The Escaping Club

by A. J. Evans

There was rather an amusing incident which happened when Moretti was chef in Room 42. Buckley was in the habit of receiving dried fruit from home, which, for purposes of his health, he kept for private use. One day Moretti raided this store, in order to give the mess stewed fruit for dinner, but, when he was cooking them, messages from home were found floating about in the stew. Examination showed that the prunes had been cut open very cleverly and a small roll of paper substituted for the stone. I have given the above description of one of the methods by which maps and compasses were obtained, not only because the possession of the things was of immense importance in our ultimate escape, but because it illustrates a fact, which many people believed with difficulty, namely, that the Germans are extremely inefficient when the use of the imagination is necessary to efficiency. They believed they were searching with the greatest possible thoroughness: every tin, for instance, was opened by them and the contents turned out on to a plate, but it was obviously impossible to examine every small packet in every small parcel, so that a certain discretion had to be used as to what to examine and what to pass, and it was quite extraordinary how they invariably spotted wrong. I have often wished to know whether the German prisoners in England smuggled forbidden goods into their camps with the same ease as we did.

One set of maps I cut down and sewed into the cuff of my tunic, and the smallest compass I stowed away in the padding on the shoulder. The rest of the stuff I divided between Moretti and Decugis, both of whom had been very good friends to me. It was from the latter indeed that I received information as to the position of the sentries on the Swiss frontier at Riedheim, where Buckley and I ultimately crossed into Switzerland.

Towards the end of our strict confinement in Fort 9, while the moat still remained frozen, the prisoners became very restless and a large number of abortive attempts to escape were made. These mainly consisted of attempts to burrow through the walls or in some way to obtain access to the inner courtyards during the night. Once in the courtyard it was thought that it would be easy to run between the sentries across the moat if the night were only reasonably dark. Three Frenchmen actually did get out, and, owing to successful "faking" of Appell, their absence was not discovered, but they were caught in the courtyard before they had crossed the moat. On another occasion some Frenchmen, by piling tables and chairs on top of one another, had managed to get up to one of the ventilators in the passage outside our rooms. Unfortunately they were seen by the sentry on the ramparts, who crept up to the ventilator, without apparently being observed, and fired two shots down through the glass into the crowd below. By some extraordinary chance no one was hit, and before the Feldwebel and about a dozen soldiers with fixed bayonets could arrive, the temporary structure beneath the ventilator had been cleared away and everyone was looking as innocent as possible, especially the culprits. Several men, including myself, who were gambling or walking quietly in the passage, only escaped being bayoneted by displaying considerable activity at the critical moment. Some of the Frenchmen spent three weeks of most skilful labor in making a hole through 4 feet of masonry into the inner courtyard. As these walls were inspected daily by the Germans the stones had to be replaced every day so as to leave no trace of the work. I inspected this place myself several times in the day time, and am prepared to swear that it was impossible to tell which stones were solidly imbedded and which were loosely held together by imitation plaster. Somehow or other this also was discovered when it was almost finished. A sentry was placed outside the hole. In spite of the sentry, however, the Frenchmen removed and threw down the latrine all the stones which they had loosened, leaving in their place a placard on which was written, "Représailles pour le Château de Chauny." In France the Germans had wantonly destroyed, only a few days before this, the beautiful Château de Chauny. Bar-cutting was also attempted by several Frenchmen and Englishmen—Bouzon, Gilliland, and others; but somehow unforeseen circumstances always turned up at the last moment to prevent an attempt to escape being made.

On one work, a tunnel,[4] in which Gaskell and I were assisting, an immense deal of labor was spent in vain. In Room 49 the Corsican colonel and Moretti and about four other Frenchmen had sunk a hole in the corner of their room close under the window. This shaft was about 6 feet deep—that is to say, to the water level of the moat. Farther one could not go, as the water came in. From here a gallery was bored through the foundations of the wall—4 or 5 feet of very solid masonry. This alone took them three weeks. For the next few yards the tunnel made better progress until, owing to the nature of the soil, they found it necessary to revet the tunnel with wood as they advanced. The gallery was so small—only 20 by 24 inches as far as I remember—that it was impossible to crawl along it. You had to drag yourself along on your stomach, and soon the conditions under which the work was carried on became so unpleasant that two Frenchmen gave it up. Gaskell and I came in as the new recruits. It was a horrible job. Most of the time one lay in water and worked in pitch darkness, as the air was so bad that no candle would keep alight. Gaskell was so large in the shoulder that he could not work down the tunnel, and I am so long in the arms that I could only do it with the greatest difficulty and exertion. After a time it was found necessary to pump air to the man at work by means of a home-made bellows and a pipe, and this made the work slightly more tolerable. From the window, the ground, starting at about the same level as the floor of our rooms, sloped down to the bank of the moat, dropping about 3 feet 6 inches, and from there there was a sharp drop of about 2 feet 6 inches to the water or, at the time we started the tunnel, to the ice.

