The Grand Escape: Chapters 17–30

“Chocks away,” Blain said, tossing his kit ahead of him into the hole, but the bravado he had maintained throughout the evening quickly dissipated as he crawled in after it.

The shadows cast about the narrow, misshapen bore resembled monsters awaiting to attack.

Sixty yards away, Holzminden was cast in a ghostly white pallor by the arc lamps swinging in the wind.

Morrogh hunkered down beside the dormer window, listening to the gale and intermittent rain.

He was tired, desperate for fresh air, and harried by the continuous noise.

Kennard was scouting the banks and spotted a dilapidated fence bordering a nearby field.

Soon after, Hartigan and the other officer came straight out of the orderly door to Block B. They should have returned to their rooms through the attic, as the others had done, but they were too addled and oxygen-starved to think clearly.

Next Niemeyer tried to send down his dog, but the animal balked at the order too.

Mandelbrat had never cared much for Commandant Niemeyer and his constant derision, and, as he went about the corridors counting the men, he could barely suppress a thin smile as silence met his calling out the name of one officer after another.

Throughout the barracks, the officers repeated the number like it had some kind of hallowed meaning.

Morrogh regaled them with some of his adventures of the past few hours, including accidentally setting his entire tin of matches on fire, almost being found by a woman and her two children who were foraging in the woods where he lay naked while his clothes dried, and sleepwalking.

He told them in fluent German how the madman Kurt Grau had recently absconded from the asylum.

Once clear, they celebrated their success, although Kennard lightheartedly bemoaned the clobbering he had received when they were forcing him down onto the ground.

The film was unmemorable, but the newsreel, which showed a macabre scene of the Kaiser’s soldiers standing over the bodies of Allied soldiers—Rathborne’s comrades—struck him to the core.

After their antics in Gellersen, Gray, Blain, and Kennard found a copse of trees and got some sleep.

They took a yeoman’s route, down country lanes and muddy paths, halting often when they saw soldiers and civilians—clearly part of the manhunt.

A downside of Third Class, as well as the discomfort, was that it was full of chatty passengers with too much idle time. One young girl prattled away for their entire journey.

There was more trouble when he went to eat dinner at a restaurant. The garrulous owner remarked that he could not quite place Rathborne’s accent.

He slept fitfully on the 100-mile journey, coming into the station on Sunday morning. Cologne was in a sorrowful state.

The faces on the streets wore a forlorn gaze, and men, both young and old, hobbled past with war injuries.

Captain Frank Sharpe and Lieutenant Bernard Luscombe, numbers 28 and 29 out of the tunnel, were the first to come back through the gates. Niemeyer glowered at them as they passed.

Their sorry state—grubby outfits, sallow faces, bodies wasted from loss of food—only darkened the mood further.

Even if the prisoners did find their way to the border, he knew well that they would be bedraggled and half-starved.

Dogs were barking in the village of Twiehausen, but the surrounding fields were too thick with mud to allow Gray, Kennard, and Blain to circumvent the hamlet.

Earlier in their journey, they might have hurried ahead—or not risked going through the hamlet in the first place. But after more than a week without proper rest, hiking miles every day, sleeping outdoors, eating half rations, and wearing damp clothes, they were cavalier.

They slipped and stumbled, floundered backward, sideways, every which way.

“We’ve bloody well made it!” Together they yawped, leaped up and down, hollered, and splashed in the marshy moon like schoolchildren in a puddle.

Although their faces were gaunt from malnutrition, they all wore the looks of conquering heroes.

Secret cables from the British Consulate in Rotterdam informed London, where Lord Newton and officials in the War Office, Military Intelligence, and the Air Ministry celebrated the triumph.

As part of a large convoy escorted by destroyers, the ship pulled out of the Dutch harbor and traveled a circuitous route across the Channel.

Outside, buses and taxis crammed the streets, and pedestrians thronged the sidewalks.

Now that the details could be revealed, their exploits captivated the nation and the world.

Now that the details could be revealed, their exploits captivated the nation and the world.

With so much sacrifice and horror on every front, the Holzminden escape was a bright banner of hope—not to mention proof of British derring-do.

Whether it was because of shame over the mass escape or too much drink, he became untethered. He raged at his charges like never before, accusing them of insurrection.

Deciding that the indictment was a farce, some of the officers gave suitably farcical answers to questions about their name, rank, religion, and prewar occupation.

Eventually, Stokes-Roberts commandeered a train to take the Holzminden men west.

“Kennard was a stout fellow, a good pal,” his obituary concluded. “His untimely death will leave a feeling of great regret in the hearts of his fellow officers.”

At the Versailles Peace Conference it had been agreed that certain “enemy officers” should be brought to justice for their crimes. Niemeyer made the list, particularly after the death of William Leefe Robinson from the privations he had suffered at Holzminden.

Given the Nazi penchant for torturing, and sometimes hanging, prisoners of war, these two organizations ended up saving many lives.