be there--or thought I knew. I know exactly how it looked to the eyes I had on the other side--if you understand me--but I'd give anything to be able to recollect precisely what I saw with my real vision--the vision I'm using now. The trouble is, I suppose, that I had been going gradually round the bend all that night. The fatigue and anxiety had found out my flaw and were extending it all the time, until, just about when I reached that open ridge the fissure in my mind was complete. When the earth is opening under you, what decides which side you jump to?

  The moonlight seemed bright enough. I thought I saw a long, grassy hog's-back running north-west and south-east. The grass was ungrazed and untrodden, grey under the moon with the white grass-flowers seeming to make a milky shimmer over it. My track had faded away. It occurred to me, I know, that for some time past I had not been following the wagon-ruts, but where they had turned off I could not recall.

  I must have advanced to the middle of that broad open ride--fire-lane, or whatever it was--before I stopped, because I could see the forest on the other side, sloping far away, down from the bare ridge. But no real moonlight, in Europe, at least, could have been strong enough to allow me to see those other woods so clearly: it was as if I saw them under a fresh, gay summer's morning, and ah--they were such different woods; not black, monotonous pine-forest, but a fair greenwood of oak and b
eech and ash and sweet white-flowering hawthorn. It was so enormous a contrast: the difference between night and day, between prison and freedom, between death and life. And looking down from my low ridge, I could just see, over the tops of the nearer trees on that side, a pleasant open glade and in that glade the pale shining of water in a little lake. It was agony to set my legs in motion once more; it felt as if my muscles had turned to stone; but I moved, straight down towards that glint of water.

  There was one other thing I saw, and, again, I'd give so much to know which eyes I saw it with; for in my heart I'm still not convinced that the shock I received was real. But all I know is that I did notice something there, between me and those inviting woods, something at odds with experience; a phenomenon that would have been unremarkable enough in a dream and which might yet be not impossible in reality. I felt, as I stumped so painfully down that gentle slope, that in front of me there was a kind of weaker light within the moonlight, some zone of faint luminosity stretching far away on either hand, not straight, like a searchlight beam, but slightly meandering as though it followed the contour of the ridge. I know it's inconsistent with physical laws that so feeble a radiance could be visible in the stronger light of the moon, and yet I swear I was aware of it. Was I outlawed indeed by then, not from man's laws but from Nature's?

  Nothing could have kept me from trying to reach that water. Once over the first agony of moving my limbs again, I broke into a stumbling run. I must have gone like a blind man, with my arms stretched out, groping, in front of me, for it was in my hands that I felt the shock first. It was a searing burn across my hands and wrists, then a shock that jarred along every bone in my body and shattered its way upwards, tearing out at the top of my skull; my eyes were pierced by a pain of yellow light, and my body, bereft of all its weight and cohesion, went whirling and spiralling upwards like a gas into the dark.