You might have noticed that Newkirk is considerably more perky in the first season of Hogan's Heroes. My theory is that Newkirk and LeBeau were both fairly young at the time of their capture, and neither of them deal with boredom very well. So before Colonel Hogan showed up and gave them something to focus on? Well, I decided to drop poor Olsen into camp and see what mischief they'd get up to.
Black Forest Cakewalk
or
Why the Fence is Only the First Hurdle
"We need to talk about trees."
"Trees?" Olsen repeated, nervously, glancing from Newkirk to LeBeau and back. He still hadn't figured out which was the saner of the two. Right now, his money was on neither.
"Yes, trees," LeBeau snapped. "Word is that you're from Illinois, and Ritchie said they have trees."
Everyone else in Barracks Two was studiously ignoring the conversation, even though it was taking place in the very middle of the room. So much for keeping his head down as he acclimatised to imprisonment. Olsen had managed to avoid the camp lunatics for his first two weeks at Stalag Thirteen, but apparently his luck had run out.
"Uh. That's true," Olsen admitted. "But Ritchie is from New Jersey, and they also have trees."
Newkirk climbed over the bench and sat on it sideways, leaning against the table so he could see Olsen and LeBeau at the same time. The little Frenchman was still standing with his hands on his hips, but Olsen expected him to eventually end up sitting on the table. He seemed to prefer it to the actual seat.
"It's not about the ruddy trees, mate." Newkirk grinned at him. "It's about the trees, and the German."
Olsen felt a shiver of terror run up his spine.
Newkirk could mean anything by that.
The people, a person… not the language.
How would the Englishman possibly know?
German was Olsen's mother tongue, and he would guard that secret with his life. He hadn't told anyone since he'd arrived two weeks ago. His squadron hadn't known. His commanding officer hadn't known. The air force knew, of course. His uncle was one of the German underground's highest leaders; he could hardly slip into the American service unnoticed.
But the other men? To them he would be The Enemy. Not American-with-a-German-mother. No matter where he grew up, no matter what side his family was fighting on. It wouldn't matter.
"What German?"
Newkirk cocked a sceptical eyebrow. "You're the only one in our barracks that keeps listening when Klink gets angry and forgets to speak English. You're also the only one that followed the sign outside the de-lousing station properly. If you didn't read German you would have tried to enter with your shoes on, like everyone else does the first time."
"I- I- anyone could have-"
LeBeau flapped his hands in the air. "Enough about German. Ugly language. You do speak it, no?"
"I-"
"He does." Newkirk railroaded any explanation Olsen might have come up with, and returned to their original topic. "See. The thing is, you've seen our Kommandant. He's a bloomin' rum and coke."
"What?"
"A joke," LeBeau muttered.
Newkirk leaned further onto the table, invading Olsen's space with aggressive friendliness. "We can get out of the camp easy as pie, me and LeBeau-"
"LeBeau and I."
Newkirk frowned at his French friend. "What?"
"Never mind." LeBeau hopped up on the edge of the table, sitting with his knees pressed against Newkirk's arm. His dark eyes glittered intently. "Escaping is not the problem. It's the forest outside of the fence. Once we get out of the camp we just keep going in circles until the guards find us! We can't figure out how to navigate the forest!"
"You want me to…" Olsen had to take a moment to knead at the skin between his eyes. If he wasn't careful, he was going to burst into hysterical laughter. "You want me to help you navigate the forest outside the camp?"
"Yes!" Newkirk broke into a delighted grin, and for a moment Olsen was charmed enough to almost let down his guard.
And when they find out why you speak German?
He sat up straight and put a bit more space between himself and the other men.
"I'm not a forest guide. I have done some camping, and a bit of trapping with my Grandfather, over in New York State, but surely there's someone else in the camp that knows more than me?"
LeBeau looked around the rest of the room. "We haven't had the best of luck with our escape attempts so far. Everyone else is afraid to do more time in the cooler with us."
Newkirk elbowed his friend in the side. "Shaddup, LeBeau. Don't tell him that."
LeBeau stuck out his lip and shrugged. "It's the truth. But we're tired of hauling around extra weight on our escape, too. Once we get out of the forest there of course will be checkpoints, we'll have to hitch rides, buy food… Everyone else's German is abysmal."
