THE ESCAPING CLUB

by

A. J. EVANS

THE JAMES A. McCANN COMPANY
Publishers New York

Copyright 1922 by
THE JAMES A. McCANN COMPANY
All Rights Reserved
PRINTED IN THE U. S. A.

TO
MY MOTHER
WHO, BY ENCOURAGEMENT AND DIRECT
ASSISTANCE, WAS LARGELY RESPONSIBLE FOR
MY ESCAPE FROM GERMANY, I DEDICATE THIS
BOOK, WHICH WAS WRITTEN AT HER REQUEST.

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

PART I

THE ESCAPING CLUB

CHAPTER I

CAPTURE

For over three months No. 3 Squadron had been occupied daily in ranging the heavy guns which night after night crept into their allotted positions in front of Albert. On July 1st 1916 the Somme offensive opened with gas and smoke and a bombardment of unprecedented severity. To the pilots and observers in an artillery squadron the beginning of this battle brought a certain relief, for we were rather tired of flying up and down, being shot at continually by fairly accurate and remarkably well hidden anti-aircraft batteries, while we registered endless guns on uninteresting points. On the German side of the trenches, before the battle, the country seemed almost peaceful and deserted. Anti-aircraft shells arrived and burst in large numbers, coming apparently from nowhere, for it was almost rare to see a flash on the German side; if one did, it was probably a dummy flash; and of movement, except for a few trains in the distance, there was none. Only an expert observer would know that the thin straight line was a light railway; that the white lines were paths made by the ration parties and reliefs following the dead ground when they came up at night; that the almost invisible line was a sunken pipe line for bringing water to the trenches, and that the shading which crept and thickened along the German reserve trenches showed that the German working parties were active at night if invisible in the day time. For the shading spelt barbed wire.

Only about half a dozen times during those three months did I have the luck to catch a German battery firing. When that happened one ceased the ranging work and called up something really heavy, for preference a nine-inch howitzer battery, which pulverised the Hun.

When the battle had started the counter-battery work became our main task. It was wonderfully exciting and interesting. Nothing can give a more solid feeling of satisfaction than when, after seeing the shells from the battery you are directing fall closer and closer to the target, you finally see a great explosion in a German gun-pit, and with a clear conscience can signal "O.K." During the battle we were much less worried by the anti-aircraft than we had been before. For some had been knocked out, some had retreated, and some had run out of ammunition, and in any case there were so many British planes to shoot at that they could not give to any one their undivided attention.

Up to July 16th, and possibly later, for I was captured on that day, German aeroplanes were remarkably scarce, and never interfered with us at our work. If one wished to find a German plane, it was necessary to go ten miles over the German lines, and alone. Even under these conditions the Germans avoided a fight if they could.

Shortly after the beginning of the battle, Long, my observer, and I were given a special job. We went up only at the direct orders of our Brigadier and did a continuous series of short reconnaissances as far over the lines as Bapaume and as far south as Cambrai. We had several fights, of which only the last, on July 14th, when we shot down our opponent after a manœuvring fight lasting about ten minutes, has a direct bearing on our capture. The end of this fight came when, for perhaps twenty seconds, we flew side by side, and at the same time as Long shot down our opponent, he riddled us with bullets, and I was very lucky to get home without the machine catching fire. My machine was too bad to be repaired, and they sent me a second one from the Aviation Park. This seemed a splendid machine, and I can only attribute the failure of the engine, which led to our capture, to a bullet in the magneto or petrol tank, probably the former. Whatever the cause, on July 16th, during an early morning reconnaissance, the engine suddenly stopped dead at 4000 feet. We must have been just N.E. of Bapaume, ten miles over the line, at the time, and I turned her head for home and did all I could; but there is very little one can do if the engine stops. After coming down a couple of thousand feet I began to look about for a landing-place away from houses and near a wood if possible, and told Long to get out matches. Just at that moment the fiery rocket battery near the one sausage balloon, which remained to the Germans after the anti-balloon offensive of July 4th, opened fire on us, and I had to dodge to avoid the rockets. By the time they had stopped firing at us we were about 500 feet from the ground, and I heard a good deal of rifle fire, apparently at us. As my engine showed no signs of coming to life again, I picked out an open field where I thought we should have time to set fire to the machine in comfort before the Germans came up. I was only up about 200 feet or less when I found we were landing almost on top of a German battery, of whose existence I had had no idea. I don't think the position of this battery was known to our people, but I may be wrong, as I temporarily lost my bearings while dodging those infernal rockets. As soldiers from the battery could be seen running out with rifles in their hands towards the spot where we obviously had to land, and as I much doubted whether we should have time to fire the machine, I determined when I was about 50 feet from the ground to crash the machine on landing. This I managed pretty successfully by ramming her nose into the ground instead of holding her off, and we had a bad crash.

I found myself hanging upside down by my belt. I was a bit shaken but unhurt, and got out quickly. Long was staggering about in a very dazed condition near the machine, and the Germans were about 50 yards away. I got a matchbox from him and crawled under the machine again, but found, firstly, that I could not reach the petrol tap, and in spite of the machine being upside down, there was no petrol dripping anywhere; and, secondly, that Long in his dazed condition had handed me a box without any matches in it. The Germans were now about 25 yards off, and I thought of trying to set the thing on fire with the Lewis gun and tracer bullets, but I could not find the gun. I think Long must have thrown it overboard as we came down. We were then surrounded by soldiers—they were a filthy crowd, but showed no signs of unpleasantness. An officer, whose face I disliked, came up, and, saluting very correctly, asked me to hand over all my papers and maps. Rather than be searched, I turned out my own and Long's pockets for him. In doing so, I found to my horror that I had my diary on me! Why, I can't think, as I was always most careful to go up without any paper of importance, and particularly without my diary. However, I managed to keep it from the Germans, and got rid of it about an hour later without being detected. We walked with the German officer to the Gondecourt road, and I was glad to see as we went away, that the machine seemed thoroughly smashed up. The propeller was smashed and nose plate obviously bent badly; one wing and the under carriage were crumpled up. The elevator was broken, and it looked as if something had gone in the fuselage, but I could not be certain of that. Long was thoroughly shaken, and walked and talked like a drunken man. He kept on asking questions, which he reiterated in the most maddening way—poor chap—but to be asked every two minutes if you had been captured, when you are surrounded by a crowd of beastly Huns...! I own I was feeling pretty irritable at the time, and perhaps a bit shaken. It took Long several days to become anything like normal again, and I don't think he was completely right in his mind again for weeks. He was obviously suffering from concussion, and I think that he now remembers nothing of the smash nor of any events which took place for several hours afterwards.

About 7 a.m., as far as I remember, a staff car picked us up and took us to Le Transloy. We were taken to one of the houses and given a couple of chairs in the yard. The place was apparently an H.Q., but what H.Q. I could not find out. I had seen about twelve English soldiers under guard as we came in, and after waiting for about two hours, we were marched off with them under escort of half a dozen mounted Uhlans. It was a pretty hot day, and we were both of us in very heavy flying kit and boots. Long was still much shaken, and walked with difficulty; in fact, I am doubtful whether he could have walked at all without my help. I amused myself talking to the guard and telling them how many prisoners and guns, etc., we had taken. After a march of several hours we reached Velu, very tired indeed. One incident which happened on the road is perhaps of interest. A woman waved to us in a field as we went by. I waved back, and this harmless action was instantly reported by one of the guard to an N.C.O., who rode back after the woman; but she, knowing the Germans better than we did, had disappeared by the time he had got there.

We had been at Velu for an hour or more when a crowd of orderlies learnt that we were officer aviators. They collected around us and assumed rather a threatening attitude, accusing us of having thrown bombs on to a hospital train a few days before. This was unfortunately true as far as Long was concerned, but as the train had no red cross on it, and was used to bring up troops as well as to take away wounded, we had a perfect right to bomb it, and anyhow could not possibly have told it was a hospital train. However, this was not the time for complicated explanations, so I lied hard for a very uncomfortable ten minutes. Just when things were looking really nasty an officer came up and took us off. We got into a staff car with him and were taken to Havrincourt to a big château—the H.Q. of the VI. Corps, I think.

A young flying corps officer who spoke a little English came to question us. He seemed a very nice fellow, and was full of praise for the audacity of the R.F.C. and most interested to learn that Long had dropped the wreath for Immelmann. This wreath had been dropped on a German aerodrome a few days before, as an official token of the respect which the R.F.C. had felt for a great pilot.

On our journey to Cambrai we had three or four guards in the horse truck with us, but as it was a hot night the sliding door was left half open on one side, and about a foot on the other. If we had made a dash for it, we might have got clear away, but after discussing the scheme I rejected it, as Long was quite unfit for anything of the sort.

Some time before midnight we entered Cambrai fort. In Cambrai station I saw a train crammed with German wounded, and there were no red crosses marked on the train. The condition of the wounded in this train was very bad—extremely crowded and dirty.

We remained in Cambrai five or six days, and were rather uncomfortable and rather short of food, but a kind French lady in the town sent us in some of the necessities of life—tooth-brushes, shirts, socks, etc. The sleeping accommodation was not luxurious, but the blankets were not verminous, which was something to be thankful for.

Whilst we were at Cambrai a German Intelligence officer took me to his room and had a long conversation with me. I refused to answer questions, so we discussed the war in general—who started it, the invasion of Belgium, our use of black troops, war in the colonies, about which he was particularly angry, quite forgetting, as I pointed out, that they began it by instigating rebellion in South Africa. He suggested that the Somme was an expensive failure, so I said, "What about Verdun?" Although I made one or two hits, he had his facts more at his fingers' ends than I had, and I think honors were about even!

Next day he took Long and myself off in a car and showed us over the Fokker squadron at Cambrai. The two pilots next for duty sat in their flying kit, in deck chairs, by the side of their planes and read novels; close behind them was a telephone in communication with the balloons, who notified them when the enemy aircraft ventured far over the lines. It seemed to me a pretty efficient arrangement, but of course suitable only for defensive and not for offensive tactics.

After we had been five or six days at Cambrai, and the number of prisoners had increased to nearly a thousand men and about a dozen officers, we were moved by train, the officers to Gütersloh, and the men, I think, to Münster. I cannot remember how long the journey took—about thirty hours, I believe. I am sure we had one night in the train, and I remember a good feed they gave us at a wayside station. I also remember remonstrating with a German officer, O.C. train, because he insisted on keeping shut the doors of the horse trucks in which the men were, causing them to be nearly suffocated with heat. During the journey I was rather surprised to find that we were nowhere insulted or cursed—very different to the terrible experiences of our early prisoners. Only in one station a poor devil, just off to the front in a crowded cattle truck, put his head in our carriage window and cursed the "verfluchte Schweinhunde" who were traveling second class and smoking cigars. After a reasonably comfortable journey we came to the prisoners-of-war camp at Gütersloh.

CHAPTER II

GUTERSLOH AND CLAUSTHAL

I believe the camp at Gütersloh had formerly been a lunatic asylum. It was composed of six or seven large independent barrack-like buildings. One of these buildings was a civilian camp, and one was a quarantine, used also as a solitary confinement or Stubenarrest prison; another was used as the quarters of the commandant. The ground was sandy, and I should think comparatively healthy and dry even in the wettest weather. In hot weather the heat was much accentuated, but there were patches of small pine trees in the camp which gave a pleasant shade. The camp area could not have been less than eight acres altogether, enclosed by two rows of barbed wire, with arc lamps every seventy yards or so. The prisoners comprised some 1200 officers—800 Russians, over 100 English, and the rest French or Belgians. We were marched up to the camp through a quiet village, and were put into the quarantine, where we remained for about a week. The morning after our arrival, we were medically inspected and questioned as to our name, rank, regiment, place of capture, age, where taught to fly, etc., all of which questions evoked a variety of mendacious and romantic answers. We were then put to bed in the quarantine and treated with some beastly anti-lice powder—most disagreeable! The food was insufficient in quarantine. We had no opportunity of taking exercise, and were all much bored and longed to be sent into the main camp, which we were told was the best in Germany. This was not far off the truth, as subsequent experience proved the administration and internal arrangements of this camp to be admirable.

Originally English, Russian, and French prisoners had lived all mixed up together, but now the nationalities were mainly in separate buildings, and always in separate rooms. In the English building there was a common room in which there was a daily English paper and two monthly magazines, all typewritten in the camp. From an artistic point of view the magazines were excellent, rather after the style of Printer's Pie, and the daily paper consisted of leading articles, correspondence, and translations out of German papers.

The canteen was very well run by a Russian on the co-operative share system, but when I was there it was becoming more and more difficult to buy goods in Germany. I don't think any food could be bought in the canteen, but wine, and, I think, whisky also, could be obtained, as well as tennis racquets, knives, books, pencils, boxes, and tobacco of all sorts.

The feeding in the camp was very bad indeed, the quantity quite insufficient, and most of it almost uneatable. However, we were hungry enough to eat it with avidity when we first came in.

Most wisely the Germans gave us ample facilities for playing games in the camp. There were ten tennis courts, and two grounds large enough for hockey and football, so we spent our time in playing tennis and exchanging lessons in modern languages, for which of course there were unique opportunities. We had two roll-calls a day, which lasted about ten minutes each, but otherwise the Germans interfered with us very little, and I think most of us found the first month or two of captivity a real rest cure after the strain and excitement of the Somme battle. I did, at any rate.

Long and I had been less than three weeks in this place when all those flying officers who had been captured on the Somme were removed from Gütersloh to Clausthal. Looking back on the life at Gütersloh, one thing strikes me more now than it did whilst I was there, and that is the fact that all the officers, with the exception of a small section of the Russians, had apparently abandoned all hope of escaping. The defenses of the camp were not strong enough to be any reason for this lack of enterprise, and I can only attribute it to the encouragement and opportunities given by the Germans for game-playing, which successfully turned the thoughts of the prisoners from escaping.

Of the journey to Clausthal, in the Harz Mountains, I only remember that it was quite comfortable, and that we arrived at night. The camp was about a mile up from the station, and we were let through a barbed wire fence and into a wooden barrack. For the next eight days we remained shut up in this place, and it was only with difficulty that we were allowed to have the windows open. There were three of these wooden barracks and a hotel or Kurhaus inside the barbed wire. This was the best German camp for food that I was in, and I think it would be possible to live on the food the Germans gave us. After eight days' quarantine we were let out into the camp. Long and I, and a captain in the R.F.C. who had been lately captured, called Nichol, had a little room together in the wooden barrack. On the whole, life was pleasant at Clausthal. The Germans were very polite, and the sentries were generally friendly.

We passed the time at Clausthal in much the same way as we had done at Gütersloh. If anything, it was more peaceful and pleasant, and the country surrounding the camp, where we sometimes went for walks, was beautiful. The Harz Mountains are a well-known German health resort, so that by the middle of September I was feeling so remarkably fit, and was getting such an overpowering aversion to being ordered about by the Germans, that, encouraged by a young Belgian called Kicq, I began to think very seriously of escaping. When I had been about six weeks at Clausthal I was given details by one of the conspirators of a scheme for escaping from the camp by a tunnel. Apparently two of the party had struck work, and owing to this I was offered a place. I was not surprised that some one had downed tools, when I saw the unpleasant and water-logged hole which was to be our path of freedom. The idea was rather a good one, but it was too widely known in the camp for the scheme to have any chance of success, and after working it for three weeks we abandoned it. In the first place because the tunnel became half full of water, and secondly, because we had reason to believe the Germans had learnt of its existence and were waiting to catch us red-handed—a suspicion which was afterwards confirmed. I was very glad, for there were never less than two inches of water when I worked there, and it was a horrible job, as all tunneling is.

About this time Kicq suggested that we should escape by train, which he felt sure was possible if we were suitably dressed. I was of the opinion that there were too many difficulties in the way to make it worth while trying, but he eventually talked me over and told me that long train journeys had already been done by Frenchmen. We then decided that we would go for Switzerland, the general opinion being that it was impossible to cross the Dutch border, as it was guarded by electric wire, dogs, and several lines of sentries. It was absolutely necessary to our plans to have a clear start of seven or eight hours without an alarm, and when our tunnel had to be abandoned I despaired of getting out without being seen or heard. Kicq, as always, was ready to try anything, and produced scheme after scheme, to all of which I objected. The real difficulty was the dogs round the camp, and though there were numerous ways of getting out of the camp, in all his schemes it was heavy odds on our being seen and the alarm being given. We both thought it was too late in the year to walk (nonsense, of course, but I did not know that then); and where should we walk to, since the Dutch frontier was impossible? As an English major said to me, "The frontier is guarded against spies who have friends on both sides and know every inch of the ground; how can you, tired prisoners of war, with no maps worth having—no knowledge and no friends—hope to cross?" I was further discouraged by a rumor that there were new railway regulations about showing passes which would make it quite impossible for us to travel by train. About that time I got into conversation with one of the German sentries, and bribed him with half a pat of butter to allow me to speak to a prisoner who was supposed to be in solitary confinement. At the end of a week the sentry had agreed to help me to escape, as long as the plan did not in any way implicate him. He told me that, speaking German as well as I did, I should have no difficulty in going by train, and that there were no passes to be shown or anything of that sort. I agreed to send 500 marks to his wife if I got away by his help. A day or two later I suddenly saw the way to get out. I was walking round with one of the tunnel conspirators at the time, and pointed it out to him. Then I found Kicq and told him we would depart on Monday. He, of course, was delighted, and ready to fall in with anything I might suggest. For some time our plans and preparations had been completed as far as possible; money had been no obstacle, as there were many men in the camp who had 20 or 30 marks, German money, and I managed to collect 80 and Kicq 120 marks. He had already got a civil outfit, and I had got a cap from an orderly. We decided not to take rücksacks but a traveling-bag, and I bought just the thing in the canteen. I was going to take an empty rücksack in the bag so that we could divide the weight afterwards, as we intended to walk the last 40 kilometres. We knew we could catch a 2.13 a.m. train at Goslar (a small town about 15 kilometres due north of Clausthal), and after that we had to trust to luck to find trains to take us via Cassel to Rotweil, a village near the Swiss frontier. The one difficulty remaining was a suit of civilian clothes for me. There was an English flying officer in the camp whose uniform had been badly spoilt when he had been brought down. In consequence, he had been allowed to buy a suit of civilian clothes in Cambrai. He was still wearing these; in fact, he had nothing else to wear. The Germans had been most unwilling to let him continue in possession of these clothes, and always had their eye on them and of course intended to confiscate them as soon as his uniform turned up from England. This fellow agreed to allow me to steal his clothes. It was a most courageous thing to do, as he would certainly have got fourteen days' imprisonment for it, in spite of the evidence which would be produced to prove that the clothes were stolen quite unknown to him. As it happened, this theft was not necessary, as I was able to buy a new suit in the camp for 20 marks. It was green, and of the cheapest possible material; the jacket was of the Norfolk type with a belt, and buttoned up high in front at the neck. A black naval mackintosh, some German boots, a pair of spectacles, and a cloth cap completed my equipment. The suit had been bought over a year before from a German tailor who had been allowed to come into the camp to do ordinary repairs. This fellow had brought with him a number of civilian suits, which had been bought up in a very short time. A few days afterwards the Germans got to hear of this, and gave orders that all civilian suits in the camp were to be confiscated and the money would be returned. Needless to say, no one owned to having a suit, and a mild search failed to unearth any of them.

We intended to escape on Monday, because Tuesday morning roll-call was at 11.30 a.m. instead of 9.30 a.m., and if we could get out unseen it would give us two hours more time before we were missed. On Friday I found out that two good fellows, Ding and Nichol, also intended to escape by the same method. We decided that all four of us would try. Naturally it was necessary to go on the same night, and Monday was selected. We tossed up who was to cut the wire and go first, and fortune decided for Ding and Nichol.

CHAPTER III

THE FIRST EVASION

A brief study of the plan of the camp and its defenses will make our plan of escape quite clear. The sentries are represented by ×, the arc lights by ☉, and the dogs in kennels by "O." All round the camp was iron wire torpedo netting, with two-inch mesh, about 12 feet high on iron poles. The gardens offered a very suitable hiding-place close to the wire-netting. At "G" was the German guardhouse, and "K" was the kitchen, and Germans used to pass frequently between the guardhouse and the kitchen along a footpath close to the wire. At 6.45 an extra sentry was placed outside the wire at "S," and it was not sufficiently dark to make the attempt till 6.30, so that we had a quarter of an hour to cut the wire and to find an opportunity to cross the path and reach the darkness behind the glare of the arc lights.

