Читать книгу The Man Who Was Saturday - Patrick Bishop - Страница 20

The adrenaline that had carried Neave through his ‘suicidal’ stagger to the docks soon dissolved. His injury was serious and he had no choice but to accept defeat. He lay on his stretcher in the pungent gloom of the cellar ward, listening to the groans of his comrades, depressed, and fearful of what might happen next. In the morning, the Germans moved them to a makeshift field hospital in the Calais-St-Pierre covered market.1 There was nothing to do but brood and endlessly go over the details of the battle. The siege of Calais had taught many brutal lessons. Neave’s schooldays and TA experiences had made him sceptical of authority and disinclined to give those who wielded it unquestioning respect. The debacle could only reinforce that attitude. The heartache felt by Churchill and Eden over the decision to sacrifice the garrison was genuine. Nonetheless, their grasp of the situation had been tenuous and their reactions clumsy and slow.

Neave looked and sounded like an Establishment stalwart, but his judgements were often robust when he delivered his verdict on events. ‘Churchill was often wrong about Calais,’ he wrote years later,2 citing as an example an intemperate memo the prime minister sent to his military assistant, General Ismay, on 24 May complaining of what he saw as the lack of enterprise in the defenders and the BEF in breaking the German siege. Churchill in time admitted the injustice of his remarks, but for Neave it was evidence of ‘the terrifying ignorance of those conducting this campaign from Whitehall’.3 If anything, the performance of the army chiefs had been worse. Calais was a ‘melancholy story of … hesitation and bad staff work’, exemplified by the shambles of departure. The manner in which the QVR had been rushed to war was ‘shameful’. Their embarkation recalled the black comedy that suffused the adventures of Evelyn Waugh’s hero Guy Crouchback ‘in which farce and tragedy are intimately combined’. The same went for the tank units, whose ‘orders were depressingly obscure and they had no idea what to expect on arrival at Calais.’

On the other hand, among those fighting on the ground there were more than enough examples of bravery and devotion to duty, carried out in a spirit of humanity and cheerfulness, to preserve the reputation of the British Army and sustain Neave’s belief in the nobility of the profession of arms. His admiration for Claude Nicholson – his spirit of defiance and loyal attempts to execute the confused orders arriving from across the Channel – bordered on hero worship. His devotion to his memory was intensified by the tragic nature of Nicholson’s end – dying in Rotenburg Castle, as a prisoner of war, in June 1943, at the age of forty-four.4

The defenders of Calais had much to feel proud about. They had accepted a hopeless situation without complaint and had fought with great effectiveness and determination. Once again, upper-class men were learning that gallantry was not the preserve of the privileged. Neave recalled how, at a corner of the Rue Edison, Captain Claude Bower of the 60th Rifles had defended a barricade of vehicles and sandbags for hours until he fell, mortally wounded. The street was lashed by machine-gun fire, which made it seemingly impossible for stretcher-bearers to bring him in. Then ‘Rifleman Matthews drove in a truck across the open street. He backed it into position to rescue Bower, but he was already dead. Matthews removed several others badly wounded, and got away unscathed. Those who witnessed this wonderful achievement never forgot it.’5

Six years before, in his school essay making the case against pacifism, Neave had expressed the hope that no Briton would fight for France. Now he and a host of his countrymen had done just that, giving their lives and liberty in defence of a French town. The same could not be said of many of the French troops. Hundreds sheltered in cellars while the battle raged. There was some redemption, though, in the performance of a hard core of patriots, who fought almost to the last man on the ramparts in defence of Bastion 11, determined to preserve ‘the honour of France’. Neave chose to see these men as the true representatives of their nation. He would come to rely on their sort – and their female counterparts – when organising escape and evasion networks on his return to the war.

