The Grand Escape by Neal Bascomb

Author:Neal Bascomb
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scholastic Inc.
Published: 2018-10-10T16:00:00+00:00

Charles Rathborne thrust his body into the tunnel, the fit almost as tight as a cork being pushed into a bottle. The already stout officer had been made stouter by the two suits he wore: one to get dirty and be thrown away, the other his disguise—a German civilian on a cross-country train journey. He had only been down into the sap once before and had never gone through its full length. He was quite unaccustomed to the claustrophobic environment and the effort it took to crawl through. The fact that his face was almost level with the dirt floor only deepened his discomfort. Nonetheless, he kept pushing himself forward, grunting and sweating as he went. Jim Bennett was behind him, like a race horse behind a mule, but there was no way around the senior officer, nor could he do anything about the walls and roof of the tunnel being disturbed by Rathborne’s movement.

Rathborne was not the first to disturb the already shaky structural integrity of the tunnel. What with their kits and their eagerness to reach the exit, the officers of the first group of 13 who had gone before had knocked out struts, loosened rocks, and left chunks of dirt (as well as tins of food fallen from their rucksacks) along the path. Once the ruck arrived, the state of the tunnel would surely deteriorate further. After over an hour in the tunnel, Rathborne finally squirmed free. Stretched out in the bean rows he was certain he could hear the sentry breathing.

Bennett rose from the sap after him, followed by fellow airman Peter Campbell-Martin. They wished each other well, then Rathborne wriggled on his belly into the rye stalks. Once deep inside the field, he lifted up to his hands and knees and continued at a crawl. Beyond the rye field was one of corn. Such was the denseness of its narrow rows that he almost felt trapped by the crop. At last he broke free. He crossed a cabbage field, then brazenly hiked along the road that led south from Holzminden. While the others were headed west, in the direction Niemeyer would immediately suspect and send his guards, Rathborne had decided to go the opposite way. He planned to catch a train, the first of several, in Göttingen, 35 miles to the southeast.

Bennett and Campbell-Martin threaded 300 yards through the same rye and cornfields as Rathborne, albeit traveling much more quickly and in the opposite direction. They may have been moving in the direction Niemeyer would suspect, but they intended to do so at such a pace that nobody would catch up with them.

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