By far the greatest danger came, not from the sentries, but from stray Germans who used the footpath at frequent but irregular intervals. We agreed to give the other two five minutes' start so as not to interfere with their escape if we were caught getting out, and also to avoid being caught red-handed ourselves if they were seen and chased in the immediate vicinity of the camp. Longer we could not allow them, and even five minutes' delay would give us very little time before the extra sentry was posted at "S." On Monday night all went excellently up to a point. The sentries marched with commendable regularity up and down their beats. At 6.30 the four of us were changed and ready. There were so many different uniforms in the camp, and so many officers habitually wore garments of a nondescript character, that in the dusk we were able to mingle with the other prisoners without drawing attention to ourselves. A minute later Ding entered the peas and began to cut the wire. He had scarcely started when a German walking on the footpath passed a few inches from his nose. Ding felt sure he had been seen and retreated hurriedly. We waited anxiously for a minute or two, prepared to rush to our rooms and change and hide our kit if there were any signs of alarm. Then Nichol went round to investigate, and taking the pincers entered once more into the garden and prepared to cut the wire. The German had certainly not seen Ding in the garden, but how he had escaped being seen coming out, considering the commotion he made, passes my comprehension. Kicq and I had a rapid consultation, and decided that it was too late to escape that night, so we sent a friend round to tell Nichol not to cut the wire, and we all retreated and changed, feeling rather crestfallen. At 6.45 Ding suddenly remembered that he had left his greatcoat in the peas close up by the wire. This was most gallantly rescued by Nichol under the nose of the sentry. The attempt had been a failure, but not a disaster.

Kicq and I decided to wait another week, for we wished to make certain that the Germans were not keeping an eye on the place in order to catch us red-handed, and Monday was the most suitable day. Ding dropped out; and Nichol, who did not speak German and consequently could not come with us, said he would not get another partner, firstly, because Kicq and I would have a better chance without a second party following us, and, secondly, because it was getting rather late in the year for walking. Nichol offered to cut the wire for us, and this offer we were only too pleased to accept, for we knew he was absolutely reliable, and it would save us from dirtying our clothes. During the week Kicq and I changed our plans and determined to go straight by the through train which left Goslar at 2.13 a.m. to Düsseldorf, and then try to find a Dutch bargee on the Rhine, who could be bribed to take us as far as the frontier and could probably give us information as to the best method of crossing if he could not take us through himself. This plan was obviously better than the long and complicated train journey to Switzerland.

The only result of last Monday's failure was to convince us that, unless real bad luck or unforeseen circumstances intervened, we were certain to get clear away. We revised and perfected details and equipment, raised some more money for the purpose of giving a larger preliminary bribe to the bargee, got some tracings of maps for the night march to Goslar, and began to feel pretty confident. I don't think there is anything that I have ever done quite so exciting as escaping from prison. It may not be the same for other men who have tried both fighting in the air and escaping, but I know that for me the "nervous tension" before the latter is much greater than anything I have experienced at the front. Once in the middle, one has not time to be nervous in either case. It is the necessity of walking and talking and acting as if nothing were about to happen, right up to the moment of going, which is such a strain.

I think there were only half a dozen people in the camp who knew that Kicq and I were going, though many knew that Ding and Nichol had tried a week before. It was very necessary to keep the knowledge, not only from the Germans, but also from the foreign members of the camp, as one can never be quite certain that there is not a spy or some one in German pay among them. For obvious reasons it would be very much more difficult to introduce a spy amongst the English, but it is a good rule that the fewer who know the better.

On Monday night at 6 o'clock Kicq and I had a good feed with Nichol on sardines and jam, and then changed into our civilian clothes. At 6.30 Nichol was timed to go in and cut the wire. We walked round the hotel, and I deposited the bag in a dark spot by "M." We then took a turn or two up and down. We had only to wait about five minutes, when Nichol appeared and said, "The wire is cut, but I am not sure if the hole is large enough to get through; take the cutters" (a pair of sharp nail pincers which had been stolen off the German electrician), "as you may have to enlarge it." The sentry at "C," a fat old Landsturmer, chose to stand still instead of going up and down his beat, but he only glanced very occasionally towards "M," and we thought the moment favorable. This time we made no mistake about it. Kicq and I walked round to "M," stood a moment on the path, and had a look round. "C" had his back turned—"B" was at the far end of his beat. I took the bag and put it among the peas. Then in went Kicq, and I after him—he was through the hole in no time. I passed the bag through to him and came through myself, and we were across the lighted-up strip and into the darkness behind the arc lights inside six seconds. We went at full speed for a hundred yards or so, then, as there was no alarm, we stopped and looked back. Everything was quite quiet and we could see the sentries walking up and down on their beats under the electric lights, so we shook hands on the success of the first phase. Meanwhile Nichol, having seen us off and done his best to close the hole, strolled back round the building and there met Kicq's friend and confidant, a Belgian captain, an excellent fellow but rather an excitable conspirator. "C'est bien l'heure," said the Captain, "ils doivent partir tout de suite ou il sera trop tard." "Ils sont déjà partis," said Nichol. With a cry of joy, the captain fell on his neck and kissed him.

CHAPTER IV

WHAT HAPPENED TO KICQ

We now felt pretty safe from immediate pursuit, and turning off to the right we made a semicircle round the camp and crossed the causeway between the two lakes. There was a good chance that our absence would not be discovered for another sixteen hours, that is, till the 11.30 roll-call next morning. We had about 16 to 20 kilometres to go to Goslar station, but as it was not yet 7 o'clock, and as our train left at 2.13 a.m., we had heaps of time. Besides this, Kicq knew the first 6 miles or so, having been that way on a walk. The walk to Goslar was almost without incident. We had two compasses, which had been made in the camp by a Belgian, and we had a sketch map of the way, which was mostly through pine forests. We were really overcautious and made wide detours round houses and took great pains not to meet any one on the road. All this was most unnecessary, as our civilian kit was quite good as I afterwards proved, and we both spoke German well enough to pass off as Germans for a few words. After walking fast for a couple of hours we found we were much ahead of time and so halted for half an hour at the foot of the Brechen, a huge tower built for sight-seeing purposes on the highest hill in the neighborhood. Soon after half-past one we entered Goslar and walked boldly through the town, saying what we had to say to each other in German; but we only saw one man, who took no notice of us. The station was easily found, and as there were twenty minutes before the train started we sat on a bench at the side of the road and waited till 2.05 a.m. before entering the station. Kicq wished to buy tickets for both of us, but I insisted on our having nothing to do with one another during the journey. We decided that Kicq was to go in first and buy a ticket for Düsseldorf if the train went as far, and if not, for Elberfeld. At 2.05 a.m. I followed him at about 150 yards distance into the station, and found that the booking office was not yet open, and that some dozen people were waiting to take tickets. Our appearance apparently caused no suspicion, and we both of us examined the time-tables on the walls in the hope of finding out if the train went to Düsseldorf. I should very much like to have known how much the ticket would cost, but could get no information on either point. Kicq looked a proper Hun in knee-breeches, dark puttees, brown boots, a German cape, and no hat. The fashion of going bareheaded had scarcely come in then, though hat cards had been lately introduced. Kicq told me afterwards that my own mother would not have known me. I wore a pair of gold-rimmed glasses and walked with a bit of a stoop and a limp. My clothes were green, with a collar that buttoned right up to the neck. I wore an ordinary black cap, and carried a black mackintosh over my arm. We both of us had our hair cut short, and our moustaches had been training for some time and curled up a bit at the ends. At last the ticket office was opened and we got into the queue. I could not hear what ticket Kicq took, so I said, "Dritte nach Düsseldorf Schnellzug" when my turn came. The clerk made some remark which I did not catch, so I added another 5 marks to the 20-marks note which I had put down. He had apparently asked if I had any small change, as he pushed back my 5-marks note and gave me a lot of change and my ticket. I pretended to count it and then stuffed it into my pocket and was jolly glad to get that business over. After I had taken my ticket I lost sight of Kicq, but the man who clipped my ticket at the barrier told me from what platform the train for Düsseldorf went. I put my bag down and sat in a dark corner on one of the benches and lit a German cigar. Kicq was walking up and down, and I did so too, though we took no notice of each other. The train was rather late, and I dared not go near my bag as an officer and a girl were standing close to it. When the train came in and I picked up the bag the girl gave me a suspicious look, but she did not have time to say anything, as I grabbed the bag and scrambled into a third-class coach. I did not see Kicq again till we met once more in prison.

Before I go any farther with my story, I will tell you how Kicq was caught. He told me about it in prison, but I cannot be certain that I have remembered all the details accurately. He got into a third-class coach and stood in the corridor. After he had been there a short time an officer came up and talked to him, and as the train rocked about a good deal they had to shout to make themselves heard. The officer did not seem to suspect anything wrong with the accent. Kicq talked German perfectly fluently, but in my opinion he has rather a curious accent. In answer to a question he told the officer that he had been on a walking tour, during his holiday, in the Harz Mountains, and numerous other lies. When asked if he had served in the army he said he had been paralyzed in the arm from infancy, and then was forced to tell more lies of a complicated nature. Kicq swore the fellow did not suspect anything, but was merely a conscientious ass. Evidently the officer asked to be allowed to look at Kicq's passport. Kicq said he was sorry he had not got it on him; he had never found it necessary to carry a passport, and he had never been asked for it before. The officer said that any letters he had on him would do, just to prove his identity. Kicq answered that for the last few days he had been walking and he had received no letters. The Bosche, apologizing, said he was sorry he would have to ask him to identify himself by telephone from the next station, but that he was officially bound to do so under the circumstances. Kicq said that of course he would be delighted to do so, and went to the lavatory, where he got rid of everything by which it would be possible to identify him as a prisoner of war. At the next station he intended to bolt as soon as the train stopped, but for some reason he had no chance of doing so. At the next station he said he was a Swiss deserter, and refused to give his name for the sake of the honor of his family. During the next twenty hours he told the most amazing number of lies, and at the end was very nearly sent to a civilian camp to be interned there pending investigations. Of course that was just what he wanted, as he had managed to hide money on his person and was quite confident that he would have no difficulty in escaping from any civilian camp. Unfortunately he was identified by an Unteroffizier sent from Clausthal for the purpose. But if he had not succeeded in his main object, he had at any rate concealed his identity for twenty-four hours, and thereby greatly increased my chances.

To return to my story. After getting into the third-class coach I made my way along the corridor, looking for a seat. The train was rather crowded, and the first carriage I tried to get into was half full of soldiers. I asked if there was a seat free, and was told, "Nur militärisch." By this time I had completely got over all feelings of nervousness, and was thoroughly enjoying the whole situation. A little farther on a young fellow saw I was looking for a place, and coming out into the corridor said he was getting out next station and I could have his corner place. This suited me very well, as I got a seat next to a woman. So I sat in the corner, pulled the curtain over my face, and went to sleep. I did not wake up again till we got to Elberfeld about 6 a.m. At Elberfeld a number of people got in, and the carriage was crowded with business men. A pretty lively discussion started, and I was afraid of being asked for my opinion, so I buried myself in the paper I had bought at Elberfeld and soon pretended to be asleep again. We got to Düsseldorf between 8 and 9, I think. I could see no signs of Kicq as I got out, and not caring to loiter about too much on the platform I went through the barrier and waited about in the main hall, through which he would have to pass to leave the station. After waiting for ten minutes I became anxious about him, and turned over all the probabilities in my mind. (1) He might have been recaptured in the train. (2) He might have taken a ticket to Elberfeld, under the impression the train only went as far as that. In this case he would come on soon, and I searched the time-tables without much success to find out when the next train from Elberfeld to Düsseldorf came in. (3) He might be waiting for me in some other part of the station, but as it was obviously easier for him to come out through the barrier than for me to go in, I decided that I was waiting in the most suitable place and had better stay there for a bit. In the meantime, according to our scheme, I asked for a plan of the town from a bookstall. The old man who sold it to me had to get it from the main bookstall, and then chatted very pleasantly to me on the weather, the war, and the increase of paper money with every new war loan. I confined my remarks to "Ja wünderschön," "Da haben Sie recht," "Ja wohl, es geht nicht so schlimm," "Kolossal," etc., but nevertheless began to get enormous confidence in my German. I also bought a local time-table. After waiting for about half an hour I did not like the way an old fellow in uniform, a sort of station official, was looking at me, so with the help of my plan I made my way to the river. I spent the next four hours in Düsseldorf, going to the station at intervals to see if Kicq had turned up. Our plan was to get hold of a Dutch bargee, so that I thought I had almost as good a chance of meeting him on the riverside as at the station, besides which the aforesaid old man at the station had got a nasty suspicious look in his eye. I bought some apples from an old lady in the market-place by the river, and then went to a quiet spot and ate some sandwiches and considered the situation. As far as I could see, there was nothing at all promising in the way of bargees on the river. I knew that an English officer had escaped from Crefeld, and that from Crefeld to the frontier was only about twenty or thirty miles. I soon saw from my time-table that I could get a tram to Crefeld across the Rhine, so I inspected the bridge over the Rhine, and as far as I could see no passes were asked for, from those going over in the tram. Before I did anything more, it seemed to me absolutely necessary to have some sort of map of the frontier, so I determined to try to buy one. I walked back once more along the riverside, and, as it was hot, tried to buy some milk in a milk shop. The woman said something about a milk card, so I said, "Ah, I forgot," and walked out. I went back once more to the station by tram (I was getting tired of lugging my bag about, and used the trams pretty freely). On the way there I went into a bookshop and bought a map of Nord Deutschland and then asked for a Baedeker. The woman said she did not think she was allowed to sell that, and called her husband, who turned out to be a German N.C.O. He said that, owing to the number of suspicious persons, spies, prisoners of war, etc., he had to be very careful to whom he sold maps. I said, "Natürlich, das verstehe ich wohl" (Naturally, I can well understand that). Just then I caught sight of a map marked "Umgebungen von Krefeld" (The Neighborhood of Crefeld), and asked to look at it. It was just what I wanted, an excellent map of Crefeld to the frontier, about 1:100,000. I bought this and cleared out, without, I think, arousing any suspicion. My confidence in my German was now "kolossal"! There was, of course, no sign of Kicq at the station, so I took the tram for the park in order to have lunch and a quiet look at my map. After I had been there a short time and had made up my mind as to my plan of campaign, I noticed an old gentleman observing me in a suspicious manner. He was obviously stalking me and trying to get a better look at me and my map. I waited till he had gone round a bush and then packed up rapidly, walked round another bush, and going through a sort of shrubbery got out of the park and boarded the first tram I saw. After traveling I know not where on this, I got out, and making my way to the river, strolled once more along the docks, keeping a lookout for Kicq, and then walked up the main street (always carrying my bag) to Prince Afold Platz, from where my tram to Crefeld started. A pointsman showed me the place from which the trams left every half-hour, so after one more visit to the station I caught the one o'clock tram. The girl conductress on the tram said I was on the wrong tram when I asked for my ticket. She gave me the ticket, however, and told me to get out at the first station over the Rhine and get into the next tram. At the first station over the Rhine I got out, and seeing a Bierhalle asked for a glass of beer. I had just given the woman a mark when my tram came in, so without waiting for the change I grabbed my bag and made off. She ran after me, but I pointed to the tram and called, "It does not matter, I have no time," and boarded the tram.

CHAPTER V

THE FRONTIER

When we got to Crefeld I saw that the station was on the east side of the town, but after my experience at Düsseldorf I thought it would be much safer to walk boldly right through the middle of the town than to skirt round the edges. My brother was at this time interned at Crefeld, and I thought how amusing it would be if I were to meet him in the town and wondered if he would keep a straight face when I winked at him. The walk through the town was without incident. One fellow, in Landsturm uniform, a prison guard I should think, turned round and looked at me in a nasty way, perhaps recognizing my likeness to my brother, but I walked quickly on and nothing came of it. It must have been just after 2 p.m. when I got through into the open country on the southwest side of Crefeld, and a more horrible country I have never seen; it was absolutely flat, no trees and no signs of cover of any sort. There were one or two disused factories, which I inspected, but did not like the look of them as hiding-places. I passed several parties of French soldiers working in the fields, but did not dare to speak to them. The day was very hot and my bag was very heavy, and I could not help feeling I was rather a suspicious figure wandering about through the fields with a heavy traveling-bag within 20 miles of the frontier. It was a most unpleasant walk, and at times I thought of just throwing myself down in the middle of a field of roots, but the country was so flat that I could never be quite sure that someone would not see me crawling into them. It was not till 3.30 that I found a small alder copse with thick undergrowth, which I thought would do. There were a number of people working in the fields quite close to it, but I walked by them and round the copse, and putting the copse between them and me I doubled back into it. It was quite a small copse, about 50 by 20 yards, with thick rank grass in between the clumps. The people outside were only about 50 yards from me, and I could hear them talking and laughing. Still I was very comfortable and there were no tracks, and when I had made up some yarn to tell them if I was discovered, I went to sleep. Later on I opened a tin of Oxford sausages and had a good meal. Once a dog came through hunting rabbits, and once a man and a girl came quite close, but neither disturbed me. I began to find things very tedious and looked forward to the night's walk. Soon after 10 p.m. I started out from my hiding-place and walked hard with very few rests till 5.30 next morning, when I found a good place to lie up in. Considering the amount of energy expended, I made very little progress. Many detours were necessary to avoid the villages and houses, and for the most part I walked across country by small paths which were very clearly shown on my excellent map. However, my bag and the going were both heavy, and three-quarters of an hour's halt between 1 and 2 a.m. and some hot cocoa were most refreshing. At one place where there was a level crossing a man came to open the barrier, so I took the initiative and said, "Nach Anrath gerade aus?" (Straight on to Anrath?) He said, "Ja wohl," and opened the gate. (After that I always kept the name of the next village of which I was sure of the pronunciation in my head, so as to be able to ask my way there.)

At about 5 o'clock I was pretty tired and found myself with the large village of Süchteln in front of me, through which I had to pass, as it is on a river. I funked it, as the bridge over the river was such an obvious place to have a sentry. After thinking it out, I decided it would be less suspicious to go through just after daylight when there were a few people about, so I lay up and went to sleep in a bush in the middle of a water meadow. When I woke up, shivering with the cold, it was about 5.30 and still dark, so I crossed the road and found a splendid warm spot in the middle of a haycock, which completely covered me up. Still, I thought, they might cart the hay that day; so at 6.15 a.m., when it was just getting light, I walked boldly through the village. There were one or two people about, but they took no interest in me. At 6.30 I had found an excellent hiding-place on the far side of the town. It was rather hot all day, and I had no water-bottle and suffered from thirst a good deal, but otherwise it was very pleasant, being up in the thick bushes on the top of an old gravel pit. The time seemed very long, and in the afternoon I very foolishly wandered about a bit in the woods. I was seen by one man, but I don't think he was suspicious, and so making a short detour I got back to my hiding-place. That is the worst of being alone; it is almost impossible not to do foolish things.

I started off again about 9.30 p.m., hoping to cross the frontier that night. I was about 10 miles from the frontier, but reckoned that it would be necessary to walk nearly 15 miles if I wanted to avoid all the villages, as the country was very thickly populated. There is nothing much to say about this night's walk—it was much like the other, though I suffered rather more from thirst. At all the places where there was water there were also houses, and I did not dare to stop. I managed to quench my thirst to a certain extent by chewing roots from the fields. Unfortunately, after crossing the canal, I took a wrong road and went many miles southwest instead of west, and found myself in a long straggling village. Fortunately for my nerves there were very few dogs (very different, as I found afterwards, from Bavaria), and after walking through about two miles of village I extricated myself and got into the big wood on the frontier at about 4.30 a.m. It was a very wild spot, and rather like some thickly wooded parts of Scotland. It was also very hilly, with ridges of thick heather or long grass between almost impenetrable fir woods. I had an extremely pleasant sleep in the heather, and at 6.30 a.m. decided that I would move on cautiously. It was an ideal place for stalking, and I thought I would try and locate the frontier in the day time and if possible find out what obstacles I had before me. From my map it appeared that I had about 3 kilometres of forest between me and the frontier, but of course I did not know whether the guards would be placed exactly on the frontier. It seemed to me at the time absolutely essential, and even now I think I was quite right, to try to find out by day exactly where the sentries' line was. For all I knew there might be electrified wires, and on a dark night in the forest one was more likely than not to walk straight into them without ever seeing them at all. The rides would almost certainly be guarded, and the woods were so thick that it was impossible to crawl through them without making an awful noise. I know now that a forest is not only the most obvious place to try and cross the frontier, and for that reason the best guarded, but under any conditions, and for many reasons, the open country is the best place to try. However, I felt pretty confident that I should see the sentries before they saw me, so I went forward cautiously, examining every ride before I went down it. I went slowly through the woods for about three hours, in a west or northwest direction, steering by compass, and then began to think I must be getting pretty near the frontier. I was confirmed in this idea by finding a well used path down one of the rides, so I crawled into the wood at the side and lay down to think it out and have lunch. While I was sitting there a soldier wheeling a bicycle came down the path. When he had gone I crawled out to the edge of the ride and had a good look around. Almost north of me I could make out the roof of a house through the trees with a flagstaff and flag beside it. Like a fool, I never grasped that that was the frontier blockhouse—and then I suddenly saw a figure half a mile away, with something on his shoulder, cross the end of the ride—a soldier with a rifle, I thought, but could not be sure.

