Gris Davies-Scourfield, who died on November 20 at 88, won high British military honors while defending Calais; he subsequently escaped from Colditz and was regarded by the German authorities as one of their most dangerous prisoners.

In May 1940, Davies-Scourfield, a platoon commander in the King’s Royal Rifle Corps, took part in four days of intense street fighting at Calais. As the riflemen were forced to withdraw from the outer perimeter into the town, they were ordered to defend their positions “at all costs to the last round and the last man.” But the desperate rearguard action was not without its comic moments.

Following a report that his battalion HQ had been surrounded, Davies-Scourfield mustered a rescue party. As they charged down the street with fixed bayonets, uttering bloodcurdling cries, they turned a corner to find their CO and adjutant, who asked them what on earth they thought they were doing.

After the Germans took the docks, Davies-Scourfield’s company was encircled. When further resistance became useless, the CO amended his original order to “every man for himself.” But the officer sent to inform the company was captured, and it never got through.

Cut off from his company HQ, and holding a block of houses under constant bombardment from close-range mortar and machine-gun fire, Davies-Scourfield was trying to contact the other platoons when he was hit in the arm, side, and head, and lost consciousness. When he came to, it was dark and raining. Having crawled into a hut, he passed out again and was awakened by a German soldier with a flashlight, who was pointing a bayonet at him. When the man realized that Davies-Scourfield was badly injured, he carefully dressed his wounds.

Davies-Scourfield was awarded the Military Cross, Britain’s third-highest military honor, but sent as a prisoner to a series of transit camps and then to Laufen, on the Austro-Bavarian border. The food was bad and the unsanitary conditions were not improved by the POW in the bed below him, who smoked bedding straw from a pipe fashioned from his bedpost.

Davies-Scourfield took part in digging an escape tunnel and was given six weeks’ solitary confinement when it was discovered. He was then moved to Fort VIII, a camp near Posen (Poznan). In May 1941, he escaped in a rubbish cart and hid for 10 days in a box room in a flat.

On the way to Lodz in a pony cart, questions addressed to him in Polish or German were met with a lolling head and gaping mouth as he played the role of a half-wit. After crossing into German-occupied Poland, he walked to Warsaw. He was harbored by a “Mrs. M” of the Polish underground until February 1942, when he moved to Cracow with some army comrades and two secret service agents.

Davies-Scourfield was arrested on a train to Vienna, when his papers were found to be forged, and returned to Cracow before being taken Colditz. At dertaker.” He was arrested and led away to the cooler to loud cheering from his comrades.

In September 1943, after many months of planning, Davies-Scourfield, encouraged by reports that the guards did not usually stick their bayonets into the packaging from the parcels’ office, concealed himself in a handcart under a pile of straw and cardboard.

The cart was tiny, and he said afterward that, with his legs up by his ears, he felt like an oven-ready chicken. He was wheeled from the office on the prisoners’ courtyard to the cellar of the sergeants’ mess on the outer courtyard and tossed into a pile of rubbish. Under his dungarees, he was wearing a German corporal’s uniform and a civilian suit under that. Opening the door with an imitation key, he passed several German soldiers on his way to a wicket gate, which he opened with another key and slipped into the park.

As soon as he was clear of the castle, he shed his German uniform, skirted the town, and, using the forest as cover, walked 10 miles to Bad Lausich, where he took a train to Leipzig; the station there closed at midnight, so he had to one of the roll calls, an embarrassed German officer announced that, following an order from Hitler, he was asking for volunteers who were prepared to devote their skills toward building the New Europe. To his astonishment, a French officer stepped forward and said he was willing to give his services, adding that the more work he was given the better. Asked his profession, the Frenchman replied: “An unsleep in the cold under some bushes.

The next morning, Davies-Scourfield headed west for the Dutch border. But after leaving the train at Hildesheim, he aroused the suspicions of a ticket collector and decided to walk 10 miles to Elze and catch the train for Osnabruck from there. On the way he was stopped by two policemen on motorcycles and arrested for possessing false papers.

He was handed over to the military and returned to Colditz, where he remained until the camp was liberated by the Americans in April 1945.

Edward Grismond Beaumont Davies-Scourfield was born in 1918 in Sussex and educated at Winchester. He got his military education at Sandhurst and was commissioned an officer in the King’s Royal Rifle Corps, a mechanized infantry battalion.

After the war, Davies-Scourfield served in Palestine, Malaya, Cyprus, and Ghana, and retired from the army in 1973. For the next nine years he was general secretary of Britain’s National Association of Boys’ Clubs.

His wartime memoirs, “In Presence of My Foes,” were published in 1991.