(AS TOLD BY AN ESCAPED PRISONER).
I was born on a Wisconsin farm, almost within sight of Lake Michigan
and only a few miles from the Illinois State line. My father was Irish
and my mother German. Like my name, most of my qualities--both good
and bad--were those of my father rather than my mother. He died when I
was ten, and within a year my mother married our German hired-man. My
mother was never unkind to me, but my stepfather was a brute, and from
the day of his coming to live with us I date a steadily growing
dislike for his race, which has been made worse by a sort of fatality
which, in spite of myself, has seemed to work to throw me amongst them
all my life.
My stepfather was always rough with me, but until I was sixteen
confined himself to a black-snake and horsewhip in beating me. I got
on as best I could with him, but when he celebrated my coming to what
he called “man’s estate” by starting in on me with a hoe-handle, it
was more than I could stand. The second time he tried it I was ready
for him and caught him a blow behind the ear with an iron
monkey-wrench that laid him out across the chopping-block. Afraid that
I had killed him--he was really not hurt much--I ran away, taking
nothing with me but the wrench I had in my hand. I never parted with
that good old monkey-wrench during all my wanderings of the next ten
years, and I felt worse about losing it to the Germans in Flanders
than I did about the two fingers their shrapnel bashed off.
For the next few years I did all kinds of farm work, always being
employed by Germans because nearly all of the farms in southern
Wisconsin are owned by those people. Possibly there were many good
people amongst them, but it always seemed to be my luck to get with
the others. Hard workers themselves, they were also hard drivers of
those who worked for them, and full of mean little tricks for getting
more time out of you or for giving you less money. Of course, being
quick-tempered and with a sort of standing grudge against all
“square-heads” growing up inside of me anyhow, I was in hot water most
of the time. The week that went by without a fight was very
exceptional. If they were content to go after me with their fists, I
usually kept to the same weapons, and hardly recall a time when I
didn’t have the best of it. But if they ever tried anything else I
always fell back on my trusty monkey-wrench, which I generally carried
swung to my belt with a raw-hide. After a while, just as the Indians
used to tally their scalps on the handles of their tomahawks, I
started cutting a notch on the wooden grip of my monkey-wrench for
every time I had dropped--I don’t think I ever killed one--a
“square-head” with it. At first--proud of what they stood for--I cut
them broad and long, but soon I saw I was using up my limited space
too fast, and, to provide for “future developments,” began cutting
them smaller. It was surprising how much the notches improved the
grip.
By the time I was twenty I was able to run both the engine and the
separator of a threshing-machine outfit, and started going west every
summer to the Dakotas and Montana to get the benefit of the high
harvest pay. My winters I spent in a big factory in Racine, learning
to repair and build threshers and tractors. Partly to save the money
that I would have had to pay for a ticket, but more for the lark of
it, I started beating my way back and forth between the east and the
west on the trains. Sometimes I stowed away with a week’s food in an
empty furniture car, sometimes I rode the “blind baggage,” but mostly
it was the old stand-by of the “bindle-stiff” called “riding the
rods.” My nerve was good and my arms strong, and it wasn’t long before
I could swing up and disappear inside the “bumpers” of a train doing
thirty miles an hour as easily as the conductor swung on to the tail
of the caboose by his hand-rail. It was little idea I had that the
tricks I learned in those days were going to make all the difference
between my starving in a German prison camp and (what is happening
now) being fed on chocolates and pink teas in London by way of
training for another go at the Huns.
In 1913 I went to South America to set up and run threshing outfits
that had been sold to the ranchers by the Racine company I had been
working for winters. I had a two years’ contract, and was supposed to
go to Uruguay or the Argentine. If I had done that, probably things
would have been all right. But at the last moment, as a result of some
one else dropping out, I was sent to Rio Grande do Sul, in the
southern “pan-handle” of Brazil. But don’t believe that because it was
Brazil there were any Brazilians there, or leastways any that counted
for anything. The Germans have been swarming into Rio Grande and
Santa Catharina for thirty years, and to-day southern Brazil is as
“Dutch” as--southern Wisconsin. Probably, in fact, it is more so, for
there are over half a million Germans there, and hardly a third that
many Brazilians.
I had been avoiding German farms for the last two or three years, but
in Rio Grande all the ranchers were Germans, and I had to go wherever
an outfit had been sold anyhow. The notches multiplied pretty fast on
my old monkey-wrench for about three weeks, but at the end of that
time I found myself in jail for knocking out the front teeth of a fat
German farmer after I had ducked a prod from his pitchfork. Our agent
at Santa Catharina and the American Consul at Santos got me clear, but
the former took the occasion to cancel my contract and ship me home
before, as he put it, I had ruined the company’s trade in that end of
Brazil.
