The Sound of His Horn Read Free Page A

learn German, but I suppose the Greek appealed to me because it seemed so clean and fresh and had nothing to do with the camp.
    Well, I mention this just to indicate that I was a fairly cheerful prisoner. Of course, I missed getting my right amount of exercise, but, considering the low diet, I probably did well enough on the gymnastics we organised. Then, I had no particular family troubles. I got letters from my mother and Elizabeth as regularly as anyone got letters, and as long as those two were all right I had nothing more of that sort to worry about. True, you might say that the enforced company of one's own sex alone is a deprivation that might set up mental strains--but I don't know: it was the same for me as for everybody else; one thought of the pleasures of dalliance, of course, but I think it helps you to take the holiday from them more philosophically if you've had a normal fair share of those pleasures before you go into the bag. It seemed to trouble the boys most; not chaps of my age.
    No, looking at it quite honestly and objectively--and a prison camp is a good place in which to measure deviations from the norm of behaviour--I would have said that I'd have been one of the last to go off my rocker. But there it is. I did. Of course, it may have been the shock--the electric shock or whatever it was that I got: I'm coming to that. But there again, I'd had far worse shocks before. I'd been torpedoed twice in three months in the North Sea, not to mention the odd bomb. Those jolts shook my body far more than the shock I got at the fence at Hackelnberg, but they did not unhinge my mind.
    Ah well! You'd not believe the times I've been over the evidence for my sanity during these two years, and the care with which I've sifted it to find the little flaw, the sign of hidden weakness, and I never can find it. I ought to; I ought to be able to find out why I went out of my mind for a period, because, don't you see, that would be the best proof of sanity--not my own sanity alone, but the sanity of all this order that we believe in, the proper sequence of time, the laws of space and matter, the truth of all our physics; because you see, if I
wasn't
mad there must be a madness in the scheme of things too wide and wild for any man's courage to face.
    And it's ironical to remember that I was looked on as the steadiest, sanest, most reliable old horse in the whole camp. There was the Escape Committee--the best brains among the senior officers: they could judge a man better than most of your psychiatrists. They, with all their experience of crack-brained schemes, would have spotted my flaw if anyone could have done. On the contrary, I had a part, as adviser or assistant, in pretty well every attempt at escape that was made. I became a sort of consultant to planners, the chap whose expert advice was sought before a plan was put up to the Escape Committee for sanction.
    Escape, of course, was the medium, as it were, in which all our thoughts existed; our little occupations and amusements were the surface waves of life and the study of escape the sea that buoyed up all we did.
    In practice all escape plans were variations of one method. There was only one way of solving the basic problem of passing the wire. That was moling--tunnelling. I had a hand in the planning of many tunnels and was a member of many different combines for digging and hiding the earth; but there was not one successful escape from Oflag XXIX Z up to the time when my partner and I made our attempt.
    I won't go into all the details of the planning and the digging. They'd prove just the opposite of what I'm trying to prove to you by this story, because that tunnel was exceedingly well planned and well dug. The whole camp backed us to succeed.
    We did it on a night towards the end of May, an hour before moonrise. The exit of our tunnel was a hundred yards beyond the wire, leaving us a fifty-yard dash to a tongue of the pine-forest. The simplest application of the