After resting till about 10.30 I retraced my steps to look for a bit of map which had fallen out of my pocket, but was unable to find it. However, it did not matter, as the map was no longer of much use to me. Once on the move I felt very restless and not a bit tired, and as the cover was so good I determined to try and find out a bit more about the frontier. I found a ride leading in the right direction and followed that along very cautiously, mostly on my hands and knees, crawling through thick heather. I crossed two more rises without seeing anyone, and still crawled on. It was really madness to go any farther now, but it all seemed so safe and the woods were so thick that the necessity seemed to me greater than the danger. It only shows the great advantage of having a friend with you when you escape—if Kicq had been there I am sure we should both of us have got across; alone, it is almost impossible to refrain from taking undue risks. It is partly overconfidence and partly boredom with doing nothing, and partly a sort of reckless and restless feeling which comes over every one, I think, at times. Buckley and I, when we got away some six months later, nearly always adopted the more cautious of two plans. The occasions on which the more cautious advice was abandoned in favor of the more reckless, though few, three times nearly led to disaster. On this first expedition of mine I had no rules and regulations for escaping prisoners, such as one learned at Fort 9, and no experience of escaping. I had to carry on by the light of nature. However, instead of making further excuses for what I did, I had better go on with the story.

After crossing a ride, I climbed a steep bank and came out on to a sort of plateau, about 100 yards across. The undergrowth was thick but there were only a few trees about, though there was a wood on the far side again. I was crawling through this undergrowth when I suddenly stopped short and held my breath. There, 15 yards from me, was a low wooden hut and I caught sight of a German soldier through the open door. I stymied myself from the hut by a bush and looked over my shoulder for the best line of retreat. Just as I was about to crawl off, a German sentry walked by me from the right, walking towards the hut. He was only about 10 yards off and was unarmed, and was buckling up his belt as he passed. I was not very well under cover from that direction, as my legs were sticking out of the bush, but I thought he would not see me if I lay quite still. When he was 5 yards from me, he stopped to adjust his belt and turned towards me, and as he looked up he saw my legs. He was a big heavy built fellow, and as he walked quickly up to me he said, "Who are you? What are you doing here?" I crawled out of the bush and stood up. "I am a papermaker from Darmstadt out on a holiday," I said.

"Have you got any papers?"

"Yes," I lied.

"Well, you must come and show them."

I took no notice of this hint, but said, "Could you kindly tell me if this is the Dutch frontier just here?"

"That has nothing to do with you," he answered; "you just come along with me."

I took no notice, and repeated the question. "Mit mir kommen—so fort," he roared out, and gripped me by the shoulder. He took me across the plateau and towards the wood on the opposite side, and as we were stepping out of a sort of pit I suddenly bolted from him. I dashed into the wood and he was after me yelling "Posten" at the top of his voice. We were running steeply down hill through the woods, consequently it was difficult for me to double back into the thick woods behind without being cut off. I turned as much right handed as I could, but he was only about 10 or 15 yards behind me, and I had not much time to think. About 50 yards ahead at the bottom of the slope there was a road which I could not avoid crossing as I saw it curling around to my right. As I was crashing through the last few yards of wood before the road, the fellow behind still yelling "Halt!" like a madman, I suddenly saw a sentry on the road who put up his rifle at 10 yards' range and called "Halt," and I halted as abruptly as possible. The fellow behind came up cursing and panting, and I was marched along the road to the left. On the road I saw there was another sentry leading a dog about 100 yards north of us. As we went along I saw the sentry who had held me up slip a clip of cartridges into his magazine, so that I am not sure that his rifle had been loaded after all. We passed another sentry (they seemed to be stationed about every 150 yards or so), and then came to the wooden hut which I had seen earlier in the day. There were about ten men in the hut (it was the guardroom for the frontier posts on that sector), and they treated me quite well. I asked for some tea and tobacco, and sat down in a corner near the window to consider the position. Rather foolishly I told them who I was. A "Flieger Hauptmann" was a bit of a capture, and they were very pleased about it. They searched me very mildly, and took away my map and compass but nothing else. From where I was sitting I could see out of a window. There I was—20 yards from the Dutch border. I had only to get across the road and I should be in thick undergrowth on the far side. It seemed to me most unlikely that there were any further obstacles than this one line of sentries. I believed at the time that I was actually on the very border, but I am not quite so sure of that now—anyhow, I am nearly sure I should have got clear away if I could have got out of that hut with a few yards' start. I could see the sentry outside the door, and he had his rifle slung over one shoulder by the strap. As I was afraid that he would get rather too good a shot at me if I ran straight, I determined that if I could get out of the hut I would double round it and get back into the thick woods behind and get across the following night. There seemed to be no obstacle of any sort in the way of wire. While I was sitting there several girls came into the hut who presented papers, which were checked by the N.C.O., and laughed and joked with the soldiers in a lingo which I could not follow. I found also that I could not understand the German soldiers when they talked among themselves.

I must have sat there for an hour or more—pretending to doze most of the time, but keeping a pretty sharp lookout for a chance of getting out of the door. Several people had come in, and I noticed exactly how the latch worked. There was an oldish fellow who annoyed me a good deal by standing with his back to the door the whole time. I thought it was accident at first, but I soon saw that he had his suspicions of me and would not be enticed from the door for anything. The only thing to be done was to pretend to fall fast asleep. This had the desired effect, and when half an hour later he left the door to glance at a paper which a soldier had brought in, I made a dash for it. There was a fellow sitting by the side of the door who must have seen me turn and, so to speak, gather myself together to make the dash; for, as I went out, he made a desperate grab at me and by ill-fortune caught the belt at the back of my coat. It tore in his hand as I struggled, but it stopped me just long enough to give the sentry outside the time to fall on my neck, and then they all fell on me and every one tried to hit me at once. For some minutes there was a horrid scene. Ten furious men hit, kicked, punched, and cursed me all at once. I did my best to ward off the blows with my hands, and luckily there were so many of them that they all got in each other's way and I was scarcely hurt at all till one of them cut my head open with a bayonet. After a bit they calmed down and I was led back into the hut, with much kicking and cursing. For a long time they continued to curse me, and I think I must have gone temporarily mad, for I started to argue with them and made matters worse. About an hour later, preparations were made to remove me to Brüggen. They undid my braces—they undid all the buttons of my trousers, which I had to hold up with one hand whilst I carried all my belongings in the other. The walking was very rough, mostly through thick heather, and I was escorted by five men and an N.C.O. The five men carried their rifles in a most explosive state of readiness and the N.C.O. kept a revolver handy. Once, when I fell, I was very near being shot on the spot. Of course there were thick woods on either hand most of the way, and once in them they would never have caught me again. However, they never gave me a chance. I was feeling extremely fit and well, and managed the hot walk over heavy ground much more easily than most of my guards, who were fat old chaps.

Although I was bitterly disappointed, I did not feel it so much at the time as afterwards, and really enjoyed the whole experience more than now seems to me possible. I was an object of curiosity in the village of Brüggen, and was eventually brought into an office, on the second story of a house, where several soldier clerks were working and given a chair in a corner, where I went to sleep. I was awakened by the entrance of a fat, unhealthy looking German lieutenant, to whom I took the most intense dislike at sight. He brought me into the next room, placed a loaded revolver on the table beside him, and ordered me to strip nude. I suppose I must have laughed at him, as he got very angry and told me it was no laughing matter. After my clothes had been searched he allowed me to dress, and then with intense deliberation began to write an account of me. I told him my camp, name, rank, etc., but when one of the guards (the brute who had first caught me) said that I had hit about me with my fists, I protested and said that, on the contrary, I had been brutally man-handled and my head had been cut open. My coat collar and head were all covered with blood, but the cut, though deep, was clean and gave little pain. He called a medical orderly, who dressed my head quite efficiently.

After waiting for an hour or two more in the clerks' office, I was solemnly warned by a nasty little N.C.O. that I would be shot immediately if I made a further attempt to escape, and was marched off with a couple of guards. One happened to be the fellow who had originally caught me and the other was the old fellow who had made such a point of guarding the door in the hut. They were both, rather naturally, very suspicious of me and never gave me half a chance. After a march of three miles or so, we came to a big factory which was used as barracks, and I was put into the guardroom. When feeding time came round, I was given a very good plate of excellent vegetable soup, of which they gave me a second helping when I asked for it, and as much hot water, colored to look like coffee, as I could drink. On the whole, considering they were a rough lot of soldiers, I was treated very decently indeed. One young fellow, in fact, went out of his way to be nice to me and to make me comfortable. He passed me a packet of tobacco when no one was looking, and later in the evening there was quite an amusing discussion on the war, aeroplanes, etc. I think it rather astonished them that an English officer, a "Hauptmann," was prepared to talk and be more or less friendly with them. I think they also rather appreciated the fact that I seemed to bear no grudge against them for hitting me over the head with a bayonet; one of them in fact almost apologized for it by saying that they had been so enraged because they would have been heavily punished if I had escaped. They gave me some blankets, and I had an excellent night on a bench. One or two of them were thoughtful enough to warn me not to attempt to escape the next morning. Precautions had been taken, they said, and I would not have a chance.

CHAPTER VI

PAYING THE PIPER

Next morning I was marched off with my two old guards, and during the march, by orders from the Company H.Q., a third was added. We went by train to Gladsbach, and I was locked up in a strong room in the citadel. There was a spy-hole in the door, and a number of people came and had a look at me through it. Several plates of vegetable soup and a large hunk of very satisfying brown army bread were given to me later. An exhaustive search of the cell disclosed a book hidden in the straw mattress (which was verminous, by the way) on deeds of valor in the German army, so I passed a peaceful and not unpleasant day.

Next day I was given a ration of bread and cheese, and a pleasantly fat German, an Offizier Stellvertreter, with a humorous face, informed me that he had to conduct me to Clausthal, and then (in an aside) that he did not like the job a bit. There was a sentry with us, a tall, good looking man of fifty or so, who slung his rifle over his shoulder instead of carrying it at the "ready," as all my sentries had done for the last twenty-four hours. We got into a third-class reserved carriage at the station. The officer asked me some questions about my escape, and said that he had been told I was a desperate character. "Are you going to try to escape again from me?" he said. I laughed, and said it depended on what sort of opportunity he gave me. "It will be a most uncomfortable journey," he said with a resigned sigh. Then he brightened up and said, "Why not give me your parole not to escape till Clausthal; it will be so much more comfortable?" "All right," I said, and we shook hands on it. The soldier immediately put his rifle, and the officer his revolver, on the rack. Then the latter got down a hand-bag, which was packed with food and a couple of bottles of wine, and we had a fine feed. We continued to have good feeds about every two hours all the way to Clausthal. During the lunch, I explained to him that if I had wanted to escape from him, he had given me several opportunities before I gave my parole. "Ah, what!" he said, "when you went to the lavatory?" "Yes," said I, "that was one of them; there was a door on the far side opening into the far carriage." "Ah, but that was guarded," he said, obviously rather startled. I knew that it had not been guarded, but it had not been worth my while attempting to escape, for many reasons. My clothes were badly torn and covered with blood, and it was broad daylight, so that I don't think I should have had any chance at all. My head was all bandaged up, and, if I had taken off the bandage to put my cap on, the wound would have started to bleed again. Also, I was beginning to feel the effects of my exertions, and had no map or compass, and very little idea of where I was. Consequently I was very glad to give my parole, and never regretted it. All my money had been taken from me, but in the most generous way he insisted that I was his guest and bought literature, beer, and food for all three of us on all possible occasions.

He said he could not understand how I managed to pass myself off as a German, as he would have known me by my accent for a foreigner immediately. Soon afterwards a pretty shop-girl got in (up to that time we had kept people out by saying it was a reserved carriage), and to my guard's surprise she had no suspicion of my accent. Eventually he told her that I was an Englishman, which she refused to believe till I owned that it was true, and then she edged away into the far corner and got out at the next station.

We got into Clausthal late at night and had a very dark walk up to the camp. My old fat officer and I parted the best of friends. He was a vulgar fellow but a good sportsman, and I am very grateful to him for his kindness. The fact of the matter is that he had been nearly two years at the front, and it was most noticeable that any German who had been at the front for any length of time became quite a decent fellow. It is the swine who has never been near the front who is intolerable. Very much the same contrast is noticeable in peace time between those Germans who have lived abroad (especially in England) and those who have always stayed at home. I suppose that an Englishman who has never traveled is a pretty intolerable sort of person to a foreigner!

The little lieutenant met me and showed me into a room in the German guardhouse, and told me to change into my uniform, and then to take any clothes I should want for the night. I was put into a very nasty, bare, whitewashed brick room, next the pigsties. A Russian orderly brought me my food, and through him I had no difficulty in secretly exchanging notes with Nichol and others in the camp. I was allowed to have any food they sent me, so, being very hungry, I naturally overate myself. Exercise consisted of half an hour's walk morning and afternoon, and I found that quite insufficient. My cell was next the pigs on one side and next the motor for making electricity on the other, and was consequently both smelly and noisy, besides being dirty. I asked to be allowed to have a bath, but it was not granted me for some days—four, I think. There were no windows to the place, but there were two doors and one doorway; that is to say, when they shut me in, they first locked an iron cage in front of the doorway, and outside that a wooden door. The wooden door, however, did not quite come to the top of the doorway; there was a gap of about nine inches, and through this gap light and air were supposed to enter. There was a bed, a basin, and a horrible stove, which either got red hot or went out. Books and tobacco were sent in to me; but, even so, I spent a fairly uncomfortable fourteen days.

After I had been in there for a week, Kicq was brought in and we shared the room, which was only about 10 feet by 6 feet. We had to put one bed on top of the other to fit the beds in at all. I was beginning to feel the disappointment of failure very bitterly, and should really have preferred to have been left alone to brood over it in peace. Kicq, however, did his best to make an exchange of Spanish and English lessons a regular occupation, and we eventually spent a good deal of our time like that. It was a disgusting sort of existence, and for several days it was extremely dirty and uncomfortable. Eventually, after repeated complaints, some improvements were made. We were not allowed to have a bath in the main building, as we would have been liable to come in contact with the other prisoners; so Nichol sent us in a tin hip-bath. We also got leave from the lieutenant to have our outside door open for half an hour in the morning and half an hour in the afternoon. As the sentries changed every two hours, it was a simple matter to tell each sentry that we had not yet had it open for half an hour that morning, so by this ruse de guerre we got a certain amount of light and air into the place.

One morning about 9.30, whilst we were in the middle of washing and shaving and having breakfast all at once, a General, an A.D.C., the Camp Commandant, and the lieutenant all suddenly appeared outside our "grill" and were admitted by the sentry. I was in pyjamas and a tunic, and Kicq even more undressed, with his face covered with shaving soap, but we gave the General as military a "stand to attention" as we could under the circumstances. He answered our salute very politely, taking no notice of our undress uniform, and turning to the Commandant, said, "Sie waren in dem Tunnel gefangen?" "Nein, nein," said the lieutenant, saluting violently, and Kicq and I grinned, whilst the lieutenant and the Commandant showed obvious signs of anger! For a long time we had believed that the Germans knew of our tunnel and were trying to catch us red-handed in it, and this of course confirmed our suspicions. The General was told that we both spoke German, and asked us if we had any complaints. We objected to the place in which we were imprisoned, but otherwise had not much of which to complain. I then said that we should like to receive our punishment, since at present we were just under arrest "pending investigation." The General turned to his A.D.C., who, saluting between each sentence, said that the General had signed our punishment the day before and that we were sentenced to fourteen days' Stubenarrest, and that our punishment started from the day he had signed it. We thanked him, and said that was just the thing we were particularly anxious to know, and felt delighted that we had got off so lightly.

Two days later we went over into the old room in which Long, Nichol, and I had originally lived in No. 3 Barracks. The windows of the room were whitewashed, and there was a sentry in front of our door, the idea being, of course, to prevent us communicating with the other prisoners. This was quite absurd and nothing but red tape, as we were allowed to have the top part of the window open and we were separated only by thin wooden walls from the rooms on either side of us. It was only necessary to bang on the wall and shout anything you might wish to say. If we wanted anything, such as books, some one just threw them through the window to us. One day when the lieutenant was in the room, a book came hurtling through the window and hit him full in the chest. The German kept his temper very well and merely remonstrated with us, saying that it was unnecessary to break the rules when we could have anything we wanted by asking him. He was quite right, and I put it down to his credit that he kept his temper, but the amusement of disobeying rules slightly relieved our very monotonous existence. I have already explained that the whole camp was divided into two by torpedo netting. For the rest of our imprisonment at Clausthal, we used to take our exercise in this lower or southern section, all the other prisoners being cleared out of it for half an hour in the morning and half an hour in the afternoon for that purpose. The weather was beautifully fine, and, as the tennis-court was in this section, we decided we had better play tennis during our half an hour's exercise. We just banged on the wall and asked the people next door to leave two racquets and some balls outside our door. This was a great success. Kicq was not much of a player, but he improved fast.

The sentries were on the whole quite friendly. They were ostentatiously officious when another sentry was near, and did not care that an officer of any nationality other than English should see them talking to us. Most of them were physically unfit or badly wounded, and, though all seemed to be sick of the war, they did their duty in as inoffensive a way as possible. The old chap whom I had bribed was several times our sentry, and when he was on at night he would allow us to go into the room next door and see Nichol and Long. We in return gave him some good things to eat and hot chocolate and coffee when the nights were cold. When I was alone in the pigsty we had had a long talk in which he said that the N.C.O. of the guard had told him that I was actually over the frontier when I was caught. I am sure that this was not the case, however.

A few days before we expected to be released, the lieutenant came in and told us that the General had made a mistake and that our Stubenarrest, as opposed to our Untersuchungschaft, did not start when the General signed our Bestrafung, but when the warrant was received by the Camp Commandant. Consequently, we should not get out till November 12th. I was extremely angry, as I was weary of the confinement, but Kicq took it very philosophically.

CHAPTER VII

REMOVAL TO A STRAFE CAMP

About this time I wrote home for the first time in code. The last time I had been home on leave from France before being taken, I had made up, with the help of the rest of my family, a very rough sort of code depending on the formation of the letters. I wrote a longish message, very small, on a piece of cigarette paper, and stuck it to the flap of the envelope, and then wrote a code message in the letter saying, "Tear open flap of envelope." The letter got through all right, but they failed at home to see that it was in code. The other letters I wrote in code, and I wrote many from Fort 9 (and much more important ones), all got through successfully.

At midday on November 12th we came out of prison. We had already been told that we were going to be sent to Ingolstadt; but, though Nichol made inquiries in the camp, no one seemed to know what sort of place it was. We had to leave Clausthal camp about 2 o'clock and walk to the station, so that we had about half an hour in the camp to say "good-bye" and pass on all we had learnt. Both Kicq and I did a good deal of talking during the last hour we spent at Clausthal, and when the sentry came to fetch us we were given a very cheery send-off, nearly all the camp turning out. We had a two or three mile walk to the station, and were escorted only by an N.C.O. with a revolver. In fact, during the whole of this journey we were, quite contrary to our expectations, so badly guarded that I swore I would be properly prepared to escape the next time I had a train journey at night. The little lieutenant met us at the station, and proved to be the most incompetent traveler. Although he asked every one he saw, he never seemed to know how or where to catch any train. In fact, Kicq, who had studied the matter when we had had intentions of trying for Switzerland, knew much more about the route than he did. We had a pretty uncomfortable and very dull journey.

At Halle, after we had waited an hour or two in a Red Cross dormitory, the lieutenant made some bad muddle about the trains, and there was also a difficulty because prisoners-of-war were not allowed to travel on a "Schnellzug" (fast train). However, eventually we got into a third-class coach, and after pushing along the corridor, to the surprise of a crowd of peaceful travelers, we got into a third-class wooden-seated compartment. The lieutenant was perfectly hopeless and helpless, and I several times felt inclined to take command of the party and give the conductor a few marks to get us a decent carriage. I had a longish talk that night with him, but he would insist on smoking strong cigars with the window tight shut, and his breath stank so that I was nearly sick. He gave me rather an interesting picture of the Russian front during the big German advance. He said the dirt and discomfort were absolutely horrible. The usual Polish village consisted of huge barn-like buildings where several families lived together with a swarm of children and some half-dozen adults of both sexes. They usually slept, as far as I can make out, on top of the stoves, which were of the big tiled variety. A large number of animals and chickens lived in the same house, or rather room. For billeting purposes as many men as possible were crammed in these places—half a company or more. The whole place was indescribably filthy, and he assured me that every soldier, from a Tommy to a general, was simply covered with lice, and never got rid of them during the whole campaign. He was wounded very seriously early on in the advance. He got a bullet through his "Herzbeutel" (the bag which contains the heart), he said. The lot of the wounded was a terrible one, as they had to be transported on carts, over the worst possible roads, for very big distances to the rail-heads. Altogether he looked back on the Russian campaign with horror.

