4
The first thing that struck Neave as he arrived at the castle at the end of May 1941 was the ‘gay, Elizabethan’ high spirits of the prisoners. They ‘sauntered proudly beneath the turrets … British, French, Belgians, Dutch, Poles and Serbs.’1 It was reminiscent of Crace’s house at Eton, ‘a salon filled with wit and self-confidence’. They were the cream of the escapologists, graduates of camps all over Hitler’s empire. They would have a hard time exercising their talents in Colditz. The castle was the ancient seat of Augustus the Strong of Saxony. The thick mediaeval walls, ninety feet high, stood on a plug of rock with sheer escarpments on three sides. It was a physical definition of a fortress, and as difficult to get out of as it was to get into.
None of this deterred the prisoners. Every officer in the castle ‘had but a single thought – to escape’, and there was none of the fatalistic acceptance that had prevailed at Spangenberg and Thorn. Despite the unpromising geology, numerous tunnelling projects were under way, multinational affairs conducted by ‘boards of directors’. By the end of July, there were about fifty British and Commonwealth officers among more than five hundred prisoners. The French made up the largest contingent (approximately 250), followed by the Poles, with 150. The place was abuzz with escape-related subsidiary industries. Every object that had a potential use was exploited: ancient lead piping could be melted down to make fake German uniform buttons and a dentist’s drill was handy for cutting keys.
By the time Neave arrived, a team of twelve British officers and a Pole had been working for months on a tunnel. On 29 May, they made their bid. The tunnel led from beneath the floor of the canteen to beyond the eastern exterior wall. They believed they had an ally in a guard whose allegiance they thought they had secured with money, cigarettes and chocolate. He promised to arrange to be on sentry duty at the point beyond the wall where they planned to break surface. Their faith was misplaced. From the start, he had been reporting their progress to his superiors. Just as they thought freedom beckoned, the escapees were hauled out of the tunnel and off to a spell of solitary confinement – the standard punishment being four weeks.
This failure reinforced Neave’s belief that tunnels were a waste of time. He nonetheless joined a Polish-led team who had sunk a shaft beneath the sickbay and for several months did his share of digging, working exhausting four-hour shifts, twice a week. It was a sort of therapy. ‘Such activities strengthen the spirit of the prisoner of war,’ he wrote. ‘They occupy his mind and body and avoid the tedium which may lead to madness. This renders all escape operations worth while, however remote and harebrained the scheme.’ He admitted there was another reason for signing up: ‘because I still had a sense of being at school, I did not wish to be left out of the second eleven.’
The reference to school was telling. The prisoners’ escape impulse was matched by a ‘common desire to infuriate the Germans’. It was the same spirit that had animated the rags and mobbings of his Eton days. Like unruly schoolboys, the prisoners were determined whenever possible to undermine authority by mockery, some of it brilliantly subversive. Neave once told Norman Tebbit* a story that he did not include in his memoirs. Following a sentence of solitary confinement, he was lying in his cell, one of several along a corridor. One end of the passage was blocked off; at the other was an iron gate with a guard on the far side. ‘[Neave] was woken in the early hours of the morning by the sound of the cell door being unlocked,’ said Tebbit.2 ‘There stood a prisoner from the cell next door – a Canadian who happened to be a locksmith in civilian life.’ The pair chatted for a while. Before calling it a night, they could not resist the opportunity to wind up the guards. ‘They wrote little messages saying, “Please wake me at 6.30. I would like scrambled eggs and bacon for breakfast,” and stuck them on their doors.’
Neave was coming to believe that deception was a better way of outwitting the Germans than digging. The gap in the Germans’ defences was mental not physical and in particular, their reverence for authority. He started to think that it might be possible to deceive the guards ‘by a bold attempt to leave by the front gate in German uniform’.3 By now the prisoners knew their captors’ routines intimately. The comings and goings of the garrison were of particular interest. It was noted that anyone entering the castle’s inner courtyard picked up a brass disc at the guardhouse, which they then showed to the sentry on the gate. A workman had been persuaded to hand over one of these discs in return for tobacco, and it was added to the communal store of escape aids. Neave hoped it would be his passport to freedom.