I was breaking prairie with a big gasoline tractor outfit in northern
Manitoba when the European War started, and so sure I was that my
country was going to take some kind of a stand against the invasion of
Belgium that I got ready at once to go home and enlist in case we had
to back up the protest with force. I waited, with my grip packed,
until it was plain that there was no chance of any move from our
brave statesmen at Washington--it must have been three or four weeks
before I gave up hope--and then threw up my job, did sixty miles on
horseback in nine hours to the railway station, and went to the
nearest recruiting office. They would probably have taken me as an
American, but I was taking no chances on being rejected. I told them I
was an Irish-Canadian, and the next day was being put through the
paces by the drill-sergeant. I could have got much more pay and a
better billet generally by going into the transport service and
driving a motor truck, but I had suddenly become aware that I had been
nursing a sort of slumbering desire to kill Germans for the last
decade, and I wasn’t going to miss the chance to let that desire wake
up. I sewed an extra loop on my belt so that I could have my good old
monkey-wrench always handy, and began looking anxiously forward to the
time when I should be able to complete my “register” of bashed-up
Dutchmen on the handle. I might have to use my rifle for long-range
work, I told myself, but for the close-in action in the trenches I was
going to do with my wrench what the other fellows did with their
bayonets. Lucky it was for my peace of mind in those days that I
couldn’t look forward and see what the end of the next eight or ten
months had in pickle for me.
The call was pretty persistent for men in those first months of the
war and, in spite of the shortage of all kinds of equipment, our
training was rushed from the very beginning. Most of the boys in my
regiment had seen service or had training--some had been in the South
African War, and others had been members of the English Territorials
or the Canadian Militia--already, and we made much better progress
than the rawer contingents that came later. We had about three months
in Canada, a little longer in England (where I had a touch of typhoid
on Salisbury Plain), and by the early spring of 1915 we were in
reserve in Flanders. By the time the Germans made their second attempt
to drive through Ypres to Calais we had been pushed up into the first
line. Until the big attack came, however, we had had no real fighting.
The Germans--I had begun to call them Huns by this time instead of
Dutchmen--made scattering raids on our trenches and we made scattering
raids on theirs, but I never figured in any of this to the extent of
mixing in hand-to-hand work. I had no chances to add any notches to
the handle of my old monkey-wrench, but from my always carrying it
around with me the English “Tommies” (who call a wrench a spanner)
had dubbed me “Spanner Mike.” They pretended to believe I was a little
“cracked” about my trusty old friend, but I found that they were never
above borrowing it for everything, from opening boxes from home to
tinkering the gear of broken-down automobile trucks--“motor lorries,”
they call them. It’s really remarkable what a lot of things a man can
use a monkey-wrench for if only he happens to have it handy when he
needs it.
For some days the shell-fire against us had been getting heavier--at
least they called it heavy then; it would be nothing now--and we knew
that the Huns were getting ready for some kind of an attack. What kind
it was going to be we little dreamed, for even our officers seem to
have known nothing about the gas they had been experimenting with over
in Germany. When it came--it rolled toward us in heavy clouds like the
morning mists in the Dakota “Bad Lands”--the word went round that the
Huns’ munitions had got afire, and we were telling each other that we
ought to be sent across to take advantage of the confusion. It was
only when we began to notice that it was bubbling up at fairly regular
intervals--thick greasy yellow clouds of it--that it seemed they
might be putting up a game on us, and by that time one of the advanced
tongues of the stuff lapped over into our trench.
I shall never forget the horrible agony and surprise in the eyes of
the men who got that first dose. It was the look of a dog being
suddenly beaten for something it hadn’t done. They looked at each
other with questioning eyes--I only recall hearing one man start
cursing--then they began gulping and coughing, and then fell down with
their faces in their hands. All the time the shrapnel was popping
overhead and raining bullets about, and, just as the gas began to pour
over my parapet, a bullet knocked my rifle out of my hand, and I
slipped in the mud as I jumped back and went down in a heap. It must
have been all of six weeks before I stood on my feet again.
My first sensation was of a smarting way up inside of my nose. This
quickly extended to my throat, and then, as my lungs suddenly seemed
filled with red-hot needles, I was seized with a spasm of coughing.