We got to Nüremberg about 2 or 3 a.m. and were put in a room above the police station or guardhouse in the station. We were allowed to buy some coffee and bread, and later got a wash and shave. We got to Ingolstadt some time about midday without further incident, and walked up to the central office of the prisoners-of-war camp. Here the lieutenant said good-bye, and I can't pretend I was sorry to see the last of him. He was quite a good, honest fellow, but one of those hopelessly conscientious people, with no initiative and no sense of humor.

After waiting in the bureau for some time we were told we were bound for Fort 9, but could elicit no information as to what sort of place it was. We were told that we should have to sleep the night at the men's camp, as the fort was about 7 kilometres out of the town, and it was either too late or inconvenient to send us out that night.

Ingolstadt is a town of some 30,000 or 40,000 inhabitants and is built on both banks of the Danube. The prisoners-of-war camp consists of half a dozen or more old forts, some of which lie on the north and some on the south bank. Fort 9 has the date 1870 above the gateway and as the others are on an almost identical plan, I expect they are much the same date. Besides these forts, which form a ring around Ingolstadt with a radius of about 7 kilometres, there is a camp for men on the outskirts of the town itself. As far as I know, all the forts except one, which is a strafe camp for N.C.O.'s who have attempted to escape, are used for officer prisoners-of-war. Fort 9, as we soon learnt, is the fort where the black sheep go. On our way to the men's camp we passed several working parties, mostly of French soldiers. As far as I could see, they showed no signs of ill-treatment, though I thought some of the Russians looked rather hungry and ill-kept. All we could see of the men's camp was a palisade with several strands of barbed wire on top. An extremely dirty, unsoldierly Bavarian sentry was sloping about outside, apparently having a beat of 200 or 300 yards long. He was merely typical of all Bavarian sentries. They are all, with rare exceptions, filthy and slovenly, and an incredibly large proportion have most unpleasant faces. Before I went to Bavaria as a prisoner, I had always looked on the South German as a kindly man—"gemütlich" is the word they like to use about themselves—but it did not take long to completely change these ideas. I had no longer any difficulty in believing that the Bavarians are justly accused of a very large share in the Belgian atrocities.

While I am on the subject I might mention here Kicq's story of how the sack of Louvain was started. The account is supported by what Major Whitton says in his book The Marne Campaign, and makes some excuses for the Germans, though it by no means frees them from blame. The Germans entered and occupied Louvain with little or no opposition, and pushed a fairly strong advance guard through the town in the direction of Antwerp. This advance guard was heavily attacked by a portion of the Belgian army, was defeated, and fled in panic and complete disorder back towards Louvain. The Germans in Louvain took these fugitives for a Belgian attack and fired on them, and they fired back. Very soon there was a general mix-up on a large scale. The defeated advance guard was being fired into by the Belgians on one side and by their own comrades on the other. The civilians in the town also thought that Louvain was being attacked and was about to be retaken by the Belgians. They were determined to do their bit, so they added to the general confusion by firing off all the guns they had left, and, if they had none, throwing furniture, hot water, and anything else handy on the heads of the Germans in the streets. A certain number of Germans were killed and injured in this way, and the German soldiers, furious not only at this but, when they found out their mistake, at having massacred their own comrades, got completely out of control and sacked and burnt the greater part of the town. Kicq, at the time when this happened, was in a hospital at Antwerp, so that his is only a second-hand account, but I think that most intelligent Belgian officers believe this to be a fairly true explanation.

To return to our story again—just inside the palisade was a group of wooden huts which I imagine were the offices of the camp. We were led through the guardroom, a filthy place with wooden benches running all down the middle, on which still filthier Bavarians were sleeping, drinking beer, or playing cards, and were locked into a small room at the end. We had some food left, and with the help of some nasty looking soup which the Germans brought us we made quite a good meal. There were wooden beds and mattresses in the room, and luckily not sufficient light to allow us to examine them too closely, so we passed quite a good night.

Next morning I asked to see the Commandant, who seemed quite a nice old fellow, and requested permission to go over the camp, so that I could testify to other officers that our prisoners were well treated. He answered that to grant my request was impossible. "In that case," I said, "I can only draw the conclusion that you will not let me see the camp because our prisoners are not treated as they should be." The old man said he was very sorry, but it was absolutely "verboten," but he assured me that the prisoners were well treated. An hour or so later an N.C.O. with a rifle turned up, and we were marched off to Fort 9. The whole country round Fort 9, which lies due south of Ingolstadt, is very flat and uninteresting. In fact, it is one of the few really ugly places I remember seeing in Bavaria. There are a few small woods and clumps of trees about, but as there is very little undergrowth in them, they afford only a very temporary shelter to an escaping prisoner—as Medlicott and I found out later. The fort, as you approach it from the north, has the appearance of an oblong mound of earth, some 350 yards long and about 60 feet high. There is a moat 4 to 6 feet deep all around the place, but a small rampart on the outer side of the moat prevents the latter being seen from the south till the outer gate into the first courtyard has been passed.

We tramped along the main high road which leads over the Danube directly south out of Ingolstadt, and after walking for well over an hour we began looking about for some signs of a camp, but could see nothing resembling our previous ideas of one. The guard informed us, however, that we had only 200 metres to go, and soon we turned sharp to the right towards the mound before mentioned. We then saw a sentry on one of the two battery positions which flanked the fort, and another on the top of the mound. In another minute or two we came to an iron door in a half-brick, half-earthen wall. Our guard looked through a peep-hole in this and said we could not go in yet, as Appell was taking place. I had a look through the peep-hole. Some 40 yards across a sort of courtyard was a moat, about 15 yards broad, over which there was a roadway with a heavy iron and wire gate, guarded by a sentry. The road led over the moat into another courtyard, at the back of which was a brick wall about 20 feet high with half a dozen large iron barred windows in it. On the top of the wall was some 40 feet of earth sloping backwards and upwards to the center "caponnière," the highest part of the mound, where a sentry stood. In the center of the wall was an enormous iron door leading, to all appearances, into the heart of the small hill in front of us. Through the peep-hole I could follow the moat for 50 or 60 yards in either direction. On the far side of the moat the ground sloped up slightly for 15 metres to a brick wall about 15 to 20 feet (surmounted by 4 or 5 metres of earth) with heavily barred windows at regular intervals all the way along it. The windows in this wall were the windows of our living rooms, and on the strip of grass between the windows and the moat sentries walked up and down.

In the courtyard about 200 prisoners-of-war of various nationalities appeared to be mixed up in a very irregular manner; in fact, a good deal of movement was noticeable among them, and from the confused shouting which went on I gathered something exciting must be happening. Suddenly the whole mob broke up and began to stream back into the fort through the main gate. A German from the inside opened the outer gate, and we were marched across the moat, a sentry unlocking the gate for us, into the inner courtyard. Suddenly I saw Milne, whom I had last seen at St. Omer in 25 Squadron. He was wearing an old flying coat and was bareheaded. He greeted me with enthusiasm and surprise. A sentry tried to stop us from meeting, but Milne took no notice of him, and we shook hands. Several other Frenchmen and Englishmen came crowding round us, and then some one began roaring out orders in German at the top of his voice about 10 yards off. I looked up and saw a German captain, who looked like a middle-aged well-to-do shopkeeper (which in fact he was), in a furious rage, gesticulating like a windmill. I gathered that Kicq and I were to be prevented from talking to the other prisoners. I thought that we had probably better obey him, but none of the other prisoners paid any attention whatever to the noise he was making till several sentries bustled us through the main door and into the Commandant's bureau. As we were going in, an Englishman in a beard passed by the side of me saying, "Have you anything to hide?" My compass, which had been given me by a Belgian at Clausthal, was hidden in my big baggage, so I shook my head.

A young French officer was in the bureau, and a furious discussion took place between him and the Commandant, who immediately began to shout and gesticulate. As far as I could make out, the Frenchman had been arrested at Appell for refusing to stand still. The Frenchman answered that his feet got cold because, owing to the total incompetency of the Germans, they took much longer than was necessary at Appell. "Aus dem Bureau!" (Leave the office immediately!) yelled the Commandant. The Frenchman tried to speak again, but was drowned by the shouts of "No, no, go out at once, you must not speak to me like that." "Pourquoi non, il n'est pas la manière d'addresser un officier Français," answered the Frenchman; and as he spoke the door behind me opened and another Frenchman entered who, pointing his finger at the Commandant, said, "Oui, oui, je suis témoin, je suis témoin," and went out again. The first Frenchman bowed in a formal manner to the Commandant, who had started to yell "Posten, Posten," and went out of the door just as the sentry entered. The Commandant mopped his brow and seemed almost on the verge of collapse, when Kicq protested against the way he had spoken to us when ordering us into the bureau. This raised another small storm, in which Kicq easily held his own. The Commandant calmed himself with an effort.

We were then asked the usual questions by an Unteroffizier and told that we should be in Room 45. Our hand baggage was then searched, and my rücksack was taken from me. To reach No. 45 we went along a very dark underground passage dimly lighted by an oil lamp. At the end of the passage there were some enormous iron doors. These led to one of the two inner courtyards of the fort, and were then shut, as they always were during Appell. A few yards before coming to the door we turned sharply to the right into an extremely dark arched opening. The whole passage was built of solid blocks of stone and had a vaulted roof. After groping our way round a turning, we came suddenly into another passage some 70 yards long, and also of stone. On the left hand was a bare stone wall running up 15 feet to the roof; on the right there were doors about every 4 yards with numbers on them ranging from 39 to 56. Light and air were brought into the passage by square ventilator shafts in the roof which ran up through the 15 feet of earth to the pathway above. At the top of the ventilators glass frames on very strong iron supports prevented the rain from coming in and the prisoners from getting out. Needless to say, the passage was the coldest and draughtiest place it is possible to imagine. Owing to the mound of earth on top, no heat but much dampness found its way into the passage. At the far end were the latrines. These were very insanitary, and the smell of them pervaded the whole passage, into which our living rooms opened. In certain winds they became almost intolerable. A detailed description of them will have to be given later, as they played an important part in many attempts to escape.

Room 45 was about half-way along the passage, and we found Captain Grinnell-Milne, R.F.C., Oliphant, Fairweather, and Medlicott, R.F.C., already installed there. The dimensions of the room were, at a guess, about 12 yards by 5 yards. The floor was asphalt and the walls were whitewashed brick. The walls and the ceiling were both curved and together formed an exact semicircle. In fact, the room was very much of the shape and size of a Nissen hut. This is an excellent shape from the point of view of strength, but not very convenient for hanging pictures or putting up shelves. The end of the room farthest from the door was mainly occupied by two large windows looking out over a strip of grass which sloped gradually down to the moat, 15 yards away. These windows were heavily barred with square one-inch bars, three to a window, and sentries passed along the strip of grass from time to time and glanced suspiciously in. If they saw anything that interested them they stood at the window and stared in. There was obviously no such thing as privacy. In each of these rooms five or six men lived and cooked and fed and slept.

CHAPTER VIII

FORT 9, INGOLSTADT

In the early days of the war Fort 9, Ingolstadt, had been, according to the oldest inmates of the prison-house, a quiet, well-behaved sort of place, but for the past six months the Germans had collected into the fort all the "mauvais sujets" from the German point of view, and all those prisoners-of-war who had made attempts to escape from other camps. There were about 150 officer prisoners in the place, and of these at least 130 had made successful attempts to escape from other camps, and had only been recaught after from three days' to three weeks' temporary freedom.

When Kicq and I arrived, 75 per cent. of the prisoners were scheming and working continually to this end. Some had tramped to the Dutch or Swiss frontiers and had been captured there; some had taken the train (those who could speak German) and had been eventually caught by some mischance; and all firmly believed that it was only the blackest misfortune which had prevented them from crossing the frontier, and were convinced that, if once more they could get clear of the camp, they would reach neutral territory and freedom. Escaping, and how it should be done, what to beware of and what to risk, what food to take, what clothes to wear, maps, compasses, and how to get them, how to look after your feet and how to light a fire without smoke, where to cross the frontier and what route to take, and a hundred and one things connected with escaping, were the most frequent subjects of conversation and rarely out of the thoughts of the great majority of the prisoners at Fort 9. Each man was ready to give the benefit of his experiences, his advice, and his immediate help to any one who asked for them. In fact, we pooled our knowledge. The camp was nothing less than an escaping club. Each man was ready to help any one who wished to escape and had a plan, quite regardless of his own risk or the punishment he might bring upon himself. For courts-martial no one cared twopence, and nearly every one in the fort had done considerable spells of solitary confinement.

There were in the camp, mainly among the Frenchmen, some of the most ingenious people I have ever come across. Men who could make keys which would unlock any door: men who could temper and jag the edge of an old table-knife so that it would cut iron bars: expert photographers (very useful for copying maps): engineering experts who would be called in to give advice on any tunnel which was being dug: men who spoke German perfectly: men who shammed insanity perfectly, and many, like myself, who were ready to risk a bit to get out, but had no parlor tricks. One had escaped from his prison camp dressed as a German officer: another had escaped in a dirty clothes basket, and another had been wheeled out of the camp hidden in a muck tub: another sportsman had painted his face green to look like a water-lily and had swum the moat in daylight under the sentry's nose. It is impossible to recount all the various means that were tried, and successfully tried, in order to escape from camps. Forgery, bribery, impersonation, with an utter disregard of risks of being shot, all found their advocates in Fort 9. In spite of the fact that every man was ready to do his utmost, at whatever personal risk, to help a friend who was trying to escape, each man was advised to keep his own plans of escape strictly to himself. It was not that we were afraid of spies among ourselves, but it was impossible to be quite sure of all the orderlies, who were either Frenchmen or Russians. There was one French orderly of whom we had serious suspicion but could never prove anything against him.

It can be readily understood that the Germans, having herded some 150 officers with the blackest characters into one camp, took considerable precautions to keep them there. From the moat on one side to the moat on the other, the fort at the broadest part measured about 300 yards. On the southern side, as can be seen from the sketch map, the moat ran around the fort in a semi-oval, and steep grass banks sloped from the top of the ramparts to the edge of the moat, beside which was a narrow footpath patroled by sentries. On the southern side the ramparts were higher than on the northern, and the top must have been 50 feet above the moat. Along the top there was a narrow footpath where the prisoners were allowed to walk. From this path we got a good view of the surrounding country, which was completely under cultivation and very flat, with small wooded downs in the distance to relieve the monotony. From the path, we were able to see the moat, but, owing to the shelving of the bank, not the sentry in the path below. Just inside the parados there were at regular intervals heavily built traverses, and between the traverses glass ventilators poked up from the rooms and passages which lay under the southern ramparts. From the parados a grass bank sloped down to a broad gravel walk, and from this another steep bank dropped some 20 feet into the inner court. The barred window from the orderlies' quarters, the kitchen, and the solitary confinement cells looked out from this bank into the courtyard. On the northern side a similar bank, but without windows in it, sloped up to the gravel path, which ran all round the fort. Only a 7-foot parapet, over which we were forbidden to look, bounded the gravel path on the north side; but the rules did not forbid us looking into the outer courtyard, where Appell was usually held. On the south side the moat was about 40 yards broad and on the north only about 16 yards, and though we never found out the depth accurately we imagined it to be about 5 feet at the deepest part. The whole space inside was formed into two courtyards by a very broad central passage leading from the main door to the center "caponnière" on the south side. The earth ridge on the top of the passage formed the highest point in the fort. On it was a flagstaff where flags were hoisted at each German victory, imaginary or otherwise. A sentry was always posted there. In the day time there were eighteen sentries posted in and around the court, and at night time twenty-two posted as I have shown them on the sketch map.

It was obvious that there were only two possible ways of getting out: one was to go out by the main gate past three sentries, three gates, and a guardhouse and the other was to go through the moat. It was impossible to tunnel under the moat. It had been tried, and the water came into the tunnel as soon as it got below the water level. An aeroplane was the only other solution. That was the problem we were up against, and however you looked at it, it always boiled down to a nasty cold swim or a colossal piece of bluff.

All the members of Room 45, where I now found myself, had previously escaped from other camps. Milne and Fairweather, with Milne's brother, then at Custrin, had walked out of the main gate of a camp of which I forget the name, the brother dressed as a German officer, Fairweather as a soldier, and Milne as a workman. The scheme had worked well. They had walked into the commandantur as if to see the commandant, and then had pulled off their British uniforms in the passage and, leaving them on the floor, had calmly walked out of the other door of the commandantur and passed all the sentries without any difficulty. Milne's brother spoke excellent German, and they said that their "get-up" had been very good and had been the result of some months' hard work. Oliphant and Medlicott[1] had been caught together within a mile or two of the Dutch frontier. Poole and these two had escaped together from a camp by an audacious bit of wire-cutting in full daylight, suitable side-shows having been provided to keep the sentries occupied. After doing the march on foot to the frontier at an almost incredible speed, they lay up in a wood a couple of miles or so from the frontier sentries, intending to cross that night. Most unluckily for them, the day being Sunday (always the most dangerous day for escaping prisoners, as there are so many people about), a party of sportsmen came upon them. Oliphant had his boots on and managed to get away, but Poole and Medlicott were collared. A sentry marched them along to a sort of barn, opened the door, and entered before them. They slammed the door on him and bolted. Poole got clean away and crossed the frontier that night, but Medlicott was caught after a short, sharp chase. Oliphant took a wrong compass-bearing during the night, lost his way, and was caught the following morning. They really had very bad luck. All three ought to have crossed, as they were very determined fellows, and all of them had had considerable previous experience in escaping.

We used to talk bitterly of prisoners' luck at Ingolstadt, and one of the things which induced us to keep on trying was the belief that our luck would turn. Medlicott especially had had four or five attempts before he came to Ingolstadt. One of these was most spectacular, and I must give a short account of it. I am not sure out of which camp the escape was made, but one-time inmates will perhaps recognize it. A road ran alongside one of the main buildings of the camp. On the far side of the road was a steep bank with a barbed wire fence on the top, and from there terraced gardens sloped steeply up a hill and away from the camp. The building was several stories high, and Medlicott and a companion decided that it would be possible to fix up a drawbridge from the second-story windows, and from there jump over the road and the wire on to the terrace. Every detail was fully thought out. They had a 9-foot plank, the near end of which they intended to place on the window-sill, and the far end would be supported by a rope from the top of the window. This would form an extremely rickety bridge, but though they would have a considerable drop, 12 feet or so, they had only quite a short distance to jump forward, as the road was quite narrow. Arrangements had been made to put out the electric light and to cut the telephone wires simultaneously, as a sentry was posted in the road and they had to jump over his head. The most suitable room was occupied by a Belgian general, and they decided to make the attempt from there. When they entered the Belgian's room on the selected night and informed him of what was about to happen, he absolutely refused to allow his room to be used for such a purpose. Medlicott explained to him (in bad French) that they were going from that room at once, whatever the general said, and that if he made a noise, they would be compelled to use force to keep him quiet. The general started shouting "Assassin!" and "A moi!" "A moi!" but they sat on him and gagged him and tied him to the bed. They then got out their plank and successfully jumped over the road and got clean away. They were recaught, however, about four days afterwards, I don't remember how. At their court-martial they were complimented by the President on their escape, and were given the lightest possible punishment (about two months apiece, I think) for the numerous crimes they had committed. The Belgian general was brought up as a witness against them, but could say nothing without making himself a laughing-stock or worse!

The other Englishmen at Fort 9 all lived in Room 42. They were Major Gaskell, Captain May, Captain Gilliland, Captain Batty Smith, Lieutenant Buckley, together with Lieutenant Bellison, a Frenchman, who spoke English with complete fluency, though with a bad accent. I know that when I first went to Ingolstadt they had some scheme on for tunneling out of the inner court through the rampart so as to come out half-way up the bank above the moat on the south side. It was a good idea, but never got very far, as the beginning of the tunnel was discovered by the Germans—without Room 42 being incriminated, however. I do not remember any time in Fort 9 when there was not some scheme or other in the English rooms for escaping, and we all occupied some hours nearly every day in perfecting our arrangements for escaping. There were several excellent maps in the fort, especially amongst the Frenchmen, and very many laborious hours were spent in copying these in different colored inks. Several people even made two or three copies, so as to be ready to try again immediately in the event of their being recaptured with a map in their possession. A certain amount of map copying was done by photography. Cameras were strictly prohibited, but there was at least one in the fort, which had got in I don't know how, and which did a lot of useful work.

