"Ah, what V.C.!" he said sourly. "Sure, his owld father wouldn't make a fuss of him. 'Why didn't he do more?' says he. 'I often laid out twenty men myself with a stick, and I coming from Macroom Fair. It is a bad trial of Mick that he could kill only eight, and he having a rifle and bayonet!' he says. c.o.c.k him up with a V.C.!" After which Jim ceased to be consoling and began to exercise his worst leg--knowing well that the sight of his torments would speedily melt Denny's heart and make him forget the sorrows of Ireland.

The guards did not trouble them much; they kept a strict watch, which was not difficult, as all the prisoners were partially disabled; and then considered their duty discharged by bringing twice a day the invariable meal of soup and bread. No one liked to speculate on what had gone to the making of the soup; it was a pale, greasy liquid, with strange lumps in it, and tasted as dish-water may be supposed to taste. Jim learned to eat the sour bread by soaking it in the soup.

He had no inclination to eat, but he forced himself to swallow the disgusting meals, so that he might keep up his strength, just as he worked his stiff limbs and rubbed them most of the day. For there was but one idea in Jim Linton's mind--escape.

Gradually he became able to sit up, and then to move a little, hobbling painfully on a stick which had been part of a broken pew, and endeavouring to take part in looking after the helpless prisoners, and in keeping the church clean, since the guards laughed at the idea of helping at either. Jim had seen something of the treatment given to wounded German soldiers in England, and he writhed to think of them, tended as though they were our own sick, while British prisoners lay and starved in filthy holes. But the little _cure_ rebuked him.

"But what would you, my son? They are _canaille_--without breeding, without decency, without hearts. Are we to put ourselves on that level?"

"I suppose not--but it's a big difference, Father," Jim muttered.

"The bigger the difference, the more honour on our side," said the little priest. "And things pa.s.s. Long after you and I and all these poor lads are forgotten it will be remembered that we came out of this war with our heads up. But they----!" Suddenly fierce scorn filled his quiet eyes. "They will be the outcasts of the world!"

Wherefore Jim worked on, and tried to take comfort by the _cure's_ philosophy; although there were many times when he found it hard to digest. It was all very well to be cheerful about the verdict of the future, but difficult to forget the insistent present, with the heel of the Hun on his neck. It was sometimes easier to be philosophic by dreaming of days when the positions should be reversed.

He was able to walk a little when the order came to move. The guards became suddenly busy; officers whom the prisoners had not seen before came in and out, and one evening the helpless were put roughly into farm carts and taken to the station, while those able to move by themselves were marched after them--marched quickly, with bayonet points ready behind them to prod stragglers. It was nearly dark when they were thrust roughly into closed trucks, looking back for the last time on the little _cure_, who had marched beside them, with an arm for two sick men, and now stood on the platform, looking wistfully at them. He put up his hand solemnly.

"G.o.d keep you, my sons!"

A German soldier elbowed him roughly aside. The doors of the trucks were clashed together, leaving them in darkness; and presently, with straining and rattling and clanging, the train moved out of the station.

"Next stop, Germany!" said Denny Callaghan from the corner where he had been put down. "And not a ticket between the lot of us!"

CHAPTER XVI

THROUGH THE DARKNESS

"I think that's the last load," Jim Linton said.

He had wriggled backwards out of a black hole in the side of a black cupboard; and now sat back on his heels, gasping. His only article of attire was a pair of short trousers. From his hair to his heels he was caked with dirt.

"Well, praise the pigs for that," said a voice from the blackness of the cupboard.

Some one switched on a tiny electric light. Then it could be seen, dimly, that the cupboard was just large enough to hold four men, crouching so closely that they almost touched each other. All were dressed--or undressed--as Jim was; all were equally dirty. Their blackened faces were set and grim. And whether they spoke, or moved, or merely sat still, they were listening--listening.

All four were British officers. Marsh and Fullerton were subalterns belonging to a cavalry regiment. Desmond was a captain--a Dublin Fusilier; and Jim Linton completed the quartette; and they sat in a hole in the ground under the floor of an officers' barrack in a Westphalian prison-camp. The yawning opening in front of them represented five months' ceaseless work, night after night. It was the mouth of a tunnel.

