Be Shot For Six Pence (13 page)

At the time I crawled in over the northern frontier, Hungary was an artificial oasis of phoney peace. In a lot of ways it was much trickier for me than a country under occupation. There was no resistance movement to help me. When I left the friendly dentist I drifted down to Buda and hitched up with the floating population of spivs, expatriates and little criminals. The fact that I spoke Hungarian was a help. I made money by giving language lessons. By that time I was competent to teach in English, French, German and Polish. I told a complicated story, involving an American father, a German grandfather and a Polish grandmother. It wasn’t my story that kept me out of gaol. It was the fact that I kept on the move. Sometimes I would find a bed in one of my new friends’ flats. The real trouble was that each block of flats (back at school again!) had a ‘housemaster’ whose duty it was to report all strangers to the police. That made it terribly dangerous to stay in any flat for more than one night. When I couldn’t find a bed, I slept in the open air. If I hadn’t anything else to do by day, I went into one of Buda’s many Turkish baths. I found a sort of restful anonymity in nakedness.

It couldn’t last. The onset of winter drove me under cover. Beds grew scarcer. In the end, because I had no alternative, I stayed for a whole week with a known criminal. That was asking for trouble. I was arrested in the first days of November.

I spent a week in the Tolonzhaz (which was the House of Detention) and was then moved over to the Margit Prison for a proper going-over. In the interval, presumably, somebody had been making enquiries about me. The trouble was that I had told too many stories. When I now reverted to the simple truth, that I was a British officer, a prisoner of war, who had escaped from a prison camp in the Reich nearly two years ago, it just got a big laugh.

Memory, which has a complicated mechanism of self-protection, has drawn a curtain over a lot of that time. I think it lasted fifteen weeks. My most vivid recollection does not concern me at all. It was Christmas morning. Christmas of 1942. The window of my cell opened on to an interior courtyard and by a contortion I could look out of the tiny opening. (It was forbidden, under severe penalties, but I did it occasionally, to keep my will in order.) I heard the most inexplicable noise outside and took a quick look. A party of warders was standing in the middle of the courtyard watching a circle of prisoners – they were mostly old men, and, I think, Jews – going round and round, in the snow on hands and knees. It was like some ghastly children’s game, and was conducted in complete silence. When it was finished the prisoners stumbled to their feet and were whipped indoors and there was nothing left except a beaten path in the snow.

In the new year, I was moved, with a few other prisoners. No one told us where we were going, but I was quite certain, in my own mind, that we were being taken out into the country to be quietly disposed of. If I hadn’t been sure of it, I should not have taken the risk I did. We weren’t handcuffed, but there were more guards than prisoners. As the train was rattling along, at quite a fast pace, through the wooded country, south of Buda, I threw myself through the window. The guards made the mistake of trying to grab me instead of shooting me. By the time they had got hold of their guns again I was rolling down the embankment and they had been carried past me. I don’t know how soon they managed to stop the train, but by that time I was in the comparative safety of the woods, my clothes torn to bits, but all in one piece.

I walked through those woods, by night, for three nights. My sojourn in the Margit Korut hadn’t made me any fitter and on the morning of the third day, when I could only just crawl, I crawled into Lisa’s garden.

Lisa’s father is a professor of toxicology and a remarkable man. He hates the Germans and the Russians, but the Russians more, because he recognises them as the real danger. He fears no one and behaves according to his lights.

I stayed there for six months, nominally hidden at the back of the loft (which was where my bed was put) but actually living as a member of the family. I stayed six months because it took me that time to get fit. I had picked up some bug in prison which attacked my stomach. Professor Prinz injected me with different by-products of kaolin, and insisted on my taking plenty of exercise. “If you lie about,” he said, “it encourages the germs.” So I chopped wood in the back yard. It was touch and go, but in the end this novel therapy won out, and I got back my weight and strength.

In early September I left them and walked through the country south of Pecs and down to the Drava, which is near the Yugoslav frontier. I swam the river one warm night with my clothes in a bundle on my head, and dressed on the other bank. It was my third war-time frontier crossing, and, as it turned out, much the easiest.

