The Man Who Was Saturday. Patrick Bishop

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СКАЧАТЬ 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. СКАЧАТЬ