This time he would act alone. Even the escape-happy inmates of Colditz seemed to regard the scheme as fanciful. It involved concocting a fake German uniform and bluffing his way through the controls disguised as an NCO. There were at least four guard posts to negotiate. It was 400 miles to the Swiss border, but as he admitted, ‘My plans hardly extended beyond the last gate of the castle,’4 where he hoped to steal a bike and pedal to the frontier. Bit by bit, he assembled his military and civilian disguises. The latter consisted of an old RAF tunic, boiled up in a cauldron with the lead from indelible pencils and dyed blue, and Air Force trousers. The ensemble was topped off with a home-made Tyrolean-style homburg, made out of blanket material stiffened with glue. The uniform was even more improbable. A month’s chocolate ration bought him a Polish tunic in khaki. There were no pencils of the right hue available to achieve an authentic German Feldgrau. He decided to use paint, which the Germans allowed to be sold in the canteen to create backdrops for the camp theatrical productions. An array of prisoners who had now retrained themselves as artisans provided fake insignia, a cardboard belt with silver paper buckle, a cap and a wooden bayonet and scabbard. The only authentic-looking item was a pair of Polish army jackboots.
Neave’s disguise had no chance of succeeding in daylight. Even in darkness it was unlikely to fool anyone who gave him a cursory glance. His last escape attempt had been a physical and mental ordeal, and could easily have landed him in a concentration camp or in front of a firing squad. Yet despite this knowledge and the scepticism of Captain Pat Reid, the British contingent’s escape officer, he pressed on. ‘A hysterical impatience overcame me,’ he wrote. ‘My plans absorbed my whole life and influenced every thought and action.’
On a hot August evening in 1941, he was ready. At nine o’clock, he went with the others to the parade ground for the evening roll-call, his fake uniform hidden under a stifling British Army overcoat. With the order to dismiss, someone whisked away the coat and as the prisoners surged back to their quarters, he marched towards the main door of the courtyard. Producing the magic disc, he announced he had a message for Hauptmann (Captain) Paul Priem, the senior camp security officer. The guard let him through. Then it was on to the first archway. He claimed later that even in these nerve-racking moments the sensation of freedom was ‘like a drug which brought an intense pleasure, an exquisite unburdening of the soul’.5 If so, it was short-lived. Even before he reached the arch, there were shouts from the guardhouse behind. He turned back and saw the arc lights shining on his pathetic disguise. The tunic showed up ‘a shade of pea-green’. The cap was the worst: ‘It shone like a brilliant emerald in the glare.’ He felt like ‘a demon king under the spotlights in a Christmas pantomime’, but nonetheless started to run.
A shout of ‘Halt, or I fire!’ stopped him. He raised his hands and was led away at rifle point for a night in the cells, with the threat that he would be shot for dishonouring the German uniform ringing in his ears. Next morning, he was brought before the camp commandant, Oberst (Colonel) Prawitz, who found the absurdity of the situation amusing. As he stood there, ‘a sad joke in a burlesque uniform’, Neave was ordered to salute, German fashion. The commandant was not satisfied and ordered him to do it again. He spent the rest of the morning under guard while passers-by examined him ‘as if I were a newly captured animal’. There was a final humiliation. An elderly photographer was summoned from the town. He set up an antique camera and snapped him from different angles. Neave grew ‘crimson with mortification’ as he posed, ‘perspiring beneath my dyed jacket … I had reduced all escaping to a ridiculous farce, a music-hall turn.’6
The pictures are on display in the escape museum at modern-day Colditz. Far from looking mortified, Neave seems to be quite enjoying the joke, and the fake uniform is less amateurish than his self-flagellating account suggests. The Germans wrung one last laugh from the episode. That evening Priem, who, according to Pat Reid, ‘possessed a rare quality among Germans – a sense of humour’,7 announced to the prisoners that ‘Gefreiter [Lance Corporal] Neave is to be sent to the Russian front.’ It was a good joke and the castle rocked with laughter. Neave’s punishment was the usual – twenty-eight days in solitary. There was a backlog of miscreants. The castle’s punishment cells were full and the town gaol had been pressed into service to accommodate the overflow. Even there, space was at a premium and it was several weeks before there was a vacancy.
In early October, he was marched from the inner courtyard where the prisoners were housed through a succession of guarded archways and onto the bridge across the castle moat. As they crossed the bridge, Neave’s eye was caught by something that gave him fresh hope. A wicket gate in the bridge opened onto a pathway that ran down to the bed of the dry moat. There it crossed to the other bank, before disappearing by the side of a block housing married prison staff. It stood alongside the wall of the large park that adjoined the castle. If he could get onto the path, he would avoid the last guardhouse at the castle entrance. As far as he could see, there was no barbed-wire fencing on the far side of the moat. The only thing standing between an escaper and open country was the wall of the park. The prisoners were taken there for exercise twice a week and Neave knew the wall presented no serious obstacle.