The Frenchmen in the fort were, as a whole, a most excellent lot of fellows, and the English and French were the very best of friends. Colonel Tardieu, the senior French officer, was one of the old school. "He thanked whatever gods there be for his unconquerable soul," and would have no truck with the Germans. He asked no favors from them, and would show no gratitude if they offered him any. He protested formally but vehemently against such insults as being asked to sit at the same table as the German officer who was guarding him on a railway journey. He said that eating at the same table was in a way a sign of friendship, and to ask a French colonel to eat with a German was an insult. I hear he was sentenced to a long term of imprisonment for this and many similar offenses. How could we all help having the greatest admiration for the unbending spirit of this man, who had his own rigid ideas of honor and lived up to them to the letter, in spite of a feeble body by no means fit to withstand the strain of continuous antagonism and physical discomfort? Commandant de Goys, who escaped from Germany a few months after I did, was in the French Flying Corps, and a very well-known man in it, I believe. At one time he had been sent by the French to reorganize the Turkish aviation corps, and told some amusing stories of his meetings with Germans there who were simultaneously reorganizing the Turkish army. He had escaped from some other camp in a clothes-basket, and had very nearly got across the Swiss frontier. He had a perfect mania for attempting to escape in baskets, and tried twice more at Ingolstadt. He was a good-looking, strongly made, athletic fellow of forty or thereabouts, and a great friend of Major Gaskell's. Through Major Gaskell I very soon got to know de Goys very well. Then there was Michel, a big fat man, whose father had been in a very high position in the French army but had retired just before the war. He was an extremely nice fellow, and very keen and quite good at games. He and Desseaux, also a charming fellow, were the best French hockey and tennis players in the fort. One of the most interesting people in the fort, and certainly the best read in French literature, was Decugis, the son of Colonel Decugis, who took some considerable part in the invention of the French 75 mm. gun. I gathered that he had led a pretty fast life before the war. He was a small dark fellow, very strong and wiry, and French to his finger-tips. He used to give me French lessons, and he learnt to talk English very quickly. Le Long, La Croix, and de Robiere and several others were nothing but children, and they were always in irrepressibly good spirits. They were great men at our fancy-dress balls, when they usually came marvelously got up as ladies of no reputation, with immense success. They were ready to attempt to escape, play the fool, or be a nuisance to the Germans at any time night or day with equal good humor. Room 39, where they lived a sort of hand-to-mouth existence, was always untidy and always noisy. They preferred it like that.

Then there was a French colonial colonel and Moretti, both Corsicans. The colonel had been in command of the disciplinary battalion of the "Joyeux," that is to say, the French criminals who do their military service in Africa in a special military organization. You can well imagine that the colonel of the battalion, to which the most incorrigible cases are sent, is likely to be a pretty hard case himself. The French used to say that all Corsicans, as soon as they get a command of any sort, imagine themselves to be budding Napoleons. This was rather the case with the colonel. He had been badly hit on the head by a bit of shell, and was not always quite sane. He was a middle-sized man, very strong and active, with close-cropped hair and rugged face, and I am sure he would stick at absolutely nothing to gain his ends. He considered himself a great strategist (with regard to escaping at any rate), but it was Moretti who had the brains and ingenuity, as well as the skill to carry out the plans.

Moretti was very short but wonderfully well made, with a round cheerful face and a funny little flat nose. He was always laughing or ragging some one. He and Buckley were inseparable companions in crime and stole oil, potatoes, coal, or wood together, keeping up a continuous flow of back-chat all the time. He had been an adjutant chef (sergeant-major) in a "Joyeux" battalion at the age of 28, which is extraordinarily young, considering that only the very best N.C.O.'s can be used for such work, and had won his commission in France. Having been employed for the eight years previous to the war in managing and outwitting the most ingenious criminals that exist when they tried to escape, he knew just about all there was to be known about stealing, cutting iron bars, picking locks, etc. He told wonderful stories of the doings of his "Joyeux" in France. He used to say they were the best troops in the world, and I believe they were extraordinarily good as troupes d'assaut. He told us how in the early days of the war 450 of his "Joyeux" had stormed a trench system and killed 600 Germans with their knives alone. That was at Maisonette, I think. He had some wonderful stories of the second battle of Ypres, where the Germans were driven back into the canal which they had crossed at Bixschoote, and were killed almost to a man. He saw more corpses there, he said, than at Verdun. When his "Joyeux" were billeted behind the lines, a special warning had to be sent to the inhabitants to lock up all their belongings.

There were, of course, a number of other Frenchmen who helped us, and whom we helped at various times, and who practically without exception were our very good friends, but I think I have mentioned those with whom we came most in contact. Among the Russians there were several excellent fellows, but as a whole we did not find them very interesting. Curiously, few of them spoke any language but their own really well, and except for Oliphant, and afterwards Spencer, none of us spoke much Russian. They were very generous fellows, and whenever they did have any food, which was seldom, they used to give dinners and sing-songs. With regard to escaping, if you needed anything such as a leather coat or a greatcoat (the Russian greatcoat can, with little alteration, be turned into a very respectable German officer's greatcoat), you could be sure to get it as a gift or by barter from the Russians if they could possibly spare it. The difficulty of saying anything about them is added to by the fact that I cannot recall their real names.

"Charley" was a very rough diamond, but as generous and kind-hearted a fellow as one could meet anywhere; he and Buckley were good friends. He spoke German perfectly and played hockey, so I also got to know him a bit better than most of the others. Lustianseff was a Russian aviator. He spoke French well, and used to teach me Russian. So did Kotcheskoff, a regular Hercules of a fellow, but mentally an absolute babe—a sort of Joe Gargery. He was universally liked, and continually had his leg pulled by the Frenchmen in de Goys' room, where he and Lustianseff lived. Kotcheskoff could talk English not much better than I could talk Russian; he also talked French and German very badly; consequently he and I could never manage much of a conservation with one another without the help of all four languages. There were, however, several Russians, real good fellows, whom I never got to know well. One of them had escaped from a camp with some friends, and had reached the frontier after walking for over thirty days. His friends had got across, but he had been recaptured. I heard a short time ago that he had escaped and had crossed the Swiss frontier at the same place as Buckley and I did.

Our day at Fort 9 was regulated to a certain extent by Appells or roll-calls. When I first went to Ingolstadt there were three Appells a day—at 7 a.m., at 11.30 a.m., and between 4 and 7 in the evening, according to the time of year. After I had been there a month or so a fourth Appell was added at 9 o'clock at night. After this fourth Appell, the door leading from each wing to the center of the fort was locked and bolted, so that the two wings were cut off from communication with each other. The 7 a.m. Appell took place whilst we were still in bed. A German N.C.O. came round and flashed a torch in each of our faces or satisfied himself that we were all there. Immediately afterwards the great iron doors leading into the inner courtyards were opened. It was in these inner courtyards that we played hockey and tennis and football, and did our exercises, etc.

The rules of the fort stated that the 11.30 Appell should take place either in our rooms or in the outer courtyard, the place where it was being held when Kicq and I first arrived, at the discretion of the Commandant. As the feeling between the Germans and the prisoners became more and more bitter, the Appell outside became really very exciting, and from the German point of view an almost intolerable performance. We always used to object to this outside Appell owing to the nuisance of turning out and to the waste of time, as the Germans never managed to count us in less than half an hour. I will say that they had a pretty difficult task; we never stood still and gave them a fair chance, as the general spirit of Fort 9 was to be insubordinate and disobedient whenever possible, so the Germans more or less dropped this outside Appell and only had it when the C.O. had some order or Strafe to read out to the prisoners as a whole. If the Germans wished the 11.30 Appell outside, they gave one ring on an electric bell which sounded in our passage, and if inside, two rings. As 11 a.m. was our usual time for breakfast, we used to listen for the second ring with some impatience. About ten minutes after the bell had rung for outside Appell the greater part of the prisoners would congregate in the outer courtyard. They turned up in any sort of costume, smoking cigarettes and talking and shouting and laughing. In the courtyard on the far side of the moat a guard of some twenty or thirty Hun soldiers was drawn up, and on either side of the main gate stood eight or nine more villainous looking Bavarian soldiers with rifles and fixed bayonets.

The C.O. usually kept us waiting for a minute or two, being perhaps under the delusion that we might get into some sort of order if we were given time. He came from the bureau through the main gate followed by his Feldwebel (sergeant-major) and several N.C.O.'s, and, though the majority used to take no notice of him whatever, he was usually greeted by some confused shouting in four languages. By this time nine-tenths of the officers had ranged themselves very roughly five deep on the right-hand side of the main gate, which was immediately closed by a cordon of sentries. Several officers would continue to stroll about behind the ranks or wander from one part to another to talk to friends; and in several parts of the line, and especially at the English and French end of the line, little knots of men would hold animated discussions of the latest news. The front ranks stood firm, but the rear ranks paid little or no attention to the Germans. On the left of the gateway the orderlies were drawn up and stood in a fairly regular and silent mob, highly amused at the disorder in the ranks of the officers. The C.O. would stand in front for perhaps a couple of minutes, hoping vainly that things would calm down. He then saluted us formally. A few Frenchmen, and most Englishmen and Russians, who happened to be looking in that direction answered his salute. Then a scene something as follows used to take place.

The C.O. called out, "Meine Herren," then louder, "Meine Herren, etwas Ruhe bitte." This had some small effect, though there would be one or two cries of "Comprends pas," "Parle pas Bosche," of which the Germans took no notice. One or two Englishmen whose breakfasts were getting cold would try to make the Frenchmen shut up, but only added to the noise. Two N.C.O.'s were then sent off to count us. One went along the front and one along the rear of the ranks trying to get the officers to stand in files of five. As the prisoners were continually moving about this looked an impossible task, but they eventually used to manage it, though they sometimes had to give up in despair and start again. As soon as this was over the numbers were reported to the Feldwebel, and two more N.C.O.'s were sent into the building to count the sick who had remained in their rooms, while we stood stamping our feet in the cold and waiting for them. Perhaps some Frenchman would call out to an Englishman, "Savez-vous combien de prisonniers Bosches les Anglais out pris hier?"—"Onze mille trois cent quatre vingt deux Bosches." A certain amount of laughter followed, and the ranks would break up more or less and start walking about and talking. After ten minutes' wait, the N.C.O.'s who had been counting the sick would return and give their counts to the Feldwebel. Sometimes the tally was right and sometimes wrong—if the latter, the whole thing had to be done over again, accompanied by cries of derision, contempt, and impatience from the prisoners.

Very often the riot got so bad that the C.O., after glancing anxiously over his shoulder, beckoned the guard to come in to overawe us. The old Landsturm, as they came pouring through the gate over the moat, were greeted with hoots and yells. At the order of an N.C.O. they loaded—this had no effect on the Frenchmen, who laughed and ragged the C.O. and sentries in French and bad German. But why did the Germans never shoot? It is not difficult to understand. We had no reason to suppose that the Commandant was tired of life, and we knew that his Feldwebel was an arrant coward; and the one thing quite certain was, that if the order to fire on us was given, the first thing we should do would be to kill the Commandant and the Feldwebel, and they knew it very well—and that was our safeguard.

Many times during those outside Appells at Fort 9 I was sure we were pretty close to a massacre—and the massacred would not have been confined to the prisoners. There were in that small courtyard only about forty armed Germans, all oldish men, and there were of us, counting the orderlies, nearly 200 extremely active men. We should have won easily—and the Germans knew it. At any time we wished, we could have taken that fort and escaped, though if we had, none of us would have got out of the country alive. You must understand then that the Germans did not tolerate this insubordination because they liked it or because they were too kind-hearted to fire, but because for the sake of their own skins they dared not give the order to fire. The prisoners, on the other hand, were prepared to risk a good deal for the sake of demonstrating how little they cared for German discipline, and for the sake of keeping up their own spirits, but most especially just for the fun of ragging the hated Bosche.

Towards the end of my time at Ingolstadt, the Germans, as I have already said, only had Appell outside when they had something to announce to the prisoners. In the momentary hush which usually occurred when we were expecting the Commandant to dismiss us, the Feldwebel would step forward, produce a paper, and start to read in German. This was always the signal for a wild outcry—"Comprends pas!" "Assassin!" "Assassin!" (for, as I will show later, the Feldwebel had good reason to be unpopular), "Parle pas Bosche!" "Can't understand that damned language," "Ne pomenaio!" (Don't understand) from a Russian, etc. The Feldwebel would carry on, white with funk, till the end, when the C.O. would seize the first moment in which he could make himself heard to dismiss us with the words, "Appell ist fertig, meine Herren." If the cordon of sentries in front of the main gate happened to hear the dismissal, they got out of the light quickly; if not, they were brushed aside before they knew what was happening. Why no one ever got stuck with a bayonet I never could make out.

So much for the 11.30 Appell. Very much more often than not it took place in our rooms. We carried on with our breakfasts or whatever we were doing, and an N.C.O., after giving a tap at the door, came in, made certain that every one was present, and went out again. Five minutes or so later the electric bell would ring, and Appell was over. The doors into the inner courtyard were then opened again—they were always closed during Appell—and everything was done with the minimum of inconvenience to ourselves. The time of the next Appell varied with the time of the year. It took place about half an hour before dark, and after it the doors into the inner courts were shut for the night, but the two wings were not locked off from one another till after the 9 o'clock Appell, when we were visited in our rooms in just the same way. Between 4 and 9 a sentry was left in the long passage in each of the wings. Poor chap! He used to have an uncomfortable time trying to stop us from stealing the lamps in the passage. After 9 o'clock he was withdrawn, and, as I have already said, the doors at the end of the passage were locked and we were left to our own devices.

The above description of an outside Appell is by no means an exaggeration. Certainly they were sometimes less rowdy, but not often. I remember one Appell was taken by General Peters in person. General Peters was the C.O. of all the camps of Ingolstadt and appeared one morning with some special Strafe or reprisal to read out to us. If I remember right, it had something to do with alleged ill-treatment of German officers in France. The General was not popular, and even more noise was made than usual. Just before the cordon was drawn across the door, a French captain walked down the whole front line carrying a chair and sat down throughout the Appell. When the Feldwebel stood forward to read his document, he was greeted with the usual cries of "Assassin!" and "Parle pas Bosche!" and finished in a storm of howls which completely drowned his voice. The interpreter then proceeded to read a French translation, which was listened to with attention, the reading being merely punctuated by cheers and laughter and hoots at the interesting points. After the Russian shooting affair, which happened towards the end of our time at the fort, one Russian always used to turn up with a large Red Cross flag on a pole. When things began to get really exciting, I own I used to edge away from the flag, as I felt sure the Germans would fire their first volley into the group round it.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Lieutenant Medlicott, R.F.C., was later murdered by the Germans on his tenth attempt to escape.

CHAPTER IX

CAPTORS AND CAPTIVES

One morning just before Appell, a Frenchman came along the passage and announced in each room that Colonel Tardieu was not going out to Appell that morning, and would be obliged if other officers would remain in their rooms when the bell went. We did not know exactly what the reason was, and I don't know now, but I think the Colonel had some right on his side—as much right as we usually had in Fort 9. Soon after this announcement a deputation of Russians waited on Major Gaskell to find out what the English intended to do. I may as well say here that Gaskell and most of the other Englishmen (myself included) did not altogether approve of this rowdyism on Appell, as we thought it might lead to serious restriction of our exercise and consequently of our chances of escaping, which was of course the only thing worth considering.

As the Russian colonel insisted on acting as interpreter for the deputation, the discussion lasted a quarter of an hour before we understood that the Russians thought it would be better to go out, as they considered it probable that the Germans would treat our refusal as an organized mutiny. But they were, they said, prepared to follow our lead.

Gaskell and I then went off to see Colonel Tardieu. The Colonel said that, though it was best for us to stick together, this case was a purely personal matter, and we could please ourselves—he could only say that he was not going out, and that the French would follow his lead. Gaskell and I determined to compromise by leaving the matter unsettled, but to go out ourselves to Appell very late. In this way it was quite impossible for the Germans to prove organized mutiny against us, and equally impossible to hold Appell outside—and the whole thing could easily be put down to mismanagement and the lack of clear orders on the part of the Germans. This was, in fact, just what happened. The Germans were furious, but we pointed out that they had given so many contradictory orders about Appell that no one knew what they wanted. They soon saw that there was no case against us for organized mutiny and let the matter drop. The real trouble was that the Commandant was a man who was simply made to be ragged.

A more unfortunate choice for a C.O. of a strafe camp can scarcely be imagined. He was a short, thick-set, dark man, about fifty years old, with a large drooping moustache and an inclination to stoutness. His hair was rather long, and he wore pince-nez for reading. I think he had only been C.O. of Fort 9 for a few months when we first went there, but some of the prisoners had known him when he had been in command of another camp, and he then had the reputation for being a kindly and sympathetic commandant. But when we first knew him constant badgering had already soured his temper. He was rather like a schoolmaster whose form has got quite out of control, uncertain whether his boys were intending to be insolent or not. He never pretended to stand on his dignity—his appearance and behavior stamped him as an amiable shopkeeper cursed with occasional fits of violent temper. Then he laid himself open to be ragged so dreadfully. Although he knew little about the business of the fort and had to appeal to his Feldwebel on almost every point, yet he insisted on attending personally to nearly every officer who came into the bureau. The Feldwebel and two extremely efficient N.C.O.'s, known as Abel and the "Blue Boy," really managed the fort.

This reminds me of a most amusing caricature of the Feldwebel ordering the C.O. about, which was pinned up in a conspicuous place. I think a Reclamation or official letter was sent in to General Peters, protesting against this state of affairs, for which the author got a few days' "jug." A few days' "jug" was just a farce. The cells were always full, and when you got your Bestrafung you were put on a waiting list and did your period of solitary confinement from three to five months later. One angry Frenchman wrote a furious Reclamation talking of justice and favoritism because Oliphant had been allowed to do a "slice of four days' jug" out of his turn on the list. A sheaf of Reclamations (the word was pronounced in either German or French way) used to go in daily to General Peters on every conceivable subject, from serious grievances to humorous insults, from a protest against the filthy habits of Bavarian sentries to an accusation of poisoning a pet rabbit.

Some men used to spend a great deal of their time writing Reclamations conveying veiled insults to the Germans. It seemed to me rather a waste of time, but they caused a great deal of amusement. It was just like composing a sarcastically offensive letter to a Government department. Some of the results were really very humorous and witty, but I am afraid they were wasted on the Bosche, and I have no doubt they all went straight into Peters' wastepaper-basket—at any rate, I never heard of a Reclamation having any effect except three days' "jug" for the author of the most offensive ones.

When we first came to the fort we were told that some of the French had sworn an oath to drive the Commandant off his head. He was pretty far gone. Some of the Englishmen, chiefly Oliphant, Medlicott, and Buckley, with these Frenchmen, used to get an enormous amount of amusement by baiting the old fool.

I remember once a conversation something as follows:—

Frenchman.—"The German food you give us is very bad."

Commandant.—"Es tut mir sehr leid, aber——"

Frenchman.—"And it is impossible for any one but a Bavarian to eat it without wine."

"Was meinen Sie, das dürfen Sie nicht sagen," answered the Commandant furiously.

"Why won't you give us wine?" shouted the Frenchman.

"You have got no right to speak to me like that."

"And you don't know how to speak to a French officer; it's disgusting that when you give," etc.

"Sofort aus dem Bureau gehen?" (Will you go out of the bureau?)

Both start shouting simultaneously:

"Why won't you give us wine?"

"Aus dem Bureau ... I will report you to General Peters."

"Je m'en fous de General Peters—I won't go out till you speak politely to a French officer."

"Go out of this bureau immediately when I tell you to."

"I won't go till you learn to speak politely to me."

The Commandant then rushed at the telephone and pretended to wind the handle violently, but without really calling up at all. He put the instrument to his ear and said:

"Herr General Peters. Are you there? I am Hauptmann L'Hirsch. There is a Frenchman in the office who won't go away. What shall I do?"

Slight pause for Peter's reply. Then to the Frenchman in French:

"The General says that you must leave the bureau immediately."

"Did the General speak politely?"

"Yes."

"Eh bien je sors."

I have already given a description of a scene which took place the first time I ever entered the bureau—and these sort of scenes used to happen daily and hourly. Whenever the Commandant lost his temper, which he did without fail every time, he threw his arms about, clenched his fists, gesticulated furiously, and shouted at the top of his voice. Soon after the Bojah affair, which I will describe later, when rows of this sort multiplied exceedingly, he was removed from the fort nothing less than a raving maniac with occasional sane intervals. In the court-martial which followed the Bojah case, the witnesses for the defense attempted to prove that the insane behavior of Hauptmann L'Hirsch was the main cause of all trouble in Fort 9. In an impartial court of justice, which this court-martial was not, I have not the smallest doubt that they would have succeeded in proving this, owing to L'Hirsch's behavior during the trial.