With capture, Neave had his first encounter with Germans since his 1933 visit to Berlin. The soldiers who guarded him and the medical orderlies who tended his wound seemed civilised enough. But as he recuperated and thought about the future, ‘It was the Nazis I dreaded, not the front-line troops who behaved well to the wounded.’6 He claimed to have remembered the First World escape stories he read as a schoolboy and that his ‘thoughts turned quickly to the chances of avoiding the inevitable journey to a prison camp’. At this early stage, when German control had not yet set hard, escape was easier to pull off and less hazardous than it soon became. Some of the defenders did manage to get away. A group of forty-seven men who had taken shelter under a pier in the port were picked up under fire by the Royal Navy yacht Gulzar in the early hours of 27 May.7 A young Searchlights officer, Lieutenant W. H. Dothie, after leading a dogged resistance from the village of Marck, east of Calais, was finally captured, but escaped from a prisoner-of-war column and eventually made his way back to England after an epic journey by foot, bicycle and boat.8

The impulse to escape, and his adventures trying to do so, are a central part of Airey Neave’s story and identity, and he wrote about them extensively. However, the account was delivered in fits and starts, over a long period and in different forms. Thirteen years after he broke out of Colditz, he published They Have Their Exits, which became a bestseller. He returned to the subject again in 1969, with Saturday at MI9. The first book skates over the period between capture in Calais and arrival at his first proper prisoner-of-war camp, Oflag IX-A/H, in the castle of Spangenberg, deep in central Germany. In the second, though, he faces the episode squarely, owning to the low spirits and doubtful nerve he suffered in the months after Calais. Neave felt sharply the ignominy, not only of the debacle, but of his own insignificant role in the defence, and his recollections are tinged with a faint sense of shame. It was compounded by a feeling that he had not moved quickly enough to try and get away.

Initially, he was too weak to escape. While still recovering in a ward with four other officers in Calais, he was approached by a young French officer, Pierre d’Harcourt, working as a Red Cross orderly, who suggested substituting the live Neave for one of the dead patients who were regularly taken off for burial, but the plan came to nothing.9 Neave had ‘neither the nerve nor the physical strength to make the attempt’, but as his health improved he found that his morale remained low and his resolve weak. In June, he was moved with other wounded to Lille, where the Faculté Catholique had been turned into a POW hospital. The lorry carrying them broke down in the town of Bailleul, twenty miles short of their destination, presenting him with a golden opportunity. While the lorry was being repaired, ‘I wandered unguarded through the streets with other wounded survivors of Calais,’ he wrote. ‘We were welcomed at every door, food and wine was pressed on us, and many offered to hide us from the Germans.’ Lille would become a centre of resistance in Northern France and, had he accepted, there would have been a high chance of success. Instead, ‘At sunset, as the crowds waved and threw flowers in the main square … I suffered myself, to my shame, to be driven off to hospital in Lille.’

Why such meek acceptance? Writing in 1969, he declared that ‘though my thoughts had already turned to escape and its organisation, the weeks in hospital seemed to deprive me of all initiative.’ He also suggested that lack of ‘military training in such matters’ had played a part in his vacillation. He was man enough to admit that ‘this was not a heroic episode in my life.’ He went on to propose that his inaction had in a way been providential, for ‘had it not happened, I might never have escaped from Colditz to England and gained the experience which enabled me to plan the escape of others.’ Once again, amid the dark clouds, Neave could see the silver lining.

In the improvised hospital in the Faculté Catholique, a ‘sombre, red-brick affair with stone floors and a smell of wounds and disinfectant’, he met a man who would later become his partner in the great enterprise to get Allied servicemen out of occupied Europe.10 When they were reunited in London, he recalled how he had last seen him: a ‘pale and strained [figure], playing cards in one of the wards. I remembered his high forehead and bright eyes as he sat on his bed dressed in a tattered shirt and trousers.’ Captain Jimmy Langley of the Coldstream Guards fitted Neave’s romantic ideal of the British warrior. He was slim, intelligent and apparently without fear, and had been captured at Dunkirk.