He clung to this thought as he passed the next four weeks smoking cigarettes and the pipe he then affected, savouring Red Cross chocolate – a great luxury in wartime Germany – and reading novels. Like other prisoners, he found that a stretch in the cooler made quite a pleasant change from what he called the ‘twitter’ of the camp. He ‘did not feel caged and helpless’, as he had been when held for interrogation in Poland. In fact, he had ‘almost forgotten the Gestapo. Now I thought only of escape.’8
Given the terror that he admitted feeling at that time, Neave had recovered his sangfroid remarkably quickly. Despite their bad-boy status, at Colditz prisoners ‘were better treated than at Thorn’. The ambience tended to reinforce the idea that escaping was a kind of game, a gentlemanly extension of the field of conflict between honourable enemies. The prison food was grim – barley gruel with strips of hog hide or potatoes and turnip stews for lunch, and bread, spread with a little margarine and jam, for breakfast and supper. But the diet was supplemented by Red Cross parcels, shared by all, which came once or twice every three weeks. They weighed ten and a half pounds each and contained a selection of tinned meat, vegetables, cheese, butter, jam, egg and milk powder, tea or cocoa, sugar, cooking fat and, of course, chocolate.
Prisoners were woken at 7.30 and the first roll-call, or Appell, took place at 8.30, after breakfast. According to Pat Reid, thereafter they were ‘free to carry on any lawful pursuit such as reading, studying, language lessons, music lessons, or exercise’. The Poles were great linguists and were happy to provide classes in a range of languages. In the afternoon, in the courtyard they played volleyball and ‘stoolball’, a variant of the Eton wall game in which sides up to thirty strong fought for possession of a football. All methods were allowed and Reid regarded it as ‘the roughest game I have ever played, putting games like rugby football in the shade’.9 It was in the gaolers’ interests to keep their charges busy, exhausted and reasonably contented. However, the calming effect of a relatively benign regime was constantly under attack by a larger imperative.
The inmates had their bad-boy status to maintain. One First World War escape yarn, written by Alfred ‘Johnny’ Evans, an RFC pilot, and devoured by schoolboys in the inter-war years, was called The Escaping Club. That, effectively, is what Colditz had become. To maintain your credentials, you had to keep on trying. Neave felt the impulse acutely. Among the motives driving him seems to have been the conviction that imprisonment had given him a chance to shine that had eluded him on the battlefield. His failed escape from Thorn was his most notable achievement to date. A successful one would not only bring him distinction, it could also be presented as a genuine contribution to the war effort: by boosting morale, tying up German resources in the inevitable hunt and potentially yielding important information about both prison conditions and enemy attitudes and dispositions.
In their anxiety to keep the inmates out of mischief, the Germans handed Neave his great opportunity. The camp had its own theatre, housed in a large room on the second floor of a block adjoining the guardhouse at the gate to the inner courtyard. There the prisoners put on regular concerts and variety shows. In December 1941, rehearsals began for a pantomime called Ballet Nonsense, dreamed up by Lieutenants Teddy Barton and Jimmy Yule. The production values were high and the enterprise was taken seriously. Given his literary enthusiasms and taste for amateur theatricals demonstrated in the Merton Floats, it was natural that Neave got involved. He contributed a sketch called ‘The Mystery of Wombat College’, a knockabout effort that smacked of Etonian humour. He wrote the part of Dr Calomel, the unpleasant headmaster, for himself.
While preparations for the panto continued, two ardent escapers had made an important discovery. Ferreting around in the rooms adjoining the theatre, Pat Reid and Hank Wardle, the Canadian RAF flier who had been sent to Colditz after a failed escape bid from Spangenberg, found a disused passageway that could be accessed from below the stage. The locked door at one end – easily picked by Wardle – led to an enclosed bridge leading to the attic of the gatehouse. As well as the guardroom on the ground, it housed an officers’ mess on the first floor. The conduit had possibilities and it was Reid who came up with an idea as to how to exploit them. He proposed that two two-man teams, composed of one Briton and one Dutchman, dressed in German uniform, should aim to enter the guardhouse from the least expected direction and bluff their way through the successive castle gates.
