[6]. To Lieutenant Fitzgerald of the Australian Flying Corps and his companion—if either of them should read this—my apologies. They were the first men out from Kaserne B at Holzminden, cutting the wire opposite the orderlies’ entrance in broad daylight and getting as far as Munster in mid-winter before recapture. But unfortunately I do not know any further details of their escapade.
On a Sunday afternoon in March the usual sort of things were happening. There was the usual small knot of people round the stoves in the Kaserne B cook-house. There were the usual few taking their afternoon constitutional up and down on the cobbles or round and round on the cinder. There was the usual bored sentry moving up and down on his particular beat in No Man’s Land in the stretch between the two Kasernes. Except to the favoured few in the secret, there was the usual complete absence of life or interest in the sombre enclosure.
From the shadow of the cook-house two officers, wearing civilian disguise and carrying bulging rucksacks, walked steadily over the cobbled track, through the plain wire fence, across No Man’s Land, and up to the wired railings which formed the northern boundary of the camp, and which can be seen in the left of the photograph. Those who were there to see them gave one gasp of amazement, and then directed an agonized look in the direction of the sentry. He was nearing the lee of Kaserne A, still on the outward portion of his beat, and was not due to turn for another fifteen seconds or so. They pushed their packs through the interstices of the palings on to the road, Walter shinned up the palings, cut the strands of barbed wire, threw back the cutters to accomplices waiting in the enclosure, and dropped into the road. Medlicott followed. Then they assumed their packs and pulled out their civilian hats. As the sentry turned on his beat, two unassuming pedestrians were to be seen walking up the road which ran parallel to the camp towards the railway crossing and the south-east. Fortune so far had favoured this amazing and wonderfully calculated audacity—a scheme worked out literally in terms of seconds. The sentry at the far corner of Kaserne B had also clearly suspected nothing: doubtless his beat had been as carefully observed and timed as that of the other, and the conclusion arrived at that for a given number of seconds the whole length of that particular side of the camp would probably not be under German observation.
Neither would it have been, but for a coincidence against which no calculations or precautions could have been proof. The German cell attendant—a decent little man in his way, but very much de trop on such an occasion as this—happened to be looking out of one of the Kaserne B cell windows which gave upon the road, and recognised both Walter and Medlicott, who had only just completed the sentence of confinement incurred for their last escape. He rushed upstairs and gave the alarm. The fugitives, who were by then only a few yards clear of the camp, realised that something unforeseen had marred their plan and that they must run for it. In broad daylight, and with a hue and cry in their rear, they stood but the slenderest chance of making cover in the woods, to reach which they had first to cross the railway. It being Sunday afternoon, there was more than the usual traffic on the road and round the adjoining fields, and—to cut off their one avenue of escape the more completely—the custodian of the level crossing had received a prompt warning from the Kommandantur by telephone as to what he might expect; and he now stood in the path of the fugitives with a loaded gun.
So the game was up, and the brave pair were brought back amidst sympathetic cheers from the windows of Kaserne B; the cell attendant got three months’ leave on the nail; and Niemeyer, glowing with patriotic fervour and pride at his still unblemished record, allowed one of his sentries to shoot without the veriest shadow of justification at one of the crowded end-corridor windows of Kaserne B. Fortunately no one was hurt either by the bullet or the broken glass. But for the second time in the history of the camp a court of enquiry sat to examine into a charge of manslaughter attempted without any provocation. The findings of this court were ultimately themselves found by the Germans during a search and promptly confiscated.
Another attempt to escape partook of the serio-comic. There had been introduced one day into Kaserne B a length of timber, intended by the authorities to serve as a framework for messing cupboards in one of the dining rooms. This timber was, however, promptly earmarked for a purpose more directly in the interests of the allied cause. A certain beardless professor of astronomy, who had lectured to us the previous Sunday on the wonders of the moon and stars, conceived the idea of projecting himself on this length of timber from one of the corridor windows of the first floor on to the wire of the palisade, and thence to the road beyond. The timber was calculated—and proved—to be just long enough to rest on the wire. His idea was to get himself pushed out on the plank on a sufficiently dark night, and, when the wire was reached, jump for it. Three miles of the Cresta run could not equal this little journey for condensed excitement.
But unfortunately, though it was a dark night and the stage was well set for the adventure, the accomplices pushed too hard, and the extemporised chute—with the professor—went flying into space on the wrong side of the wire, to the intense alarm of the nearest sentry. Next morning the dining room was locked, on the ground that it had been put to improper use. Thereupon several hungry men who wanted to get at their day’s food-supply battered in the door with stools. Niemeyer retaliated by locking the whole of the Barrack up within the Kaserne for twenty-four hours. This was a good example of the collective punishments which used so often to be applied in prison camps under the rules of the Hague Convention, embodied, unfortunately, in our own Manual of Military Law. They were futile, served no effective or precautionary end, and succeeded merely in rousing even in the more stolid the most bitter feelings of personal antagonism. It need not be added that such intervals were infinitely more to Niemeyer’s taste than were the humdrum periods of chronic dislike and discontent fostered under his genial charge.
In this particular instance the siege was lifted after twenty-four hours. A draft letter to the Kriegsministerium, asking in plain German whether, as the result of one officer attempting to escape, the remaining officers were to be denied access to their food, was presented to the Commandant. Niemeyer saw that he had gone far enough, arranged to parley, and eventually capitulated; an active boycott of the canteen in A Kaserne may also possibly have hastened his resolution.