The Great Escape by Paul Brickhill Page B

black-haired Birkland, also Canadian, was distinguished by a little fringe of beard around his jowls.
    They all had their little peculiarities. Davy Jones had no nerves and a blind faith that a tunnel would never fall on him. Later he found out. Whenever Scruffy Weir dug, the tunnel used to take a diving turn to the left. Crump used to curse him every second day for going off course, but Scruffy kept making diving turns. Birkland used to veer to the right nearly every shift, so Crump always rostered him to dig after Scruffy to even things out. For a long time, Birkland insisted on working stark naked below, and to see him, sweat-and-sand-stained, reversing down the tunnel was an unnerving sight. Floody noticed that he was getting sand-scarred on the knees and elbows and made him wear the hated long underpants and vests. The sand scars looked too obvious.
    When each tunnel was about thirty feet long, Floody changed the shoring system to conserve wood. Instead of solid framing all the way, they spaced the frames about a foot apart and laid boards over the tops.
    Williams had already made three levies on bedboards throughout the camp, demanding a certain number from every room. Every bed now had about three boards missing, and the paillasses, which were never very comfortable, sagged in the gaps. You got used to it in time. Some of the rooms had double doors, and Williams sent his carpenters under the huts to rip off some of the lower floor boards. They sawed them into lengths of about eighteen inches and took them below to shore the tunnel roofs between the box frames.
     
    With the new shoring the face had to be dug forward about two feet before they could put in a new box frame and line the roof, and the falls of sand immediately became worse. No matter how carefully you scraped the concave archway overhead, the stuff cracked and fell nearly every day. There was hardly ever enough warning to get clear; just the little cracking noise and down it came, usually burying the digger from head to hips and leaving a dome overhead.
    Sometimes a couple of hundred pounds of sand fell and then number two worked fast, grabbed his half-entombed mate by the ankles and hauled him clear, sand in his eyes and ears and choking in his nose and mouth.
    Nearly always the fat lamp and air line were smothered, and they were left in stifling blackness. Unable to write a note, number two trolleyed himself back to the shaft and returned with another lamp, by which time number one would probably have coughed the sand out of his nose and mouth so he could breathe again. You’d know if he could breathe by the curses.
    The last four feet of the tunnel would be blocked with sand. They dug out the nozzle of the air line, emptied the sand out, and refitted it. About a third of the sand that had fallen they sent back on the trolley, and then, with just enough room to work in, number one box-framed the area of the fall. He left a little gap in the room through which he packed sand for half an hour till the dome above was filled in. Then he boarded over the gap and carried on tunneling. The exasperating thing about a fall was that, no matter how tightly you crammed it, you could only pack about two-thirds of the amount that fell back in the dome. The rest was so much extra sand to be dispersed.
    One of Travis’ men relieved the fat-lamp situation a little. He’d been an electrical engineer, and he went around every hut rearranging all the electric-light wiring. When he’d finished, he had about forty bits of cable from a foot to ten feet long. He spliced them all together, tapped the power lines behind the walls, and installed electric lights in all the shafts and for the first few feet of the tunnels. It wasn’t any good during the day because the power wasn’t on, but it was a great help to the evening dispersing shifts.
    On a good day when there weren’t too many ferret alarms Or falls, each tunnel crawled forward about five feet. Often it was less, but