The food given us by the Germans was not only very nasty, but there was not enough of it to keep a man alive. Perhaps this is an exaggeration, as I know that a man can keep alive, though weak, with very little food. But lack of food to this extent, combined with the hardships of a winter at Fort 9, would, I am sure, be enough to kill most strong men. Every day each man received a loaf of bread, shaped like a bun, about 4-1/2 inches across the bottom and 2 inches in depth. It was of a dirty brown color and, though unpleasant, it was eatable. Some even said they liked it. I don't know what it was made of, but I should think from the taste that rye, sawdust, and potatoes formed the ingredients, the latter predominating. It was sometimes very stodgy, and sometimes sour, but on the whole was better bread than we received either at Gütersloh or Clausthal. Later on, the size of the loaf was reduced by more than a third and the quality deteriorated very much, the percentage of sawdust and other unpleasant ingredients being much increased. We never ate it unless we were very hard up, but, if left for a few days, it became as hard as a brick and was most useful as a firelighter. I remember an officer telling us that when he was a prisoner at Magdeburg in the early days of the war, the English prisoners had started playing rugger in the exercise yard with a piece of bread that had dropped in the mud. There was a terrible scene of indignation and excitement among the Germans. The guard turned out—fixed bayonets—charged—rescued the loaf—arrested every one, and I don't remember what happened after that, but all the criminals were severely punished. It must have been terrible to have been a prisoner in those early days. I heard hundreds of stories from the poor devils who were caught in 1914. Some of these stories were funny, some were filthy, that is to say, funny to a German mind, and some were enough to make a man swear, as many have sworn, never to speak to a German in peace time and never to show mercy to one in war.[2]

Besides this ration of bread, we were given a small basin of soup daily—it was just greasy hot water with some vegetable, nearly always cabbage, in it. The amount of meat we received used to provide each of us with one helping of meat once every ten days. Two or three times during my stay at Ingolstadt I remember the meat was quite good, and, if it was eatable at all, we enjoyed it enormously, as fresh meat was such a welcome change after the tinned food which we ate continually. Usually, however, it was impossibly tough, and sometimes merely a piece of bone and gristle. We tried keeping it for several days, but it always got high before it got tender. At the end of my time there, when Moretti had been elected chef of Room 42, we always used to make soup from it. Moretti used it five times for soup before he would throw it away, and announced, as he put the soup on the table, "La première," or "La troisième séance," or "La cinquième et dernière séance," whichever it was. The Germans also gave us a certain amount of perfectly undrinkable acorn coffee, and sugar at the rate of about two lumps per man per day. Sometimes they gave us some very nasty beans and sometimes some really horrible dried fish—I think it was haddock. It was very salt, and stank so that we used always to throw it away immediately—we simply could not stand it in the room. Room 39 used to hang all their fish outside the window during the cold weather—a revolting sight. It was their reserve rations, they said. Some of the Russians managed to eat their fish, and I believe there was a French room which had a special method of treating it, but it was generally voted uneatable throughout the fort. About one moderate sized potato per day per head concluded the food rations. This may seem a fairly generous allowance of food, even if it was not of very high quality, but in reality it was very little indeed. A day's rations would work out something as follows: one potato, one small plateful of hot-water soup, one cup acorn coffee, one lump of sugar, two mouthfuls of fish, one mouthful of meat, four or five beans, and the loaf of bread. If any one thinks he can live on that, I should like him to try for a few months in cold weather. We had not many luxuries and comforts in Fort 9, and we did look forward to and enjoy the good things to eat that came from home. It is only people who have never been hungry who can pretend to be indifferent about food—that is to say, if they are well and in hard training as we were. The arrival of the parcel cart was hailed with enormous enthusiasm. I think our people at home would have been well repaid for all the trouble they took in packing the parcels if they could have seen the pleasure it gave us receiving them. Excitement reached a high pitch when we knew that a map or compass was hidden in one of the parcels.

All the work of the fort—cleaning, cooking, emptying dust-bins, etc.—was done by French and Russian orderlies under the orders of German N.C.O.'s, and when our parcels came they were taken out of the cart and wheeled in on a hand-cart from the outside courtyard to the packet office. There they were sorted by Abel, a German N.C.O., with the help of a French orderly. When this had been done, usually the day after the arrival of the parcels, a list was put up of those who had received any, just inside the main gateway, on the official notice board. The giving out of the paquets was a pretty lengthy process, as each was opened by Abel or an assistant Hun and carefully searched. Each wing alternately was served first, and an orderly warned each room when the parcels for that room would be given out. This prevented there being a long queue of officers waiting outside the paquet office. A sentry stood outside the door and admitted three officers at a time. A couple of yards inside the door there was a counter right across the room, and on the far side two German N.C.O.'s stood, each armed with a knife and a skewer—the first for opening the parcels, the latter for probing the contents for forbidden articles. You signed for your parcels and paid 5 Pf. or 10 Pf. for the cost of carting them up.

The Germans, after showing you the address on the outside, cut them open and examined the contents, sometimes minutely and sometimes carelessly. Abel was an oily little brute, very efficient; we hated him and he hated us with a bitter hatred—not without reason on both sides. I think he hated the French more than he did the English, but he hated Medlicott more than all the rest put together. About two months before I left Fort 9 a rumor went round, to the intense joy of every one, that Abel was under orders for the West Front, and we all wished him luck, and he knew what we meant. Abel was just a bit too clever, and consequently got done in the eye sometimes; but I must own that he had a tremendous amount of work to do and did it very quickly and efficiently. His very capable assistant was the "Blue Boy," whose chief job was to lurk about the fort and try and catch us out. He was always standing in dark corners and turning up unexpectedly. It was his job to tap the bars of our windows with a sledge hammer every three days, and he took an active part in the pursuit if any one escaped.

He was not so clever as Abel, but he had more time for spying and was more persistent. It always seemed to me to be worth keeping on fairly decent terms with these two. It was only necessary to refrain from being offensive to be on better terms than most people in the fort.

It was very different with that swine of a Feldwebel. He never walked about without a revolver in his pocket, and he never came alone down any dark passage; "et il avait raison," as the French said, as he had several pretty narrow shaves with brickbats as it was. At one time those tins and jars, such as butter, jam, quaker-oats, which had been packed and sealed in a shop, were passed over to us unopened, and only home-made and home-packed articles were examined. Later on, however, everything had to be turned out on a plate and the Germans kept the tin.

Although very nearly all our parcels arrived eventually, they used to come rather irregularly, and several times as many as twenty to thirty parcels would arrive for the six of us who were in one room. Consequently, if all the food had been opened immediately, much of it would have gone bad before we could eat it. To obviate this difficulty, the Germans made shelves in the parcel office, and each room or mess could leave there the food which it did not need for the moment.

At first sight it would seem that this arrangement would make the smuggling through of forbidden goods almost impossible, or at any rate that our difficulties would be greatly increased. In reality the business was simplified. As long as we knew in which tin or small package the map, compass, or what-not was coming, we could make fairly certain, by methods which I shall describe later, of getting it without it ever being opened by the Germans.

After Appell all the fort except the English had dinner. This was the hour when the potato, wood, oil, and coal stealing fatigues did their duty. For some weeks our French orderly used to steal potatoes for us as we needed them. He knew the ropes very well, as he had been in the fort for more than a year. One day, however, he said that this stealing in small quantities was a mistake, and that it would be safer to have one big steal once a month or so. Four of us, under the leadership of Carpentier, stole eight small sacks without much difficulty. It was just a matter of knowing the habits of our jailers and timing it accurately. The Germans were not so suspicious in those days as they became later. There was a small trap-door 6 feet up the wall in the central passage, which Carpentier knew how to open. He got in, filled the bags, and passed them out to us. To carry the full bags back to our rooms we had to pass under the eyes of a sentry. But that is just the best of a German sentry. He had had no orders to spot prisoners carrying bags, and he had also no imagination, so he took no notice.

Between the hours of twelve and two we did our lessons. From two till four we played hockey or tennis. Tea was at four, when some Frenchmen usually came in to see us. Appell took place and the doors of the courtyards were shut about half an hour before sunset. After this Appell, till the evening Appell at nine o'clock, a sentry was left in our passage; but we could still communicate with the other wing. Bridge, reading, lessons, lectures, and preparation for dinner took place during this period. The great amusement was lamp-stealing. During the winter the Germans allowed us, as we thought, a totally insufficient supply of oil, which only enabled us to burn our lamps for four hours out of the twenty-four. This meant going to bed at nine, which was of course ridiculous. The gloomy passages of the fort were mainly lit by oil lamps, and from these we used to steal the oil systematically. After a month or two the Germans realized that this was going on and reduced the number of lamps, and in the long passage where it was obviously impossible to stop us stealing oil they put acetylene lamps. Two lamps to a passage 70 yards long was not a generous allowance.

Between 5 and 9 p.m. the sentry in the passage had special orders, a loaded rifle, and a fixed bayonet, to see that these lamps were not stolen. As all the sentries had been stuffed up by the Feldwebel with horrible stories about the murderous and criminal characters of the prisoners, it is not surprising that each sentry showed the greatest keenness in preventing us from stealing the lamps and leaving him, an isolated Hun, in total darkness and at the mercy of the prisoners. As any man came out of his room and passed one of the lamps, which were on brackets about 7 feet from the ground, the sentry would eye him anxiously and hold himself in readiness to yell "Halt!" and charge up the passage. The lamps were about 30 yards apart, and someone would come up, walk up to a lamp, and stop beneath it—the sentry would advance on him, and when he was sufficiently attracted, the officer would take out his watch and look at it by the light of the lamp. Meanwhile a second officer would come quickly out of his room and take down the other lamp. As soon as the sentry perceived this he would immediately charge, with loud yells of "Halt! Halt!" but as he turned both lamps would be blown out simultaneously, and the officers would disappear into their respective rooms, leaving the passage in total darkness. The amusing part was that this used to happen every night, and the sentries knew it was going to happen; but against tactics of this sort, varied occasionally, of course, but always ending with the lights being blown out simultaneously, they were quite powerless!

The evening, after the sentry had been withdrawn at 9 p.m., was spent in the ordinary occupations of gambling, reading, tracing maps, making German uniforms and pork-pie caps, with occasional fancy-dress balls or impromptu concerts. Sometimes mysterious lights would be seen in odd corners of the passage, where someone was industriously working at making a hole through the wall, removing the blocks of stone noiselessly one by one; and sometimes one would run up against a few men round a wonderful structure of tables and chairs in the middle of the passage, where someone was climbing up the skylight to inspect the sentries on their beats on the top parapet, but usually all was peace and quiet till about 11 p.m. At that hour the sentries were supposed to make us put out the lights in our rooms, but when they found that we paid little or no attention to repeated cries of "Licht ausmachen," and as there was no method, short of firing through the bars into a lighted bedroom, to make us put them out, they eventually gave up these attempts, and, except for an occasional very offensive or conscientious sentry, we put out our lamps or candles when we wished.

FOOTNOTES:

[2] The Germans varied their treatment of their prisoners inversely with their prospects of victory. When things were going badly with them—during most of 1916, for instance—much unnecessary harshness towards their prisoners was relaxed. When once more their hopes of final victory were raised by the invasion of Roumania and the checking of the Somme offensive, the poor prisoners had a rough time. Such is the way with bullies.

CHAPTER X

ATTEMPTS TO ESCAPE

When we had been a few days at the fort, and had had time for a good look round, Room 45 formed themselves into an escaping club. That is to say, our ideas and discoveries would be common property. If possible, we would all escape together; but if the way out was only for two or three, the rest would help those selected to go to the best of their ability. It was universally agreed that Fort 9 was the toughest proposition that any of us had yet struck. The difficulty was not so much the material obstacles, but the suspicious nature of the Germans.

Medlicott and Oliphant, as the most experienced prison-breakers, came to the conclusion that it was absolutely necessary to have more accurate knowledge of the numbers, positions, and movements of the sentries on the ramparts and round the moat at night than we already possessed. For this purpose it was decided that one of us must spend a night out. It was no job to be undertaken lightly. It meant a fifteen-hours' wait on a freezing night. For the first three and the last three hours of this time it would be almost impossible to move a muscle without discovery. And discovery meant a very excellent chance of being stuck with a bayonet. Besides this, there were two Appells to be "faked"—the Appell just before sunset and the early morning one. There was no Appell at 9 o'clock in those days. Our rooms were separated from one another by 3-foot thick walls, but in these walls were archways leading from one room to the other. These archways were blocked up by boarding, and formed recesses in each room which were usually employed as hanging-cupboards for clothes, coats, etc. Under cover of these we cut a couple of planks out of the wooden barrier and made a hole so a man could slip through quickly from one room to the other. These planks could be put back quickly, and it would have needed a pretty close examination to have discovered where the board was cut, once pictures had been pasted over the cracks and coats had been hung up in front. There was some difficulty at first in obtaining the necessary tools for the work. The first plank we cut through with a heated table-knife, but for the second one we managed to steal a saw from the German carpenter who was doing some work in one of the rooms, and return it before he missed it. It must not be forgotten that there was absolutely no privacy in the fort, and that a sentry passed the window and probably stared into the room every minute or two. A special watch had to be kept for him, and you had to be prepared at any moment to look as if you were doing something quite innocent. Room 43 was inhabited by Frenchmen, but as usual in Fort 9 they were quite willing to help us. We practiced the trick many times till every one was perfect in his part. The rehearsals were most amusing. One of us pretended to be Abel doing Appell. First he tapped at the door of 43 and counted the men in the room, shut the door and walked about 7 paces to the next door, tapped and entered. Between the time Abel shut one door till the time he opened the next, six to eight seconds elapsed. During those seconds it was necessary for the Frenchman to slip through the hole, put on a British warm (we lived in coats in the cold weather), and pretend to be Oliphant. Abel knew every man by sight in every room; but, as long as he saw the requisite number of officers in each room, he did not often bother to examine their faces. After we had done it successfully, several other rooms adopted the method, and the "faking" was done a very large number of times before the Germans discovered it four months later.

The early morning Appell was really easier. For several mornings the fellow in the bed nearest the hole made a habit of covering his face with the bed-clothes. Abel soon got used to seeing him like that, and, if he saw him breathing or moving, did not bother to pull the clothes off his face. The Frenchman had simply to run from his bed, bolt through the hole and into the bed in our room, cover up his face, and go through the motions of breathing and moving his legs sufficiently but without overdoing it. All this had been practiced carefully beforehand. We had, of course, enormous fun over these preparations, stealing the saw and cutting the planks, pretending to be Abel doing Appell, and all the time dodging the sentry at the window. This sort of amusement may seem childish, but it was the only thing which made life tolerable at Fort 9.

We cast lots as to which one of us was to sleep out. It fell to Oliphant. I own I breathed a sigh of relief, as I did not relish the job. The next thing to do was to hide him outside on the ramparts. The place was selected with great care, and was behind one of the traverses up on the ramparts on the south side, for our idea was for some or all of us to hide up there and swim the moat on the south side one dark night. Medlicott and Milne dug a grave for him, whilst Fairweather and I kept watch. Just before the Appell bell went we buried him and covered him with sods and grass. Of course he was very warmly clad, but he had a pretty beastly night in front of him, as it was freezing at the time. It was about 4.30 p.m. when he was covered up, and he would not get back to our room and comparative warmth till 8.15 next morning, when the doors were opened. The evening Appell went off splendidly, but the night was brighter than we had hoped, and we were rather anxious about him.

There was some anxiety also about the morning Appell, as we could not be quite certain which way Abel would take the Appell, up or down the passage: that is to say, which room, 42 or 43, would he come to first? It made all the difference to our arrangements. By careful listening we found out which way he was coming, and when he poked our substitute, who groaned and moved in the oft-rehearsed manner, we nearly killed ourselves with suppressed laughter.

About an hour afterwards, just as we were going out to cover his retreat, Oliphant suddenly walked in, very cold and hungry but otherwise cheerful. He had had quite a successful night, and had gained pretty well all the information we wished for. The bright moon had prevented him from crawling about very much, but he had seen enough for us to realize that it would be a pretty difficult job to get through the sentries and swim the moat even on a dark night.

Although we temporarily abandoned this scheme, owing in the first place to the difficulties which we only realized after Oliphant's expedition, and secondly because "faking" Appell was a very chancy business for more than two people, we nevertheless made the most careful preparations to escape at the first possible opportunity. Several schemes were broached. One of these schemes I always considered a good one. In the low and flat country in which the fort was situated very thick fogs used to come down quite suddenly. As soon as it became foggy all the prisoners had to come into the fort and the doors of the courtyards were shut. Our idea was either to wait outside carefully hidden when the order was given to come in, or to have some method of getting into the courtyard in foggy weather; in either case we thought it would not have been a difficult business to cross the narrow moat on the north side during a fog in the day time. At night time there were sentries in the courtyards and on the ramparts, as well as three in front of our windows. In the day time there were none in the courtyards or on the ramparts, and only one in front of our windows. The difficulty was to get into the courtyards after we had been locked up. I climbed up a ventilator several times to see if it were not possible to cut our way out there, but the more one went into the details the more difficult it seemed.

In the meantime we went on with our preparations: map-copying (which was Fairweather's department), rations and equipment (of which Medlicott and Oliphant were in charge), intelligence department as to movements of sentries and habits of Huns (which was my job). Boots, socks, grease, home-made rücksacks, concentrated food and the correct amount of meat and biscuits for a ten days' march, maps, compasses, the route to follow, and numerous other details were carefully prepared, and the material hidden. We thought that it was unlikely that a larger party than four would be able to go, and Medlicott, Oliphant, Fairweather, and myself were selected to be the first party to try if anything turned up.

The next bit of excitement was the escape of Kicq and party. This happened when we had been in the fort about a month. Early on Kicq had left Room 45 and gone into a French room, 41. One afternoon he asked me if I would help him to escape, which I agreed to do. His idea was to dress up as a German N.C.O., and with six Frenchmen and a Belgian named Callens to bluff themselves out of the main gate at about 6.30 in the evening. The scheme seemed to me almost impossible—but Kicq was enthusiastic about it, and persuaded me that it would probably come off, if only because it was so improbable that any one would attempt such a thing. There were three sentries and three gates and a guardhouse to pass, and the real danger was that, if they passed the first sentry and gate and were stopped in front of the second, they would be caught in the outer courtyard at the tender mercy of two angry sentries, and in my opinion would stand an excellent chance of being stuck with a bayonet. However, Kicq realized that as well as I did; and, as it is for every man to judge the risks he cares to take, I promised to do my part, which was quite simple.

About 6 p.m. I went into Room 41, and there they were all dressing up and painting their faces, etc., as if for private theatricals. Kicq was excellent as a German Unteroffizier. He had made a very passable pork-pie cap, of which the badge in front is very easy to imitate by painted paper. He had a dark overcoat on to which bright buttons, which would pass in the dark as German buttons, had been sewn, and he had a worn-out pair of German boots which had been given to one of the orderlies by a German. Some of the others had on the typical red trousers—but any sort of nondescript costume will do for a French orderly. They were timed to go as soon after 6.30 p.m. as the road was clear, and it was my job to give the signal. I was pleased to be able to report that I had never seen the sentry, who was on duty at the main gate, before, and it was most unlikely that he knew any of their faces. I stood about opposite the packet office, and Abel came along the passage and went in. Looking through the keyhole I saw that he was busy in there near the door and might come out at any moment. I reported this, and the whole party came and stood in the dark turning of the passage by the bathroom, from where they could watch me peering through the packet office keyhole. At last I saw Abel sit down at his table and begin writing, so I gave the signal. Immediately a whole troop of French orderlies, carrying mattresses, blankets, and bedding on their heads, came clattering down the passage, laughing and talking to one another in French. A German N.C.O. was among them, and as he went along he collided with a German-speaking Russian, a great friend of ours known as Charley, who naturally cursed his eyes out in German. Kicq took no notice, but going just ahead of his orderlies he cursed the sentry at the main gate for not opening the door more quickly for them, and stood aside counting them as they went out. One fellow came running down the passage a bit after the others—Kicq waited for him and then went out after them, and the door closed.

I waited most anxiously for any noise which would show that things had gone wrong. But after ten minutes it seemed certain that they had got clear away.

