CHAPTER IXTHE ESCAPE AND THE SEQUEL

The reader will excuse if at this point in the story the first person pronoun figures rather prominently. I was myself at this time the Adjutant of the camp, and, as such, had been fairly thoroughly coached how things were to be done. I was very glad to have the opportunity of contributing, in however modest a degree, to the success of the plot. The glorious nature of the adventure came home to me at last, and I experienced some rather severe eleventh-hour twinges of regret that I had not availed myself more fully of any chances that I might have had of actually participating. There had been times of late when I had almost given up the tunnel. There had seemed to be no end to the difficulties and obstacles in completing it. Added to which, the ordinary routine duties of Adjutant had kept me too fully occupied to acquire the proper escaper’s atmosphere and spend long hours over preparing maps and packs and securing the necessary money and disguise. Frankly, I had been a little sceptical.

Later on, in another camp, where there was full latitude to mature one’s scheme and the Germans interfered hardly at all with one’s daily doings, I experienced the complete escape fever. But that is another story.

The actual night of the escape was the 24th July.

I was warned just before eveningappel, at 6 o’clock, that if B house harboured no aliens that night, the escape would take place. I got hold of Grieve during the evening and we held a long confabulation as to how the policing had best be done. It was arranged that I should do all the warning and escort people to the rendezvous in the attic, and that he should do the actual controlling and keep in communication with the orderlies. The evening passed away and I don’t think anybody outside the working-party was aware that anything was actually in the wind.

The doors in B house were safely locked at 9.0 p.m. without a single intruder from A house. Several people had been keenly on the watch to see to this point. We went off quietly to our respective rooms to have our names called.

After the Feldwebel and his minions had finally left the building, there was still another hour or so to wait before the coast was clear for action. A German sentry used to come round some time after 10 o’clock to close all the windows in the corridors and incidentally remove anything that he saw to his liking which might be lying about. Until he had gone it would be unsafe to have any undue movement, and only the cutting-out man—i.e. the first officer to go through the tunnel—and the two next on the list would go down to the chamber before he was well clear.

During this period of waiting the senior British officer paid me a visit in his dressing-gown and said good-bye. I wished him good luck. We had worked together for two months or more and had discussed the tunnel and his particular plan to escape countless times. He had a very good disguise and, without wishing to disparage his features, they were—with the aid of glasses—wonderfully Teutonic. He was, so far as I knew, the only one who was proposing to travel all the way to the frontier by train, and with his excellent knowledge of German and forged papers he looked to have a very good chance.

I sat in my room until the outside door had slammed behind the German sentry and I knew the working-party would have already begun making their way through the tunnel for the last time. Then I began going round the rooms and warning personally every man on the list. They were to get their kit ready and get into bed fully dressed and then wait until they were called. There was to be no movement in the corridors of any sort. For all the secrecy that had been attempted, they were most of them more than half expecting the long-deferred call. Probably someone had seen a member of the working-party in his disguise and had passed on the information. A few of them wanted to know where they were in the list, but I told them that they were not to know and had only to obey orders. Everyone would have to come upstairs in his socks, carrying his boots in his hand. After I had completed the task of warning everybody I went up to see Grieve. It was now past half-past eleven. He told me that the working-party were all well away already and that the thing was going well.

The hour’s law for the working-party was strictly adhered to, and at 12.30 the supplementary working-party began to go through. They, too, were all through by about 1.15.

At 1.10 or thereabouts I began my duties of assembling those on the waiting list. Two or three passed through all right, and then the orderly on the orderlies’ side of the attic hole passed the word back that there was a hitch. He would let Grieve know when it was all clear again.

The next man due to go through had overweighted himself and his pack to such an extent that the delay proved perhaps a blessing in disguise. If we had let him go through as he was, he would probably have stuck in the tunnel, would most certainly not have forded the Weser, and could, in any case, not have marched for more than three days. We sent him back with some stern advice to remove a dozen tins or so from his pack, discard his stick, and take off his hobnailed boots which had made an infernal clatter in the passage. A few more such performers and the secret would be out!

No news came through from the tunnel, so I decided to turn in for an hour or so, and Grieve arranged for a message to be sent to me if the coast was clear before that time.

