13 Days: The Chronicle of an Escape from a German Prison

by John Alan Lyde Caunter

As we had been allowed to take only one box with us from Crefeld, some officers had purchased huge baskets in the canteen into which they had crammed great quantities of luggage.

When these baskets were unpacked, the German authorities decided that they were too big to remain in the rooms and so ordered that they should be removed from the camp to a store shed outside the wire fence.

Three officers availed themselves of this fact and hid themselves inside the baskets, arranging that strong English soldiers should carry them out, pretending that they were empty and put them with the other large boxes in the shed. Thus the officers would get outside the camp and eventually get away from the shed by night.

All went well at first. The baskets were outside the gate, and merrily moving off towards the shed, when the Boche officer called upon the soldiers to halt, and decided that as the soldiers were needed for other work the baskets were not to be put in the store room till after five o'clock. Down went the baskets on to the ground and were then massed near the German sentry on gate duty. As it was only two o'clock and fearfully hot, the wretched inhabitants of the baskets had a very poor time of it waiting till five.

One of the three did not keep still and we could see the wicker-work straining from his movements. Awful squeakings and scratchings came from this basket, and although we tried to drown the noise by talking and shouting near the gate, the German sentry must have heard something and became suspicious, as he stood by them and looked carefully at each in turn.

At last they were taken to the store. What really caused their recapture I don't know, but it appeared to be due to one of them showing himself at the window of the store-room some three hours later. They had to be careful to arrange it so that one of the baskets could be cut open from the inside, and the others could then be opened with the keys that the occupant of this basket had on him.

At about eight o'clock the German officer arrived, followed by a guard, went straight to the store-room and captured all three, who by this time had been out of their baskets for hours. We next saw them marched off to cells, where they were to do five months in solitary confinement.

We had not been thirty-six hours in this camp before three officers did get away. Crashing along a ditch, they cut the wire and got through the hole which was in the fence opposite the nearest clump of undergrowth to the camp.

How the Germans did not hear them crashing into these bushes I cannot conceive, as I myself heard them seventy or eighty yards away. These three were away about ten days before being caught. Not very long after their exit the German sentry noticed the hole in the wire and so that chance was spoilt for anyone else. The clump of bushes, which had been so useful to the three escapers, was cut down by order of the commandant, and after that a hundred yards of open clearing surrounded the wire fence, making a good field of fire for the sentries.

Owing to the sandy nature of the soil, which had all the dirt-causing propensities of coal dust and none of the advantages of clean sand, we had to be constantly washing our feet if they were to be kept clean at all. Many prisoners, realising what a lot of laundry work wearing socks in this dusty place meant, discarded their use altogether and simply wore football shorts and shoes, with an old shirt as top-wear.