Our object was to come out in the steep bank of the moat on a level with the ice and crawl across on a dark night. With the ice there I think the idea was an extremely good one, and as nearly certain of success as anything could be in Fort 9, but it is obvious from the dimensions given that the tunnel towards the end must necessarily come within a few inches of the surface of the ground. Actually for the last 3 or 4 yards we were within 6 inches of the surface, and were able to drive a small tube up through which we could breathe. Working in the tunnel was a loathsome task, and one hour per day, in two shifts, was as much as I could stand. You had to lie 12 yards or more under ground, in an extremely confined space, in total darkness and in a pool of water. The atmosphere was almost intolerable, and sometimes one had to come out for a breath of fresh air for fear that one would faint. But we did this unwillingly, as it took quite two minutes to go in and about four minutes to get out, and so wasted much time. By getting into an excruciatingly uncomfortable position, it was possible to shovel earth into a wooden sledge made for the purpose, and when this was full, at a given signal it was dragged back by a man at the pit-head, whose job it was also to work the bellows. To your left wrist was tied a string, and when this was twitched you stopped work and lay still waiting for the sentry to tramp within 6 inches of your head, and wondering when he would put his foot through, and if he did whether you would be suffocated or whether he would stick you with a bayonet. Our safeguard was that the top 8 to 12 inches of ground were frozen solid, and as long as the frost lasted we were fairly safe, and later on we revetted the tunnel very thoroughly with wood.

All the earth had to be carried in bags along the passage and emptied down the latrines. This was Gaskell's self-appointed task, and he must have emptied many hundreds of bags in this way. Considering that there was a sentry permanently posted outside the windows of the latrines it needed considerable skill and judgment to avoid being detected. We soon found that we needed more labor, and two more Frenchmen, de Goys being one of them, joined our working party. Moretti was not only chief engineer, but also the most skilful and effective workman in the tunnel, and it was entirely owing to him that it came so near to being a success. I was a mere laborer, and not entrusted with any skilled work.

Unfortunately before the work was finished, the thaw came, and we had to make other and much more complicated plans for crossing the moat.

It was generally agreed that we could not afford to get our clothes wet through in crossing the moat. Moretti, the Colonel, and the two other Frenchmen in their party decided to wade through the moat naked, carrying two bundles sewn in waterproof cloth, one containing their clothes and the other their food and other necessaries for a ten days' march and life in the open in the middle of winter.

Gaskell and I and de Goys and his partner disliked the idea of being chased naked in the middle of winter carrying two bundles, each weighing 20 pounds or more, so we decided to make ourselves diving-suits out of mackintoshes. After waterproofing the worn patches on them with candle grease, and sewing up the front of the neck, where a "soufflet" or extra piece was let in to enable one to enter the garment from the top, and binding the legs and arms with strips of cloth, we felt pretty certain that little or no water would enter during the short passage of the moat. Whether or not this would have been successful I cannot say, for thank Heaven we never tried. As the ground gradually thawed, and as the tunnel approached the moat, the question of revetting became ever of greater importance. In some places the earth fell away and left cavities above the woodwork, which we blocked up to the best of our ability. There still remained a 6-inch layer of frozen earth above us, but for the last week of the work we could never be sure that a heavy-footed sentry would not come through if he trod on a tender spot. Towards the end, the difficulty of obtaining sufficient wood became very acute, for a large part of the woodwork of the fort had already been burnt in our stoves during the winter. We all of us reduced the planks in our beds to the minimum, and Moretti, by means of a false key, entered some unused living-rooms which were kept locked by the Germans, and stole and broke up every bit of wood he could find—beds, furniture, stools, shelves, partitions and all. He was one day occupied in this way in one of the empty rooms when the sentry outside the window saw or heard him, and shot into the room at him from about 3 yards' range but missed, and Moretti retreated with the wood. At last, after three months' work in all, the tunnel was finished, and a night selected for the escape. As the sentry who walked between our windows and the moat was never, even at the far end of his beat, more than 30 yards from the exit of the tunnel, we considered it essential that there should be sufficient wind to ruffle the surface of the moat, and not too bright a moon. To a certain extent by skill, but mainly by good luck, we had come to the exact spot on the bank at which we had aimed. The place was close under a lantern which was always hung at night near the edge of the moat, but owing to the way in which the shadows fell we reckoned that the light would dazzle rather than help the sentry to see the mouth of the hole when it was opened. In the day time the open hole could not fail to attract immediate attention, so that we intended to cut through the last few inches of earth only an hour or so before the escape.

The Colonel and Moretti were to go first, and then the two Frenchmen in their room, as these had done five weeks' more work than the rest of us. Gaskell and de Goys played baccarat to decide which team should be the next, and we won. Then Gaskell and I played to decide who should go first of us two, and I won. De Goys and his partner lived in the other wing of the fort, so that it was necessary for them to fake Appell and remain over in our rooms after 9 o'clock at night. This was carried out successfully by help of most lifelike dummies in their beds, which breathed when you pulled a string, and when the German N.C.O. came round on our side de Goys and partner just hid under the beds. We got a great deal of innocent amusement out of this sort of thing.