Profiles in courage

Have you ever escaped from captivity by removing from your boot the serrated surgical wire cunningly disguised as a shoelace and sawing through the windpipe of your hapless, squirming guard? Me neither, but I know someone who has. He’s a lovely old boy, gentle, thoughtful, slightly melancholy and, but for that unsettlingly sardonic smile and the gimlet glint in his eye, you’d never imagine for a moment that he could have killed anyone.

But he did, quite a few times in fact, during his service in the second world war with the commandos. On this particular occasion, he had been captured with three of his comrades outside Dunkirk. One was shot almost immediately, supposedly while trying to escape; one was moved elsewhere and never seen again; the other two — my friend and his pal (a German Jew) were imprisoned in a bunker and told by their guard that if they made the slightest move they’d be shot.

Of course, they were probably going to be shot anyway — this after all was Hitler’s order regarding captured commandos — so they had nothing to lose by trying. The guard who had threatened them watched them like a hawk. But when he was relieved by a laxer one they made their move. ‘He was having a Jimmy Riddle,’ my friend recalls. ‘And we did him with a Gigli wire. There was a terrible lot of blood and it went all over my battledress. I didn’t wash for over a month, so I had something to remember that dead German by all that time.’

After my friend told me this story a few weeks ago I remember feeling oddly elated. Partly, no doubt, this reflected the same unhealthy prurience which makes us slow down when passing major motorway accidents or sit, tranfixed, through hour-long documentaries about Beslan.