Coughing up red-hot needles is not exactly a pleasant operation, and
the pain was intense. Mercifully, it was only a few minutes before a
sort of stupor seemed to come on, but even as I passed into
half-consciousness I was aware of my outraged lungs revolting, in
heaves that shook my frame, against the poison that had swamped the
trench. With some of my comrades the fighting instinct was the last
thing that died, and I have a sort of a recollection of two or three
of them clutching at the parapet and firing from cough-shaken
shoulders off into the depths of the rolling yellow gas clouds. One
lad toppled over beside me and still kept pumping shots from the
bottom of the trench. I remember hazily trying to kick his rifle out
of his hand as he discharged it over my ear, and, failing to locate it
with my foot, recall groping instinctively for my old wrench and
trying to disarm him with that. My last recollection of this stage of
things was the shock of feeling the wrench-handle swing backward
harmlessly for lack of my two shrapnel-smashed fingers to steady it.
I had rolled and writhed, in the agony of the pain of the gas in my
lungs, in a pool of slush in the bottom of the trench, and it must
have been the lying with my face buried in the shoulder of my wet
woollen tunic that saved my life. Most of my comrades were quite
unconscious when the Huns, with their heads protected by baggy
“snoots,” came pouring into the trench, but I had enough of my senses
left unparalysed to be able to watch them in a hazy sort of way. The
horrible quietness of the thing was positively uncanny. Always before
the enemy had charged with yells (it is directed in their manual that
they do so, though, of course, a man “gives tongue” naturally on such
occasions from sheer excitement), but now they were hardly making a
sound. Probably this was by orders, so that no more air than was
necessary should be taken into the lungs, but even when some of them
did try to speak the words were so muffled that it must have been very
hard to make them out.
The Huns were pretty excited at first, and started right down the
trench bayoneting one body after another. But before they got to me an
officer stopped them for a minute and evidently gave them to
understand that they were to confine their butchery only to those that
tried to resist. Two or three of our boys, who had not gone under
entirely but had not sense enough to understand the uselessness of
putting up a fight, made a few groggy passes at the Huns and paid the
penalty. I lay quiet and played “possum,” but got a nasty prod in the
groin when one of them turned me over with his bayonet to see where I
was wounded. There was still a good deal of gas in the bottom of the
trench, and between that and loss of blood I must have lost
consciousness entirely about this time.
My recollections covering the next day or two are very dim and
confused, but one thing was photographed so clearly on my mind that
the image of it has never faded; I even grow hot as I think of it now,
over a year later. This was the last thing I saw before I “went to
sleep” in the trenches--two Huns using my monkey-wrench (the tool I
had been “strafing” “Dutchmen” with for the last ten years, and which
I had brought along to continue that good work with) to tinker up one
of our own smashed machine-guns to use against our own men. I never
saw it again, and its loss rankled in my mind during the whole year
that I was doomed to spend in German hospitals and prison camps.
I have some memory of being carried in a stretcher, and of passing
through one or two dressing-stations where my wounds were washed and
bandaged. My connected recollections begin after my waking up in a
hospital--well back from the Front, but still not out of the sound of
the guns--that was evidently devoted entirely to “gas” cases. The ward
I was in was filled with men from my own regiment, but what interested
me specially--as soon as I was able to take any interest in anything
beyond my own suffering--was to observe that a great many Germans
were also being treated in the same hospital. I never did find out
just how these happened to be “gassed,” but presume it was either
through accidents to their apparatus or from their “snoots” being
faulty.
At any rate, the Germans had evidently prepared in advance for “gas”
cases, and the chances are that they pulled through a good many of us
who might have died had we been taken back to our own hospitals, where
they had, at that time, small facilities for handling that kind of
trouble. The ward was kept as hot as a Turkish bath, and some of our
chaps thought this was done with the idea of making our agony worse.
One of them, who jumped out of bed, threw up a window, got a lungful
of cold air, and died the same night, gave us a proper object-lesson
in why the air had to be kept at close to blood heat. Some of them
also thought that a kind of stuff they gave us to inhale made us worse
rather than better, but that was only their imagination. If there was
any real ground for complaint it might have been on the score that the
doctors tried a good many experiments on us because this was the first
chance they had had to study gas poisoning on a large scale, but that
was no more than we could have expected. Probably our own doctors
would have been glad of some “dogs,” in the shape of Huns, to “try it
on” when they first began to study “gassing.”
But the doctors were always attentive, and the nurses always
kind--more than kind, most of them. But I already had learned that a
nurse’s best stock-in-trade is her “sympathy,” and those I met in
Germany were no exception to the rule. I think it was the way that
those plump blonde _fräuleins_ looked after us poor devils in that
steaming-hot ward that kept me from trying to run amuck and commit
murder as soon as I was well enough to be sure that my memory of those
two Huns tinkering at our machine-gun with my old monkey-wrench was no
“fevered vision.”
