For a moment I could hardly feel. I hardly dared feel. I just breathed
quietly to myself, and thought how nice the air tasted. I was going to
see human beings again. For a time the words were rather meaningless,
and then I gradually began to revive under their warmth. We went out
into the street to the Alexanderplatz station. I had a fine opportunity
to run away here, though I should have been a fool to have done so,
and to have invited prison again. In any case, I had no glasses with
me, and I was very short-sighted. We had gone up on to the platform,
and I was chuckling and giggling like a schoolgirl at seeing life once
again, when the policeman discovered it was the wrong one. "Run," he
said, "there's our train over there." I ran like a leopard. In ten
bounds I had slipped through the crowd and had lost him. I ran on
down the stairs, and into the street. How glorious it all seemed, and
I roared aloud with laughter, at which a sallow-faced woman in black
seemed offended and turned round to stare. I rushed on, up the other
set of stairs and in time my captor appeared. The idea of bolting had
just entered my head and flown, but "no," I said, "wait till we get to
Ruhleben, and have got tired of that, then we'll see what can be done."
Meanwhile, I stared out into the darkness from the brightly-lit
carriage as we steamed through the suburbs of Berlin. I got a glimpse
of a tiny room, in which numbers of steaming dishevelled women were
crowded together bending over machines and needlework. They were being
sweated. That was their daily life. They too, lived in what was really
a prison, though no law stopped them roaming whence they would. I was
in the world once more....
(The prisoner relates numerous stories of his experiences, of which
the above is but a single instance. He describes the prison; how it
feels waiting to be shot; the impressions of a lunatic on release
from solitary confinement and his daring escape with Mr. Edward Falk,
District Commissioner in the Political Service of Nigeria.)