The Professor, who thought on international lines, already knew a good deal about the rising star of Tito and his introductions steered me into the great man’s entourage. Here the first person I spoke to was an officer in my own regiment, who had been seconded to the Partisans. I had never really liked him before (I shall suppress his name) and I liked him even less when he assumed, without consulting me, that my one desire would be to help him fight his part of the War.

“But my dear fellow,” he said, “you’re an English officer. Fate has sent you here.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “But I’m not playing. All I want now is to get back to England and sleep in my own bed.” (I think the truth is that I was suffering from a cumulative morale breakdown, more insidious than any physical upset and taking a lot longer to get over. I should not assert with any confidence that I’ve entirely got over it to this day.)

In the end, and with very bad grace, I was taken to the coast and put back across the Adriatic in a returning M.T.B. Naturally nobody hurried themselves over me and it was mid-December before the wheels began to turn. I landed at Bari on Christmas Day 1943. Here I ran into someone with some sense, who put me straight on to an aeroplane and sent me back to England.

Some of this I told Trüe as we sat in the summer-house. The easy bits. When I reached England I had suffered so much at the hands of interrogators, official and unofficial, that I had got little sequences off by heart and they tripped out readily, like a favourite after-dinner story, worn a bit thin with repetition but nice and smooth.

When I reached the end I realised that I had two listeners. Besides Trüe there was Lisa who had perched herself on the bank behind the summer-house.

“If you’re quite finished entertaining the
jeune fille
,” she said, “I’ve got a message for you. Lady wants you.”

“If it’s all that urgent, you could have given it to me without sitting there eavesdropping.”

“But I
love
hearing you tell it,” she said. “Never, never, do I get tired of it.”

“There is no need to sneer,” said Trüe. “And he was telling it to me, privately. Not to you.”

“I am sorry if I intruded. Next time I must knock.”

I left them at it. In the hall I met Major Piper. He was coming down the stairs and looked pleased with himself.

“Morning, Waters,” he said.

“If you’ve been talking to Lady, as I gather you have,” I said, “you are perfectly well aware that my name is not Waters.”

“Matter of fact,” said the Major, “knew it all along. See you soon.”

He tripped away down the steps into the forecourt, whiffling his stick.

Buffoon.

By the time I reached Lady I was in a cold temper.

“Before you start telling me what I can do and what I can’t do,” I said belligerently, “let me tell you something. I’ve made up my mind. I’m going to see Thugutt tonight. All I want from you is a decent map and I can find my own way.”

“Of course,” said Lady. “But why a map? I had already arranged for a guide.”

“Oh, you had, had you,” I said, feeling deflated, and looking for some further cause of offence. “About time too,” was all I could think of.

Lady grinned like a cat. It always pleased him to get someone on the wrong foot.

“The delay is regretted. Normally this journey affords no difficulty at all. There are men in the frontier trade who make it six times a week. But recently there have been complications. Unforeseen complications.”

He wandered across to the map.

“Unofficially the frontier has been shut. Unofficially, but quite effectively Why, I do not know. The Hungarians have staged an exercise for their so-called Western Army. It has been going on for three days.”

“Just why should that worry me? I don’t want to go into Hungary at all. Thugutt lives in Yugoslavia.”

“That would be a valid argument
if
the frontier was a nice straight line and
if
it were on the plain. Unfortunately it is far from straight and far from flat. In fact the only easy way to Thugutt’s used to involve
two
crossings of the Hungarian frontier. That is now impossible. But we are not idle. An alternative route has been worked out. It involves its own hazards. I think you will find it amusing. I believe that rock climbing is one of your numerous accomplishments.”

“When do I start?”

“Young Franz Schneidermeister is taking you. He will be here at seven o’clock.”

I thought a bit about footwear and decided in the end to stick to my rubbers. It didn’t look like rain, and anyway I couldn’t have got hold of a set of nails and broken them in by seven o’clock that evening. Franz turned up to time and we set out. He was a pleasant youth, and had, as I soon noticed, all the tricks of the mountaineer’s trade, including the deceptive, short paced, shuffling stride which seems slovenly on the flat but takes you up mountains at a pace you need to be very fit indeed to keep up with.