I took a turn up and down the corridors before I lay down. There were the sentries outside walking up and down, with their chins sunk on their breasts and their rifles slung on their backs, wonderfully as usual. It was odd to think that within a hundred yards our fellows were wriggling away through the rye. Clearly nothing had been suspected so far. It was a calm night and fairly dark.

I lay down knowing that there would be heaps of work to do the next day, whatever happened, and that I should want my wits about me. But I could not sleep, and at about 2.30 I went upstairs to see Grieve again. He reported there was no change in the position. We tried to get an answer from the orderlies’ quarters, but there was no reply. It was rather baffling. At 3 o’clock we held a council of war with Captain Sharp, who was one of those due to go through early in the list, and we agreed—although it was against the instructions given us, which had been that the orderlies should alone be responsible for letting anyone through the attic hole—that Sharp should go through to reconnoitre. He did so, and came back in about a quarter of an hour’s time to report that no one was about, and that the tunnel was empty[10].

10.It was never found out exactly what caused the check and I do not think it ever will be.

It was rather a nasty moment. We had a sudden new suspicion of insecurity and a feeling that valuable time might have been lost. It now wanted about two hours to dawn, and so far we reckoned that only 24 were out of the camp. It did not look very promising for most of the waiting list.

In the absence of the orderlies—we hardly felt justified in giving them further orders—we sent through the next five officers on the waiting list, headed by Sharp, allowing five minutes between each. They did not return, so we concluded that the tunnel was still clear and that they had got away, thus bringing the total number to 29. About half a dozen more had followed at regular intervals, and it was getting on for half-past four, when the last—Captain Gardiner of the A.I.F.—came back to report that the tunnel was blocked and passage impossible. According to his report the tunnel was reverberating with groans, curses, and expressions of encouragement. Someone apparently was stuck in front and was urging those behind him to get back in order to let him out. Those behind, on the other hand, like the Tuscans in the famous Lay, were crying “Forward” in no uncertain tones, and urging him to get out and on with it. It had clearly become a hopeless impasse. It seemed best, therefore, at this juncture to call a halt and clear the course before daylight, so as to defer the chance of discovery till the last possible moment. Recommendations were therefore passed along to evacuate the tunnel.

But here arose another difficulty. Those now labouring in the tunnel were not used to its ways. It was hard enough to wriggle along in a forward direction, but withdrawal, with a heavy pack in tow, was an even more strenuous proposition. It will be remembered that the working-party, with muscles attuned by long practice, had experienced the utmost difficulty in pulling out the sacks of earth when the rope method broke down. And to get the packs out was an absolute necessity, for otherwise there would be a complete block both before and behind, which would result in the foremost unfortunates being entombed until the tunnel was discovered and they were dug out.

The situation called for desperate measures, and fortunately the right man was at hand. A New Zealand officer called Garland, who was high up on the waiting list, came up to the rendezvous to prospect. He happened to be about as strong physically as any other two officers in the camp, and possessed the biceps of a Hercules. He at once volunteered to go down and try to pull out the rear-most man.

After about half an hour he succeeded in doing so, and the two collaborators in this severe physical exercise crawled back through the attic hole completely exhausted and dripping with sweat.

There still remained four men stuck in the tunnel, it was already getting light, and in an hour and a half—at 6 a.m.—a German N.C.O. was due to open the outside door and call the orderlies. It was essential, therefore, to get everyone back into the building before that time. If the alarm of the escape was not raised before 9 o’clockappel, the 29 fugitives now at large would have all the better opportunity of making cover some distance away from the camp before they lay up for their first day out.

An hour past a look-out from an upper window at the end of one of the corridors had reported that two figures had been seen in the dim half light of the dawn making off through the rye-field. It was guessed that these would probably be the last pair out before the accident had happened in the tunnel which had barred further passage. If this couple could gain the Duke of Brunswick’s hunting woods—some three miles distant—before the hue and cry was out, they could lie up snugly and safely, and their predecessors would be in all the better plight.

