Ernie’s story was remarkable enough. He told it disconnectedly and rather incoherently. There were moments when he rambled in a rather peculiar way, and sometimes he stammered, and seemed unable to frame a sentence. Lily’s husband went out to fetch some beer to celebrate the joyful occasion, and Ernie drank his in little sips, and spluttered. The boy must have suffered considerably, and he had a wound in the abdomen, and another in the right forearm which for a time had paralyzed him.
As far as I could gather, his story was this:
He and a platoon of men had been ambushed and had had to surrender. When being sent back to a base, three of them tried to escape from the train, which had been held up at night. He did not know what had happened to the other two men, but it was on this occasion that he received his abdominal wound at the hands of a guard.
He had then been sent to some infirmary where he was fairly well treated, but as soon as his wound had healed a little, he had been suddenly sent to some fortress prison, presumably as a punishment. He hadn’t the faintest idea how long he had been confined there. He said it seemed like fifteen years. It was probably nine months. He had solitary confinement in a cell, which was like a small lavatory. He had fifteen minutes’ exercise every day in a yard with some other prisoners, who were Russians he thought. He spoke to no one. He used to sing and recite in his cell, and there were times when he was quite convinced that he was “off his chump.” He said he had lost “all sense of everything” when he was suddenly transferred to another prison. Here the conditions were somewhat better and he was made to work. He said he wrote six or seven letters home from there, but received no reply. The letters certainly never reached Dalston. The food was execrable, but a big improvement on the dungeon. He was only there a few weeks when he and some thirty other prisoners were sent suddenly to work on the land at a kind of settlement. He said that the life there would have been tolerable if it hadn’t been for the fact that the Commandant was an absolute brute. The food was worse than in the prison, and they were punished severely for the most trivial offenses.
It was here, however, that he met a sailor named Martin, a Royal Naval reservist, an elderly thickset man with a black heard and only one eye. Ernie said that this Martin “was an artist. He wangled everything. He had a genius for getting what he wanted. He would get a beef-steak out of stone.” In fact, it was obvious that the whole of Ernie’s narrative was colored by his vision of Martin. He said he’d never met such a chap in his life. He admired him enormously, and he was also a little afraid of him.
By some miraculous means peculiar to sailors, Martin acquired a compass. Ernie hardly knew what a compass was, but the sailor explained to him that it was all that was necessary to take you straight to England. Ernie said he “had had enough escaping. It didn’t agree with his health,” but so strong was his faith and belief in Martin that he ultimately agreed to try with him.
He said Martin’s method of escape was the coolest thing he’d ever seen. He planned it all beforehand. It was the fag-end of the day, and the whistle had gone and the prisoners were trooping back across a potato field. Martin and Ernie were very slow. They lingered apparently to discuss some matter connected with the soil. There were two sentries in sight, one near them and the other perhaps a hundred yards away. The potato field was on a slope and at the bottom of the field were two lines of barbed wire entanglements. The other prisoners passed out of sight, and the sentry near them called out something, probably telling them to hurry up. They started to go up the field when suddenly Martin staggered and clutched his throat. Then he fell over backwards and commenced to have an epileptic fit. Ernie said it was the realest thing he’d ever seen. The sentry ran up, at the same time whistling to his comrade. Ernie released Martin’s collar-band and tried to help him. Both the sentries approached, and Ernie stood back. He saw them bending over the prostrate man, when suddenly a most extraordinary thing happened. Both their heads were brought together with fearful violence. One fell completely senseless, but the other staggered forward and groped for his rifle.
When Ernie told this part of the story he kept dabbing his forehead with his handkerchief.
“I never seen such a man as Martin I don’t think,” he said. “Lord! He had a fist like a leg of mutton. He laid ’em out neatly on the grass, took off their coats and most of their other clothes, and flung ’em over the barbed wire and then swarmed over like a cat. I had more difficulty, but he got me across too, somehow. Then we carted the clothes away to the next line.
“We got up into a wood that night, and Martin draws out his compass and he says: ‘We’ve got a hundred and seven miles to do in night shifts, cully. And if we make a slip we’re shot as safe as knife.’ It sounded the maddest scheme in the world, but I somehow felt that Martin would get through it. The only thing that saved me was that—that I didn’t have to think. I simply left everything to him. If I’d started thinking I could have gone mad. I had it fixed in my mind, ‘either he does it or he doesn’t do it. I can’t help it.’ I reely don’t remember much about that journey. It was all a dream like. We did all our travelin’ at night by compass, and hid by day. Neither of us had a word of German. But Gawd’s truth! that man Martin was a marvel! He turned our trousers inside out, and made ’em look like ordinary laborers’ trousers. He disappeared the first night and came back with some other old clothes. We lived mostly on raw potatoes we dug out of the ground with our hands, but not always. One night he came back with a fowl which he cooked in a hole in the earth, making a fire with a flint and some dry stuff he pinched from a farm. I believed Martin could have stole an egg from under a hen without her noticing it. He was the coolest card there ever was. Of course there was a lot of trouble one way and another. It wasn’t always easy to find wooded country or protection of any sort. We often ran into people and they stared at us, and we shifted our course. But I think we were only addressed three or four times by men, and then Martin’s methods were the simplest in the world. He just looked sort of blank for a moment, and then knocked them clean out, and bolted. Of course they were after us all the time, and it was this constant tacking and shifting ground that took so long. Fancy! he never had a map, you know, nothing but the compass. We didn’t know what sort of country we were coming to, nothing. We just crept through the night like cats. I believe Martin could see in the dark.... He killed a dog one night with his hands.... It was necessary.”