As escape officer, it was Reid’s decision who should get the chance. The protocol was that prisoners took their turn. However, despite the fact that he was not at the front of the queue, Reid chose Neave. Reid had been impressed by his ‘dynamic determination’. All the other escape projects had been thwarted and Reid felt a success was vitally important. ‘This young man was the man I wanted,’ he remembered many years later. ‘I chose him and pinned my faith on him and he proved it in the end.’10 It was Reid’s plan, but Neave claimed to have had a hand in the design. He wrote that ‘it seemed to me that if two men in German officers’ uniforms were to descend the stairs from the attic and emerge from the guard-house door through the passage which the door of the actual guard room opened, their appearance would not be questioned by the sentry outside. What more natural than that two officers, after visiting the mess above, should appear from the guard-room door [and start] walking towards the Kommandantur?’ – the administrative offices that enclosed the outer courtyard.11
It was clear that the disguises would have to be a lot more convincing than had been used in Neave’s previous dressing-up-box effort. Fortunately, an understanding forged between the British and sixty-odd Dutch inmates provided a solution. According to Reid, they were ‘as obstinate as mules and as brave as lions’.12 Most of them spoke good English and German. The two groups soon partnered up, with the Dutch using British escape supplies while they contributed their language skills and – crucially – the use of their uniforms. Netherlands army kit was a shade of greeny-blue which closely resembled German Feldgrau. Neave acquired a long overcoat, which the camp tailors remodelled to conform to Wehrmacht issue, complete with authentic-looking braid epaulettes, made from lino removed from the bathroom floor and painted silver. They also acquired neutral-looking trousers, jackets and coats that would pass for civilian outfits for the second part of their journey.
Neave’s partner was Lieutenant Abraham Pierre Tony Luteyn, well-built, good-looking and amiable, but with a tungsten core of determination. Tony Luteyn, as he was usually known, was born in Batavia, in the Dutch East Indies, and was a cadet at the military academy in Breda, Holland, when the war broke out. He was one of a group of more than sixty members of the Royal Dutch East Indies Army who had refused the German offer of an amnesty if they signed a declaration that they would take no part in the war against them, and had chosen prison instead. He was a year younger than Neave and the ideal travelling companion. He was resourceful and had the stamina of mind and body necessary for the protracted crises and dilemmas of escaping. Above all, he spoke excellent German, far better than Neave’s. From his own, modestly related account of the escape, it is clear that his superior grasp of the language was vital in alerting the pair to potential danger and talking them out of trouble, and that without him, the bid might easily have failed. The stresses of escaping could be enough to fracture even the most apparently durable friendship. Neave made no mention of the state of relations between himself and Norman Forbes during their escape. Of Luteyn he said that ‘rebellious by temperament though I was, I found him easy to work with and we seldom argued with each other.’13 This is a neutral-sounding endorsement and as we shall hear later, the relationship that resulted from their shared experience seems to have meant more to Luteyn than it did to Neave.
Once clear of Colditz, the pair intended to abandon their uniforms and dress as civilian ‘guest workers’, then head for the Swiss frontier by train, crossing via the German border town of Singen, 400 miles to the south-west. The route was proposed by the Dutch contingent, having already been proved by an officer of the Royal Netherlands Navy, Lieutenant Hans Larive, who had escaped from Oflag VI-A in Soest, Germany, in October 1940. He was caught at Singen but had learned from a talkative German the best place to cross into neutral Switzerland. On 15 August 1941, he and another Dutch naval officer, Francis Steinmetz, escaped from Colditz by hiding in a manhole under cover of a game of rugby during exercise in the Castle grounds. They reached Switzerland via Singen three days later and both made a ‘home run’ back to Britain, where they served on Motor Torpedo Boats. This feat, perhaps surprisingly, gets little mention in Neave’s account, as do the escapes of the ten French and two other Dutch Colditz POWs who, by one means or another, made successful getaways before he achieved his own. This reticence might be taken as further evidence of the jealous pride that Neave took in his feat as the first British officer to escape and a reluctance to dilute it by reference to the exploits of others.
Luteyn had never met Neave, but once they were teamed up they started to spend time together. Luteyn would be disguised as a German captain, Neave as a lieutenant. Luteyn believed their body language should reflect the difference in rank. Neave struck him as rather ‘nonchalant … normally he walked with his hands in his pockets, like a lot of British officers.’14 In order to ‘to train him to be subordinate to me we walked for a week in the courtyard, up and down, him walking at my left-hand side … when I turned he had to turn around me … a well-dressed German lieutenant, walking with his captain.’