The Coldstream’s orders were to hold up the Germans while the evacuation was under way. Langley was a platoon commander with ‘3’ Company, 2nd Battalion. The company was led, with what feels today like lunatic determination, by Major Angus McCorquodale, who gave orders for any officer who showed an inclination to retire to be shot. Langley described later how a captain commanding a unit on the company’s right came over to announce that he was planning to withdraw. The Germans were massing for an armoured assault on a bridgehead they were holding and his men were too exhausted to resist.11 McCorquodale ordered him to ‘stay put and fight it out’. The officer replied that his orders from the commanding officer were to retire as and when he saw fit. McCorquodale was having none of it. ‘You see that big poplar tree on the road with the white mile stone beside it?’ he told him. ‘The moment you or any of your men go back beyond that tree we will shoot you.’ The captain departed and McCorquodale picked up a rifle and ordered Langley to get one himself. ‘When I returned with mine he said “Sights at 250. You will shoot to kill the moment he passes that tree …” We had not long to wait before the captain appeared, followed by two men. They stood for a long time by the tree and then the captain walked on. Both our rifles went off simultaneously: he dropped out of sight and the two men ran back.’ This ruthlessness matched the determination with which the company did its duty. Langley was a marksman and accounted for many Germans before losing his arm to a shell. McCorquodale died at his post.

Langley did not let his injury delay his departure. While in Lille, he managed to contact local resisters who got him out of the hospital and took him to Paris. From there he crossed the demarcation line into the Unoccupied Zone. In spring 1941, the Vichy Armistice Commission passed him unfit for any further military service and he was escorted over the Spanish frontier to freedom. Neave and Langley teamed up again when serving in the secret escape and evasion organisation MI9. Though their backgrounds were similar, their characters were not, and their wars as fighting soldiers had taken very different forms.

There was a further contrast in the way they viewed their escapes. Langley claimed to dislike the fact that his return to fight another day ‘would be a matter of some congratulation’ and ‘regarded as an epic of courage and endurance’. He protested that ‘running away hardly came into the category of bravery … travelling by train and hiding in hotels did not call for much endurance.’12

For Neave, escape became his claim to fame, the thing he was most remembered for. He fostered its memory carefully through his books, and thirty years after the event was still giving regular talks to schools and clubs about his adventures. Writing in 1975, after a tour of army bases in Northern Ireland, he could not resist commenting that conditions in ‘one or two are worse than Colditz’.13 As well as his most memorable achievement, escape was also a turning point in his wartime life – the moment when he pulled off a private and bloodless victory over the Germans, restoring his self-respect and making up for his disappointing performance on the conventional battlefield.

The yearning to break free would become a ‘fever’ that mounted the longer he was behind bars.14 But the further he got from France, the harder escape became. While he was still in Lille, a young Frenchwoman who brought flowers and food to the wounded offered to help him and two others – an early example of the courage and patriotism shown by so many of the female resisters he encountered. When senior officers in the hospital heard about the plan, they were ‘lectured severely on the reprisals which might be visited on other wounded’.

It was too late anyway. In late July or early August, he was on the move again, on a ‘grim march through Belgium’, before embarking on a coal barge which chugged up the Scheldt and into the Waal, reaching the Rhine and the German frontier at Emmerich. Along with his belief in providence, Neave had an eye for the karmic re-adjustments that life sometimes delivers. He was pleased to note that his journey as a prisoner took him under the bridge at Nijmegen that he would cross four years later as a victor and see ‘the dead Germans on the sidewalks as we made all speed for Arnhem’.

Oflag – meaning ‘officers’ camp’ – IX-A/H was housed in a schloss overlooking Spangenberg, a small town in the heart of central Germany, 220 miles as the crow flies from the Dutch border, and further still from the French and Swiss frontiers. The castle, a Disneyish concoction with moat and drawbridge, had arched doorways and a clock tower which reminded him of school. The social hierarchy among the prisoners was also built on equally familiar lines, for there were ‘strict codes of behaviour designed for us by our senior officers, and social cliques appeared from the very first day.’