I have been told often since returning to England that it will be just
as well not to say too much about my hardships in the German prison
camps, as it might be the way of making things all the worse for those
still doomed to remain there. So I shall touch lightly on this side of
my experiences, and, to be on the safe side, will try not to mention
any camps or other German localities by name. I was sent to what, had
I but known it, was the most liberally run prison camp in Germany
after my discharge from the hospital, but even at that the treatment
was so abominable in comparison with what I had been receiving and had
a right to expect that it undid at once the “soothing” effect the kind
nurses and doctors had had on me. I don’t mean that I went back
physically a great deal--my constitution was too strong for that--but
only that my old hate of the Hun redoubled. This would have been all
very well if I had only been back in the trenches, but in a prison
camp it could only have one end. I dropped in his tracks with my
fist--mighty hard it was his shaved head felt to my half-healed
“right”--the first guard that tried to hustle me into line with the
toe of his boot. Then I used up what strength I had left in a rough
and-tumble with three or four others, until one of them finally put me
to sleep with the butt of his rifle. In at least three other camps I
could name I would have been shot then and there (it has happened to
many a lad whose pride made him turn loose on a brutal guard), and I
can count myself very lucky that I got off with no more than a bit
more of a beating up and two weeks’ solitary confinement on black
bread and water. Perhaps the worst consequence of my action was my
transfer, a few weeks later, to a camp that has since become notorious
for both its unhealthfulness and its inhumanity.
The first glimmerings of sense (regarding the situation that I was
going to have to face as a prisoner of war in Germany) was let into my
rather thick head by the blow it got from that rifle-butt; the
rest--enough to start me on the right course, at least--filtered in
during my two weeks of solitary confinement on bread and water. I was
of no use to myself or any one else in a German prison camp, I told
myself. I had no chance there either to kill Huns or destroy Hun
property. Once outside I might well be able to do both--perhaps even
get back to England and join my regiment if any of it was left. How to
get out?--that was the question. From that time on I turned my every
thought and act to that one end.
What makes it almost hopeless for a prisoner of war to get out of
Germany is not so much the actual escape from his prison--that is
comparatively easy, especially if he is on outside work--as the lack
of clothes and money, and the difficulty of avoiding giving himself
away by being unable to speak the language. These things make the odds
a thousand to one against the average prisoner having more than
twenty-four hours’ freedom at the outside. The chances against success
are so big that few attempt it. Luckily, I had one advantage over the
general run of the prisoners in my ability to speak fairly good
German. I must have had a lot of accent, of course, but I still
understood all that was said to me in German, and was also able to say
all that I wanted to. This would be good enough, I told myself, to run
a bluff with the ordinary run of people I might meet about my being a
returned German-American come back to work for my Fatherland; that is
to say, I ought to be able to prevent such people from being
suspicious of me, where they would have attacked or reported a man who
could not speak German at once. Anything in the way of police or
officials I should have to fight shy of, and, as I foresaw there must
be all kinds of checks on strangers and travellers, I knew I should
have to steer clear of trains and hotels. I felt sure of myself on the
score of language, therefore; clothes and money were things to be
provided as opportunity offered. Fortunately, Fate was very kind to me
in this respect.
One little incident I must mention before I go on with my story. In
the prison I was transferred to most of the English prisoners, after a
while, began to receive parcels from home, even some of the Canadians
coming in on the deal. I, having no friends either in Canada or
England, got nothing direct, but all sorts of nice little odds and
ends of dainties came my way in the final “divvy.” One lad from the
south of England, who was dying with a sort of slow blood-poisoning
and lack of care of a never-healed wound at the back of his neck, was
especially generous to me with the things he got from home, and when
he finally went under I managed to get permission to write a few words
to his family, telling them, among other things, how kind he had been
to me with his parcels. And what should they do--his brokenhearted
mother and sisters in Devonshire--but “adopt” me in his place and keep
right on sending the chocolate and cigarettes and other “goodies” just
as regularly as before. And now they’ve been to see me here, and tell
me they are going to keep sending me things when I return to the Front
just the same as though I was the boy they had lost.
As soon as I had fully made up my mind what I wanted to do, I went on
my good behaviour, got into the “trusty” class, and was one of the
first picked for outside work when the call came for English prisoners
to help in harvesting and road-making. I had a good chance to practise
my German during the harvest work, but the prospects for making good
after a “get-away” were not very promising, and I had sense enough to
bide my time. But when I got switched on to road work, and when almost
the first thing I saw was a bunch of Huns clustered round an old Holt
“Caterpillar” tractor that had got stalled on them, I felt that time
was drawing near.