The original plan was for Neave and Luteyn to escape during a performance of Ballet Nonsense. During the noisy finale, they would climb through a trapdoor under the stage and shin down a knotted-sheet rope into the passage that led to the bridge to the guardhouse. After donning their uniforms, they would descend the stairs to the guardroom door and head for the moat bridge and the path that led to the park. In the event, the uniforms were not completed by the time the pantomime began its run. The prisoners passed a boozy Christmas, lit up by hooch distilled from currants and raisins, and on 5 January 1942, everything was in place. The weather was perfect. It was blowing a blizzard that would mask their disguises and deter the guards from over-zealous interpretation of their duties.
As he went down for the 9 p.m. roll-call, Neave had ‘an overpowering sense that this was my last evening in the castle’.15 After the order to dismiss, he and Luteyn went with Pat Reid and Hank Wardle to the darkened theatre and clambered beneath the stage. They loosened the floorboards and, one by one, slid down the sheet rope through a hole in the ceiling to the passage below. They crept to the door opening onto the bridge that connected to the guardhouse and, after an anxious ten minutes, Reid finally managed to pick the lock. The door swung open and they were in the attic. There were handshakes and ‘good lucks’ and Wardle and Reid padded away. Up the well of the stone spiral staircase drifted organ music playing on the guardroom radio. They took the steps confidently, past the light showing under the door of the officers’ mess, to the ground floor. The guardroom door was half open, but no one gave them a glance. Then they stepped out into the freezing night air and the blinding white of the snowflakes swirling in the arc lights.
The sentry on the gate saluted promptly, but Neave sensed his eyes boring into their backs. They passed the first archway and the second sentry without incident. Two officers came up behind them, talking loudly, and in an effort to appear casual Neave clasped his arms behind him – until Luteyn told him not to be a bloody fool and to march with his hands by his side in proper Prussian fashion. Then they were through the clock tower, where the sentry gave another obedient salute. The moat bridge stretched ahead, and to the left, the wicket gate he had noted three months before. Down they went into the moat, stumbling and slipping on the snow. A soldier approached on the path. When he reached them, he stopped and stared.
‘Why do you not salute?’ snapped Luteyn.
The soldier gaped, then obeyed, and went on his way. They crossed to the far side of the moat and passed the married quarters. They groped through snow-laden shrubs to the high stone wall that bounded the park. Neave scrabbled to the top first and tried to pull Luteyn after him. The stones were caked in snow and ice and he kept slithering back. At last, he grabbed the Dutchman under the armpits and hoisted him up beside him. They sat for a few minutes filling their lungs with the freezing air. Then they dropped twelve feet to the frozen ground, landing heavily. Another minute passed. Neave was bruised, shaken and rather frightened. But there were no more obstacles and they were on their way.16
They shed their uniforms and got into their civilian outfits, completed by caps with earflaps, which were welcome in the intense cold. They had German money, chocolate bars, a compass and authentic-looking papers identifying them as Dutch electricians who had volunteered to work in the Reich, forged by a Dutch officer who worked in the Kommandantur and had access to an official typewriter and stamps. Their first objective was the small town of Leisnig, six miles away. On this adventure, trekking was to be kept to a minimum. They were going to take trains wherever possible. Their cover was plausible enough. Germany was swarming with workers from the conquered territories, drafted in to replace the men at the front. Their story was that they had been ordered to move from Leipzig – the nearest large town to Colditz – to Ulm, close to the Swiss border. They set off through the snow in their civvies for the train station, where they took an early workers’ train to Leipzig.
At Leipzig station they learned there was no train south until 10.30 that evening. A dangerous day lay ahead. Their best protection was inconspicuousness, yet almost immediately Neave did something stupid. In the station waiting room, packed with dejected, down-at-heel passengers, he pulled out a large bar of Red Cross chocolate and started to eat. A young woman, with ‘fierce, hysterical eyes, gazed at the chocolate as if she had seen a ghost.’ In wartime Germany it was a fabulous luxury and no one had tasted it for months. As the nudging and muttering grew, Neave and Luteyn slunk out into the hostile streets.