Nearly all prisoners’ memoirs speak of the desolation that descends when the journey is over, the destination is reached and the gates clang shut behind them. Neave’s portrayal of the ‘double tragedy’ of imprisonment was particularly eloquent: ‘First, there is the loss of freedom. Then, since there is no particular crime to expiate, unless it be personal folly, a sense of injustice scars the spirit … The prisoner of war is to himself an object of pity. He feels he is forgotten by those who flung him, so he thinks, into an unequal contest. He broods over the causes of his capture, and to himself and his friends he soon becomes a bore, endlessly relating the story of his last stand.’15

Neave, like many others, seems to have experienced a period of numb acceptance, trying to find a rhythm of life to ease the tight confines of a new universe. He had always felt the urge to write and he tried to alleviate the boredom by starting a novel ‘about the life after death of an eighteenth century peer’ and a ‘superficial’ study of Shakespeare’s sonnets.16 Essays on ‘eccentrics’ and other subjects for the camp publication, produced on a ‘jellygraph’, a gelatin duplicator used to run off school magazines and the like, did not go down well. They were ‘rapidly dismissed as unsuitable’ and Neave ceased his literary efforts. The lesson was that it was ‘dangerous to tamper with the literary views of the average British officer’ and that ‘any attempt at being funny’ in print was ‘doomed to failure and will very likely lead to ostracism’.17

In these first months in Spangenberg, the rather adolescent bolshiness that surfaced in his Oxford days was again to the fore. The mood did not last long. By December he started thinking seriously about escape. Since the camp had opened in October 1939 there had been several attempts by inmates. Flight Lieutenant Howard ‘Hank’ Wardle, a Canadian who joined the RAF shortly before the war, was shot down in his Fairey Battle bomber in April 1940 and was the only member of the three-man crew to survive. In August, just before Neave arrived, he was being taken with other prisoners to a gym outside the castle walls when he scaled a high barricade and slipped away.18 He was captured after twenty-four hours and sent to Colditz, already established as a prison for troublemakers.

Flying Officers Keith Milne and Donald Middleton, two more Canadians serving with the RAF, managed to get through the gates disguised as painters, complete with buckets of whitewash and a ladder. They too were soon recaptured and ended up in Colditz. If these exploits sounded light-hearted, there was a price to pay. According to Pat Reid, who later escaped from Colditz with Wardle, all three ‘suffered badly at the hands of their captors, being severely kicked and battered with rifle-butts’.19

Such efforts were initially seen by the senior British officers in the camp as a threat to good order, inviting reprisals on the rest of the prisoners. Neave wrote that the pioneer escapers were ‘often unpopular … They were considered a disturbing influence in the orderly life of the camp where the pre-war British military and class system was applied from the day of arrival.’20 He blamed the discouraging attitude on low morale, caused by Britain’s poor performance in the war and the debilitating effect of the meagre rations. In the autumn of 1940, Red Cross parcels started to arrive. With that, ‘health and spirits improved, and with it the attitude of senior officers, who no longer claimed that escape was hopeless.’

At some point, Neave was moved with others to a new camp in the woods beneath the castle. The rural setting was a relief after the cold walls of the schloss, and the laughter of children carried to the prisoners from a path that ran by the boundary. The winter of 1940 passed ‘in discomfort, but without great suffering, unless it be of the soul’. The main complaint was food, or the lack of it. The man who in his Eton diary had noted almost every meal he ate was reduced to a diet of bread, soup and root vegetables, cheered only by the occasional scrap of meat or treat from a food parcel. At Christmas, everyone was given a tin of steak-and-kidney pudding. His stomach had shrunk and he could not finish it.21

Early in 1941, there was another move which took him yet further from a friendly frontier. In February, the camp was temporarily closed and all the inmates moved by train to Stalag XX-A, a large prison complex based on a chain of fortresses surrounding the Polish city of Thorn, modern-day Torun, on the banks of the Vistula. Neave says the evacuation was a reprisal for the alleged ill-treatment of German POWs in Canada. The atmosphere and the attitude of the guards had certainly darkened. The new arrivals were met at the station by tanks, searchlights and Field Police with Alsatian dogs. Neave and his fellow officers were housed in semi-darkness in ‘damp, cold, vault-like rooms’, which had once served as ammunition bunkers in one of the forts, built in the nineteenth century to defend Prussia’s eastern borders. The prisoners were the flotsam of a string of British defeats. There were hundreds of survivors of the Norway debacle of May 1940 and many who had been captured at Dunkirk and St-Valery-en-Caux, where the 51st (Highland) Division were forced to surrender. In this ambience of failure Neave felt his resolve harden. ‘From this terrible futility,’ he wrote, ‘I determined to free myself.’22

