April 27, 1941– Stalag 13, Germany

The barbed wire stood out darkly against the grey sky as the morning dawned, cold and grey. The spring chill still hadn't left the air and the tattered uniforms of the prisoners did little to keep them warm. So they stood with their arms wrapped around themselves, stomping their feet in an attempt to generate a little extra body heat.

"Herr kommandant," a thin German guard stammered, "I beg to report that eleven men are missing." The private checked his count against his clipboard one more time, hoping against hope that the last two checks had been wrong.

"Eleven!" the kommandant exploded, whirling around to face the sergeant standing beside him. "How could you have allowed this to happen?" he demanded. "Eleven men! That's impossible. Count them again."

The fumbling private went through the assembled prisoners again, checking the numbers carefully against the ones on his clipboard. This time, as with the two previous times, it was obvious that the men were missing. "There are eleven men missing, Oberst Stumpff," he reported desperately.

"Find them!" Stumpff ordered. "And I want to know which men are gone."

He turned to furiously stomp away when the sergeant spoke up. "How shall we find them, Herr Obsert?" he asked. He was new to the camp, having been transferred in after the last escape.

"Find them any way you can!" he screamed. "Tear the camp apart if you have to! I don't care. Just find them!" Then, without another word, the stocky German colonel stormed away.

Standing in position among the ranks of prisoners, LeBeau turned slightly to whisper jubilantly to his neighbour. "The filthy Bosche will never find them. By now they should be crossing into France!"

"How can you be so sure?" the man asked in confusion. He was a newcomer to Stalag 13, shot down during the last bombing raid. He had parachuted down almost within the camps confines; he had never even had a chance to try and evade the German guards.

"We have a good system here," LeBeau told him, grinning widely. This man had just finished being vetted by the escape officer, and so he still didn't know about the escape network that they had built up.

Stalag 13 had the highest escape numbers of any camp, most of them home runs. Prisoners escaped so often that they had developed a highly effective network of safe houses. The safe houses were so efficient that a dozen men could be smuggled through to France at a time.

As the guards started to pull out the prisoners' files, LeBeau spoke again to the man beside him. "Give me your identity disks," he said quickly, holding out his hand.

"Why?" the man asked in confusion. He raised his hand to his chest, reaching for his tags. But rather than offering them out to LeBeau, he was holding on to them. He was unwilling to part with them.

"Just do it," LeBeau said, holding his own tags out to him. Sergeant James Irving, according to the tags, hurriedly exchanged identification with LeBeau.

The guards began herding the prisoners into lines in front of the tables that they had set up, sorting them according to nationality. The older guards were the most efficient, they were given the job of corralling the prisoners; the more inexperienced guards were behind the tables, given the simple job of comparing pictures with prisoners.

As the prisoners waited in their lines, the older prisoners were watching the guards, looking to see which were the greenest. Then, inconspicuously, they worked their way into those lines. It was easier to trick the younger guards; they didn't know enough to recognise the troublemakers.

When LeBeau finally reached the head of the line he had chosen, the guard behind the table spoke in harsh German. "Your identity tags," he demanded. His head stayed down, looking at the files before him. That was the reason that LeBeau had picked this line.

LeBeau fumbled in his sweater for Irving's tags. It looked too suspicious to have them ready for the guards; it made it look like he was co-operating too much. He passed the tags wordlessly to the guard. The guard took the tags, still keeping his head down. "You are RAF," he said brokenly, in English, thrusting the tabs back at LeBeau. "You go there." He pointed to the correct table with one hand, eyes downcast, and the other hand already reaching out for the next person's tags.

As he meandered over to the RAF table, he looked around to see what the other 'old hands' were doing. He knew they would be attempting to cause as much trouble as possible, the only question was how. The answers were as varied as the men themselves; each old hand had a favoured way of confusing the guards.

Corporal Keegan had taken the tags of a man that had escaped from the camp months ago, and the guard was frantically paging through the files, searching for the right picture to match the tags. The confusion was clearly evident in the guard's eyes as he started over at the beginning again. Behind Keegan, two of the others, waiting further back in line, had started a heated argument. Knowing the two of them, it was likely to break out into a full-fledged fistfight at any time. But it was accomplishing the intended purpose; most of the guards were more concerned with breaking up the fight than with watching that prisoners were staying in the barracks once they had been counted.

And that worked well for Sergeant LeClerc. The lanky Frenchman had taken the tags of the escaped prisoners that looked the most like him. He had passed through the line twice already, both times on borrowed tags. This time he was trying to go through as himself. The guards would have the names of only nine missing prisoners, but would continue to count eleven men short.

LeBeau grinned as he sidled up to the RAF table, this time picking a guard who carefully examined the prisoners before taking their tags. The guard eyed him curiously, clearly aware that LeBeau was not wearing an RAF uniform. "Your tags," he ordered.

"Oui, monsieur," LeBeau answered, starting to fumble again for his tags.

"C'est pour l'anglais," the guard told him in broken French. "Le français est cet table." He pointed helpfully off in the direction that LeBeau had just come from.

"Merci, monsieur," LeBeau told him seriously. As he turned away, the grin reappeared on his face. Baiting the Germans was such sport.