Neave was disappointed that there were no signs of RAF bombing. As for the mood of the inhabitants, the young blonde women in short skirts, and the smart soldiers they gazed at with ‘fiercely possessive blue eyes’, seemed confident and hopeful. The older generation, though, looked ‘shabby’, ‘hungry’ and ‘unhappy’. He ‘could read memories in their worn faces and their hatred of Hitler’s New Order’.17 Whether these feelings occurred to him then or whether they surfaced later, they reveal a humane attitude towards the enemy. Unlike some of the wartime generation, Neave insisted on the distinction between Germans and Nazis. He was reluctant to demonise even the worst of them, trying hard to understand their motives before condemning, and in the case of Rudolf Hess, was ready to show them compassion.
Luteyn says that when they ducked into the shelter of a shabby cinema, Neave committed a second faux pas when he lit up an English cigarette whose distinctive Virginia tobacco ‘you could smell for miles’ and was told sharply by him to put it out. There Neave got his first real feeling of what had been going on beyond the prison walls during his eighteen months of incarceration. The newsreel showed footage from Libya – Rommel standing beside his staff car in the desert and Panzers churning through the sand. Then there was a close-up a captured British pilot. He was waving encouragement to his comrades still fighting in the air. In the castle, there had been a hidden radio on which they tuned into the BBC. Otherwise, all Neave knew of the progress of the war was from German propaganda. In his excitement, he grabbed the seat in front of him, to the annoyance of its occupant. ‘I could have wept from joy,’ he wrote. ‘At least the war was not yet lost.’18 The newsreel showed more good news. There were images of the Eastern Front, where the Germans were enduring their first struggle with General Winter. Soldiers dragged guns and vehicles through a blinding blizzard and frozen corpses littered the ground. The idea was presumably to impress the public with the troops’ sufferings, in order to inspire them to greater sacrifices at home. It was clear, though, that the days of cheap and easy victories were over.
That night they boarded the train to Ulm. Their stories were holding up well. There was an alarming moment when a man in SS uniform invited them to share his compartment. Luteyn’s German came to the rescue and before long the pair were chatting easily about the situation in Holland. According to Neave, when they arrived at Ulm station, they went to the booking office and Luteyn asked for two tickets to Singen. The girl behind the counter frowned. Neave’s ‘heart began to sink’. She asked for their papers and then told them to stay put. She was calling the railway police. They decided not to run but to bluff it out. The policeman who arrived took them to an office, where their papers were examined by a senior colleague. Luteyn’s account differs somewhat from Neave’s and he makes it clear that but for a stroke of luck, their bid for freedom might well have ended here. He says that he asked for a ticket to Tuttlingen, twenty miles short of Singen, which was less likely to be under close surveillance. This, however, aroused the female ticket office clerk’s suspicions and resulted in them being marched off for interrogation by a police ‘commissioner’. Things looked black until the officer examined Luteyn’s (genuine) Dutch passport and noted that he had been born in Batavia. He told him: ‘“That’s a nice hot country,” and we started talking about Indonesia and how good it was.’ The policeman nonetheless wanted to know why he had asked for a ticket to Tuttlingen when their papers only authorised them to go to Ulm. He replied: ‘We are Dutchmen and we have never seen mountains.’ They planned to spend the night there and return the following day. The officer replied that ‘he had been young too. He would not report it but we were never to do it again.’ With that they were sent off with an armed escort to the labour office in town which controlled the movement of foreign workers.
On the way, they both talked cheerfully to their minder, praising the beauty of the old town and trying to win his confidence. It seemed to work. He asked them about life in Holland and, when they got to their destination, left them at the front door, telling them they could make their own way to the appropriate office while he waited for them downstairs. The pair were ‘hardly able to believe their good fortune’.19 They roamed the building until they found some stairs that led to a coal cellar from where they escaped into the back streets of Ulm.
After buying a local map, they set off on foot for the town of Laupheim, where it seemed they could get a train for Stockach, about twelve miles from the Swiss frontier. By now, alarm bells must have been ringing everywhere and Stockach was as near to the border as they dared to go. They arrived at Laupheim at dusk and made for the station. There was no difficulty at the ticket counter and at 9 p.m. the little train pulled in to Stockach. From there Singen was, in theory at least, only a few hours’ walk away. It was tantalisingly close, but the weather had conspired against them. The road rose ‘steeply through the forests and great banks of snow were on either side of us,’ he wrote. ‘Even by two o’clock in the morning we still had many miles to go.’ They trudged on and, at about 5 a.m., decided it was hopeless to try and cross the frontier that night, looking instead for somewhere to hide until the following evening. There were lights showing ahead on the road and figures emerged out of the darkness wheeling bicycles. They seemed harmless and they stopped to talk. They were woodcutters on their way to work. One asked the pair if they were Poles. Luteyn replied that they were. ‘I don’t believe it,’ the questioner replied. ‘Poles are not allowed out of their camp at five in the morning.’ The oldest woodcutter then told one of the men to go and fetch the police.