"Yours isn't much better," Newkirk said, absently.
"No," LeBeau agreed. He seemed strangely pleased. "Ugly language. But I can play a French collaborator. An American collaborator wandering through a forest in Germany? It might look a bit more strange."
"So?" Newkirk looked hopeful, his hooded green eyes as wide as he seemed able to open them, and Olsen wondered how long Newkirk and LeBeau had been trying to make it home.
Maybe a long time.
"Okay. Yeah. I'll do it."
8 8 8
"To start with, this forest is a mix of deciduous and coniferous trees."
They stood in the middle of the camp compound, staring through the nearest break in the scattered grey buildings. It was early fall, and the trees on the other side of the fence were still a wall of green.
LeBeau nodded along, but Newkirk obviously wasn't following.
"Deciduous trees drop their leaves in the winter, but coniferous trees stay green all year-"
"Evergreens: Christmas trees: that's what he means," LeBeau interrupted impatiently.
"Oh." Newkirk shoved his hands in his pockets. "They all look the same to me."
"That's part of the problem," Olsen said. "Once you can identify some of the trees, it won't be so hard to pick out landmarks."
Newkirk disagreed. "Don't think there are any landmarks. It's a forest."
"I- it's-" Olsen paused. Big city boys, he tried to remind himself. Newkirk had never even seen greenery outside of a landscaped park before this. "Let's just focus on learning the trees for now. The most common tree around here is the Scots Pine. If we check out the driveway by the gate we might even find some cones that got tracked in by the guards."
Newkirk and LeBeau trailed after him in search of pine cones.
8 8 8
"In a forest, you can't necessarily see enough sky to tell which way is North and South. Um…" Olsen glanced over at Newkirk.
He stared back for a moment and then his face broke into a scowl. "I know which way the sun goes!"
"Yes. Of course. Well, moss likes to grow in the shade, so in the Northern Hemisphere it usually grows thickest on the north side of the trees. Got it?"
"North side of the tree: more moss." LeBeau agreed dutifully.
Newkirk was pouting, arms crossed against his chest.
"Today we're going to practice walking in a straight line in a forest."
Olsen indicated the maze of empty tin cans he'd set up in the empty space between Barracks Three and Four. He'd only managed to scrounge up eight tins. "To be sure that you're not gradually curving back on yourself, you need to keep three trees lined up in your field of vision. One in front of another, so they're almost covering each other up when you're looking at them. Once you reach the first tree, you line up a new tree with the third, and so continue in a straight line."
LeBeau squatted down to observe the cans. "How are we going to do this? You can't line up the tins unless you're lying on the ground. We're not at the right angle to look at them. Ça ne marchera pas."
Newkirk threw himself down on his belly, fine dirt clouding up in the air around him. He wiggled forward until he found a view he liked. "So lie on the ground, then. Don't be a ninny, LeBeau."
"I'm the one who did the laundry this week!"
"Uh." Olsen crouched beside LeBeau. "Maybe we could just pretend we're lining them up?"
"Does this really work?" Newkirk asked.
"Theoretically?"
"Merde." LeBeau lay down in the dirt. "If we're doing this, we might as well do it the right way."
Fifteen minutes later the fat guard strolled past Barracks Four and stopped in surprise. He took in the cans, the cloud of dirt and the three POWs commando crawling back and forth across the yard.
Olsen was worried for a moment, but the guard just shut his eyes tight and hurried around the next corner.
8 8 8
"So, Olsen." Newkirk planted his tray beside Olsen at the dining table. "We're mates now, aren't we?"
LeBeau sat down across from them, and if Newkirk's smile was predatory, at least LeBeau's was genuinely friendly.
"Yes?" After a week of 'training' he couldn't think of a reasonable way to disassociate himself from them.
"Good. Now we can ask you all those questions it's not polite to ask strangers."
LeBeau reached out to pat Olsen on the shoulder. "You are my favourite American, camarade."
Given that he'd been shot down on his first operation, it was a sad excuse for a compliment. Olsen was one of very, very, very few Americans in the camp. One of very few POWs, period.
