In the cells Neave was thoroughly searched – ‘more thoroughly than usual’ according to Eggers. They discovered the Cellophane container stuffed with money, which was a disconcerting find. It showed that the prisoners had access to German currency, an invaluable aid to escaping. Neave was led roughly away to solitary confinement, where he took off his makeshift cardboard belt and wooden bayonet and hurled them to the floor in a fit of temper. It was hours before he could sleep. Years later, he would reflect on his dejection at being caught, on his fall from self-made hero to a sad joke in a burlesque German uniform. Perhaps he was too hard on himself. It was not his uniform that had given him away, nor necessarily his behaviour, but the brass disc that the British contingent had coaxed out of the civilian painter. Had they copied the disc, and engraved a different number, the ruse might have worked. Even so, and as Chaplain Platt observed, Neave had not thought through his tactics after getting over the first big hurdle, the castle gate. His passion for flight was the rage of youth. He was still only twenty-five, perhaps older than his years but still lacking in a strategic grasp of the science of escape. Neave had proved he could get out of Colditz, but not clear away from Nazi Germany. Being a loner was his nature, and it was not enough. It never would be. He needed others, allies with a greater instinct for the long range.
In the morning after his failed bid, the guard brought him the usual ersatz coffee. Gravely, he warned Neave that he was about to be court-martialled and shot. Neave snorted with derision. He was no longer afraid. He felt only foolish and unaccountably ‘liverish’. Later in the morning, he was frogmarched to the Kommandant’s headquarters, where in a formal, wood-panelled gallery, he was inspected by Colditz officers one by one. The reactions to his uniform varied from derision to wrath. Kommandant Prawitz ordered him to stand to attention and salute, German fashion. Neave was beside himself with rage and made a poor show of a German salute. Prawitz ordered him to do it again, this time properly. The other officers sniggered and Neave saluted again. It was a humiliating experience. He was made to stay in the gallery, under guard, for the rest of the morning. From time to time, police officers from the village and soldiers came in to gape at him as if he were an exhibit in a zoo. Then, an elderly photographer from the town was brought in to take his picture. Neave posed for the camera, perspiring profusely beneath his lurid uniform. ‘I had reduced all escaping to a ridiculous farce, a music-hall turn,’ he raged. ‘I grew crimson with mortification as the old man doddered about the gallery exchanging feeble jokes with the soldiers. It seemed hours before the comedy was over.’13 The photograph he took survives to this day and it does Neave more credit than he realised at the time. He stands, half at ease, left arm behind his back so that the scabbard for his ‘bayonet’ is clearly visible. He stares coolly at the camera and it is impossible to imagine him thinking anything but: ‘You may have got me this time, but there will be another.’
After the embarrassing charade of being photographed, his fake uniform was removed, thereafter to take pride of place in the Kommandant’s personal museum. The threat of court martial for impersonating a German officer was quietly dropped. Instead he would serve the customary indignity of imprisonment in the town gaol when a cell became available, there being constant pressure on accommodation due to frequent escape bids.
Neave’s humiliation was not complete. At the evening roll-call, Hauptmann Priem, the officer to whom Neave was supposed to be taking a message during his escape, announced to the crowded courtyard: ‘Gefreiter Neave is to be sent to the Russian Front.’ Everyone joined in the laughter. ‘It was friendly towards me,’ recalled Neave, ‘but it was not music to my ears.’ Eggers remembers the incident slightly differently, recording that Priem announced: ‘Gefreiter Neave is posted to the Russian Front.’ Eggers also recalled: ‘There was an almighty roar of laughter. Lieut. Neave looked very rueful. Six months later, though, he had the last laugh.’14 Following Neave’s daring bid, the camp authorities tightened security. All escapers and new arrivals were subject to mouth and body – i.e. rectal – examination. All military personnel had to carry a printed pass, signed and stamped by the camp adjutant, which was to be shown to all sentries. However, not even the German guards observed such Teutonic thoroughness. They were often too deferential to higher ranks and the rule was never completely observed. Roll-calls, too, were extended, and a new system of counting introduced to make deception harder.
Before the year was out, Neave was caught once again, this time in the Polish orderlies’ quarters on top of the old sick bay when he should have been in bed. German guards who picked Neave and a fellow prisoner up on the night of 23 November assumed, wrongly, that the miscreants were helping an escape bid by two Canadians found on the roof. Chaplain Platt noted enigmatically in his diary: ‘Actually, they were pursuing interests of their own.’ They were thrown into the Schloss prison, but, gaol space being at such a premium, Neave was locked in an unheated double cell with two fellow officers. Their cigarettes were confiscated and ‘they thought themselves to be holy innocents exposed to the harsh winds of a cold, hard and unjust world’. They determined on a protest notice, which read ‘Achtung! Dieser Tat ist eine Schandtat’ (Attention! This is a scandal). Reasoning that it was of little use to write out so high-minded a notice unless it could be suitably displayed, the trio picked the lock of their cell door, pinned the notice at eye level on the outside, then locked themselves in again and went to sleep. Episodes like these, amusing though they were, drove the German guards to despair.
Neave was sentenced to the usual twenty-eight days’ solitary confinement for his escape attempt. Several weeks elapsed before he could serve his term in Colditz town gaol, and he spent the time staring disconsolately from the British quarters as the weather turned colder. In early October he was taken under guard along the route by which he had tried to reach freedom. The sentries joked that the new white barrier at the final gate was a tribute to his audacious bid. His books and tobacco wrapped in a blanket, Neave was in no mood for entertainment.
Then, by his own account, he spotted another way out of the castle. Looking over the parapet of the moat bridge, he noticed a rough pathway leading across the tumbled stones of the dry moat towards the German married quarters. A small wicket gate stood half open in the moat bridge wall. If he could gain access to this gate, he was free of the barbed wire, with only a fence round the married quarters and a 12-foot high wall around the park beyond to negotiate. Excited, Neave crowed with delight, puzzling his guard with his air of elation. Neave’s version of events is contested by Pat Reid, who said he himself had spotted the small garden gate on his arrival at Colditz a year earlier. The energetic Dutch, always on the lookout for escape possibilities, also claimed to know of its existence.
Banged up in his municipal cell, Neave still thought of escape. The tiny barred window was beyond reach. He climbed on to the massive East European-style stove and contemplated cutting through the ceiling, breaking out of the roof and letting himself down to the gravel courtyard with a blanket rope. Thus occupied with thoughts of flight, he was surprised by the gaoler who roared with laughter: ‘So soon, Herr Leutnant! You must stay with us a few days longer.’ Next day, they moved him to a cell on the ground floor. He endured his spell of confinement remote from the worsening fortunes of the war, smoking on his bunk in the company of Jane Eyre and the Duchess of Wrexe. On his way back to the castle twenty-eight days later, he noticed again the little wicket gate, which by now appeared in his dreams as ‘the gateway to the land beyond the Blue Mountains’.
Some weeks earlier, Pat Reid had also had an inspiration. A trained engineer, he understood architectural drawings and had the happy knack of mentally being able to take buildings to pieces and put them back together again. It occurred to Reid that the wooden stage of the camp theatre, on the second floor of a building occupied by the most senior Allied officers, offered escape potential. It was constructed over a room leading to the top of the German guardhouse outside the prisoners’ courtyard.