After half an hour of subdued rejoicing in the fort, for by that time the story had gone round, we suddenly heard an awful commotion among the Huns. The guards were turning out at the double, clutching their rifles amid a regular pandemonium of shouts and orders, and the roar of the Commandant could be heard above the tumult. We turned out into the passages to see the fun. The C.O. was raving like a maniac. The minute he caught sight of us laughing at him he brandished his fists and shouted at us to go to our rooms. Oliphant and I started to argue that the bell had not gone and therefore we need not go to our rooms, but he told off a sentry, who drove us back at the point of the bayonet, Oliphant protesting in his worst German, "Sie dürfen nicht so sprechen mit ein English Offizier."

We cheered like mad and sang the Marseillaise and "On les aura"—in fact, celebrated the occasion to the best of our ability.

What happened as soon as the party got outside the first door, Kicq told me afterwards. The second obstacle they had to pass was the gate which barred the roadway over the moat. This the sentry opened for them without a word, whilst Kicq trod on his toes to distract his attention. As they passed the guardhouse in the outer court several men came out and shouted at them, but they were unarmed, and Kicq & Co. paid no attention. The outer gate consists of a double door which they knew would pull open without being unlocked, once the bar was removed. They got the bar off and tore open the gate, and found a sentry waiting for them with a rifle and fixed bayonet outside. "Wer kommt dann hier?" said he. Kicq was out first, and holding up his hand said, "Ruhig, einer ist los!" (Be quiet, a prisoner has got away), and rushed past him into the darkness. Without giving the sentry time to recover his wits, the rest pushed past, throwing their mattresses, etc., on the ground at his feet, and disappeared. Kicq and Decugis went on together for a bit, thinking that the rest must have been held up and expecting to hear shots. Then they saw other figures moving near them in the darkness and thought at first they were Germans searching, but found they were the rest of the party. It was not for some minutes afterwards that the alarm was given; but the whole party, after nearly running into a sentry on a neighboring fort, managed to get away from their pursuers. After a terribly hard eleven days' march they were all caught near the frontier. It was in the middle of winter, and they suffered most dreadfully from cold and bad feet. All of them, with the exception of Kicq and Callens, had gone out (according to English ideas of escaping) very badly prepared for such a journey at that time of year. They had quite insufficient food (though they had opportunities of carrying out any amount), insufficient socks, grease, and numerous other things. They also lost their way rather badly the first two nights. Then Kicq took charge, and the latter part of the journey they went by the same route which Buckley and I afterwards followed. None of them had thought of going into proper training, and to have reached the frontier under such conditions was a wonderful feat of endurance. They were in a terrible condition when they were caught. When within 70 kilometres of the frontier, just north of Stockach, they separated, the Frenchmen going on together and making a forced march of 60 kilometres in one night, and the Belgians coming on in their own time. Both parties were caught on the same day and about the same time; the Frenchmen because they got into a country close to the frontier where they could find no decent place to lie up, and, as there was a light fall of snow, their tracks were traced. The Belgians were caught in a very unlucky manner. Their hiding-place was excellent, but on a Sunday the Germans usually go out shooting, and a shooting party came on them. A dog came up and sniffed at them, and then an old German with a gun stared into the bush and said, "Es ist ein Fuchs" (It's a fox).

They soon found it was not a fox, and Kicq and Callens were hauled out. The Würtembergers treated them very well indeed, and said they were almost sorry they had captured them, as they had made such a sporting effort, or words to that effect. They were escorted back to the fort by a very decent Würtemberg officer, who was furious with the Commandant when he laughed and jeered at them for being recaptured. "Well," said Kicq in excellent German to the Commandant, "if you leave all the gates open, how are prisoners to know that they are not allowed to go out that way?" The Würtemberg officer remarked, as he said good-bye to them outside, that "the Prussians were brutes, but the Bavarians were swine." Which remark seems to me very much to the point. All the party, with the exception of a very young Frenchman called La Croix, had painful and swollen feet, and all without exception were ravenously hungry for a week or more after they had been returned to prison. One of them retired to hospital for several weeks, and I believe that there was a danger at one time that he would lose his feet owing to frost-bite. However, they healed in time.

As far as I remember they received no special punishment for this escape. They probably got five days' "jug," each, but, as I have explained before, this was a mere farce. Each of the three sentries whom they had passed got three months—and I don't imagine that was any farce at all for the unfortunate sentries.

During the spell of fine weather which we had before the winter set in, Medlicott and Buckley joined forces and made an attempt to escape by a method which, in my opinion, was as unpleasant and risky as any which was attempted in Fort 9. With the help of the Commandant de Goys they persuaded some French orderlies to wheel them out concealed in the muck and rubbish boxes. We buried them one afternoon beneath potato peel and muck of every description, heaved the boxes on to a hand-cart, and then from the top of the ramparts watched four orderlies escorted by a sentry wheel them out to the rubbish-heap about 200 yards from the fort. In the boxes they were lying on sacking, so that when the box was upset the sacking would fall over them. We saw the first box upset apparently successfully, but as they were about to deal with the second, which contained Medlicott, there was a pause. The sentry unslung his rifle, and it was obvious to us that they had been discovered. Buckley's account of what happened was as follows:—

"At about 4.45 Medlicott and I proceeded to where the boxes stood, and after some of the rubbish had been taken out we were thrust into its place by the willing hands of Evans, Milne, Fairweather, and Oliphant, and covered up again with rubbish. In due course the orderlies arrived, the boxes were loaded on to the cart, and the 'procession' started. All seemed to be going extremely well as far as I could judge from my uncomfortable position; the sentry was picked up at the guardhouse, and I heard with joy the gate of the fort being unlocked to let the party out. The orderlies stopped the cart at the rubbish-heap (or rather some hundred yards short of it, as we found out afterwards, our combined weight having made farther progress in the snow impossible), and started to unload the box in which I was concealed. As instructed, they unloaded us as far away from the sentry as possible. I felt my box taken off the cart and turned over. I lay still, and seemed to be well covered with rubbish and to be unnoticed. I heard Medlicott's box unloaded alongside of me, but just as this was being completed I felt some one tugging at the Burberry I was wearing, a corner of which was showing from under the rubbish.

"It had been arranged previously that if either of us was discovered the one discovered first was to give himself up at once and endeavor to conceal the presence of the other. I lay still for a few seconds, but as the tugging continued, I concluded the game was up and I stood up, literally covered in sackcloth and ashes. I must have looked a fairly awe-inspiring sight, and I evidently caused some alarm in the noble breast of a German civilian who had come to hunt the rubbish heap for scraps of food and clothing, and who evidently thought he had discovered a gold mine in the shape of a Burberry which he had been trying to pull off my back for the last few minutes. Anyway, he retired with some speed to a safe distance! The sentry, who up to the time of my getting up had noticed nothing wrong, at this point began to perform rifle exercise in the close proximity of my person, and generally to behave in an excited and dangerous manner. Then followed for the next few minutes the unpleasant and, alas! far too frequent experience of staring down the muzzle of a German rifle, held as it seemed with remarkable steadiness in spite of the excitement of the man behind it. The guard, whose attention had been attracted by the combined shouts of the civilian and the sentry, next appeared on the scene at the double. They were cold, hungry, and excited, to say the least of it.

"Having failed to convince my sentry that I was alone and that there was nobody under the other heap of rubbish, I warned Medlicott of the guard's approach and advised him to get up. This he did, and was at once set upon by the oncoming Landsturm, who really looked as if they meant to do him in. After a considerable show of hate, in which I received a hefty clout over the knee with the butt of a rifle, we were marched back to the fort. A wild and disorderly scene followed between Medlicott, the German Commandant, and myself, of which I have a very vivid recollection. It ended by my being ejected by force from the Commandant's office, but not before both Medlicott and I had either concealed our valuable maps and compasses or had passed them unobserved into the hands of the willing friends who had come to see the fun."

Soon after the recapture of Kicq and party, the moat froze over, and though the Germans for several days were able to keep it broken by going round in a boat every day, they at last had to give it up. It was rather hard to get any conclusive proof as to whether the ice would bear or not, but one evening, after testing the ice with stones, we decided that if there was a frost that night we, that is to say, Oliphant, Medlicott, Milne, Fairweather, Wilkin, and myself, would run over the south rampart and across the ice just before the evening Appell. We made complete preparations, and every one had ten days' rations and everything else necessary for a march in winter to the frontier.

However, it never came off, as at morning Appell next day the Commandant informed us that the doors into the inner courtyards would not be opened again until the moat thawed. This was rather a blow, because I felt sure that if we had only had the courage to try, the ice would have borne us the evening before.

About this time, or perhaps rather earlier, there were one or two attempts to escape on the way to the dentist. Du Sellier and another Frenchman and Fairweather were all booked to go one afternoon to the dentist at Ingolstadt. They went under escort, and if they could delay matters so as to return in the darkness it would be the simplest thing in the world to get away. However, they made an awful mess of things, and though they came back in the dark, owing to good procrastination by Fairweather, only Du Sellier got away, and the other Frenchmen knocked up the sentry's rifle as he fired. This was a badly managed business, as all three men ought to have been able to escape from a single sentry in the dark. Du Sellier did not get very far, as the weather was very cold and he was insufficiently prepared. Being alone too was a great handicap. His feet got very bad and he had practically to give himself up, or at any rate to take quite absurd risks after being three or four days out, and was recaptured. The real risks were taken by Fairweather and the other Frenchman, and I don't quite know how they failed to get "done in" by an enraged sentry.

Another rather ingenious but still more unsuccessful attempt was made on the way to the dentist by Frenchmen. The idea was to go into one of those large round urinals which are fairly common in French and German towns. Inside they did a very rapid change, put on false beards, spectacles, etc., and walked out at the other end. Unfortunately the sentry recognized them.

In what I have written and intend to write it must not be imagined that I am giving an exhaustive account of all that happened at Fort 9. I can give a fairly detailed account of the main incidents of my own prison career, but even this is not chronologically correct. Otherwise, I can only note a certain number of incidents and stories which will help to illustrate the sort of life we led in this prison. Most of these incidents have to do with escaping or attempting to escape. But it must not be imagined that this is the only thing we ever did or thought about. It was our work, so to speak. Just as at the front, whilst fighting is the main business, soldiers nevertheless manage to amuse themselves pretty well behind the line in rest billets by sports, gambling, sing-songs, and dinners, so with us, whilst escaping was the main object in life, a large part of our time was taken up with lessons in languages, most vigorous games of hockey and tennis, poker and bridge, cooking and eating food, dancing and music, reading the German papers and discussing the war news (we were pretty good at reading between the lines), and attending lectures which were given nearly every night on subjects varying from aviation to Victor Hugo.

After a week or so of hard frost a thaw set in, the ice melted on the moat, and we were again let out into the courtyards. Hockey started once more, and we had some very good games. Some time before this Oliphant's sentence had come through, and he was sent off to Wesel for six months' imprisonment in a fortress; as a punishment, I believe, for attempting to escape, and for things incidental to escaping, such as cutting wire and having maps and other forbidden articles in his possession. When it started to freeze again, I thought of the last time and determined not to miss another opportunity. One morning after testing the ice by throwing stones from the top of the bank I determined to make the attempt that evening. The Appell bell went about 5 p.m., and about 5.30 it became dark. My idea was to start as the Appell bell went, believing that they would not be able to catch us before the darkness came down. We had to run down a steep bank on to the ice, about 40 yards across the ice, and then 200 yards or so through one or two trees before we could put a cottage between ourselves and the sentries. There was certain to be some shooting, but we reckoned that the sentries' hands would be very cold, as at 5 p.m. they would have been at their posts for just two hours, and they were armed with old French rifles, which they handled very badly.

Wilkin agreed to come with me, and Kicq, when he heard what was up, said he would like to come too. He had always a surprising faith in me. He had scarcely recovered from his last escape, but although he was not very fit, he was, or would have been, a great asset to the party, as he knew the way. This was especially valuable as our maps at that time were only copies of copies, and consequently not very accurate. The plan was to carry out rücksacks and other equipment nearly to the top of the south bank and hide behind one of the traverses just under the path. From there we should be hidden from the prying eyes of the sentry on the center "caponnière." The 5 p.m. Appell bell was the signal for two parties, one headed by Major Gaskell and one by Captain Unett,[3] to distract the attention of the two sentries by throwing stones on to the ice. We would then seize our opportunity and rush down the bank, and we hoped to be most of the way across the ice before the firing began.

The question which really was causing us some anxiety was, "Would the ice bear?" I felt confident it would. Wilkin said he was beastily frightened, but he had made up his mind to come and he would go through with it. Kicq said that, if I thought it would bear, he was quite content, and I really believe that the matter did not worry him in the least. It would have been a very unpleasant business if the ice had broken, as, with the heavy clothes we had on, I doubt if we could have got out again. Still, any one who lets his mind dwell too much on what may happen will never escape from any prison in Germany.

Our equipment was pretty complete. I had very thick underclothes, two sweaters, a thick leather flying coat and a tunic, and socks over my boots so as not to slip when running across the ice. The others were dressed much the same, except that Kicq had a cap which had been stolen by Oliphant from the Commandant. He said it might come in useful in impersonating a German N.C.O. conducting two English prisoners.

In our rücksacks we had ample rations for a ten days' march and enough solidified alcohol for at least one hot meal per diem. We managed to get our bags and coats up into the jumping-off place without being seen by the sentry and without much difficulty. I remember walking across the courtyard about 4.30 with Gilliland, picking up stones for him to throw at the ice. I think he was more nervous about it than we were: as is often the case, this sort of thing is more of a strain on the nerves for the onlookers than for those actually taking part. We were all in our places and in our kit, with our sacks on our backs, a few minutes before five. Whilst we were waiting for the bell to go, there were several prisoners walking up and down the path in front of us, along the top of the rampart. Of course they took absolutely no notice of us, except one Frenchman who spoke to us without looking round and assured us that the ice would not bear—a cheerful thing to say under the circumstances. "Mais oui, vous allez voir," we answered.

It was a bad five minutes waiting there. Then the bell went, and almost immediately I heard laughter and shouting and the noise of stones falling on the ice. Then we jumped up and bolted over the path and down the slope. I was slightly ahead of the other two, and when I got to the bottom of the steep bank I gave a little jump on to the ice, hoping it would break at the edge rather than in the middle if it were going to break at all. But it bore all right, and I shuffled across at a good speed. About half-way over I heard repeated and furious yells of "Halt!" followed soon afterwards by a fair amount of shooting, but I have no idea how many shots were fired. I was soon up the bank on the far side, through a few scattered trees, and over the frozen stream by a plank bridge. Then I looked back. The others were only just clambering up the bank from the moat and were a good 100 yards behind me. What had happened was this. I had made a small jump on to the ice, thus avoiding the rotten edge. The other two did not, but stepped carefully on to the edge, which broke under their weight and they fell flat on their faces. For the moment they were unable to extricate themselves. Wilkin says he got somehow upside down and his heavy rücksack came over his head so that he was quite unable to move. Then Kicq got himself free and pulled out Wilkin. At first he thought of beating a retreat up the bank again, believing naturally that the ice would not bear, but then he saw me three parts of the way across and heard the sentries shooting apparently at me, so he and Wilkin, keeping a bit separated so as not to offer too large a target, ran across after me. The sentry in the center, who had been well attracted by Gaskell and the stone-throwing party, only caught sight of me when I was well on the ice, but then he started yelling "Halt!" and loading his rifle as fast as possible. He then ran to the edge of his "caponnière" and dropping on one knee fired and missed. Cold fingers, abuse, and perhaps a few stones too, which were hurled at him by the gang on the pathway just above his head, did not help to steady his aim. After one or two shots his rifle jammed. Yells and cheers from the spectators. He tore at the bolt, cursing and swearing, and then put up his rifle at the crowd of jeering prisoners above him. But they could see that the bolt had not gone home and only yelled the more. The other sentry had started firing by this time, but he was out of sight of the prisoners in the fort, and Unett and Milne, who had been distracting his attention (Unett said the sentry nearly shot him once), ran off to prove an alibi. I don't know how many shots were fired altogether. Not a large number, as owing to the appearance of some civilians they stopped firing when once Kicq and Wilkin had got well on to the far bank of the moat. When I was half-way across the space between the moat and the cottage, I saw on the main road on my left a large four-horse wagon with a knot of gesticulating men in civilian clothes. We learnt afterwards that they were carters from a munition factory in the neighborhood, and were fairly strong and healthy fellows. They were only about 150 yards away, and started after us led by a fellow with a cart-whip. The going was very heavy, as there were two or three inches of snow and heavy plough underneath, so we made slow progress, as we were carrying a lot of weight in clothes and food. They quickly overtook me, and the fellow who was leading slashed me across the shoulders with his whip. I turned and rushed at him, but he ran out of my reach. The rest of them then came round and I began to see that the game was up, especially as at that moment I saw some armed soldiers coming on bicycles along the road from the fort.

The next thing to do was to avoid being shot on recapture. I stood still, whilst they all snarled round me, and beckoning the smallest man said to him in German, "Come here and I will give myself up to you." The fellow with the whip immediately came forward. "Not to you, you Schweinhund," I said; "you hit me with that whip." The little fellow was quite pleased, as I think there is 100 marks reward for the recapture of an officer, and caught hold of my coat tails, and we started off towards the fort. Wilkin had given himself up to two or three others by this time, but I saw that Kicq was trying to sneak off without being noticed while the mob was occupied with us. However, a few seconds later they saw him. Two or three gave chase, and he was brought in soon after us. We had not gone more than a few steps towards the fort when I saw the Feldwebel running across the snow towards us. He came up in a furious rage, cursing us and brandishing a revolver. We waved him aside and told him not to make such a fuss, as it was all over now, and he soon calmed down. Some soldiers then came up and marched us in, the Frenchmen cheering us as we came through the gate. Before we came to the fort we had to cross a bridge over the stream; and, as we walked along, I tore up my map and dropped it into the stream. I forgot to say that Kicq, when he went off by himself just before being taken, had managed to get rid of the Commandant's hat by stuffing it down a hole. As Kicq crossed the bridge he took out his map to throw it into the water, but was seen by his guard, a horrid little fellow who used to help with the clerical work in the bureau. Kicq dropped the map, and a scuffle ensued. Kicq got much the best of this and kicked the map into the stream.

There was quite an amusing scene in the bureau. We all of us had to take off most of our clothes and be searched. I had nothing I could hide, but both Kicq and Wilkin had compasses, which they smuggled through with great skill. Kicq had his hidden in the lining of his greatcoat, and Wilkin kept his in his handkerchief, which he pulled out of his pocket and waved to show there was nothing in it, at the same time holding the compass, and then put it back into his pocket. All our foodstuffs and clothes were returned to us, with the exception of my black flying-coat. I complained about this, and appealed to a German general who come round to inspect the fort a few days later, and it was returned to me, but was eventually confiscated when I tried to escape in it a week or two later. We had several tins of solidified alcohol with us for smokeless cooking purposes. These were taken, though we protested. For all the things taken off us we were given receipts by the Germans and told, rather ironically, that we could have them back at the end of the war.

Just as we were going out I saw my tin of solidified alcohol, which was valuable stuff (we used to manufacture it in the fort from paraffin and soap), standing almost within my reach, and very nearly managed to pocket it as I went out. However, I found Decugis outside, and explained to him the position of the tin, and suggested that he should take in one or two pals, have a row in there, and steal it back for me. This is the sort of expedition that the Frenchmen loved and were absolute masters at. Within ten minutes I had my solid alcohol back all right and kept my receipt for it as well.

FOOTNOTES:

[3] Captain Unett had been sent to Fort 9 as a punishment for escaping from Clausthal.

CHAPTER XI

AN ESCAPE WITH MEDLICOTT

For the next six weeks life was rather hard. It froze continuously, even in the day time, in spite of the sun, which showed itself frequently, and at night the thermometer registered as often as not more than 27° of frost. The Germans, who had made many efforts to keep the ice in the moat broken by punting round in a steel boat kept for the purpose, now abandoned the attempt, and in consequence of this and of our escape across the ice we were denied the use of the inner courtyards. For the next six weeks the only place in which we could take exercise was the little outer court where Appell was sometimes held. It was only about 50 yards by 25, and was really an inadequate exercise ground for 150 active men. Still we kept pretty fit. Every morning all the English had an ice-cold shower-bath. Of the Frenchmen, Bellison, who lived in Gaskell's room, and one other, I think, had been used to take a cold bath every morning, but it was really astonishing what a number followed our example at Fort 9. When it was so cold that the water in the tubs above the shower-sprays was frozen solid, thirty or forty officers, by pumping the water from the well, used to take a bath regularly every morning. It was only when coal became so scarce that it was not possible to keep a fire going all day in the living-rooms, and when, if you took a bath cold you would never get warm again the whole day, that attendance dropped to some half-dozen men who, having before them the possibility of a ten days' march to the frontier in the dead of winter, looked upon the bath in the morning more as a method of making themselves hard and fit than as an act of cleanliness.

