The Second World War: PART 4 - Andrew MacDonald - Sagan (1943)

MACDONALD

4.

1943

SAGAN

The Royal Air Force Flight Lieutenant, the Scotsman Andrew MacDonald, and appointed Intelligence Chief of Stalag Luft III, left the warmth of Hut 106 and closed the door conspiratorially behind him. 

            He slung his leather bomber jacket, tattered, over his right shoulder and climbed down the three wooden steps into the courtyard.  He padded over, standing beside a shifty-looking young fellow in his late twenties.  The man took a gunmetal cigarette case from his black pocket and offered MacDonald one.  The gold on his shoulders and breast pocket implied a certain sense of efficacy from experience: a naval man.   

            ‘Cigarette?’ he asked.

            ‘Sure, old boy,’

            ‘Think Roger made it?’ he said.

            ‘Which one?’

            ‘Bartlett,’

Macdonald sighed in the fumes, thinking.  He was forty-one and had a very calm, very calculating face for a very tough Scot.  His relaxed features wrinkled into a frown at the mention of the man’s name. 

            ‘I don’t know Eric.  I don’t know.’

Stuffing his hands into his sides he traced small circles with his shoe in the ground, churning the dirt.

‘Farrier?’ he asked rather suddenly.

‘Pardon?’

‘Roger Farrier?’ Eric Ashley-Pitt repeated.

‘I’d say so,’ a voice said.

Willie Dickies appeared out of nowhere and joined the RAF and RN officer at the foot of 106.  He had a boyish smirk drawn over his freckled face as he embraced MacDonald wholeheartedly. 

            ‘How’ve you been Willie?’

            ‘Surviving,’

            ‘You think Farrier’s still alive?’ Ashley-Pitt asked.

            ‘Of course, he’s made over eleven escape attempts.  Him and Ives even tried to jump out of the truck getting here.  The man’s a bloody legend!’

            ‘I’ve never encountered him personally, only by reputation.’ Pitt said.  ‘I might have seen him earlier in fact, two of the goons dragged a hooded man off to the Cooler.  Put up a bit of a scrap from the look of things.’

            ‘No surprise there then,’ MacDonald retorted. 

The three of them, unknowingly so, had fixed their attentions upon the Kommandant’s office.  Across the warning wire, through the two gated doors, past the fence, four armed guards and fifty feet precisely from the very ground they stood on. 

Von Luger’s office was twelve-feet tall, occupying a single floor.  It reminded the chaps of their makeshift command posts along the French coast.  It had been painted beech to complement the dirt exterior of the compound, providing a more hospitable look to the place.  It gave off the effect of a Nordic sauna building.  It wasn’t altogether different from the huts, aside from the window bars and shutters.  It offered no opportunities of escape.

Macdonald tossed his cigarette long.  Beneath the thin straw hair, his small blue eyes darted about wildly, looking for something, another possible opening of sorts.  The High Command had done a bloody good job on this place; there was none.

‘We’ll need the two Rogers if we’re going to pull this one off,’ he then said.  

  ‘Don’t hold your breath,’ Ashley-Pitt replied. 

            As Macdonald looked the Yorkshireman in the eye there was the backfire of an engine.  Two German motorcars appeared from a clearing, kicking up dust.  The second vehicle, whatever it was but certainly expensive, had three men in the back.  The jailers seized an arm each and a man stepped from the vehicle between them, wearing a raincoat and black cap.

            Squadron Leader Roger Bartlett had just turned thirty-three when he reached the entrance of Stalag Luft III.  He was a big, tempestuous man with broad shoulders and chilling pale blue eyes.  His right one dropped, giving a most sinister and brooding look to his otherwise friendly appearance.  Not to mention some fresh bruising around the mouth that left a permanent sneer.  The otherwise broken face fought the temptation to smile as he and Macdonald glimpsed one another.

            ‘Don’t take too much notice, the goons may not know who he is.  I’ll pass the word on.’ Macdonald said, setting off at a pace towards Hut 103, he seized a younger lad by the jacket sleeve.  ‘Get word sent to Farrier, too.  We’re meeting tonight.  X is back.’

            And with that the boy shrugged off Macdonald and passed his message onto the next man and thereon through the camp like a bout of wildfire.