The work of extracting the remaining four went on slowly and laboriously, and by a quarter to six two more mudstained objects had been salved and had been sent back, cursing bitterly, to their rooms to get rid of their mud and cover their traces. It appeared that the tunnel had caved in about five-sixths of the way up—at the bottom of the slope up to the final exit. Stones loosened in the traffic had found their way to this—the lowest point in the whole tunnel, and were blocking further progress. A landslip on the most modest scale would be quite enough to block up the tiny hole.

There was now nothing left to do. The two officers still in the tunnel with the volunteers assisting them to get out would have to be left to take their chance. Everybody else went back to their rooms and to bed, hugging themselves in anticipation of the 9 o’clockappel, and the fireworks which would inevitably ensue when the Feldwebel of B house reported with a rueful countenance that according to his reckoning there “failed” (fehlen) no less than twenty-nineHerren.

This hope was, however, frustrated, and the bubble burst two hours too soon. The two last men in the tunnel were eventually retrieved, and emerged from the plank entrance with their rescuers to find the door at the orderlies’ entrance open. The under-officer had duly called the orderlies some twenty minutes previously and had gone away suspecting nothing. Their obvious course was to obey instructions and go back to their house by the same way as they had come. But for some reason they failed to do so and ran out very foolishly into the cookhouse in the enclosure, where they met Niemeyer out for an inopportune early morning stroll. Their salvage party meanwhile had gone back by the proper way.

In ten minutes the whole of the camp staff had appeared on the scene. The two officers, of course, refused to say anything or to explain their muddy condition. Even then Niemeyer failed to tumble to what had actually occurred. But a few minutes later an excited farmer appeared at the postern gate and led the whole party to where, amid the trampled rye in which a dozen different tracks were visible from the camp windows, a gaping hole brought recognition and late wisdom to Milwaukee Bill.

“So, ein Tunnel.”

Tunnel. The same dangerous word, common to either language, which had been whispered for so long by the one side, now ran like electricity through the ranks of the other.

The next question from Niemeyer’s point of view was, how many? The fat Feldwebel went off and counted an expectant house. He found everybody unusually wide awake and good humoured for that hour of the morning. The fat Feldwebel was himself thoroughly amused by the eventful happenings since his last appearance in the house, and he merely chortled good-humouredly as name after name elicited no response. He returned to the rye-field to report to Niemeyer an absentee list of 26. In his excitement he had forgotten to count the “Munshi’s” room, from which all three occupants had flitted.

Then came the real moment. Niemeyer’s jaw dropped, his moustachios for a brief instant lost their twirl, his solid stomach swelled less impressively against his overcoat. Just for a moment he became grey and looked very old. But only for a moment. The sound of laughter in the upper corridor windows floated down to him and roused action and the devil in him forthwith. As an initial measure he put all the windows at that end of the building out of bounds and told his sentries to fire at once if a face appeared. Then he had the outer doors of both houses locked. Then he placed a sentry over the tunnel head and stalked away to the Kommandantur to ring up the Company Captain in Holzminden, inform the police, report events to Corps Headquarters at Hanover, and issue emergency orders “for the safety of the camp.”

These were posted up in both houses and caused considerable amusement. Briefly, they permitted the officers remaining in the camp to eat, sleep, and breathe, but that was about all. “No one,” so ran the order, “when inside the building was to move from his own room. Conversation with other officers in the corridors or by the notice boards was forbidden. Officers were not allowed to stand about at the doors of the buildings. No officer belonging to one house might enter the other. Officers were not to walk about in groups of more than two.” And so on.

Of course we had amply expected all this. Indeed, there was ground for congratulation that things had panned out up to the present without murder being done. Stringent orders had been issued that, in the event of the escape only being discovered at the 9 o’clockappel, there was to be no laughter or demonstration calculated to aggravate. Months before, the more serious-minded had discussed the prospects of someone being shot in the Commandant’s first wild ebullition of fury and baffled rage at the defeat of all his precautions. It was one advantage of the premature discovery of the escape that what shooting was ordered was confined to the windows.

