Then began one of the most remarkable series of perils, hardships,
struggles and curious adventures that fell to the lot of any individual
in the course of the war. With the aid of a map, which he had stolen
from a guard’s room at Courtrai, he set out with the distant
Holland frontier as his objective. It is a narrative that loses by
condensation, for there is hardly an adventure or experience that
has not novel interest as O’Brien relates it. To avoid detection and
capture he had to secrete himself by day, all his travel being by
night. His guide was the Pole Star. “But for it I wouldn’t be here
to-day.”
About the ninth night he crossed into Luxemburg, but though the
principality was officially neutral it offered no safer haven than
Belgium would. Discovery would have been followed by the same
consequences as capture in Germany proper. In the nine nights he had
traveled perhaps seventy-five miles.
He was nine or ten days getting across Luxemburg, a task that could
have been accomplished in two days of normal travel, but swollen feet
and knees, aching body and a hunger-griping stomach together with the
necessity of stealth to avoid discovery, German guards, workmen and
others often having to be widely circled are not conducive to speed.
About the eighteenth day after his leap from the train he entered
Belgium, and some days later brought up at the Meuse between Namur and
Huy, where it was at least half a mile wide. There he came nearest
of all to giving up the struggle. But he must get across. There was
nothing to do but swim.
There were adventures in Belgium, some amusing, some harrowing, all of
them perilous to an English officer escaped from captivity. When, after
narrow escapes not a few he reached the Holland frontier, one of the
greatest of his herculean tasks presented itself. He had to pass the
triple barbed-wire barrier with its electrically charged nine-foot-high
fence. With hands and sticks he resolutely set to work to dig under the
deadly barrier—hard work and most dangerous. He was forced to stop from
time to time to escape detection. At last, on November 19, 1917, the
hole was finished. He writhed through and into Holland territory.
A few more difficulties to surmount, then on board train for Rotterdam,
a run to London, a presentation to the King, some banquet pleasures in
London and, crowning all, home again, “in the little town of Momence,
Illinois, on the Kankakee River.”