"I dreamed to-day that we crawled in," Marsh said, in a whisper--they had all learned to hear the faintest murmur of speech. "And we crawled, and crawled, and crawled: for years, it seemed. And then we saw daylight ahead, and we crawled out--in Piccadilly Circus!"

"That was 'some' tunnel, even in a dream," Desmond said.

"I feel as if it were 'some' tunnel now," remarked Jim--still breathing heavily.

"Yes--you've had a long spell, Linton. We were just beginning to think something was wrong."

"I thought I might as well finish--and then another bit of roof fell in, and I had to fix it," Jim answered. "Well, it won't be gardening that I'll go in for when I get back to Australia; I've dug enough here to last me my life!"

"Hear, hear!" said some one. "And what now?"

"Bed, I think," Desmond said. "And to-morrow night--the last crawl down that beastly rabbit-run, if we've luck. Only this time we won't crawl back."

He felt within a little hollow in the earth wall, and brought out some empty tins and some bottles of water; and slowly, painstakingly, they washed off the dirt that encrusted them. It was a long business, and at the end of it Desmond inspected them all, and was himself inspected, to make sure that no tell-tale streaks remained. Finally he nodded, satisfied, and then, with infinite caution, he slid back a panel and peered out into blackness--having first extinguished their little light. There was no sound. He slipped out of the door, and returned after a few moments.

"All clear," he whispered, and vanished.

One by one they followed him, each man gliding noiselessly away. They had donned uniform coats and trousers before leaving, and closed the entrance to the tunnel with a round screen of rough, interlaced twigs which they plastered with earth. The tins were buried again, with the bottles. Ordinarily each man carried away an empty bottle, to be brought back next night filled with water; but there was no further need of this. To-morrow night, please G.o.d, there would be no returning; no washing, crouched in the darkness, to escape the eagle eye of the guards; no bitter toil in the darkness, listening with strained ears all the while.

Jim was the last to leave. He slid the panel into position, and placed against it the brooms and mops used in keeping the barrack clean. As he handled them one by one, a brush slipped and clattered ever so slightly. He caught at it desperately, and then stood motionless, beads of perspiration breaking out upon his forehead. But no sound came from without, and presently he breathed more freely.

He stood in a cupboard under the stairs. It was Desmond who first realized that there must be s.p.a.ce beyond it, who had planned a way in, and thence to cut a tunnel to freedom. They had found, or stolen, or manufactured, tools, and had cut the sliding panel so cunningly that none of the Germans who used the broom-cupboard had suspected its existence. The s.p.a.ce on the far side of the wall had given them room to begin their work. Gradually it had been filled with earth until there was barely s.p.a.ce for them to move; then the earth as they dug it out had to be laboriously thrust under the floor of the building, which was luckily raised a little above ground. They had managed to secrete some wire, and, having tapped the electric supply which lit the barrack, had carried a switch-line into their "dug-out." But the tunnel itself had, for the most part, been done in utter blackness.

Three times the roof had fallen in badly, on the second occasion nearly burying Jim and Fullerton; it was considered, now, that Linton was a difficult man to bury, with an unconquerable habit of resurrecting himself. A score of times they had narrowly escaped detection. For five months they had lived in a daily and nightly agony of fear--not of discovery itself, or its certain savage punishment, but of losing their chance.

There were eight officers altogether in the "syndicate," and four others knew of their plan--four who were keen to help, but too badly disabled from wounds to hope for anything but the end of the war.

They worked in shifts of four--one quartette stealing underground each night, as soon as the guards relaxed their vigil, while the others remained in the dormitories, ready to signal to the working party, should any alarm occur, and, if possible, to create a disturbance to hold the attention of the Germans for a little. They had succeeded in saving the situation three times when a surprise roll-call was made during the night--thanks to another wire which carried an electric alarm signal underground from the dormitory. Baylis, who had been an electrical engineer in time of peace, had managed the wiring; it was believed among the syndicate that when Baylis needed any electric fitting very badly he simply went and thought about it so hard that it materialized, like the gentleman who evolved a camel out of his inner consciousness.

