ESCAPES
Such, in brief, were the precautions of the Xth Army Corps for our safe
custody: bolted ground floor windows; wire in abundance; an encircling
belt of No Man’s Land searched to its uttermost inch by strong electric
lamps; an absence of any ground that could by a stretch of imagination
be termed “dead”; police dogs and night patrols; and withal a very
formidable cordon of sentries both within and, subsequently, without the
camp. It was not an easy nut to crack by the overland route.
After the original mode of exit—through the Kommandantur in “A” House
and out through the main gate—had become known, and therefore obsolete,
more direct methods were practised, with, in many cases, great bravery
and ingenuity, but in all a regrettable absence of success. Three of
these escapades are perhaps deserving of especial mention.
[Illustration:
Scene of the Walter-Medlicott attempt.
]
[Illustration:
A dining-room at Holzminden.
]
The first[6] of these will always be regarded by those who saw it or
knew of it as the bravest and at the same time the coolest exploit of
their prison experience. Both the officers who performed it were
subsequently killed—in an attempt, it was said, to break away from their
guards after recapture following an escape from Bad Kolberg.
Unfortunately the English version of that story will never be known, and
the sworn evidence of the sentries—that the British officers, after
being delivered over to their escort, and in spite of the most stringent
warnings, broke away and were mortally wounded in doing so—remains, even
if it be true, cold comfort to their friends. It was the custom that an
attempt to escape, if resulting in capture, involved automatic transfer
to another camp, and of both Medlicott and Walter, the heroes of this
exploit, it can be safely said that neither of them ever stayed anywhere
in Germany long enough to worry about making themselves comfortable.
Truly a proud record.
[Footnote 6: To Lieutenant Fitzgerald of the Australian Flying Corps and
his companion—if either of them should read this—my apologies. They were
the first men out from Kaserne B at Holzminden, cutting the wire
opposite the orderlies’ entrance in broad daylight and getting as far as
Munster in mid-winter before recapture. But unfortunately I do not know
any further details of their escapade.]
On a Sunday afternoon in March the usual sort of things were happening.
There was the usual small knot of people round the stoves in the Kaserne
B cook-house. There were the usual few taking their afternoon
constitutional up and down on the cobbles or round and round on the
cinder. There was the usual bored sentry moving up and down on his
particular beat in No Man’s Land in the stretch between the two
Kasernes. Except to the favoured few in the secret, there was the usual
complete absence of life or interest in the sombre enclosure.
From the shadow of the cook-house two officers, wearing civilian
disguise and carrying bulging rucksacks, walked steadily over the
cobbled track, through the plain wire fence, across No Man’s Land, and
up to the wired railings which formed the northern boundary of the camp,
and which can be seen in the left of the photograph. Those who were
there to see them gave one gasp of amazement, and then directed an
agonized look in the direction of the sentry. He was nearing the lee of
Kaserne A, still on the outward portion of his beat, and was not due to
turn for another fifteen seconds or so. They pushed their packs through
the interstices of the palings on to the road, Walter shinned up the
palings, cut the strands of barbed wire, threw back the cutters to
accomplices waiting in the enclosure, and dropped into the road.
Medlicott followed. Then they assumed their packs and pulled out their
civilian hats. As the sentry turned on his beat, two unassuming
pedestrians were to be seen walking up the road which ran parallel to
the camp towards the railway crossing and the south-east. Fortune so far
had favoured this amazing and wonderfully calculated audacity—a scheme
worked out literally in terms of seconds. The sentry at the far corner
of Kaserne B had also clearly suspected nothing: doubtless his beat had
been as carefully observed and timed as that of the other, and the
conclusion arrived at that for a given number of seconds the whole
length of that particular side of the camp would probably not be under
German observation.
Neither would it have been, but for a coincidence against which no
calculations or precautions could have been proof. The German cell
attendant—a decent little man in his way, but very much _de trop_ on
such an occasion as this—happened to be looking out of one of the
Kaserne B cell windows which gave upon the road, and recognised both
Walter and Medlicott, who had only just completed the sentence of
confinement incurred for their last escape. He rushed upstairs and gave
the alarm. The fugitives, who were by then only a few yards clear of the
camp, realised that something unforeseen had marred their plan and that
they must run for it. In broad daylight, and with a hue and cry in their
rear, they stood but the slenderest chance of making cover in the woods,
to reach which they had first to cross the railway. It being Sunday
afternoon, there was more than the usual traffic on the road and round
the adjoining fields, and—to cut off their one avenue of escape the more
completely—the custodian of the level crossing had received a prompt
warning from the Kommandantur by telephone as to what he might expect;
and he now stood in the path of the fugitives with a loaded gun.