Every day a good many of us took exercise by running round and round the small court, to the astonishment of the sentries. Müller's exercises were introduced, and Medlicott and Gaskell, Buckley and I, and many other Englishmen and Frenchmen, did them regularly every day for the rest of the time we were in Germany. As a result of this strenuous life, though we were often very cold and very hungry, we were, with few exceptions easily traceable to bad tinned food, never sick or sorry for ourselves the whole time.

Unett, poor fellow, suffered severely from boils, and Buckley from the same complaint during his two months' solitary confinement. From this onwards, for all the winter months, the coal and light shortage became very serious. We stole wood, coal, and oil freely from the Germans, and before the end nearly all the woodwork in the fort had been torn down and burnt, in spite of the strict orders to the sentries to shoot at sight any one seen taking wood. So long as the Germans continued to use oil lamps in the many dark passages of the fort, it was not very difficult to keep a decent store of oil in hand, but after a month or so the Germans realized they were being robbed, and substituted acetylene for oil.

We all wrote home for packets of candles, and considering the amount of oil we were officially allowed, the length of time we managed to keep our lamps burning remained to the end a source of astonishment to the Germans.

As it was Christmas time, and as Room 45 was well supplied with food, we decided to give a dinner to the Allies on Christmas night. A rumor had been passed round, with the intention, I have no doubt, that it should come to the ears of the Germans, that a number of prisoners intended to escape on Christmas night. The Germans were consequently in a state of nervous tension, the guards were doubled, and N.C.O.'s made frequent rounds. No one had any intention of escaping on that night as far as I know.

A piano which had been hired by a Frenchman was kept in the music-room, a bare underground cell of a place at the far end of the central passage, and we applied to be allowed to bring this into our room. To our huge indignation this was refused, on the grounds that we might use it as a method of attracting the sentries' attention.

However, we were determined to have the piano and a dance on Christmas night, so a party was organized to bring it from the music-room in spite of the German orders. I don't know exactly how it was managed, but I think a row of some sort was begun in the other wing of the fort and, when the German N.C.O.'s had been attracted in that direction, the piano was "rushed" along to the "ballroom." The dinner was an undoubted success. Room 45, with Medlicott as chef, spent the whole day cooking, and that evening about twenty of us sat down to dinner—the guests being all of them Frenchmen or Russians. After dinner we all attended a fancy-dress dance which some Frenchmen gave in the adjoining room. They had knocked down a wooden partition between two rooms, and had a dance in one and the piano and a drinking bar in the other. The French are a most ingenious nation, and the costumes were simply amazing.

There were double sentries all round the fort that night, and some of them stood outside the windows and enjoyed the dancing and singing. It was an extremely cold night outside, and I am not surprised that some of them felt rather bitter against us. I offered one a bit of cake, but he merely had a jab at me through the bars with his bayonet.

About midnight we sang "God Save the King," the "Marseillaise," and "On les aura," with several encores. This turned out the guard, and a dozen of them with fixed bayonets, headed by the Feldwebel, crashed up the passage and, after a most amusing scene in which both sides kept their tempers, recaptured the piano.

A few days after this, Medlicott and I learnt that four Frenchmen were cutting a bar in the latrine with the object of escaping across the frozen moat. We offered them our assistance in exchange for the right of following them at half an hour's interval if they got away without being detected. They agreed to this, as they needed some extra help in guarding the passage and giving warning of the approach of the sentry whilst the bar was being cut. At the farthest end of his beat the sentry was never more than 40 yards away from the window where the operation was being carried out. Under these circumstances a very high degree of skill was necessary for the successful cutting of an inch-thick bar. Here Moretti was in his element. No handle to the saw was used; he held the saw in gloved hands to deaden the noise, and in four hours made two cuts through the bar.

Repeated halts had to be made, as the sentry passed the window every three or four minutes, and, as he was liable to examine the bars at any time, they sealed up the crack between each spell of work with some flour paste colored with ashes for the purpose. This made the cut on the bars invisible. I examined the bars carefully myself after they had been cut, and was quite unable to tell which one was only held in place by a thread of metal at each end.

The removal of one bar would leave only a narrow exit through which a man could squeeze and, thinking that this might delay them, the Frenchmen, rather unwisely I consider, decided to cut a second bar.

Now whether they were really betrayed, as we believe, by one of the French orderlies who for some time had been under suspicion as a spy, or whether some one on the far bank of the canal had happened to see or hear them, we never knew, but it is certain that the Germans learnt, without getting exact details, that one of the bars in the latrines was being cut. The "Blue Boy" visited the latrines four times in a couple of hours and examined the bars with care, but without finding anything wrong. At last the Commandant and the Feldwebel walked up outside our windows, and the latter taking each bar in turn shook it violently. About the fourth one he shook came off in his hands and he fell down flat on his back.

The Germans brought up barbed wire and wound it round and round the bars and across the hole. Besides this, they put an extra sentry to watch the place. It seemed at first hopeless to think of escaping that way. The Frenchmen gave it up, but I kept an eye on it for a week or so, and as a precaution obtained leave from the Frenchmen to use it if I saw an opportunity.

One very cold night about a week later I was standing in the latrines and watching the sentry stamping backwards and forwards on his 20-yard beat, when it seemed to me just possible that the thing might be done. I fetched Medlicott and Wilkin, who had some wire-cutters. Medlicott took the cutters and, choosing a favorable moment, cut the tightest strand of wire. It seemed to us to make a very loud "ping," but the sentry took no notice, so Medlicott cut eight more strands rapidly.

Leaving Wilkin to guard the hole Medlicott and I rushed off to change in the dark, because if we lighted a lamp any sentry passing our window could see straight into the room. It was half an hour after midnight when we started to change, but by 1.15 a.m. we were ready—our rücksacks, maps, compasses, and all were lying packed and hidden. Over our warm clothes we wore white underclothes, as there were several inches of snow on the ground outside; and over our boots we had socks, as much to deaden the noise as to prevent our slipping as we crossed the frozen moat.

Outside, the reflection from the snow made the night seem bright, but there was a slight haze which prevented white objects such as ourselves being seen at a greater distance than about 100 yards.

In the latrines it was as dark as pitch, so that, though we stood within a few yards of the sentry, we could watch him in safety. It was only safe to work when the sentry was at the far end of his beat; that is to say, about 15 yards away. Medlicott cut the wire, whilst Wilkin and I watched and gave him signs when the sentry was approaching. Owing to repeated halts, it was a long job. The sentries glanced from time to time at the wire, but all the cuts were on the inside of the bars and invisible to them. Removing the bits of wire when they had all been cut was like a complicated game of spillikins, and it was not till nearly 4.30 a.m. that Medlicott had finished. It was a long and rather nerve-racking business waiting in the cold to make a dash across the moat.

Medlicott and I tossed up as to who should go first, and he won. It was not easy to choose the right moment, for almost our only hope of getting across without a shot was when the two sentries were at their beats farthest from us, and one of these sentries was invisible to us, though we could hear him stamping to keep warm as he turned at the near end of his beat.

At last a favorable moment came and Medlicott put his head and shoulders through the hole, but stuck half-way. He had too many clothes on. We were only just in time to pull him out of sight as the sentry turned. He took off some clothes and put them in his sack and tried again, though we had to wait some time for an opportunity. Again he found he was too fat—and what was worse got hung up on a piece of barbed wire. We made what seemed to us a fearful noise hauling him in and disentangling him, but the sentry took no notice. Then Wilkin rushed off and got a second sack, into which Medlicott packed several layers of clothes. Another long wait for a suitable moment. We heard the sentry on our left come to the end of the beat, then it sounded as if he had turned and his steps died away. The man on our right was at the far end of his beat. Now was the moment. With a push and a struggle Medlicott was through the hole. I went after him instantly, but stuck. A kick from Wilkin sent me sprawling on to the snow on the far side. In a few seconds we were crossing the moat, I a couple of yards behind Medlicott, as fast as our heavy kit and the snow would let us. We were almost across when "Halt! Halt!! Halt!!" came from the sentry on our left. He had never gone back after all, but had only stamped his feet and then stood still. On the far side of the moat was a steepish bank lined with small trees; we tore up this and hurled ourselves over the far bank just as the first shot rang out. We were safe for the moment—no sentry could see us, but shot after shot was fired. Each sentry in the neighborhood safeguarded himself against punishment by letting off his rifle several times. Milne, who knew we were escaping and was lying in bed listening, told me afterwards that he had felt certain that one of us had been hit and that they were finishing him off. For several hundred yards we went northwards across the fields, only halting a moment to pull off the socks from our boots. Then we turned left-handed, intending to make a big circuit towards the south so as to avoid passing too close to the battery which flanks the fort.

When we had gone about 400 yards we saw behind us lights from several moving lanterns and realized that some one was following on our tracks. It was very necessary to throw off our pursuers as soon as possible, because there was little more than a couple of hours before the daylight, so we changed our plan and made towards a large wood which we knew was about a mile and a half northwest of the fort.

Just before entering the wood we saw that the lights behind us were still about 300 yards away, but now there seemed to be ten or a dozen lights as well, in a large semicircle to the south of us.

The wood proved useless for our purpose. There was scarcely any undergrowth, and it was just as easy to follow our tracks there as in the open field. There was only one thing to be done. We must double back through the lights and gain a village to the south of us. Once on the hard road we might throw them off. Choosing the largest gap in the encircling band of lanterns we walked through crouching low, and unseen owing to our white clothes. Once in the village we felt more hopeful. At any rate they could no longer trace our footsteps, and we believed that all our pursuers were behind us. Choosing at random one of three or four roads which led out of the village in a more or less southerly direction, we marched on at top speed. After walking for a quarter of an hour, we were about to pass a house and a clump of trees at the side of the road when we heard a noise from that direction, and suspecting an ambush we instantly struck off across the fields, putting the house between ourselves and the possible enemy. Then we heard footsteps running in the snow, and then a cry of "Halt! Halt!" from about 15 yards behind us. The position was hopeless; there was no cover, and our pursuer could certainly run as fast as we could in our heavy clothes.

"It's no good," said Medlicott; "call out to him."

I quite agreed and shouted.

"Come here, then," the man answered.

"All right, we are coming, so don't shoot."

When we got close we saw it was the little N.C.O. who looked after the canteen. His relations with the prisoners had always been comparatively friendly. He was quite a decent fellow, and I think we owe our lives to the fact that it was this man who caught us.

He only had a small automatic pistol, and, as we came back on to the road, he said, "Mind now, no nonsense! I am only a moderate shot with this, so I shall have to shoot quick." I said we had surrendered and would do nothing silly. He walked behind us back to the village, on the outskirts of which we met the pursuing party, consisting of the "Blue Boy" with a rifle and a sentry with a lantern.

The lantern was held up to our faces. "Ha ha," said the "Blue Boy," "Herr Medlicott and Hauptmann Evans, noch mal." Then we walked back to the fort under escort, about a 4 mile march. As we entered the outer door of the fort the sentry at the entrance cursed us and threatened me violently with a bayonet, but our N.C.O. stopped him just in time.

In the main building just outside the bureau we had a very hostile reception from a mob of angry sentries through whom we had to pass. For a few moments things looked very ugly. I was all for conciliation and a whole skin if possible, but it was all I could do to calm Medlicott, who under circumstances of this sort only became more pugnacious and glared round him like a savage animal. Then the Feldwebel appeared and addressed the soldiers, cursing them roundly for bringing us in alive instead of dead. I have treasured up that speech in my memory, and, if ever I meet Feldwebel Bühl again, I shall remind him of it. He is the only German against whom, from personal experience, I have feelings which can be called really bitter. The Feldwebel wished to search us, but we refused to be searched unless an officer was present; so we waited in the bureau for an hour and a half till the Commandant arrived. This time they took my flying-coat away and refused to give it back. They also found on me the same tin of solidified alcohol which had been taken off me before and restolen by the Frenchmen. They recognized it, but of course could not prove it was the same. "I know how you stole this back," said the senior clerk as he searched me. "You shall not have it again." He was a Saxon, and the only German with a sense of humor in the fort. We both laughed over the incident. I laughed last, however, as I got the tin back in about a week's time, as I will tell later.

The search being over, we were allowed to go back into our rooms, and had breakfast in bed.

Perhaps it may seem rather extraordinary that we were not punished severely for these attempts to escape, but the explanation lies not in the leniency of the German but in the fact that there were no convenient cells in which to punish us. The cells at Fort 9 were all of them always full, and there was a very long waiting list besides. They might have court-martialled us and sent us to a fortress, but our crime, a "simple escape," was a small one. They might have sent us to another camp; but the Germans knew that we would ask nothing better, as no officers' camp was likely to be more uncomfortable or more difficult to escape from. Any way, it would be a change. Sometimes, when there was a vacancy, they sent us to the town jail, but, as had been demonstrated more than once, it was easier to escape from there than from Fort 9. The Germans' main object being to keep us safe, they just put us back into the fort and awarded us a few days' Bestrafung, which we did in a few months' time when there was a cell vacant.

CHAPTER XII

SHORT RATIONS AND MANY RIOTS

The weather became colder and colder, and for the next month we seldom had less than 27° of frost at night, and in the day time anything up to 20° in spite of the fairly frequent appearance of the sun. The countryside was covered by a few inches of snow, now in the crisp and powdery condition seldom seen except in Switzerland and the colder countries. After the experience of Medlicott and myself it was generally agreed in the fort that escape was almost impossible, unless a very considerable start could be obtained; so the greater number of us settled down to face the not altogether pleasant domestic problems of Fort 9.

Our allowance of coal was found to be quite insufficient to keep the room tolerably warm. It was the same in every room in the fort. Repeated requests for an increased allowance having as usual had no effect, we proceeded to tear down all the available woodwork in the fort and in our rooms and burn it in the stoves. We lived literally in a solid block of ice. Just before the long frost had set in, the ground above and round our rooms had been soaking wet, and the walls and floors had been streaming with moisture. Then came the frost, and everything was frozen solid, and outside in the passage an icy blast blew continually, and in places beneath broken ventilators a few inches of frozen snow lay for weeks unthawed inside the fort. That passage was, without exception, the coldest place I have ever known.

Down the walls of each of our rooms ran a flue in the stonework, intended to drain the earth above the rooms. For over six weeks there was a solid block of ice in it from top to bottom, in spite of the fact that the flue was in the common wall of two living-rooms.

We lived continually in our great coats and all the warm underclothes we possessed; we ourselves seldom, and our allies never, opened windows, and we pasted up cracks and holes; but still we remained cold, and crouched all day round our miserable stoves. Müller's exercises, skipping, and wood, coal, and oil stealing were recreations and means of keeping warm and keeping up our spirits. On top of this came the famine. For the last few months we had been so well and regularly supplied with food from home that we had never thought of eating the very unpalatable food given us by the Germans, and had at length come to an agreement whereby they gave us full pay—in my case 100 marks per month—and no longer supplied us with food. Up to the time of this agreement they had deducted 42 marks monthly, and this extra money was quite useful. Some time before Christmas we were warned that there would be a ten days' stoppage of our parcels in order to allow of the more rapid delivery of the German Christmas mail to their troops. In consequence we had all written home asking that double parcels should be sent us for the two weeks preceding Christmas. However, Christmas passed and parcels came with almost the same regularity as they had always done. Christmas festivities, and the knowledge that double parcels were on their way, induced us to draw rather heavily on our reserve store. Then came the stoppage. Daily we looked anxiously for the parcel cart which never came. Reduced to our last half-dozen tins of food among six men we went onto quarter rations, helped out from a large supply of stolen potatoes. At length we had nothing whatever to eat but our daily ration of bread and almost unlimited potatoes. No butter, no salt, no pepper. It would not have mattered very much in warm weather, but in those conditions of cold and discomfort in which we were living, hunger was rather hard to bear.

A diet consisting entirely of butterless and saltless potatoes in various forms became after three or four days extremely tedious. It is quite impossible to eat enough of them to satisfy one's hunger. After a gorge of potatoes one is distended but still hungry. I forget how long the famine lasted—about ten days, I think, though I remember very well the arrival of a cartload of parcels which relieved the situation just when things began to get serious. It arrived on a Saturday, and the Germans said that they would be given out on Monday, as a certain time was necessary for sorting and registering the parcels. To starving men this delay was quite intolerable, and the prisoners adopted such a threatening attitude that the Commandant considered it wisest to give out a small portion of the parcels to keep us going till Monday.

Of course we might have asked the Germans to supply us with food when we were short, but I don't think such a course was contemplated seriously by anybody.

Perhaps it may be considered that the kindly Germans, knowing that their prisoners were nearing starvation, should have insisted on supplying us with food. But the Germans of Fort 9 were not accustomed to confer favors on us—if they had offered them we should have refused—and I have no doubt that they considered a little hunger very good for us.

So much for the famine; our parcels for the rest of the time I was in Germany arrived in large quantities.

About this time, on the strength of the convention agreed to between the English and the German governments, we obtained from the very unwilling Germans the privilege of going on walks for an hour or two a week on parole.

For the rest of the time I was at Fort 9 the parties of English and Russian prisoners, but not French, as I believe they had no such convention with the Germans, exercised this privilege once and sometimes twice a week, accompanied by an unarmed German N.C.O., who under these circumstances sometimes became quite human.

The walks were very dull indeed, as the country round the fort is very uninteresting. However, it was certainly a relief to get out of the place every now and then. The only other way in which we ever got out of the fort legitimately was when we were sent for from Ingolstadt for preliminary inquiries concerning a court-martial, or to make a statement concerning the vigilance of the sentry past whom we had escaped. We always did our best to defend the unfortunate sentries, but I am afraid that they almost invariably were heavily punished.

The next incident of any interest was a turbulent affair which has become known to the one-time inmates of Fort 9 as the Bojah case. As I was not involved to any great extent in this storm in a teacup, I have rather a confused idea of what happened and why it happened.

I am not even sure how it started, but I believe the original cause was a very mild and commonplace theft by Medlicott. A German carpenter was putting up some shelves in one of our living-rooms when Medlicott and I entered the room. Quite on the spur of the moment Medlicott picked up the carpenter's pincers when his back was turned and handed them to me. I put them in my pocket and walked out of the room and hid them. Before the pincers were missed Medlicott also followed me out of the room. No one else in the room had noticed the theft, and naturally denied it indignantly when accused by the carpenter. Apparently the carpenter, being very angry, instantly informed the Commandant. About ten minutes later we heard a fearful row in the passage outside, and we all came out of our rooms to see the fun. In the doorway of one of the rooms was a seething, shouting mob consisting of several sentries with fixed bayonets, the Feldwebel and half a dozen prisoners, mostly French, and the Commandant. They were all shouting at the top of their voices and pushing, and the Commandant was brandishing his arms and generally behaving like an enraged maniac. What the Frenchmen were doing in that room I am not quite clear, but I believe they had come into the room in which the carpenter had been after the latter had departed to report the loss of the pincers to the Commandant. When the Commandant arrived with his guard he insulted them and accused them of stealing the pincers and then ordered them back to their rooms. The Frenchmen—Kicq, Derobiere, Bojah, and a few others of the younger and more violent sort—were the last people in the world to take this sort of thing lying down; besides which they loved a row at any time for its own sake, and for once in a way they had right on their side. They denied the accusation and protested against the insults with some violence, and when ordered to their rooms by the Commandant refused to go unless they first had an apology. It is quite impossible to imagine the scene unless you realize the character of the Commandant. The one outstanding feature was his conspicuous lack of dignity and total inability to keep his temper. In his quiet moments he was an incompetent, funny bourgeois shopkeeper; when angry, as at this moment, he was a howling, raving madman. When the Frenchmen refused to move, the Commandant apparently ordered the Feldwebel to arrest them, and confused shouting followed, in the midst of which the Commandant hit the Feldwebel and, I believe, though I did not see it, also hit Bojah. There was a complete block in the doorway, and the passage was also blocked by a hand-cart, which happened to be there, and a large and cheering crowd of spectators. The sentries could not get in, and the Feldwebel and the Commandant, who were blocked in the doorway, could not move, and every one continued to shout. Medlicott, who loved this sort of thing, tried to barge into the scrimmage, and I only just prevented him being struck by a bayonet. Then Kicq managed to get close to the Commandant and call him a "cochon." Two sentries effected his arrest. After that, I really don't know how things got disentangled without bloodshed, but eventually the Germans retreated amidst yells of derision, with Bojah, Kicq, and Derobiere in their midst.

The English and French prisoners who had seen this affair decided that, as the Commandant's conduct had been unbecoming that of an officer, we would hold no further communication with him. Most of us were content to act up to this passively, but when Batty Smith was summoned to the office he informed the Commandant of the decision and walked out. Buckley and Medlicott also took the earliest opportunity of doing the same thing.