Twenty-nine. The magic number flitted from mouth to mouth and was shouted across from B house to A, who cheered heartily on hearing the figure. It was indeed a good number and constituted an easy record for Germany, if not for all time.Neun und zwanzig.Long ere now it had permeated to the town, and the road outside the camp was strangely peopled with unusual figures of both sexes and all ages, anxious to view the scene of the occurrence, and most of them no doubt vastly pleased at the discomfiture of the notorious bully, Hauptmann Niemeyer. Always the camp had been the diversion of a Sunday evening stroll for the burghers of Holzminden; now we played daily to crowded houses, until the Commandant, in his exasperation, put the confines of the camp out of bounds to civilians. Those who had been stuck in the hours of the dawn exchanged experiences and friendly recrimination. Personal disappointment was merged in the general triumph. For triumph it was. Twenty-nine loose in Germany. Twenty-nine. He would have been a bold man who would have breathed that number in Niemeyer’s hearing.

The sentries grinned as they echoed it. Kasten, the fat old Feldwebel, laughed as he notched it on the next (mid-day)appel. And Niemeyer tried to digest it.

He was not very successful. We were let out of the barracks after mid-day. No attempt was naturally made to fall in with the newly posted camp regulations, and serious collisions with Niemeyer, as soon as he came abroad, were inevitable. There was at the bottom of everybody’s mind a feeling that the time had at last come to be rid of him, that now the star of the Great Twin Brethren might at last wane and the wrath from Hanover or Berlin descend on the discredited favourite for being unable either to keep his gaol-birds at home or to keep order in his own house. But bloodshed was to be avoided. It was a difficult policy, to annoy by pinpricks, to goad an already maddened creature, but to keep, as a community, within the law. But it was the right policy, and one which commended itself to the new senior British officer, Colonel Stokes Roberts, who succeeded to the position vacated by Colonel Rathborne, now well on his way to freedom.

Accordingly the red rag was discreetly held out, and Niemeyer retained just enough self-control not to draw and flourish a revolver. All the available cells were filled within the first few hours with candidates for three days’ arrest. Their crimes were imaginary and were not stated. They might have failed to salute at 40 paces, they might have laughed, they might merely have happened to be standing somewhere in Niemeyer’s path. It did not matter. They had certainly all broken the latest camp regulations.

All the orderlies were taken off duty and set to dig up the tunnel. The tin rooms and parcel rooms were closed until further notice. I myself, whose complicity with the plot was highly suspected, was removed from my own room and bundled unceremoniously into one of the large rooms on the top floor of A house. The windows of the cells were barricaded up and made quite dark by day and the lights in them were kept on all night. Every German in the camp personnel was put on to sentry duty and sentries paraded the passages three times in the night. The use of the bath room attendant for this purpose precluded baths. In a word we were “strafed,” and the camp knew once more the open warfare which had prevailed for the first unforgettable month of its existence.

Orderlies digging out the tunnel between Kaserne B and the outer wall.

The inconveniences of such a state of affairs were lightly borne, and even relished, by the large majority. The Tunnellers had scored too heavily for us to mind doing scapegoat for them. It was a pleasant thought that all twenty-nine were still abroad, and that there was a reasonable certainty of a fair proportion of them getting over and putting a stop to Niemeyer’s run of atrocious good luck in the matter of escapes. Apart from the hue and cry which had already been raised through the North German press, the fugitives had everything in their favour. They had had months to deliberate on their route and travelling tactics; their packs had been stocked at leisure so as to combine the maximum of nutrition with the minimum of weight; their civilian disguises were adequate for their purpose. Most of them were going to trust to their legs to carry them over the border and would be only night birds of passage, lying up during the day. But Colonel Rathborne possessed a knowledge of German and a superb civilian suit, over which he had put pyjamas in going through the tunnel, and which would be able to set casual interference blandly at defiance. He was walking due south to Göttingen and was there going to entrain for AachenviâCassel and Frankfurt. If all went well with him and his forged passport passed muster, he would be over the frontier in under three days. And later, when six days had gone by and he had not returned, the camp knew that the spell had been broken and that an Englishman was over from Holzminden. But we said nothing to the Germans.

However, before six days had passed a good number of the twenty-nine had already been rounded up and brought back to camp. As they were kept in the strictest isolation, it was only possible to hear their stories by bribing the cell attendants to bring written messages from them. If bribes failed, the message was concealed somehow in their trays of food. Every officer in detention cell had to have a friend to feed him—i.e. cook his food and see that it was delivered to him; otherwise he existed in semi-starvation on the German ration. It was the usual thing, preparatory to an attempt to escape, to arrange for your feeding arrangements in “jug”; and the penalty of recapture was shared to the full by the luckless partner, who thus had double work.

