The search being over, we were allowed to go back into our rooms, and had breakfast in bed.
Perhaps it may seem rather extraordinary that we were not punished severely for these attempts to escape, but the explanation lies not in the leniency of the German but in the fact that there were no convenient cells in which to punish us. The cells at Fort 9 were all of them always full, and there was a very long waiting list besides. They might have court-martialled us and sent us to a fortress, but our crime, a "simple escape," was a small one. They might have sent us to another camp; but the Germans knew that we would ask nothing better, as no officers' camp was likely to be more uncomfortable or more difficult to escape from. Any way, it would be a change. Sometimes, when there was a vacancy, they sent us to the town jail, but, as had been demonstrated more than once, it was easier to escape from there than from Fort 9. The Germans' main object being to keep us safe, they just put us back into the fort and awarded us a few days' Bestrafung, which we did in a few months' time when there was a cell vacant.
CHAPTER XII
SHORT RATIONS AND MANY RIOTS
The weather became colder and colder, and for the next month we seldom had less than 27° of frost at night, and in the day time anything up to 20° in spite of the fairly frequent appearance of the sun. The countryside was covered by a few inches of snow, now in the crisp and powdery condition seldom seen except in Switzerland and the colder countries. After the experience of Medlicott and myself it was generally agreed in the fort that escape was almost impossible, unless a very considerable start could be obtained; so the greater number of us settled down to face the not altogether pleasant domestic problems of Fort 9.
Our allowance of coal was found to be quite insufficient to keep the room tolerably warm. It was the same in every room in the fort. Repeated requests for an increased allowance having as usual had no effect, we proceeded to tear down all the available woodwork in the fort and in our rooms and burn it in the stoves. We lived literally in a solid block of ice. Just before the long frost had set in, the ground above and round our rooms had been soaking wet, and the walls and floors had been streaming with moisture. Then came the frost, and everything was frozen solid, and outside in the passage an icy blast blew continually, and in places beneath broken ventilators a few inches of frozen snow lay for weeks unthawed inside the fort. That passage was, without exception, the coldest place I have ever known.
Down the walls of each of our rooms ran a flue in the stonework, intended to drain the earth above the rooms. For over six weeks there was a solid block of ice in it from top to bottom, in spite of the fact that the flue was in the common wall of two living-rooms.
We lived continually in our great coats and all the warm underclothes we possessed; we ourselves seldom, and our allies never, opened windows, and we pasted up cracks and holes; but still we remained cold, and crouched all day round our miserable stoves. Müller's exercises, skipping, and wood, coal, and oil stealing were recreations and means of keeping warm and keeping up our spirits. On top of this came the famine. For the last few months we had been so well and regularly supplied with food from home that we had never thought of eating the very unpalatable food given us by the Germans, and had at length come to an agreement whereby they gave us full pay—in my case 100 marks per month—and no longer supplied us with food. Up to the time of this agreement they had deducted 42 marks monthly, and this extra money was quite useful. Some time before Christmas we were warned that there would be a ten days' stoppage of our parcels in order to allow of the more rapid delivery of the German Christmas mail to their troops. In consequence we had all written home asking that double parcels should be sent us for the two weeks preceding Christmas. However, Christmas passed and parcels came with almost the same regularity as they had always done. Christmas festivities, and the knowledge that double parcels were on their way, induced us to draw rather heavily on our reserve store. Then came the stoppage. Daily we looked anxiously for the parcel cart which never came. Reduced to our last half-dozen tins of food among six men we went onto quarter rations, helped out from a large supply of stolen potatoes. At length we had nothing whatever to eat but our daily ration of bread and almost unlimited potatoes. No butter, no salt, no pepper. It would not have mattered very much in warm weather, but in those conditions of cold and discomfort in which we were living, hunger was rather hard to bear.