The Great Escape by Paul Brickhill Page A

But you must never salute without a cap on (except in the U.S.), and there were only a few caps in the whole of North Camp. So whenever Lindeiner came into the compound, the bare-headed prisoners who passed him would nod politely, and the impeccable Prussian would salute the scruffy prisoner who, like as not, had a great hole in the seat of his pants and a two days’ stubble because he’d been using the same razor blade for a month. It was intriguing situation, a touch of ritual and civilized sanity.
    And next day the Kommandant would issue a routine order emphasizing to all guards the necessity to shoot anyone who poked his nose over the warning wire. (Not many of the guards needed prompting. The bombing was hurting them too much.)
    Pieber was another good German. Actually he was Austrian, but that didn’t count. A lot of people said Pieber was two-faced, and perhaps he was. His brotherly love was half opportunism, but the other half was due to a kind, if not very stout, heart. He liked to be on good terms with everyone.



Chapter 6

    Roger went in search of Travis and found him in his room filing a broken knife into a screw driver.
    “Can you make me a rifle?” he asked, and Travis stared at him.
    “It’s for show, not for shooting,” Bushell explained.
    “What sort of a rifle exactly?”
    “German one. Imitation. We’ve got a new show on. D’you remember the time just before we moved they took a mob out from East Camp to be deloused?”
    “Yes,” said Travis. “Someone on a new purge came in with wogs all over him.”
    “That’s it,” said Roger. “I think we can put on a couple of unofficial ones. We’ve got to have some Goons to go as escort. Guest is making the uniforms. You’re going to make their guns.”
    “They’d have to be terribly good to pass the gate
Postens
, Roger,” Travis said slowly. “I don’t know that we can do it.”
    Roger swiveled his twisted eye on him. “I want them in a week,” he said, and walked out.
    Travis, McIntosh, and Muller tried to put on paper an accurate plan of a German military carbine and found they didn’t have a clue about the detail and dimensions. Muller went and got Henri Picard out of the forgery factory. Picard, a young Belgian, was one of the best artists in the camp. Muller’s idea appealed to him, and he went away and cut a rough pair of calipers out of a piece of tin.
    Coming off appell that afternoon Muller started chatting to one of the guards, and Picard stood just behind very carefully measuring with his calipers the width and depth of various parts of the carbine slung over the guard’s shoulder. Then he stood beside him and calculated the length of the rifle, noting where the barrel came to about the height of his head and where the butt finished by his thighs. For the next day he cautiously trailed several guards drawing in rough detail parts of the gun.
    Travis had noticed that about one in every three hundred bedboards was made of beech instead of pine, and Williams toured every hut and swiped every beech board he could find. The boards weren’t thick enough to make a rifle, so they sawed and carved out each rifle in two halves, glued them together, and clamped them to set in vises made out of reinforced ping-pong net-posts. They carved out in wood the parts that were supposed to be metal, barrel, breech, and bolt, and rubbed and polished them with a lump of graphite brought in by a tame German till they looked like blue gun metal. The wooden parts that were really wood they stained with tan boot polish and rubbed and rubbed till it looked perfect.
    The clips around the barrels Muller made from strips cut off a metal jug; he used bent nails for the sling clips and belts for the slings. Muller didn’t think the polished wooden barrel looked quite perfect enough so he melted down the silver paper from cigarette packs into lead and cast a proper barrel end in a soap mold. He polished it with graphite until it
was
perfect.
    By happy