Prisoners had two basic ways of dealing with incarceration. They could accept their fate and choose a settled existence, waiting for the end of the war and using the unmeasurable days of captivity killing time as best they could or engaging in self-improvement projects for a future that might never arrive. Or they could devote themselves to breaking free. Fatalists vastly outnumbered would-be escapers. An RAF report on Stalag Luft VI, the camp for NCO airmen at Heydekrug in East Prussia, estimated the proportion of escape-minded prisoners at only 5 per cent.23 One of the most determined ‘escapologists’ of the war, the American RAF fighter pilot William Ash, came to the same conclusion. ‘There cannot have been a single POW … who did not think about escaping,’ he wrote.24 In an average camp, about a third would be prepared to lend a helping hand to others’ attempts, by acting as lookouts, for example, forging fake documents or improvising digging implements. However, ‘maybe only 5 per cent were committed to getting outside the wire at all costs.’ And for most of those, one attempt was usually enough, leaving a handful for whom escaping was ‘a way of life’. Prisoners’ stories devote much time to analysing the elements that pushed a man into one group and not the other. They remain hard to define. There was little obvious connection with background, class, political outlook, nationality or even character. Ardent escapers could be introverts or extraverts, intellectuals or hearties.

In the end it came down to an impulse – something that had to be done. Pat Reid, who first wrote the story of Colditz, portrayed it as a supremely intoxicating pursuit on a par with winning the Grand National at Aintree. ‘I can think of no sport that is the peer of escape,’ he wrote, ‘where freedom, life, and loved ones are the price of victory, and death the possible though by no means inevitable price of failure.’25 It was echoed by Ash, who described the urge as something almost beyond his control. ‘Escaping is quite addictive,’ he wrote, ‘and, like all addictive drugs, extremely dangerous.’26

Others cited more elevated motives. Aidan Crawley was a pre-war journalist and intelligence officer who joined the RAF. He was shot down and taken prisoner in North Africa in 1941. He later wrote the official history of escape attempts by airmen, in which he judged that ‘no one could blame those who decided escape was not worthwhile.’27 However, Crawley believed ‘the arguments in favour of trying … were overwhelming.’ It was a self-imposed duty, ‘because the return of a prisoner had considerable military value’. At the very least, he might bring back valuable intelligence about enemy dispositions or the details of potentially useful underground networks. If he was an airman, he could go back into action and his very expensive training would not have gone to waste. This latter argument was often wielded by Neave when justifying the existence of MI9 in its frequent turf wars with other intelligence organisations.

A few weeks after arriving at Thorn, Neave hatched his first serious, thought-out and well-resourced escape plan. Stalag XXa was like a small penitentiary town, with outposts and suburbs and a labour force made up of NCO and ‘other ranks’ prisoners, who the Germans put to work building roads and infrastructure and clearing land for the ever-expanding complex. The practice was within the terms of the Geneva Conventions, though officers were exempted. However, what might at first have seemed to the officers a privilege came by many to be regarded as a curse. Work, however menial, was a distraction from the long empty hours of brooding.

The main compound for non-commissioned prisoners was about four miles from Neave’s cell in the fort. Inside it, there was a wooden hut where a British dentist had his surgery. The Germans allowed British officers to visit every Thursday. It was Neave’s good luck to suffer from inflamed gums, a result of poor diet and his run-down condition, which required regular treatment. The dentist’s hut would be the springboard for his dive for freedom. On his trips back and forth he worked up a plan. Even though Germany and the Soviet Union were still at that time uneasy allies, he reckoned that if he managed to make it to the frontier at Brest-Litovsk, the Russians would treat him well and ‘I should swiftly be ushered into the presence of the British ambassador [in Moscow], Sir Stafford Cripps.’28 It was a fantastic proposition. It meant a journey, via Warsaw, of 300 miles over heavily occupied territory, with a very uncertain reception at the end of it.

