Why such meek acceptance? Writing in 1969, he declared that ‘though my thoughts had already turned to escape and its organisation, the weeks in hospital seemed to deprive me of all initiative.’ He also suggested that lack of ‘military training in such matters’ had played a part in his vacillation. He was man enough to admit that ‘this was not a heroic episode in my life.’ He went on to propose that his inaction had in a way been providential, for ‘had it not happened, I might never have escaped from Colditz to England and gained the experience which enabled me to plan the escape of others.’ Once again, amid the dark clouds, Neave could see the silver lining.
In the improvised hospital in the Faculté Catholique, a ‘sombre, red-brick affair with stone floors and a smell of wounds and disinfectant’, he met a man who would later become his partner in the great enterprise to get Allied servicemen out of occupied Europe.10 When they were reunited in London, he recalled how he had last seen him: a ‘pale and strained [figure], playing cards in one of the wards. I remembered his high forehead and bright eyes as he sat on his bed dressed in a tattered shirt and trousers.’ Captain Jimmy Langley of the Coldstream Guards fitted Neave’s romantic ideal of the British warrior. He was slim, intelligent and apparently without fear, and had been captured at Dunkirk.
The Coldstream’s orders were to hold up the Germans while the evacuation was under way. Langley was a platoon commander with ‘3’ Company, 2nd Battalion. The company was led, with what feels today like lunatic determination, by Major Angus McCorquodale, who gave orders for any officer who showed an inclination to retire to be shot. Langley described later how a captain commanding a unit on the company’s right came over to announce that he was planning to withdraw. The Germans were massing for an armoured assault on a bridgehead they were holding and his men were too exhausted to resist.11 McCorquodale ordered him to ‘stay put and fight it out’. The officer replied that his orders from the commanding officer were to retire as and when he saw fit. McCorquodale was having none of it. ‘You see that big poplar tree on the road with the white mile stone beside it?’ he told him. ‘The moment you or any of your men go back beyond that tree we will shoot you.’ The captain departed and McCorquodale picked up a rifle and ordered Langley to get one himself. ‘When I returned with mine he said “Sights at 250. You will shoot to kill the moment he passes that tree …” We had not long to wait before the captain appeared, followed by two men. They stood for a long time by the tree and then the captain walked on. Both our rifles went off simultaneously: he dropped out of sight and the two men ran back.’ This ruthlessness matched the determination with which the company did its duty. Langley was a marksman and accounted for many Germans before losing his arm to a shell. McCorquodale died at his post.
Langley did not let his injury delay his departure. While in Lille, he managed to contact local resisters who got him out of the hospital and took him to Paris. From there he crossed the demarcation line into the Unoccupied Zone. In spring 1941, the Vichy Armistice Commission passed him unfit for any further military service and he was escorted over the Spanish frontier to freedom. Neave and Langley teamed up again when serving in the secret escape and evasion organisation MI9. Though their backgrounds were similar, their characters were not, and their wars as fighting soldiers had taken very different forms.
There was a further contrast in the way they viewed their escapes. Langley claimed to dislike the fact that his return to fight another day ‘would be a matter of some congratulation’ and ‘regarded as an epic of courage and endurance’. He protested that ‘running away hardly came into the category of bravery … travelling by train and hiding in hotels did not call for much endurance.’12
For Neave, escape became his claim to fame, the thing he was most remembered for. He fostered its memory carefully through his books, and thirty years after the event was still giving regular talks to schools and clubs about his adventures. Writing in 1975, after a tour of army bases in Northern Ireland, he could not resist commenting that conditions in ‘one or two are worse than Colditz’.13 As well as his most memorable achievement, escape was also a turning point in his wartime life – the moment when he pulled off a private and bloodless victory over the Germans, restoring his self-respect and making up for his disappointing performance on the conventional battlefield.
The yearning to break free would become a ‘fever’ that mounted the longer he was behind bars.14 But the further he got from France, the harder escape became. While he was still in Lille, a young Frenchwoman who brought flowers and food to the wounded offered to help him and two others – an early example of the courage and patriotism shown by so many of the female resisters he encountered. When senior officers in the hospital heard about the plan, they were ‘lectured severely on the reprisals which might be visited on other wounded’.
It was too late anyway. In late July or early August, he was on the move again, on a ‘grim march through Belgium’, before embarking on a coal barge which chugged up the Scheldt and into the Waal, reaching the Rhine and the German frontier at Emmerich. Along with his belief in providence, Neave had an eye for the karmic re-adjustments that life sometimes delivers. He was pleased to note that his journey as a prisoner took him under the bridge at Nijmegen that he would cross four years later as a victor and see ‘the dead Germans on the sidewalks as we made all speed for Arnhem’.
Oflag – meaning ‘officers’ camp’ – IX-A/H was housed in a schloss overlooking Spangenberg, a small town in the heart of central Germany, 220 miles as the crow flies from the Dutch border, and further still from the French and Swiss frontiers. The castle, a Disneyish concoction with moat and drawbridge, had arched doorways and a clock tower which reminded him of school. The social hierarchy among the prisoners was also built on equally familiar lines, for there were ‘strict codes of behaviour designed for us by our senior officers, and social cliques appeared from the very first day.’
Nearly all prisoners’ memoirs speak of the desolation that descends when the journey is over, the destination is reached and the gates clang shut behind them. Neave’s portrayal of the ‘double tragedy’ of imprisonment was particularly eloquent: ‘First, there is the loss of freedom. Then, since there is no particular crime to expiate, unless it be personal folly, a sense of injustice scars the spirit … The prisoner of war is to himself an object of pity. He feels he is forgotten by those who flung him, so he thinks, into an unequal contest. He broods over the causes of his capture, and to himself and his friends he soon becomes a bore, endlessly relating the story of his last stand.’15
Neave, like many others, seems to have experienced a period of numb acceptance, trying to find a rhythm of life to ease the tight confines of a new universe. He had always felt the urge to write and he tried to alleviate the boredom by starting a novel ‘about the life after death of an eighteenth century peer’ and a ‘superficial’ study of Shakespeare’s sonnets.16 Essays on ‘eccentrics’ and other subjects for the camp publication, produced