The Man Who Was Saturday

He staggered across to his original destination, the café on the corner, and took shelter in the side street, gratefully accepting a large cognac from the proprietor. A bespectacled medical orderly appeared, opened Neave’s battledress and examined the wound. He pronounced him lucky – the bullet had passed half an inch from his heart. The orderly’s cheerfulness and inclination to ‘talk professionally about the condition of the wound’ grated on Neave’s nerves. His great fear was ‘that the Germans would break through in the next few minutes, that I should be left behind and captured’. He swore at the medic and ordered him to take him to the next street. There they were joined by a Frenchman and between them they walked him away.

There was no sign of a regimental aid post (RAP), and he knew the nearest hospital was a mile away. He was calmed by the arrival of a scout car carrying a young officer of the 60th, Michael Sinclair, who like him was captured and ended up in Colditz, where he was shot dead while trying to escape in 1944. Sinclair ‘smilingly drew my attention to a van flying the Red Cross’. The improvised ambulance, ‘smelling strongly of stale vegetables’, carried him at high speed back into the centre to the Pont Georges Cinq, the central of three spans that connected Calais-St-Pierre to Calais-Nord. They halted by a group of soldiers seeking directions to the 60th’s RAP, but no one knew its whereabouts and an argument broke out as to which of the three hospitals in town he should be taken to.

Lying in the back, listening to the confused voices, Neave ‘was suffering more from anger than pain’. He was still tortured by the thought that he might be captured. ‘My chief interest,’ he admitted frankly, ‘was in evacuation by sea to England.’ Eventually it was decided to take him to the Hôpital Militaire, a former convent only a few hundred yards away in the Rue Leveux, under the eastern wall of the Citadel. He was unloaded under the supervision of the 60th’s medical officer, Lieutenant A. F. Stallard, who after examination told him he had received a ‘penetrating flank wound’ that would require an operation. He was ‘carried, protesting, into the dark interior of the hospital where grinning French surgeons in white caps, and smoking Gauloise cigarettes, awaited me’.

Beyond the ramparts of Calais, great strategic events had conspired to cancel all hope of evacuation. Throughout the day, the realisation had penetrated the heads of those directing events in London that the BEF was facing extinction. Unless it could be saved, Britain’s continuation in the war was seriously in doubt. Calais now assumed a new and different importance. It had become a key element in the struggle to bring the BEF home through the port of Dunkirk, thirty miles to the north-east. Their job was to drag the 10th Panzer Division into a fight to the last ditch, man and bullet, in order to delay it moving north and adding its weight to the enemy forces closing on the 200,000 beleaguered British troops.

Although the British did not know it, the threat of an armoured onslaught had temporarily subsided. That morning, Guderian had been ordered to halt his other Panzer divisions on a line on the river Aa, just to the east of Calais. Hitler had decided to give his exhausted soldiers a brief respite before moving against the French armies to the south. The British were beaten and he was prepared to allow Hermann Goering the chance to make good on his promise that the Luftwaffe would finish them off.

A further great decision settled the Calais garrison’s fate. Lord Gort, the BEF’s commander, came to the conclusion that the idea of attacking south to join up with the French army on the Somme was a fantasy. On the 25th, on his own initiative, he took what Neave described as ‘the most vital decision of the entire campaign’17 (#litres_trial_promo) and ordered his army to fall back to the north and Dunkirk and prepare for evacuation. It was also one of the fateful decisions of the war. Had he prevaricated, the BEF would have been lost and with it perhaps any realistic hope that Britain could stay in the war and establish the conditions for eventual victory. But in order for the BEF to be saved, the Calais garrison had to be sacrificed. It became the tethered goat to distract the Panzers from the greater prize ahead.

The drastic change in thinking was signalled in orders which arrived late on the night of the 24th, crushing hope of an evacuation and telling Nicholson that he must fight on ‘for the sake of Allied solidarity’. This was a reference to the furious reaction of the French to the news that Calais, like Boulogne, was about to be abandoned, scuppering their plans to establish a bridgehead that could be supplied by sea and keep resistance alive in the north-east. The theme was repeated the following day in a message to Nicholson from Anthony Eden, which arrived at 2 p.m., stating ‘Defence of Calais to the utmost is of highest importance to our country as symbolising our continued co-operation with France. The eyes of the empire are upon the defence of Calais and HM Government are confident you and your gallant regiments will perform an exploit worthy of the British name.’

That day saw the launching of the evacuation plan, Operation Dynamo. There would be no further reference to Allied solidarity, and the signal drafted in London that night by Churchill, Anthony Eden and the Chief of the General Staff, Edmund Ironside, was stark. It read: ‘Every hour you continue to exist is of greatest help to BEF. Government has therefore decided you must continue to fight. Have greatest possible admiration for your splendid stand.’