Now a “Caterpillar” is just about the finest tractor in the world for
general purposes, provided it is run by a man that has had plenty of
experience with its funny little ways; in the hands of any one
else--even a first-class engineer that is quite at home with a wheel
tractor--it is the original fount of trouble. To me the machine was an
old friend, however, for I had run one for two or three seasons in the
West and worked for a winter in one of the company’s factories in
Illinois. I took the first opportunity to let the Huns know my
qualifications, and when they saw me start in to true up the wobbly
“track,” they just about fell on my neck then and there. They had
seized the machine in a Belgian sugar-beet field a few days after the
outbreak of the war, they explained, and it had been used for a while
to haul heavy artillery in the drive into France. After a time the
hard usage had begun to tell on the “track,” and--as they had no new
parts to replace worn ones with--it had been giving about as much
trouble as it was worth ever since. When I told them that it was
adjustment rather than replacement that was needed, and that in a few
days I could have the machine as good as new, they fairly tumbled over
themselves to “borrow” me for the job.
As a matter of fact, the old “crawler” was just about on its last
legs, but I knew in any case that I could tinker it into some kind of
running shape, and the comparative freedom of the job was what I
wanted. This worked out even better than I expected, for after the
first day or two, in order to save the time taken up by returning me
to the prison camp at night and bringing me back in the morning, they
arranged for me to bunk in in the road camp. They were too much
occupied in hustling the job along to think about asking me for my
parole--a lucky thing, for I should have had a hard time to keep from
breaking it.
With two men to help me, I took the tractor all down, “babbitted” up
the bearings, readjusted the gears, and had it up and running at the
end of a week. With a string back to the seat to open up the throttle
for the sharp pulls, I had it snaking a string of ten waggon-loads of
crushed rock where it had been stalling down on three before the
overhauling. During that week I had also managed to pick up--no
matter how--several marks in money, and had succeeded in concealing so
effectually the greasy jacket of one of my assistants that he gave up
hunting for it and got a new one. A machinist’s cap had already been
given me, and the evening that the other helper washed out his
overalls and flung them over his tent to dry, I--seeing a chance to
complete my wardrobe--decided promptly that the time had come to make
a move. They had offered me a steady job running the old
“Caterpillar,” and at something better than ordinary “prisoner’s pay,”
but as it would have kept me in the same neighbourhood, I could not
figure how it would help my chances in the least to “linger on.”
There was supposed to be a sentry watching the road machinery, and
also keeping a wary eye on the tent where I bunked with a half-dozen
of the engineers, but he did not take his job very seriously, and I
knew I would have no difficulty avoiding him. We had had a hard day of
it, and my tent mates were in bed by dark--about 8 o’clock--and
asleep, by their deep breathing, a few minutes later. They all slept
in their working clothes, else I could have made up my outfit then and
there. But it did not matter, for within half a minute of the time I
had slipped noiselessly under the loosened tent-flap, I was making off
down the road with a full suit of German machinist’s togs under my
arm. Five minutes later I stopped in the darker darkness under a tree
by the roadside and slipped them on over my prison suit, rightly
anticipating that the extra warmth of the latter might be very welcome
if I had much sleeping out to do.
It was partly bravado, probably, and partly because I felt that, if
missed, I would be searched for in the opposite direction, that caused
me to head for the two-mile-distant town of X----. And it was probably
the same combination which led me, after passing unchallenged down the
long main street, to march up to the wicket of a “movie” show, pay my
twenty-five pfennig and pass inside. Had there been a “hue and cry”
that night (which there was not), this was undoubtedly the last place
they would have looked for me in.
The films were mostly war views--cracking fine things from both the
Russian and French fronts--and other patriotic subjects, but among
them was one of those “blood-and-thunder thrillers” from California. I
don’t recall exactly how the story went, but the thing that set me
thinking was the way the heroine pinched the lights off the automobile
they had kidnapped her in, and afterwards pawned them for enough to
get a ticket home with. What was to prevent my going back and getting
busy on my old “Caterpillar”? I asked myself. The magneto was worth
something like a hundred dollars, and even if I had no chance to sell
it, it was a pity to overlook so easy a bit of “strafing.” I concluded
that my steps had been guided to that “movie” show by my lucky star,
and promptly got up and started back for the road-making camp. On the
way some tipsy villagers passed me singing the “Hymn of Hate,” the air
and most of the words of which I had already picked up, and, out of
sheer happiness at being again (if only for a few hours) at liberty, I
joined in the explosive bursts of the chorus, booming out louder than
any of them on “England!” Evidently, unconsciously, I had done quite
the proper thing, for they raised their voices to match mine, gave a
“Hoch” or two, and passed on without stopping. That also gave me an
idea. During the whole following two weeks of my wanderings in Germany
every man, woman or child that I passed upon the road, in light or in
darkness, might have heard me humming “The Hymn of Hate,” “Die Wacht
am Rhein,” or, after I had mastered it toward the end, “Deutschland
über Alles.”