If the prisoner to guard ratio had been any higher, Olsen was sure Newkirk and LeBeau would have escaped long ago, despite the forest that ringed the camp.
"What's it like?"
Olsen struggled with that for a moment before he realised what Newkirk was asking. "America?"
"Yes!"
"Have you ever seen a cowboy?" LeBeau asked.
"Or an Indian?"
"Have you ever ridden a horse like a cowboy?"
Olsen found himself flushing. In the face of Newkirk and LeBeau's enthusiasm, he was sorry he'd never travelled much of his country. "I've seen men who raised cattle, but I don't know if you'd call them cowboys. They didn't wear Stetsons, like you're talking about."
"But have you ridden a horse?"
"A few times."
Newkirk looked especially impressed. "You're nearly a cowboy yourself, mate. Hey! Can you name all the States for us?"
"Why?" LeBeau asked the Englishman.
"They have so many strange names. Alabama! Verrr-mont." Newkirk told LeBeau. "And I want to see if he can name them all. There's, blimey… what? Fifty of 'em?"
"Forty-eight."
LeBeau shook his head, stirring a spoon through his oily soup. "That's not that many."
"There's even a New England," Newkirk laughed.
"Actually, New England isn't-"
Newkirk leaned forward eagerly. "If you stand at the top of a hill, how far can you see?"
"What kind of a stupid question is that?"
Newkirk shoved LeBeau, hard. "Shut up! How is it stupid?"
"Why would he be able to see any farther in America?"
Newkirk looked at his small friend askance. "Obviously, mate. It's bigger."
"That does not mean basic perspectives works any differently. Imbécile. You've never climbed a real hill, have you?" LeBeau demanded.
The tops of the Englishman's cheeks flushed with pink. "I've been to the top of plenty of tall buildings."
Olsen choked on his soup and burst into a round of coughs.
Newkirk jumped up from the bench to wack him on the back and LeBeau climbed onto the tabletop to grab his face and chatter at him in French. They both appeared honestly concerned for his well-being.
Are we really friends? Olsen asked himself, slightly hysterically. I'm not sure I'm ready for this!
8 8 8
Getting through the fence was so easy Olsen wondered if Kommandant Klink could possibly be an Allied plant, set up to undermine the Third Reich from within.
"I wish we had a torch," LeBeau muttered, crouched amongst the underbrush, just inside the forest. "How can we tell if the trees have moss, let alone which side it's on?"
They weren't bringing any supplies. Newkirk explained that they'd buried a box with a knife, a crude map and some tins of food at the base of a dead tree, not far from the fence. Unfortunately, they'd never been able to find their way back to it.
Olsen was taking point, LeBeau and then Newkirk trailing behind him. They appeared to be completely at ease with the process of 'escaping', even though Olsen's heart was thrumming like a hummingbird's.
"We are now entering the Black Forest," Newkirk narrated, in an uncanny imitation that Olsen immediately recognised as the BBC's regular announcer, "a fine example of trees, bushes and… trees, in their natural habitat. Do have a nice journey and be on the look-out for chocolate cakes."
Olsen had been terrified of Newkirk since his first day, when he'd arrived to the sight of Newkirk trying to bash in the face of another Englishman twice his size. The scariest part was that he wasn't even making any progress, and yet the guards couldn't get him to stop. Olsen never found out what the fight was over, but now he had to consider… maybe these two weren't completely feral. Maybe they just operated on an alternate form of logic?
"You do know not every tree in Germany is part of the 'Black Forest'," Olsen said, hesitantly.
Newkirk paused. "Really? I thought that was what they called forests here."
"No. It's one forest in particular, in the south-west. The Schwarzwald."
"Black forest," Newkirk translated back to him.
"You speak German, too?" In his desperation to avoid the subject, he'd somehow missed that Newkirk spoke the language.
Newkirk nodded. "Learned it in the circus. Schuster, our costumer and pianist? When his sister died he brought over all her kids from here. They didn't speak nothing but German, and I used to watch 'em between the acts. I can get the sound right, but it took me a while to get used to all the extra bits."
LeBeau smirked as he ducked under a tree-branch Olsen was holding in place for them.