As it turned out, breaking out of Thorn was the relatively easy part. But to succeed he still needed help. There was plenty on hand among the soldiers in the work camp. Their ingenuity and selflessness left a deep impression. Every day a party of about a dozen made the four-mile journey from the compound to the fort to carry out maintenance work. Among them were two men who had belonged to Neave’s battery at Calais. Through the messages that they carried back and forth each day, he was able to establish a team of helpers in the work camp to put the operation into action. He planned a phased departure from Stalag XXa. The idea was that he would slip away during a trip to the dentist and get into the compound. There, protected by the inmates, he would lie low until the hue and cry following the discovery that he was missing had died down. Then he would walk out with one of the work parties and hide at the end of the shift. When the coast was clear, he would strike out eastwards, disguised as a workman – Polish or German, depending on who challenged him.

The scheme was bold and ambitious. It needed considerable organisation, precise timing and significant resources in the form of clothing, food, money and documentation. At least a dozen accomplices were needed for it to work. Protocol required that the Senior British Officer, Brigadier N. F. Somerset, was kept informed as the plan matured. Neave had decided that he did not want to travel alone. He was unable to persuade any of his room-mates, who ‘regarded my plans with friendly derision and few could be found who would even discuss them seriously.’ He asked Somerset if he could suggest a companion – one who, like him, spoke some German. Flying Officer Norman Forbes, a Hurricane pilot with 605 Squadron who had been shot down just south of Calais on 27 May 1940 while Neave was spending his first day in captivity, was an excellent candidate. He was a ‘tall, slender man with fair hair’, quick, determined and shrewd. He had also been brought up a Christian Scientist and ‘had faith in the success of our plan’.

By the second week in April everything was in place. Using barter and persuasion, he had assembled an impressive escape kit. His workman’s coat and painter’s trousers he obtained from a British officer who had ‘decided to abandon escaping to read for a degree in Law’. He was one of many who took advantage of the system, operated under the Red Cross, which offered correspondence courses resulting in valid professional qualifications. Neave procured some reichsmarks by selling Player’s cigarettes (tobacco was usually available to prisoners and a universal currency) to a Polish glazier. Rations in the shape of tinned sardines and condensed milk and chocolate came from the food parcels. All were smuggled out of the fort and down to the work camp.

Why had Neave chosen discomfort and danger over acceptance and making the most of a bad situation? Lying on his bunk bed at night as the hours to the escape bid ticked away, he struggled to explain it to himself. ‘I desired only to be free from the terrible monotony of the fort and once outside under the stars I cared little what happened to me,’ he wrote. ‘I dreamed of nights sheltering in the shade of some romantic forest alone in the world. I felt that once outside the camp I should be happy if I were only free for a while.’

On the morning of 16 April 1941, he and Forbes set off under guard for the dentist’s hut, just outside the British prisoners’ compound, four miles from the fort. Under their overcoats, badges had been removed from their battledress tunics so they could pass as ‘other ranks’. Neave left a detailed description of the events of the morning, embellished with literary touches.29 Looking through the waiting room for his turn in the chair, he could ‘see small groups of British prisoners among the pine trees pushing carts of wood, and from the distance came the strains of “Roll Out the Barrel” as a working party set off into the forest … A light breeze blew among the pines.’ The account was written twelve years after the event and it might be asked how he could remember so much. Some moments in our lives embed themselves in our memories, leaving the indelible trace of a smell, a voice, a colour. For Neave, this was surely one of them. His first escape was a landmark of his existence, the point when he at last seized control of his own destiny, in the process scoring a small but immensely pleasing victory over the enemy.

Everything went swimmingly. After his session in the chair, he made way for Forbes. In the waiting room he told the guard he wanted to use the ‘Abort’ and was allowed to go unescorted to the latrine next door. Inside, he stowed his overcoat and retrieved some lengths of wood hidden in the ceiling by his helpers to be used as props in the next phase of the escape. He was soon joined by Forbes and, at a signal from a sergeant who was keeping watch outside, they stepped out, carrying the timber, ostensibly just two ordinary soldiers engaged in some errand. It was a short walk to the main gate of the compound, where the sentry’s attention was distracted by a corporal detailed to engage him in chat, and they passed through, mingling with the other POWs. At the door of a long hut housing warrant officers, Company Sergeant Major Thornborough of the Green Howards, immaculately turned out in spruce uniform and shining boots, grinned and shook their hands. They were left to rest for a bit until Thornborough returned, telling them there was a sight waiting that was not to be missed.