It was plain that my flight had not been discovered, for I found the
camp as quiet as when I left it three hours before. I could just make
out the figure of the sentry pacing along down the line of tractors
and dump-waggons, but the canvas which had been thrown over the
“Caterpillar” to protect it from possible rain made it easy for me to
escape attracting his attention. Of light I had no need; I knew the
old “65” well enough to work on it in my sleep. A wrench and pair of
nippers, located just where I had left them in their loops in the
cover of the tool-box over the right “track,” were all I needed. First
I cut the insulated copper wires running to the magneto with the
nippers, and then (placing my double-folded handkerchief over them to
prevent noise) unscrewed with the wrench the nuts from the bolts which
held the costly electrical contrivance to the steel frame of the
tractor. Then I cut off with a knife a good-sized square of the canvas
paulin that covered the machine, wrapped the magneto in it, and tied
up the bundle with a piece of the insulated copper wire, leaving a
doubled loop for a handle. Then I threw out some of the more delicate
adjustments, dropped some odds and ends of small tools and bits of
metal down among the gears where they would do the most “good,”
pocketed the knife and nippers, and, with the magneto in one hand and
the biggest wrench I could find in the other, set off for X---- again.
The wrench was my last and greatest inspiration; it was to take the
place of the one the Huns had robbed me of in the trenches. I am glad
to be able to write that I have it by me at the present moment, and
that it is slated to go back to the Front with me--, I hope to do a
bit of the “strafing” that Fate denied the other.
Probably no prisoner of war was ever loose in the interior of Germany
with a clearer idea of what he wanted to do, and how he intended to do
it, than I had at this moment. I knew that my only chance of escaping
capture within the next twenty-four hours was in putting a long way--a
hundred miles or more--between myself and that place by daylight, when
the “alarm” would go out. I knew the only way this could be done was
by train; but I also knew that the quickest way to instant arrest was
to try to enter a station and take a train in the ordinary way. To any
but one who had “hoboed” back and forth across the North American
Continent as I had the game would have seemed a hopeless one.
I was far from despairing, however; in fact, I never felt more equal
to a situation in my life. The whole thing hinged on my getting my
first train. After that I felt I could manage. I had studied German
passenger cars as closely as possible in watching them pass at a
distance, and was certain they offered fairly good “tourist”
accommodation on the “bumpers” or brake beams; but I did not feel that
I yet knew enough of their under-slung “architecture” to board them
when on the move. This meant that I was going to have to start on my
“maiden” trip from a station or siding, where I could find a train at
rest. A siding would, of course, have been vastly preferable, but as I
had none definitely located, and knew that I might easily waste the
rest of the night looking for one, the X---- _bahnhof_ was the only
alternative. Because this was so plainly the _only_ way, I was nerved
to the job far better than if I had had to decide between two or three
lines of action.
Nor was I in any doubt as to how the thing would have to be done. At
the ticket windows, or at the gates to the train shed, I was positive
I would be challenged at once--even if no word had yet gone to the
police of my escape--and held for investigation. Besides, I had not
money enough to take me a quarter the distance I felt that I should
have to go to be reasonably safe. The only way was to follow the
tracks in through the yards and make the best of any opportunity that
offered. The ten or twelve-pound magneto would be a good deal of a
nuisance, but, as the possible sale of it at some distant point
offered an easy way to the money I was sure to need I decided not to
let it go till I had to.
I already knew the general lay of the X---- station, and decided that
it would be best to go to the tracks by crossing a field just outside
of the town. My road crossed the line a half-mile further away, but I
felt sure a bridge over a canal which would have to be passed if I
took to the ties at this point would be guarded by soldiers. A stumble
through a weed-choked ditch, a trudge across a couple of hundred yards
of rye stubble, a climb over the wire fencing of the right-of-way, and
I was once more crushing stone ballasting under my brogans, as I had
done so often before. Ten minutes later I passed unchallenged under
the lights of a switching-tower and was inside the X---- yards. Almost
at the same moment a bright headlight flashed out down the line ahead,
and before I reached the station a long passenger train had pulled in
and stopped. “Just in time,” I muttered to myself; “that’s _my_ train,
wherever it’s going.”
