And so it happened.
And—this is no joke—twenty men from the guard with fixed bayonets were sent for. The solitary German soldier with the innocent tiny fawn was taken into their midst. On the order “Quick march” the whole procession moved to the inside door of the fence. The latter was opened, the twenty men with the German soldier and the fawn stepped into the intervening space, the so-called “lock,” the inner portal, was carefully shut. Only then was the outer one opened, the soldier liberated the fawn, and after that the whole procession wended its way back. Oh, Mr. M—— what a laughing stock you made of yourself!
After that all the entanglements were carefully examined, and, though it was impossible to find the smallest cleft through which a man could have crept, M—— could not quiet down for days.
Apart from the post, the arrival of newspapers represented the chief interest of the day. We were allowed to receive the Times and the Morning Post, and, though they were nearly exclusively filled with Entente victories, we knew them so well after a short time that we could read between the lines, and were able to conjecture the real state of affairs with approximate correctness.
But what rage in the newspapers at the sinking of the Lusitania, and what anger when the Russians had to retire—of course only for strategic reasons! We had manufactured for ourselves several huge maps of the theatres of war, which were correct even to the slightest details, and each morning at eleven our “General Staff Officers” were hard at work moving the little flags. Often the English Colonel himself stood in front of them and thoughtfully shook his head.
CHAPTER XII
THE ESCAPE
IN time captivity became unbearable. Nothing relieved my gloom—neither letters, parcels forwarded from home by loving hands, the company of my friends, not even hockey, to which I devoted myself so strenuously that in the evenings I used to drop asleep, half-dead from fatigue.