He didn’t talk a lot. We started by making a long cast back, into the foothills, striking almost due west, and keeping off all roads. Then, very slowly, we veered south, and began to climb. We must have made a seven mile point from Obersteinbruck (it was every bit of ten on the ground) before we halted. We had reached an outcrop of rock, shaped like a fish standing on its head; and here we rested, and Franz smoked a cigarette.

“Harder now,” he said, with a grin.

We turned almost back on our tracks and began to climb steeply. Night had come whilst we rested. The moon would not be up for another two hours. I kept one eye carefully on Franz’s white shirt collar, which bobbed before me in the darkness like a rabbit’s scut and the other on my footholds. It was difficult to judge, but we seemed to be running head on into a wall of rock.

Suddenly, incredulously, I found I was treading on railway sleepers.

It wasn’t old, disused line either. The metal rail of the single track was gleaming in the starlight.

Franz stopped for me to catch up with him and we squatted down beside each other.

“Where the hell does this line go?” I said. “And what construction gang of angels flew up here with it? Don’t tell me it takes us through the mountains into Yugoslavia.”

Franz was enjoying my bewilderment.

“It goes through the mountains—yes. But not into Yugoslavia. No. We are in Yugoslavia already.”

“Come again.”

“We crossed the frontier line ten minutes ago. It is not always along the peaks. Here it lies on this side.”

I knew enough about European-style frontiers to realise that this might be true. Not all frontiers in Europe – in fact very few of them – are marked with fence lines. Usually they are invisible to the eye of anyone except the cartographer and the diplomat; and in mountain country the actual custom and control stations lie well back, in the foothills.

“Where do we go from here, then?” I said. “And what’s the snag?”

“The snag,” said Franz, “is that.” He indicated the cliff face which stretched across our front. It must have been the result of a geological fault. It looked sheer and dangerous.

“If we go round it, we run into trouble. Guards at both ends. So we go through it.”

“By the railway tunnel?”

“Yes.”

“Sounds all right,” I said. “Lead on.”

“It is far from all right,” said Franz, seriously. “And you must listen very carefully to me and do what I say. First, you must understand, it is not a passenger line. It is a working line for the Gold-Kranz High Ore Mine. Second, if they did not need this ore very badly, I do not think the tunnel would be used at all. It is more than a mile long, and has no ventilation except at the ends. There is a pump which drives the air along, but that does not always work. Last year a train broke down. The driver and his assistant were both dead when they reached them.”

I swallowed twice and said, “All right. We’ll just have to hope the ventilation doesn’t break down tonight.”

“That is not the greatest danger,” said Franz. “One of the reasons we made such a long detour was so that I could watch for trains. It is a single track. There is only one engine used. If we had seen a train go past, in either direction, we should have been safe for six hours.”

“I didn’t notice any train,” I said, thoughtfully.

“No,” said Franz. “No train. We just take a chance, yes?”

“Do they run at night?”

“Sometimes at night, sometimes by day. There is no time-table.”

“What do we do if a train comes? Run ahead of it?”

“If a train comes, you must throw yourself forward, quite flat, against the side of the wall. You will be in the angle, you understand. There is no room to lie beside the track. And throw your arms above your head. That way you will occupy less space.”

I looked hard at Franz to see if he was joking. He seemed quite serious. When we reached the tunnel I began to believe him. The people who had cut it had not wasted an inch. The engines were diesel-electric, and there was no smoke disposal problem, and therefore very little head room. There was very little room anywhere. The tunnel had simply been tailored to fit the engine.

“We walk on the right,” said Franz. After that we stopped talking, and started walking.

Whether the air-drive was working or not I don’t know, but before I had gone a hundred paces I was pouring with sweat. It was easy going, if somewhat lopsided. My left foot was on the sleepers. My right in the very narrow channel between the end of the sleepers and the wall.