The Escaping Club

by A. J. Evans

Every day a good many of us took exercise by running round and round the small court, to the astonishment of the sentries. Müller's exercises were introduced, and Medlicott and Gaskell, Buckley and I, and many other Englishmen and Frenchmen, did them regularly every day for the rest of the time we were in Germany. As a result of this strenuous life, though we were often very cold and very hungry, we were, with few exceptions easily traceable to bad tinned food, never sick or sorry for ourselves the whole time.

Unett, poor fellow, suffered severely from boils, and Buckley from the same complaint during his two months' solitary confinement. From this onwards, for all the winter months, the coal and light shortage became very serious. We stole wood, coal, and oil freely from the Germans, and before the end nearly all the woodwork in the fort had been torn down and burnt, in spite of the strict orders to the sentries to shoot at sight any one seen taking wood. So long as the Germans continued to use oil lamps in the many dark passages of the fort, it was not very difficult to keep a decent store of oil in hand, but after a month or so the Germans realized they were being robbed, and substituted acetylene for oil.

We all wrote home for packets of candles, and considering the amount of oil we were officially allowed, the length of time we managed to keep our lamps burning remained to the end a source of astonishment to the Germans.

As it was Christmas time, and as Room 45 was well supplied with food, we decided to give a dinner to the Allies on Christmas night. A rumor had been passed round, with the intention, I have no doubt, that it should come to the ears of the Germans, that a number of prisoners intended to escape on Christmas night. The Germans were consequently in a state of nervous tension, the guards were doubled, and N.C.O.'s made frequent rounds. No one had any intention of escaping on that night as far as I know.

A piano which had been hired by a Frenchman was kept in the music-room, a bare underground cell of a place at the far end of the central passage, and we applied to be allowed to bring this into our room. To our huge indignation this was refused, on the grounds that we might use it as a method of attracting the sentries' attention.

However, we were determined to have the piano and a dance on Christmas night, so a party was organized to bring it from the music-room in spite of the German orders. I don't know exactly how it was managed, but I think a row of some sort was begun in the other wing of the fort and, when the German N.C.O.'s had been attracted in that direction, the piano was "rushed" along to the "ballroom." The dinner was an undoubted success. Room 45, with Medlicott as chef, spent the whole day cooking, and that evening about twenty of us sat down to dinner—the guests being all of them Frenchmen or Russians. After dinner we all attended a fancy-dress dance which some Frenchmen gave in the adjoining room. They had knocked down a wooden partition between two rooms, and had a dance in one and the piano and a drinking bar in the other. The French are a most ingenious nation, and the costumes were simply amazing.

There were double sentries all round the fort that night, and some of them stood outside the windows and enjoyed the dancing and singing. It was an extremely cold night outside, and I am not surprised that some of them felt rather bitter against us. I offered one a bit of cake, but he merely had a jab at me through the bars with his bayonet.

About midnight we sang "God Save the King," the "Marseillaise," and "On les aura," with several encores. This turned out the guard, and a dozen of them with fixed bayonets, headed by the Feldwebel, crashed up the passage and, after a most amusing scene in which both sides kept their tempers, recaptured the piano.

A few days after this, Medlicott and I learnt that four Frenchmen were cutting a bar in the latrine with the object of escaping across the frozen moat. We offered them our assistance in exchange for the right of following them at half an hour's interval if they got away without being detected. They agreed to this, as they needed some extra help in guarding the passage and giving warning of the approach of the sentry whilst the bar was being cut. At the farthest end of his beat the sentry was never more than 40 yards away from the window where the operation was being carried out. Under these circumstances a very high degree of skill was necessary for the successful cutting of an inch-thick bar. Here Moretti was in his element. No handle to the saw was used; he held the saw in gloved hands to deaden the noise, and in four hours made two cuts through the bar.

Repeated halts had to be made, as the sentry passed the window every three or four minutes, and, as he was liable to examine the bars at any time, they sealed up the crack between each spell of work with some flour paste colored with ashes for the purpose. This made the cut on the bars invisible. I examined the bars carefully myself after they had been cut, and was quite unable to tell which one was only held in place by a thread of metal at each end.