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

by John Alan Lyde Caunter

If so, from what were they running? This question was answered shortly afterwards. A cart driven by two men suddenly came into sight not very far from the place where we had first seen the two running men.

This cart was coming towards our hut, and soon began to fill us with something stronger than mere interest in its movements.

It came to within 150 yards of us and then stopped. The men got out and began filling the cart with peat from the piles of this commodity lying about.

We by this time were lying on the bottom of the hut, or squashed up against the back of the door, not daring to move. We prayed that it would not come on to rain heavily, as the men would be certain then to take shelter in one of the huts, and ours was the nearest to them. This suspense continued for about half an hour, and then, with the cart filled, the two men departed the way they had come.

At about noon we made up our minds that we could safely attempt the crossing of the moor by day. Accordingly, after clearing the hut of all traces of our occupation we packed up our kit, shouldered our packs and set off. We had torn up the benches and taken planks off the back of one of the other huts, intending to carry them with us to serve as material for our raft for the crossing of the Weser, but now that we actually began our march we found that the weight of all this wood was very considerable and so at the last moment left the whole lot behind. We were fortunate in so doing, as the distance was much greater than we had realised, and, as it turned out, it would have been a case of carrying coals to Newcastle.

We proceeded to negotiate the same ground as that which we had attempted to cross and failed over the night before, and now realised how impossible a task it would have been in the inky blackness of the night, proving as it did a sufficiently difficult task even by daylight.

Two or three miles of boggy rough ground had to be covered, and during the last few hundred yards of this, before we reached the lowest slopes of a range of hills, we were continually going through the spongy soil up to our knees.

Fox, who was brought up amidst Irish bogs, chose the line, and we followed as nearly in his tracks as we possibly could. We were not sorry to get off this bit of difficult country, and we wondered what would have happened if we had continued our attempt the night before.

The range of hills we had now reached ran in a westerly direction for a few miles before sloping down to the valley of the Weser. They were covered with fine pine and fir woods, cut up every now and then into squares by drives made through them.

We saw several deer, and the additional presence of things that looked like shooting butts made us think that this area was probably some special deer-forest. None of us felt very safe, as deer-forests mean forest-guards. The lack of food in Germany has probably increased the numbers of the poaching fraternity, and the German authorities are sure not to have reduced the establishment of forest-guards. These ideas caused us usually to feel very nervous in woods, fine cover though they afford.