My recollections covering the next day or two are very dim and confused, but one thing was photographed so clearly on my mind that the image of it has never faded; I even grow hot as I think of it now, over a year later. This was the last thing I saw before I “went to sleep” in the trenches—two Huns using my monkey-wrench (the tool I had been “strafing” “Dutchmen” with for the last ten years, and which I had brought along to continue that good work with) to tinker up one of our own smashed machine-guns to use against our own men. I never saw it again, and its loss rankled in my mind during the whole year that I was doomed to spend in German hospitals and prison camps.
I have some memory of being carried in a stretcher, and of passing through one or two dressing-stations where my wounds were washed and bandaged. My connected recollections begin after my waking up in a hospital—well back from the Front, but still not out of the sound of the guns—that was evidently devoted entirely to “gas” cases. The ward I was in was filled with men from my own regiment, but what interested me specially—as soon as I was able to take any interest in anything beyond my own suffering—was to observe that a great many Germans were also being treated in the same hospital. I never did find out just how these happened to be “gassed,” but presume it was either through accidents to their apparatus or from their “snoots” being faulty.
At any rate, the Germans had evidently prepared in advance for “gas” cases, and the chances are that they pulled through a good many of us who might have died had we been taken back to our own hospitals, where they had, at that time, small facilities for handling that kind of trouble. The ward was kept as hot as a Turkish bath, and some of our chaps thought this was done with the idea of making our agony worse. One of them, who jumped out of bed, threw up a window, got a lungful of cold air, and died the same night, gave us a proper object-lesson in why the air had to be kept at close to blood heat. Some of them also thought that a kind of stuff they gave us to inhale made us worse rather than better, but that was only their imagination. If there was any real ground for complaint it might have been on the score that the doctors tried a good many experiments on us because this was the first chance they had had to study gas poisoning on a large scale, but that was no more than we could have expected. Probably our own doctors would have been glad of some “dogs,” in the shape of Huns, to “try it on” when they first began to study “gassing.”
But the doctors were always attentive, and the nurses always kind—more than kind, most of them. But I already had learned that a nurse’s best stock-in-trade is her “sympathy,” and those I met in Germany were no exception to the rule. I think it was the way that those plump blonde fräuleins looked after us poor devils in that steaming-hot ward that kept me from trying to run amuck and commit murder as soon as I was well enough to be sure that my memory of those two Huns tinkering at our machine-gun with my old monkey-wrench was no “fevered vision.”
I have been told often since returning to England that it will be just as well not to say too much about my hardships in the German prison camps, as it might be the way of making things all the worse for those still doomed to remain there. So I shall touch lightly on this side of my experiences, and, to be on the safe side, will try not to mention any camps or other German localities by name. I was sent to what, had I but known it, was the most liberally run prison camp in Germany after my discharge from the hospital, but even at that the treatment was so abominable in comparison with what I had been receiving and had a right to expect that it undid at once the “soothing” effect the kind nurses and doctors had had on me. I don’t mean that I went back physically a great deal—my constitution was too strong for that—but only that my old hate of the Hun redoubled. This would have been all very well if I had only been back in the trenches, but in a prison camp it could only have one end. I dropped in his tracks with my fist—mighty hard it was his shaved head felt to my half-healed “right”—the first guard that tried to hustle me into line with the toe of his boot. Then I used up what strength I had left in a rough and-tumble with three or four others, until one of them finally put me to sleep with the butt of his rifle. In at least three other camps I could name I would have been shot then and there (it has happened to many a lad whose pride made him turn loose on a brutal guard), and I can count myself very lucky that I got off with no more than a bit more of a beating up and two weeks’ solitary confinement on black bread and water. Perhaps the worst consequence of my action was my transfer, a few weeks later, to a camp that has since become notorious for both its unhealthfulness and its inhumanity.
The first glimmerings of sense (regarding the situation that I was going to have to face as a prisoner of war in Germany) was let into my rather thick head by the blow it got from that rifle-butt; the rest—enough to start me on the right course, at least—filtered in during my two weeks of solitary confinement on bread and water. I was of no use to myself or any one else in a German prison camp, I told myself. I had no chance there either to kill Huns or destroy Hun property. Once outside I might well be able to do both—perhaps even get back to England and join my regiment if any of it was left. How to get out?—that was the question. From that time on I turned my every thought and act to that one end.
What makes it almost hopeless for a prisoner of war to get out of Germany is not so much the actual escape from his prison—that is comparatively easy, especially if he is on outside work—as the lack of clothes and money, and the difficulty of avoiding giving himself away by being unable to speak the language. These things make the odds a thousand to one against the average prisoner having more than twenty-four hours’ freedom at the outside. The chances against success are so big that few attempt it. Luckily, I had one advantage over the general run of the prisoners in my ability to speak fairly good German. I must have had a lot of accent, of course, but I still understood all that was said to me in German, and was also able to say all that I wanted to. This would be good enough, I told myself, to run a bluff with the ordinary run of people I might meet about my being a returned German-American come back to work for my Fatherland; that is to say, I ought to be able to prevent such people from being suspicious of me, where they would have attacked or reported a man who could not speak German at once. Anything in the way of police or officials I should have to fight shy of, and, as I foresaw there must be all kinds of checks on strangers and travellers, I knew I should have to steer clear of trains and hotels. I felt sure of myself on the score of language, therefore; clothes and money were things to be provided as opportunity offered. Fortunately, Fate was very kind to me in this respect.
One little incident I must mention before I go on with my story. In the prison I was transferred to most of the English prisoners, after a while, began to receive parcels from home, even some of the Canadians coming in on the deal. I, having no friends either in Canada or England, got nothing direct, but all sorts of nice little odds and ends of dainties came my way in the final “divvy.” One lad from the south of England, who was dying with a sort of slow blood-poisoning and lack of care of a never-healed wound at the back of his neck, was especially generous to me with the things he got from home, and when he finally went under I managed to get permission to write a few words to his family, telling them, among other things, how kind he had been to me with his parcels. And what should they do—his brokenhearted mother and sisters in Devonshire—but “adopt” me in his place and keep right on sending the chocolate and cigarettes and other “goodies” just as regularly as before. And now they’ve been to see me here, and tell me they are going to keep sending me things when I return to the Front just the same as though I was the boy they had lost.
As soon as I had fully made up my mind what I wanted to do, I went on my good behaviour, got into the “trusty” class, and was one of the first picked for outside work when the call came for English prisoners to help in harvesting and road-making. I had a good chance to practise my German during the harvest work, but the prospects for making good after a “get-away” were not very promising, and I had sense enough to bide my time. But when I got switched on to road work, and when almost the first thing I saw was a bunch of Huns clustered round an old Holt “Caterpillar” tractor that had got stalled on them, I felt that time was drawing near.