One of the romances of the Great War might be written about the way in which prisoners bent on escape were able to obtain materials for getting out, and necessary supplies when once they were away from the camp. Much of how it was done will never be known, for the organization was kept profoundly secret, and those who were helped by it were often pledged solemnly to reveal nothing. Money--plenty of money--was the only thing necessary; given the command of that, the prisoner who wished to break out would find, mysteriously, tools or disguises, or whatever else he needed within the camp, and, after he had escaped, the three essentials, without which he had very little chance--map, compa.s.s, and civilian clothes. Then, having paid enormous sums for what had probably cost the supply system a few shillings, he was at liberty to strike for freedom--with a section of German territory--a few miles or a few hundred--to cross; and finally the chance of circ.u.mventing the guards on the Dutch frontier. It was so desperate an undertaking that the wonder was, not that so many failed, but that so many succeeded.

Jim Linton had no money. His was one of the many cases among prisoners in which no letters over seemed to reach home--no communication to be opened up with England. For some time he had not been permitted to write, having unfortunately managed to incur the enmity of the camp commandant by failing to salute him with the precise degree of servility which that official considered necessary to his dignity. Then, when at length he was allowed to send an occasional letter, he waited in vain for any reply, either from his home or his regiment. Possibly the commandant knew why; he used to look at Jim with an evil triumph in his eye which made the boy long to take him by his fat throat and ask him whether indeed his letters ever got farther than the office waste-paper basket.

Other officers in the camp would have written about him to their friends, so that the information could be pa.s.sed on to Jim's father; but in all probability their letters also would have been suppressed, and Jim refused to allow them to take the risk. Letters were too precious, and went astray too easily; it was not fair to add to the chances of their failing to reach those who longed for them at home.

And then, there was always the hope that his own might really have got through, even though delayed; that some day might come answers, telling that at last his father and Norah and Wally were no longer mourning him as dead. He clung to the hope though one mail day after another left him bitterly disappointed. In a German prison-camp there was little to do except hope.

Jim would have fared badly enough on the miserable food of the camp, but for the other officers. They received parcels regularly, the contents of which were dumped into a common store; and Jim and another "orphan" were made honorary members of the mess, with such genuine heartiness that after the first protests they ceased to worry their hosts with objections, and merely tried to eat as little as possible.

Jim thought about them gratefully on this last night as he slipped out of the cupboard and made his way upstairs, moving noiselessly as a cat on the bare boards. What good chaps they were! How they had made him welcome!--even though his coming meant that they went hungrier. They were such a gay, laughing little band; there was not one of them who did not play the game, keeping a cheery front to the world and meeting privation and wretchedness with a joke and a shrug. If that was British spirit, then Jim decided that to be British was a pretty big thing.

It was thanks to Desmond and Fullerton that he had been able to join the "syndicate." They had plenty of money, and had insisted on lending him his share of the expenses, representing, when he had hesitated, that they needed his strength for the work of tunnelling--after which Jim had laboured far more mightily than they had ever wished, or even suspected. He was fit and strong again now; lean and pinched, as were they all, but in hard training. Hope had keyed him up to a high pitch. The last night in this rat-hole; to-morrow----!

A light flashed downstairs and a door flung open just as he reached the landing. Jim sprang to his dormitory, flinging off his coat as he ran with leaping, stealthy strides. Feet were tramping up the stairs behind him. He dived into his blankets and drew them up under his chin, just as he had dived hurriedly into bed a score of times at school when an intrusive master had come upon a midnight "spread"; but with his heart pounding with fear as it had never pounded at school.

What did they suspect? Had they found out anything?

The guard tramped noisily into the room, under a big Feldwebel, or sergeant-major. He flashed his lantern down the long room, and uttered a sharp word of command that brought the sleepers to their feet, blinking and but half awake. Then he called the roll, pausing when he came to Jim.

"You sleep in a curious dress. Where is your shirt?"

"Drying," said Jim curtly. "I washed it--I've only one."

"Enough for an English swine-hound," said the German contemptuously.

He pa.s.sed on to the next man, and Jim sighed with relief.

Presently the guard clanked out, and the prisoners returned to their straw mattresses.

"That was near enough," whispered Baylis, who was next to Jim.

"A good deal too near," Jim answered. "However, it ought to be fairly certain that they won't spring another surprise-party on us to-morrow.