"You mean the grammar?" Olsen clarified.
"Sure. Those parts."
They pressed against a tree, waiting for Olsen to move into the lead again.
"It's too complex," LeBeau complained.
"It's not as simple as English, that's for sure."
"That depends, mate. If you're one of them sorts what expects everyone to sound like a bloody textbook, then I'd argue English is just as blasted hard as German."
Olsen smiled, aware that Newkirk couldn't see his expression in the dark. He imagined Newkirk got plenty of flak for his creative grammar. It wasn't exactly the 'Queen's English', even if he was an Englishman.
"But you. You're an 'ole ocean away. Where did you learn?"
Olsen tripped over a tree root, and LeBeau lurched forward to grab his arm. The weight was too much for him, and Newkirk gripped LeBeau's collar to stop them both from falling.
"Hurk!"
LeBeau choked and coughed as they found their feet, and then burst into giggles. The other two joined him, hands clapped over their mouths to muffle the peals of surprised laughter.
Wiping his eyes, Olsen shook his head. "My mother. She immigrated from Germany at seventeen. We spoke it together while I was growing up."
LeBeau coughed, and then punched Newkirk in the arm. "Told you! I win."
Olsen frowned.
"LeBeau said one of your parents must have spoke it. I was guessing some kind of special operations training. Why else would you get shot down so soon?"
"Just bad luck, actually," Olsen admitted, feeling shaky with surprise and relief. "Thought I could help get that crazy maniac out of power. Help my mother's country get their act together. Looks like I'll be sitting out the war instead."
"Not necessarily." LeBeau nudged Olsen with his shoulder. "We're already half-way back to the Allies. So, Olsen, mon camarade, are you going to lead us out of this forest?"
"Well, I'm no Davy Crockett, but I'll do my best."
Newkirk swept out a hand of invitation, allowing Olsen and LeBeau to pass him. "You mean Klapwick?"
"No. That's Dan. Dan Klapwick," LeBeau called back.
Newkirk took immediate offense. "I know Klapwick's name. It's Davey. Not Danny. Danny's the bloke what patched up his coat with bits of electric tape."
"'Who'."
"What?"
"It's 'Who', not 'What.'" LeBeau gave a barely perceptibly eye-roll, as if this was a subject that had come up enough times he was now entirely exhausted with the thing.
Olsen paused to stare at a particularly wide oak. He wasn't sure if this was the particularly wide oak they'd passed five minutes ago, or a new one of a similar shape. It was too dark to see very clearly without a flashlight.
"This is harder than I'd thought it'd be," he offered to Newkirk.
"You're telling me."
They walked on.
"It's Davey. I'm sure it's Davey."
"Well, I'm sure you're wrong."
8 8 8
They were back at the fence again.
"Huh."
LeBeau came up beside him and glared at the fence like it had personally offended him. "See? This is a difficult forest."
"Don't worry, mate." Newkirk appeared on his other side, and slapped Olsen on the shoulder. "We stayed on track for the first bit. That's never happened before."
"Trail and error," said LeBeau.
The harsh beam of the search light cut across their faces, turning the forest into a glowing scene of shadow and overexposed POWs.
"Zut alors!" LeBeau threw his hands up in the air, and Olsen followed his example. "Every time this happens! Why can't they just let us go?"
"Bad for business," Newkirk sighed. "It's not like anyone would move here for fun. Look at the scenery."
"What's the punishment for escape again, boys?" For some reason Olsen wasn't feeling nearly as scared as he had been earlier. They'd done this before. Why couldn't he?
"Thirty days in the cooler," Newkirk and LeBeau answered in unison.
Guards poured out of the forest and surrounded them. They were marched back in the direction of the camp entrance. Olsen looked up at the moon that hovered above the slumbering camp. It was all the way down at the other end of the sky. Somehow they'd wandered through the forest for hours and still ended up at the fence again.
LeBeau pressed up against his side, and Olsen leaned down to hear the Frenchman's whisper. "Don't worry. Newkirk breaks in and out of the cooler all the time. We'll try again tomorrow night."
Olsen took a deep breath, suppressing a serious case of the giggles. He could do this. Yes. He could. With these two running his life, what did he have left to fear?