I am back again in England, back in my beloved native town, with its
houses all askew and its quaint and narrow streets. For nearly two
years the Huns have had me in their grip; they had drawn for me the
picture of an England that would have been a nightmare; they had told
me of towns bombarded from the skies and reduced to ruins, and of
thirty-three British warships sent to the bottom of the sea.
What did I expect? Much what I have found; for we learned to suspect
those German-made victories by land, by sea, by air, and we discovered
means of inoculating ourselves against the poisonous virus. Scraps of
newspapers enclosed in parcels from home, tales passed from mouth to
mouth--things like this gave us courage and hope.
To you, mayhap, captivity is just a word, at best or worst suggestive
only of discomfort and loss of personal liberty. To me it represents
all that is hideous, humiliating, irksome, and galling. It brings
back before my eyes two years of petty tyranny, of pin-pricks,
aggressiveness, hostility, degradation, and, at times, absolute cruelty.
Those who have never lost their freedom cannot understand how the iron
may enter one's soul; they cannot understand the days and nights and
weeks and months of maddening monotony.
It was from this death-in-life that I determined to escape almost
before I had tasted the full bitterness of my lot. It was from this
that I fled, a hardened, desperate man. My heart seemed to have turned
to stone, my soul to flint.
To talk like a soldier, I was simply "fed-up," and I meant to let
nothing come between me and freedom.
Before I tell you of my three escapades I want to try to show you how
I came to be in that miserable plight--a prisoner-of-war. With my
comrades of the Cheshire Regiment I found myself, in August, 1914,
trying to stem a rushing, raging torrent. What a handful we seemed;
what millions the Germans appeared! It was fight and retreat, retreat
and fight, with little time for food, little time for attention.
Wounded or whole, we fought doggedly on; and I mention this because,
when I was taken prisoner on October 21st, 1914, I was suffering from
a wound in the left leg.
It had not rendered me helpless, however, and when twenty-eight of
us were surrounded I did my best to escape through a village, but was
brought back by the the German soldiers and marched with the rest
for a day and a night, without food or water. A tramp of twenty or
twenty-five kilometers landed us at Douai, where, for a week, we were
lodged in a church, sleeping on the floor and kept from starving to
death by the food the French people were permitted or ordered to give
us.