Entering the train-shed, I avoided the platforms and hurried along
between the passenger train and a string of freight cars standing on
the next track. Two or three yard hands brushed by me without a
glance, for there was practically no difference between my greasy
machinist’s rig-out and their own. But as I stopped and began to peer
under one of the _erstige_ coaches I saw, with the tail of my eye, a
brakeman of the freight train pause in his clamber up the end of one
of the cars and crane his head suspiciously in my direction. Scores of
times before (though never with so much at stake) I had faced the same
kind of emergency, and, without an instant’s hesitation and as though
it was the most natural thing in the world to be doing, I started
tapping one of the wheels with my big steel wrench. Heaven only knows
if they test for cracked car wheels that way in Germany! I certainly
have never seen them do it, at any rate. Anyhow, it served my purpose
of making the brakeman think I was there on business, for he climbed
on up on to his train and passed out of sight. Two seconds later I was
snuggled up on the “bumpers” with my wrench and magneto in my lap.
The brake-beams of a German _schlafwagen_ are not quite as roomy as
those of an American Pullman, but they might be much worse. The train
was a fairly fast one, making few stops, and I believe would have
taken me right in to Berlin if I had remained aboard long enough. I
was getting rather cramped and stiff after four or five hours,
however, and not caring to run the risk of being seen riding by
daylight, I dropped off as the train slowed down at a junction on the
outskirts of what appeared, and turned out, to be a large
manufacturing city. The magneto slipped out of my two-fingered hand as
I jumped off, and brought up in the frog of a switch with a jolt that
must have played hob with its delicate insides, but I wasn’t doing any
worrying on that score. Here I was, safe and sound, a good hundred
miles beyond any place they would ever think of looking for me.
Moreover, I had money in my pocket, as well as the possible means of
getting more. I couldn’t have wished for a better start.
There are a number of reasons why it would not be best for me to go
into detail at this time regarding the various ways in which I steered
clear of trouble in getting beyond the German frontiers, not the least
of them being that it might make it harder in the future for some
other poor devil trying to do the same thing. I do not think, however,
there would be one chance in a thousand for a British prisoner less
“heeled for the game”--a man unable to speak the language and to steal
rides on the “brake-beams” of the trains, I mean--than I was to win
through from any great distance from the frontier. But however that
may be, I am not going to make it harder for any one who may get the
chance by telling just how I did it.
Money--to be obtained by selling the magneto of the tractor I had
brought along with me--was the first thing for me to see to after
getting well clear of the country in which I was likely to be searched
for, and it was in going after this that I was nearest to “coming a
cropper.” I made the mistake--in my haste to get rid of the burden of
the heavy thing--of offering it to the first electrical supply shop I
came to. The proprietor wanted the thing very badly, but while he
seemed to accept readily enough my story that I was a returned
German-American working in munition factories, he said that the law
required him to call up the police and ask if anything of the kind had
been reported as stolen. I was not in the least afraid that the
magneto would be reported at a point so distant from the one I had
taken it from, but I did know that I couldn’t “stand up” for two
minutes in any kind of interview with the police. So I told old Fritz
to go ahead and telephone, and as soon as his back was turned grabbed
up the magneto and slipped out to the street as quietly as possible.
Whether the police made any effort to trace me or not I never knew.
There was no evidence of it, anyhow. I headed into the first side
street, and from that into another, and then kept going until I came
to a dirty little secondhand shop with a Jew name over the door.
Luckily the old Sheeny had had some dealing in junk and hardware, and
knew at once the value of the goods I had to offer. As a matter of
fact, indeed, the magneto was a “Bosch,” made in Germany in the first
place, and imported to the U.S. by the makers of the tractor from
which I had taken it. I was a good deal winded from quick walking--I
hadn’t a lot of strength at that time anyhow--and the shrewd old
Hebrew must have felt sure that I had stolen the thing within the
hour. He said no word about ’phoning the police, however, but merely
looked at me slyly out of the corner of one eye and offered me fifty
marks for an instrument that was worth four or five hundred in
ordinary times, and probably half again as much more through war
demands. I could probably have got more out of him, but I was in no
temper for bargaining, and the quick way in which I snapped up his
offer must have confirmed any suspicions the old fox may have had
concerning the way I came by the “goods.” The joint was probably
little more than a “fence”--a thieves’ clearing-house--anyhow, and I
was dead lucky to stumble on to it as I did.