Picking up brushes and buckets so as to look like orderlies off on a fatigue, they followed him across the parade ground. Their escape had been discovered and the guards were angry and indignant. ‘Around us a crowd of British soldiers were laughing and shouting sallies at the Germans,’ he wrote. ‘Furious Germans stamped around … Down the steps of the Kommandantur [administrative headquarters] came agitated German officers gesticulating at the crestfallen sentries.’ They were joined by Field Police with dogs, who set off on the hunt in the opposite direction to where their quarry had gone to earth. The satisfaction was enormous. For the first time since the start of the war, Neave had put one over on the Germans. They spent the next three days hidden in the warrant officers’ hut. There was one scare when they had to hide under their cots while the Germans conducted a search. Neave wondered why they now suspected they might still be in the camp. Thornborough had warned him there were ‘one or two stool pigeons in the camp’. It was an early lesson that in the escape business it was wise to say the minimum and trust nobody, a policy that Neave’s critics would later say he followed closely in his political life.

At six o’clock on the morning of 19 April, after a cup of ersatz coffee, he and Forbes left the camp in the middle of a party of 150 men. They spent the day at a farm, where they were put to work in a barn stuffing mattress covers with straw. During the afternoon, on a signal that the coast was clear, they climbed into the loft and burrowed into the hay. Earlier, their helpers had smuggled in two extra men on the ration lorry. When the guards counted the work party out they matched the number who had marched in. It was the final touch in a superb performance by the NCOs and men, and Neave never forgot these ‘staunch and kindly people’. They ‘ran greater risks of punishment than we did, but not one spoke of the consequences … During my stay there had been no feeling of class or rank among us, only a mutual desire to defy the Germans.’

When night fell, they climbed down from the hayloft and went to the back door of the barn, where one of the helpers had loosened the wire holding it shut. They stepped out into the starlit night and, for the first time in two years, breathed the air as free men. For the next four days, dressed in their rough clothes, they trudged eastwards. Since devising his original plan, he and Forbes had hatched an alternative. There was a German aerodrome at Graudenz, north of Warsaw. The Poles in the camp had provided enough information about it to sketch a map. Forbes was a pilot. Perhaps they could steal an aeroplane and fly to neutral Sweden. It had been tried before by two RAF inmates of Thorn, who had got as far as climbing into an aircraft disguised as Luftwaffe aircrew before being rumbled because they could not understand the instructions from the control tower.30

The trek started well, matching the fantasies he had entertained while day-dreaming on his bunk. It was ‘like walking on air’. The language is telling, a further sign of the quasi-mystical importance Neave gave to the act of escaping. Relating the story of this first attempt, he stated that ‘no one who has not known the pain of imprisonment understands the meaning of Liberty.’31 The capital letter is his. For Neave this was more than a simple act of duty or defiance. It had an almost religious significance. ‘The real escaper,’ he wrote, ‘is more than a man equipped with compass, maps, papers, disguise and a plan. He has an inner confidence, a serenity of spirit which make him a Pilgrim.’

After a few hours, the intoxication of freedom began to wear off. His sack of rations – tins of sardines and condensed milk and Red Cross parcel chocolate – cut into his shoulder, he was soaked in sweat and his feet swelled up painfully inside his army boots. In the morning it rained for hours. The countryside, carved through by the wide, muddy Vistula and dotted with small farms and orchards, was filled with ominous landmarks. They were following the river to Warsaw, taking the same route that the Germans had followed twenty months before, and the scars of the fighting were fresh. There were graveyards where Polish army helmets sat on white crosses, charred buildings and a smashed-up chapel with half a crucifix hanging over the doorway. Almost every farmhouse, no matter how small and mean, had new owners. The Poles had been turned out of their homes and German settlers put in. The pair were anxious to avoid all human encounters, but it was impossible not to feel the presence of the new masters.

