conspirators, seeing the fate of their chief, hastened bedwards with all possible speed, and when the orderly officer came round they imitated with considerable ability the righteous indignation of a man who is woken up after a three hours’ sleep.
This attempt was the signal for frequent and repeated excursions. The lead once given, there were found many ready to follow it; and there was considerable comfort in the assurance that the sentries had orders not to fire unless they were charged. And so for the remainder of our captivity the camp buzzed with rumours.
No one ever got away. Occasionally the first strand of netting was penetrated, but nothing more; and it must have been a poor form of amusement. For the desperadoes always chose a night of rain and wind in the hope that the sentries might have sought consolation within their huts, and it can have been no fun crawling on one’s stomach, over sodden gravel, getting soaked and cold; and as the night of capture was always spent in the guardroom, it was a sport that can have held out few inducements.
For the cowardly, however, it did add a spice and flavour to existence. On these nights of danger we used to lie awake patiently listening. The hours would drift by. Twelve o’clock, one o’clock, it looked as if they had got away after all; and then, sure enough, would come the alarm, two whistles would shriek loud above the drip of the rain, there would be a scurry of feet; and then a few minutes later we would see the unfortunate beings escorted to the cells.... We would do all we could for them; we would clamber on to the window sill and would shout our condolences; and these friendly wishes would on the next day as likely as not serve as an excuse for the General to place upon us some further restriction, as punishment for what he considered an unmannerly exhibition of independence.
Of these bold bids for freedom none stood any very real chance of success, and towards the end they became somewhat discredited, as they involved certain inconveniences on those who had resigned themselves to their fate. There would be additional roll-calls, and precautions. Whole rooms were searched and ransacked, a most disagreeable proceeding. And on one occasion the attempt was made from the theatre, which led to the closing of that hall of pleasure during an entire morning while the complete staging apparatus was overhauled, and examined. This caused genuine annoyance, especially as the ravages of the soldiery delayed for three days a performance that had been the centre of much curiosity and conjecture. And this annoyance became almost indignation, when it transpired that this herald of defiance had provisioned himself for his long journey with nothing more substantial than a tin of skipper sardines, two oxo cubes, and a tin of mustard. The general opinion was that if a man was “such a damned fool as to carry that sort of stuff about with him, he had no right to try to escape, upsetting arrangements and all.”
And on this type of sally the theatre incident rang down the curtain. But under this category it is impossible to number the attempts of Colonel Wright. His methods were very different; they were not showy; he did not talk about what he was going to do. And as a result he very nearly succeeded.
The chief ingenuity of the Scarlet Pimpernel lay, as far as I can remember, in his grasp of the fact that it is the obvious that evades suspicion. Sentries are on the lookout for an escape by night, but by day they are off their guard. And working on this plan, both Colonel Wright’s attempts were made by daylight. Indeed they were both so simple that in cold blood they looked quite ridiculous. The first attempt failed completely, and but for his later achievement, one might have been tempted to wonder how the gallant colonel could have expected any different result.