Neave was always frank about the ease with which fatigue and discomfort could undermine his morale. After nine hours on the road he was instantly deflated by this setback. ‘I was near to surrender,’ he wrote. ‘My feet seemed to be frozen in my boots … I hardly cared that we had come so far only to be recaptured. I could only think of warm fires and beds.’20 But it was soon clear that the woodcutters were frightened of them. They made no attempt to detain them, but just stood there ‘irresolute and dumb’. An unspoken signal passed between Neave and Luteyn. Without a word, they set off simultaneously, floundering through the snow across a field and into a forest, running until they collapsed. When they recovered they searched for shelter. Luck was on their side. They came across a large wooden hut, found an open window and climbed in. One room had a bed, where they lay down together and, covered by an old blanket, slept without waking until the following afternoon.
They waited for nightfall, hearing once in the distance the barking of dogs. The hut was well equipped. They found spades with which they could dig themselves out of snowdrifts and white coats – left by bee-keepers, it seemed – which would make perfect camouflage against the snow that was again falling heavily. At five o’clock on the afternoon of 8 January 1942, they made their way through the forest, back to the road that led to Singen. West and south of the town there were woods, through which ran the road and railway line to Schaffhausen, just inside Switzerland. Freedom and safety were within their grasp.
They marched for a mile, with the spades on their shoulders and the white coats under their arms. Then, again, they saw bicycle lamps ahead. A voice shouted at them to halt. Out of the darkness came two boys in the uniform of the Hitler Youth. They were both carrying truncheons. Refreshed by his sleep, Neave ‘felt no fear of them … I was determined they should not stop us.’ In ‘a hectoring fashion’, the boys asked them their names and where they were going. Luteyn replied that they were Westphalians working in the neighbourhood. The Westphalian accent was supposed to be close to that of the Dutch. The teenagers seemed uncertain. Neave asked them what was wrong. One replied that they had been ‘told to look for two British prisoners who have escaped and are thought to be trying to cross the frontier tonight’. The fugitives laughed. ‘They won’t get far,’ said Luteyn. ‘It’s much too cold for prisoners.’ The boys seemed suspicious, but they went on their way. Afterwards, Neave asked Luteyn what he had in mind if the boys had challenged them again. ‘For me to kill one with my spade and you the other,’ he replied. ‘What did you intend to do?’ Neave said, ‘Exactly the same.’21
They walked through a blacked-out Singen and set off southwards through the woods, heading on a compass bearing to the frontier. At two in the morning, they reached the railway line to Schaffhausen. It was two miles north of the road that marked the German–Swiss border. They wrapped themselves in the white coats and slipped across the tracks, then moved carefully through the trees until they could see the lights of cars passing on the frontier road. Not far to the east was the glow of lanterns and the murmur of voices. It seemed to be a border-post. They settled down in a ditch and waited, watching a guard pace up and down only forty yards away. Beyond the road lay ‘a smooth plain of snow surrounded by distant trees’. This few hundred yards of no-man’s-land was all that now stood between them and freedom. They crouched there for an hour, finishing off the last of their chocolate and quenching their thirst with mouthfuls of snow. Clouds had covered the moon and a rising wind made the cold even more bitter. ‘Do you agree to cross now?’ Luteyn asked him. ‘This is the moment,’ he whispered back. They climbed out of the ditch and crawled towards the invisible frontier, ‘ploughing on hands and knees through the deep snow. After what seemed an eternity we rose to our feet, and surged forward into Switzerland.’
It was 9 January 1942, and only eighty-four hours had passed since they walked out of Colditz.
* Norman Tebbit (1931–), educated Edmonton Grammar School; Conservative MP for Chingford, 1970–92 (Epping 1970–74); successively Secretary of State for Employment, 1981–83, Trade and Industry, 1983–85, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, 1985–87; Chairman of the Conservative Party, 1985–87; created Lord Tebbit of Chingford, 1992.