Late that first morning, they were passed by a ‘a four-wheeled open carriage … driven by a German farmer in a flat cap, smoking a short cigar.’ He turned back to examine them and ‘his arrogant, fleshy face … bore an expression of savage contempt … and he fingered the stock of his long whip.’ Neave had been exposed to Germans frequently in his short life, as a schoolboy visitor, as a patient in the care of the military and as a captive. Until now, these experiences had suggested that, despite the repellent philosophy of the new order, the population had its fair share of decent human beings. On this journey, the Germans seemed wholly bad.

A little later, skirting a farm, they met a Polish man who recognised that they were fugitives. He wished them good luck in English but warned them to move on quickly as the German farmer was ‘very bad’. As they left they spotted him, ‘thick-set with an evil-tempered red face like the man who had driven past us. He too carried a long black whip and smoked a short cigar. We hurried away from him down a slippery path into the valley and heard him shouting to the Pole as if to a dog.’

The cruelty of the German occupation made an ineradicable impression on Neave and these memories bubbled to the surface when, four years later at the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal, he served the indictment on the Gauleiter overlord of conquered Poland, Hans Frank. At the same time, he was profoundly moved by the stoicism of the Poles and the sacrificial generosity they were prepared to offer to those they identified as friends. Again, it was something he never forgot. Long afterwards, in the face of Foreign Office opposition, he campaigned doggedly for a memorial to the thousands of Poles murdered by their Soviet oppressors in 1940.

At dusk on their second day of freedom, they were too exhausted to face another night in the open. They approached a whitewashed house and knocked. The door was opened by a young Polish woman, who summoned her father, a farmer who had somehow avoided eviction. He made them welcome and gave Neave a pair of corduroy trousers to replace the thin, torn ones he arrived in. Their only drawback was that they lacked fly buttons. There was shy giggling as the girls of the house removed the buttons from the old trousers and sewed them onto the new pair.

But after this interlude the smiling stopped. Neave sensed that ‘the room was heavy with their fear … I knew that the girls were watching for a glimpse of field-grey … at the window.’ There was a crash of heavy boots and a loud knock and he and Forbes scuttled to the kitchen. The visitor was a young Polish man who held an urgent conversation with the farmer. Even though Neave knew not a word of the language, there was no mistaking the tone of disquiet. He wrote later that ‘a great feeling of guilt ran through me as I witnessed their terror. Was it to destroy these simple lives that I escaped? Was it not better to endure the bitter frustrations of the Fort … all the degradation of being a prisoner? What did it matter whether I escaped or not if others were to die?’

This dilemma would confront every man who managed to get away from a German camp. As the war progressed, they were increasingly sited in Poland. Many – perhaps most – attempts required the assistance of Poles. Polish workers smuggled escape materials into camps and provided vital intelligence. Polish families gave food and shelter. All risked death by doing so and many paid the price. Most of the helpers were ‘ordinary’ people. Their fundamental motivation was decency and humanity. The question of whether these humble heroes and heroines should be put in mortal danger by the imperatives of the escapees was one that even the most thoughtful were never able to resolve. In the end, they could only comfort themselves with the thought that the assistance was freely given, in full knowledge of the deadly consequences.

Neave and Forbes were spared further agonising when the Polish farmer told them to sleep in the barn, asking them to be gone before dawn. The visitor had warned him that the local German settlers were looking out for them. The next afternoon they reached the large town of Wloclawek on the banks of the Vistula, about a hundred miles north-west of Warsaw. It was the day after Hitler’s birthday and swastikas and bunting fluttered over the streets. As they slunk along, Neave saw an old man with the Star of David ‘painted in yellow on his back’ walking slowly along the pavement. At the same time, a small detachment of SS men came marching by. They were singing, ‘their arrogant young faces scorning all around them’. Poles and Germans alike raised their hands obediently in the Nazi salute and Neave and Forbes quickly followed suit. The old man failed to see the Germans in time and ‘a fair young thug stepped from the ranks and struck him on the head. His hat spun in the wind and rolled across the road.’ The SS man pushed him off the pavement and he stumbled in the gutter and lay there moaning. No one dared to go to his aid.