Nicholson needed no exhortations to keep fighting. That morning, the attackers broke into Calais-St-Pierre and at 8 a.m. the swastika was flying from the Hôtel de Ville. Three hours later, the Germans sent the town mayor, André Gershell, to Nicholson at his headquarters in the Citadel to demand his surrender. His reply was that ‘If the Germans want Calais they will have to fight for it.’18 (#litres_trial_promo) A German officer led a second deputation in the afternoon, which was similarly rebuffed.

Neave spent the night of the 24/25th recovering from his operation in a ward in the cellars of the Hôpital Militaire. In the next bed lay a young Hurricane pilot who knew he was dying. He ‘could still speak and begged me to keep talking to him’.19 (#litres_trial_promo) As it grew light, ‘his body shuddered and his mouth fell open. The orderly saluted and, for a few minutes, the ward was very quiet.’ He passed the rest of the day there, with the sounds of the fight piercing the thick walls and the occasional shell bursting in the vicinity, one of which showered his bed with broken glass. Outside, the defenders were being forced back street by street. Much of the town was choked with smoke and fire. In the early evening, the town was shaken by a prolonged artillery bombardment. Above the crackle of burning houses, Neave heard the ‘groans and cries’ of the wounded as they were brought down to the cellars.

At 9.30 in the morning, Stuka dive-bombers descended on the town, and an hour later enemy troops began crossing the bridges to Calais-Nord. The bombs shook the hospital and in the basement ‘the smell of wounds and fear was overpowering.’ Just before 10 a.m., a bomb landed in front of the hospital, blowing in the main doors. Fear seized Neave. He was ‘terrified that with the next direct hit the wounded would be buried alive’. When the Stukas finally departed, he left his bed and found he could walk unaided. He decided to head for the Gare Maritime and find transport. He fixed on the hope that ‘it might still be possible to evacuate the wounded by sea. Anything was better for them than entombment in the ruins of the Hôpital Militaire.’20 (#litres_trial_promo) He seems to have discussed the idea with an unnamed fellow patient, a corporal who volunteered to go with him. Dressed in what he could find – shirt, battledress trousers and steel helmet – he left the shelter. The hospital garden was a shambles of uprooted trees, with shattered masonry and glass lying around the graves dug for five riflemen who had died of their wounds in the cellar. The French military doctor commanding the hospital listened to his plan with amazement, telling him, ‘You are crazy, mon lieutenant. You do not know what is happening in the town.’ Neave repeated that the men would only be taken prisoner if they remained and insisted on his belief that it was still possible to get hospital ships in the harbour. ‘You are absolutely determined to sacrifice your life?’ the doctor asked. ‘I was not interested in anything of the kind,’ Neave recalled. ‘I was irrationally confident that I could get through.’

The two injured men picked their way through the shattered and burning streets, Neave doubled up from the wound in his side and his companion limping. Calais-Nord was deserted after the dive-bombing, but as they passed the old fisherman’s quarter called the Courgain which abuts the Gare Maritime, ‘without warning, shells whistled and burst near us … The corporal vanished in the blinding flash and dust.’ Neave fell to the ground unhurt and crawled to the side of the street where, miraculously, an old Frenchman offered him a bottle of cognac from a cellar window.21 (#litres_trial_promo) He drank from it and staggered on until he reached the Pont Vétillard swing bridge which led to the Gare Maritime, where he could see British troops of the QVR in front of the station.

His ‘apparition caused a sensation’. However, the reception he got was cold. The rumours of spies and German agents were now treated as established fact and his identity card was inspected several times. His demand that transport should be sent to collect the wounded from the hospital cellar ‘was thought to be peculiar. Obviously I was either a fifth columnist or delirious.’ Neave’s pleas were ignored and he was packed off to another cellar, beneath the Gare Maritime, to join rows of wounded. The stay was short. The area came under intense mortar fire and he was soon moved to a tunnel under Bastion 1 of the enceinte, which had been transformed into a regimental aid post.

At 4 p.m. the Citadel where Nicholson made his final stand fell. Shortly before, the Rifle Brigade fought their last gallant action around the Gare Maritime, with some units fighting literally to the last round. Lying on his cot, Neave heard ‘the hoarse shouts of German under-officers and the noise of rifles being flung on the floor of the tunnel. Through the doorway came field-grey figures waving revolvers.’22 (#litres_trial_promo) His war as a fighting soldier was over. His direct engagement with the enemy had amounted to a few futile shots, fired at a spotter plane.

3

‘In the Bag’ (#ulink_21f3aca5-b776-58cf-983c-f07e0c04dd87)

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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo)

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 (#litres_trial_promo)

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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo)

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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo)

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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo)

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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo)

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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo)

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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo)

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 (#litres_trial_promo)

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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo)

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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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.