I had two hearty meals that day in cheap restaurants--taking care to
order no bread or anything else I felt there might be a chance of my
needing a “card” for--and that night swung up on to the “rods” of a
passenger train that had slowed down to something like ten miles an
hour at a crossing, and rode for several hours in a direction which I
correctly figured to be that of the Dutch frontier. I spent the
following day moving freely about a good-sized manufacturing city, and
the next night “beat” through to a town on the border of Holland. As
this was not a place where there were any factories, my machinist’s
rig-out didn’t “merge into the landscape” in quite the same way it did
in the places where there was a lot of manufacturing, and I stayed
there only long enough to make sure that the frontier was guarded in a
way that would make the chances very much against my getting across
without some kind of help. Such help I knew that I could get in
Belgium, and therefore, as the whole of the German railway system
seemed to be at my disposal for night excursions, I decided to try my
luck from that direction. I wanted to take a look at Essen and Krupps’
while I was so near, but finally concluded it would not be best to
take a chance in a district where there were sure to be more on the
watch than anywhere else. The distant tops of tall chimneys and a
cloud of smoke in the sky were all that I saw of the “place where the
war was made.”
The Germans boast of a great intelligence system, yet not once--so far
as I could see--was I under suspicion during the several days in which
I made my leisurely way, by more or less indirect route, into Belgium.
As a matter of fact, I did not give them very much to “lay hold of.” I
kept closely to my original plan of steering clear of railway stations
and hotels, and of asking for nothing in shops or restaurants that
might require “tickets.” The weather was good, and most of my sleeping
was done in about the same quiet sort of outdoor nooks as the American
“hobo” seeks out in making his way across the continent. The only
difference was that it was safer, if anything, in Germany, and many
times when, in the States, I would have been greeted by a policeman’s
club on the soles of my boots, I saw, from the tail of my eye, the
“arm of the law” strut by without a second glance at the tired
machinist, with his wrench beside him, dozing under a tree in a park
or by the roadside. I had half a dozen good meals with kind-hearted
peasants, and one night--it was raining, and I was pretty well played
out--I accepted the offer of a bed in a farmhouse, the owner of which
had a son who had a sheep ranch in Montana, near Miles City, a place
where I had run a threshing outfit one season. He said he was very
sorry that the boy had not been as clever as I was in evading the
“Englanders” and getting home to help the Fatherland. He was a kind
old fellow, and I tinkered up his mowing-machine and put a new valve
in his leaking pump to square my account. There were a number of
little incidents of this kind, and the simple kindliness of the old
peasants I met--mostly fathers and mothers and wives with sons or
husbands in the war--was responsible for the fact that I did not feel
quite as harshly against Huns in general when I left their country as
when I entered it. Still, I know very well that their good treatment
of me was only because they thought I was one of themselves, and that
they would probably have given me up to a mob to tear to pieces if
they had suspected for a minute what I really was.
I went through into Belgium on the brake-beams of a fast freight
which, from the way it seemed to have the right-of-way over
passengers, I concluded was carrying munitions urgently needed at the
front. It was slowed down in some kind of a traffic jam at a junction
when I boarded it, but when I left it--when I thought I was as far
into Belgium as I wanted to go--it was hitting up a lively thirty
miles an hour or more, and all my practice at the game could not save
me from a nasty roll. Luckily, I dropped clear of the ties; and as the
fill was of soft earth, with a ditch full of water at the bottom, I
was not much the worse for a fall that would have brained me a dozen
times over on most American lines.
Of how I got out of Belgium into Holland, and finally on to England,
it would not do for me to write anything at all at this time, beyond
saying that it was entirely due to aid that I had from the Belgians
themselves. One of the most interesting chapters of the war will be
the one--not to be published till all is over--telling how Belgian
patriots in Belgium not only kept touch with each other during the
German occupation, but also contrived to send news--and even go and
come themselves--to the outer world. Even the “electric fence” along
the Holland boundary has no terrors for them, and I am giving away no
secret when I say that there are more ways of getting safely under or
over that fence than there are wires in it. It will probably do no
harm for me to say that _I_ crossed this barrier on a very cleverly
made little folding stairway which when not in use, was kept hidden
under a square of sod but a few feet away from the fence itself. The
genial old German sentry who spread it for me--he had, of course, been
liberally bribed, and probably had some regular “working arrangement”
with my Belgian friends--confided to me at parting that, when he had
accumulated enough money to keep him comfortably the rest of his life
in Holland, he intended to climb over that little stairway himself and
never go back. I have often wondered how many other Germans feel the
same about leaving “the sinking ship.”