Sharp and Luscombe were the first pair back, as they had been the last pair away. They had had two days and a night out and had been caught passing through a village at night about 15 miles down the Weser. Sharp reported that at his search on being brought back to the camp, Niemeyer had vented his spleen on him by picking a valuable gold watch to pieces with his pocket knife, and by giving instructions for his civilian clothes (which included a brand new coat from England) to be ripped to ribbons. Every day brought in some fresh recapture, and, the cell accommodation being completely inadequate to cope with the numerous criminals, the town gaol was drawn upon to afford relief.

It was a sad blow to the camp when some of the foremost spirits in the adventure—Mardock, Lawrence, Butler, and Langren—were brought back after being out about ten days. Butler had stolen a bicycle and was caught on it while passing through a village. The others had been taken in the vicinity of the Ems. All these separate captures used to be described at length and with appropriate embellishments in the Hanoverian press. Thus in one organ it was stated that the refugees were all wearing British uniform; another had it that British naval uniform was the mode, with the buttons altered; yet another explained that the prisoners had escaped in civilian disguise procured from British friends outside the camp. To be sure, we had British friends outside the camp—what prisoner-of-war did not? But one could imagine the burghers of Hanover reading this sort of stuff and commenting on the lax policy of the Government towards enemy aliens!

A detective from Berlin had arrived shortly after the escape and displayed the usual aptitude of his species in examining the tunnel. Several hours elapsed before he found the door in the partition. This was all in Niemeyer’s favour, since a mere Commandant, a layman in the science of crime, could not reasonably have been expected to guess the secret which had temporarily baffled the expert. Such acuteness would have been unseemly and unprofessional. The detective took a large number of photographs[11]and made a large number of notes, and the two parted on the best of terms. When Niemeyer had bowed the important visitor off the premises, he turned his attention once more to the safe keeping of the British officers still remaining under his wing.

11.Three of these are reproduced in this book.

For several days he achieved a crescendo of fury and malevolence and maintained all the outward characteristics of a mad bull. Unfortunately he had not in any way fallen from grace. A staff officer from Hanover specially sent down to examine the affair was, to our disappointment, an apparently appreciative witness of his behaviour. We had calculated that von Hänisch would by now have discovered a flaw in his chosen instrument, and that the attitude of the chief might be seen to be reflected in his subordinates. But we were out of our reckoning. The captain from Hanover used even to accompany Niemeyer in his periodical incursions into the camp precincts and stand stolidly by while the latter blackguarded every Englishman within reach or hearing.

Possibly Niemeyer had got ideas from reading Don Quixote on his dull evenings. One of his favourite amusements during this period was to make fierce onslaughts with his stick on the washing hanging out to dry on the wire fence between the two main buildings. He would lunge at some unoffending under-garment, spit it, brandish it violently in the air, and then trample on it. It was against the regulations for washing to be hung on the wire, and the Commandant sacrificed his personal dignity to see that these regulations were unflinchingly obeyed.

His behaviour towards the orderlies was a delightful contrast. Usually domineering and foul-mouthed towards them beyond the ordinary, he was now honey-tongued good fellowship itself. The orderlies were all employed digging up the tunnel; and Niemeyer used to stand by them for hours at a time, asking the men questions about their homes in England, their wives and children, and generally trying to put himself on the best possible terms with them.

Niemeyer was looking desperately hard for a scapegoat. It is to be remembered that no one had been caught actuallyinthe tunnel, and every officer recaptured stoutly refused to say how he had got out. There was no tangible evidence of any conspiracy. Consequently unless an admission of complicity was wrung from one of the orderlies, the charge of doing damage to German property, levelled against a number of unconvicted and unconvictable persons, would lose weight, however circumstantial the evidence; and it was punishment to the hilt which the Commandant, in his wounded pride, yearned after. But his clumsy overtures took in nobody. The men knew that he was trying his hardest to pump them and gave nothing away.

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