Churchill's Band of Brothers by Damien Lewis

Author:Damien Lewis [Lewis, Damien]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Citadel Press
Published: 2021-02-11T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 15

It was when poking around at the bars to his window that Vaculik first sensed the possibility of escape. Of course, solitary confinement is designed to do what it says on the tin – to deprive an individual of all other human contact. In the SAS captives’ case, they were supposed not even to know the fate of their fellow prisoners. But Vaculik had managed to befriend Vassiliev, a Russian guard who had been captured two years earlier, during the Battle for Moscow, opting to join the German military rather than be shot, and Vassiliev was proving helpful.

From Vassiliev, Vaculik had managed to scrounge the odd cigarette. More importantly, he’d learned that Ginger Jones was being held on the same floor, as were Walker, Young and Varey. The five were together, but apart. He was determined to get a message to his friends, to stiffen their spirits. Via Vassiliev’s good offices, Vaculik managed to broker a trip to the lavatory with a brief stopover at the door to Jones’s cell. After checking the coast was clear, the Russian flipped aside the peephole and beckoned Vaculik over.

‘Ginger!’ Vaculik hissed, as he forced a partly smoked cigarette through the narrow aperture. ‘Here’s a dog-end for you.’

‘Good lord!’ Jones cried. ‘How goes it? I thought you were dead.’

‘Not quite, but they fixed me up alright.’

‘We’ll make ’em pay for it later,’ Jones growled.

The guard hurried Vaculik away, but on hearing those few words of defiance he had felt his spirits soar. Later, in the privacy of his cell, he took a careful look at his watch, which by chance his captors had failed to confiscate. With infinite care, he managed to dismantle it, removing the mainspring, the coil of toughened steel that, when wound, provides power to the timepiece’s mechanics. With the spring straightened, Vaculik broke it into two pieces – the kind of lengths that might serve as a makeshift file – and hid the remains of the watch deep in his mattress.

That done, he crept to the window and began to work on the bars. Luckily he could hear the guard’s approach, whenever he came to check via the peephole, and could break off from his sawing in good time. After two hours’ work, and with fingers rubbed bloody and raw, he’d managed to sever the first bar. The cut from the narrow ‘blade’ was all but invisible. He figured there was little chance it – and subsequent cuts – would be discovered.

The following day he managed to slip a length of the spring through Jones’s peephole, under the cover of grabbing a few quick words. He felt sure his friend would know what to do with it. While the food at 3 Place des États Unis consisted of little more than a hunk of coarse black bread, a bowl of thin soup and a mug of bitter coffee, if they could only keep their strength up escape was possible: Vaculik felt sure of it. With time, he and Jones could saw through the bars, ‘and escape one night into the convent garden’ that lay below.

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