I lived and they died.
He cursed often at his eyes, and how they'd betrayed them all by spotting that convoy. He thought incongruously that if only he'd been born stone blind, instead of blessed with especially acute eyesight, then they'd all still be alive. It did no good, he knew, to think like that. Instead, he vowed that if he survived the war, one day he would travel all the way across the country to West Texas, and after he arrived there, he would drive deep into the scrubland and arroyos of that harsh land and take up a rifle and begin to kill jackrabbits.
Every jackrabbit he could spot. Every jackrabbit for miles around.
He envisioned himself shooting dozens, hundreds, thousands, a great slaughter of rabbits. Killing jackrabbits until he fell to the earth exhausted, ammunition expended, the barrel of the rifle seared red hot.
Surrounded by enough dead jackrabbits to last his captain an eternity.
He knew he would not be able to fall back to sleep.
So, he lay back, listening to the rain striking the metal roof and resounding like gunshots. And mixed in that sound came a low and distant thud. And moments later, shrill whistles and frantic shouts, all in the unmistakable angry German of the prison camp guards. He swung his feet out of the bunk and was pulling on his boots when he heard a pounding on the barracks door and "Raus! Raus! Schnell!" It would be cold on the parade ground, and Tommy Hart reached for his old leather flight jacket. The men around him were hurrying to dress, pulling on their woolen underwear and cracked and worn flight boots as the first insinuations of dawn light came filtering through the grimy barracks windows. In his hurry to get dressed, he lost sight of the Lovely Lydia and its crew, letting them fade into the near part of his memory as he quickly joined the flow of men heading out into the damp early morning chill of Stalag Luft Thirteen.
Second Lieutenant Tommy Hart shuffled his feet in the light brown mud of the parade compound. The grumbling had started within a few minutes of the assembly-an Appell in German-and now, whenever a guard walked by, the men would begin to catcall, and complain.
The Germans, for the most part, ignored them. Occasionally a Hundfuhrer, with his snarling shepherd at his side, would turn at the groups of men, and make motions as if he were ready to let the dog loose, which had the intended effect of quieting the airmen, if only for a few minutes. Luftwaffe Oberst Edward Von Reiter, the camp commandant, had quick-marched past the formations hours earlier, pausing only when accosted by the Senior American Officer, Colonel Lewis MacNamara, who immediately launched into a series of rapid-fire complaints. Von Reiter listened to MacNamara for perhaps thirty seconds, then casually saluted, raising a riding crop to the brim of his cap, and gestured for the SAO to return to his position at the head of the blocks of men. Without another glance at the row of airmen, Von Reiter had disappeared in the direction of Hut 109.
The kriegies mumbled and stamped their feet, as the day grew around them. Kriegies was what they called themselves, a shortening of the German Kriegsgefangene, which loosely translated into "war captured."
Standing, waiting, was both boring and exhausting. It was something they were familiar with, but hated.
There were nearly ten thousand Allied prisoners of war held in the camp, split almost equally between two compounds, North and South. The U.S. fliers-all officers-were in the southern compound, while British and other Allies were situated to the North, a quarter mile away.
Passage between the camps, while not unusual, was mildly difficult. An escort and an armed guard and a compelling reason were necessary.
Of course, a compelling reason could be manufactured by the quick exchange of a couple of cigarettes passed to one of the ferrets, which was what the kriegies called the guards who roamed the camps, armed only with the sword-like steel probes they used to poke into the ground. The guards with the dogs were called by their official names, because the dogs scared everyone. There were no walls at the camp, but each of the compounds was surrounded by a twenty-foot-high fence. Two rows of barbed concertina wire on either side of a metal chain link.
Every fifty yards along the fence was a stolid, squat wooden tower.
These were manned around the clock by humorless and unbribable machine-gun crews, goons, with Schmeisser machine pistols hung around their necks.
Ten feet inside the main fence the Germans had strung a thin strand of wire from wooden stakes. This was the deadline.
Anyone crossing that line was assumed to be trying to escape, and would be shot. At least, that was what the Luftwaffe commandant told each prisoner upon arrival at Stalag Luft Thirteen. The reality was that the guards would let a prisoner, who donned a white smock with a red cross prominently centered on it, pursue a baseball or football if it rolled to the exterior fence, although sometimes, for amusement, they would wave a prisoner after the item, then fire a short burst into the air above his head or into the dirt at his feet. Walking the deadline was a favorite kriegie activity; the airmen would pace endless laps at the limit of their confinement.
The May sun rose rapidly, warming the faces of the men gathered on the parade ground. Tommy Hart guessed they had been standing in formation for nearly four hours, while steady processions of German officers and enlisted men had passed by, heading toward the collapsed tunnel. The enlisted men carried shovels and pickaxes. The officers wore frowns.
"It's the damn wood," a voice from the formation spoke.
"It gets wet, it gets rotten, won't hold up a damn thing."
Tommy Hart turned and saw that the man speaking was a wiry West Virginian, copilot on a B-l 7, and a man whose father had grown up working in the coal mines. He'd presumed the West Virginian, whose flat voice twanged with disgust, was prominent in escape planning. Men with knowledge of the earth-farmers, miners, excavators, even a funeral home director shot down over France who lived in the next hut over were enlisted in the efforts within hours of their arrival at Stalag Luft Thirteen.
He had made no efforts to escape the camp. Nor did he have any great desire to try, unlike many of the other men. It was not that he didn't want to be free, which he did, but that he silently knew that in order to escape he would have to descend into a tunnel.
And this he could not do.
He supposed his fear of enclosed spaces came from the time he accidentally locked himself inside a basement closet when he was no more than four or five. A dozen terrifying hours spent enclosed in darkness, in heat and tears, hearing his mother's distant voice calling to him yet unable to raise his own, he was so panicked. He probably would not have characterized the fear that remained with him from that day as claustrophobia, but that, in effect, was what it was. He'd joined the air corps at least in part because even in the tight confines of the bomber, he was still out in the open. The idea of being inside a tank or a submarine had been far more frightening to him than the fear of enemy bullets.
So, in the oddly uncertain prison world of Stalag Luft Thirteen, Tommy Hart knew one thing: If he ever did get out, it would have to be through the front gate. Because he would never voluntarily descend into a tunnel.
This made him think of himself as content although that was probably not the right word, more willing or resigned to wait for the end of the war despite the rigors of Stalag Luft Thirteen. He was occasionally enlisted as a stooge to take up a position where he could keep an eye on one of the ferrets, an -early warning system designed by the camp security officers. Any German walking within the camp was constantly followed and observed by a system of overlapping watchers, with redundant signaling methods. Of course, the ferrets knew they were being watched, and consequently tried their best to evade the security, constantly altering their routes, and their paths.