So the game was up, and the brave pair were brought back amidst
sympathetic cheers from the windows of Kaserne B; the cell attendant got
three months’ leave on the nail; and Niemeyer, glowing with patriotic
fervour and pride at his still unblemished record, allowed one of his
sentries to shoot without the veriest shadow of justification at one of
the crowded end-corridor windows of Kaserne B. Fortunately no one was
hurt either by the bullet or the broken glass. But for the second time
in the history of the camp a court of enquiry sat to examine into a
charge of manslaughter attempted without any provocation. The findings
of this court were ultimately themselves found by the Germans during a
search and promptly confiscated.
Another attempt to escape partook of the serio-comic. There had been
introduced one day into Kaserne B a length of timber, intended by the
authorities to serve as a framework for messing cupboards in one of the
dining rooms. This timber was, however, promptly earmarked for a purpose
more directly in the interests of the allied cause. A certain beardless
professor of astronomy, who had lectured to us the previous Sunday on
the wonders of the moon and stars, conceived the idea of projecting
himself on this length of timber from one of the corridor windows of the
first floor on to the wire of the palisade, and thence to the road
beyond. The timber was calculated—and proved—to be just long enough to
rest on the wire. His idea was to get himself pushed out on the plank on
a sufficiently dark night, and, when the wire was reached, jump for it.
Three miles of the Cresta run could not equal this little journey for
condensed excitement.
But unfortunately, though it was a dark night and the stage was well set
for the adventure, the accomplices pushed too hard, and the extemporised
chute—with the professor—went flying into space on the wrong side of the
wire, to the intense alarm of the nearest sentry. Next morning the
dining room was locked, on the ground that it had been put to improper
use. Thereupon several hungry men who wanted to get at their day’s
food-supply battered in the door with stools. Niemeyer retaliated by
locking the whole of the Barrack up within the Kaserne for twenty-four
hours. This was a good example of the collective punishments which used
so often to be applied in prison camps under the rules of the Hague
Convention, embodied, unfortunately, in our own Manual of Military Law.
They were futile, served no effective or precautionary end, and
succeeded merely in rousing even in the more stolid the most bitter
feelings of personal antagonism. It need not be added that such
intervals were infinitely more to Niemeyer’s taste than were the humdrum
periods of chronic dislike and discontent fostered under his genial
charge.
In this particular instance the siege was lifted after twenty-four
hours. A draft letter to the _Kriegsministerium_, asking in plain German
whether, as the result of one officer attempting to escape, the
remaining officers were to be denied access to their food, was presented
to the Commandant. Niemeyer saw that he had gone far enough, arranged to
parley, and eventually capitulated; an active boycott of the canteen in
A Kaserne may also possibly have hastened his resolution.
To the end we never discovered the degree of pecuniary interest which
Niemeyer exercised in the profits of the canteen—probably fairly
considerable; he at all events never let a chance slip of attesting
before all and sundry that he was out of pocket on it.
There was one other very clever attempt made about this time—the only
occasion besides the Walter-Medlicott affair on which the wire was
successfully cut and negotiated in broad daylight. This again was the
result of minute observation and carefully timed and cool action, and
the cause of its failure could have been as little foreseen.
The performers in this attempt were Captain Strover (Indian Army),
Lieutenant Bousfield (Royal Engineers), and Lieutenant Nichol (R.F.C.).
They chose what was perhaps the weakest spot in the cordon of
sentries—just behind the parcel room. The back of the parcel room—itself
strictly out of bounds except during receiving hours—abutted closely on
to the outer wire, which consisted of wire netting at the bottom and
barbed strands on top to a height of eight feet. Once through this, and
provided you had not been observed, it was only necessary to walk airily
through the married quarters, out of an open gate, and into the suburbs
of Holzminden town.
The three managed to secrete themselves in the parcel room till about
mid-day, when the German personnel betook itself to the most important
task of the twenty-four hours. Then, with extreme skill and presence of
mind, an aperture in the wire netting was made to admit of the passage
of their persons and packs, and was closed behind them in such a way as
to leave no trace, except upon minute observation, that the wire had
been tampered with at all. The solitary sentry on that particular beat
saw nothing, and they walked unchallenged into Holzminden, intending to
cross the Weser at the town bridge and make north-west for Holland. But
at a street corner they came face to face with one of the tin room
attendants of the camp, who knew Strover by sight. He allowed them to
pass unchallenged, but a little later obviously thought better of it;
and from that moment they were aware that their footsteps were being
dogged. They hurried on as fast as was possible, but the game was up. In
an incredibly short time, so it seemed, the whole of Holzminden was
following them, as the children of Hamelin, further down the Weser, once
followed the Pied Piper; and after one half-hearted attempt to disarm
suspicion by a mild _was ist los?_ (“what’s up?”)—the most appropriate
German remark under the circumstances—they chucked their hand in and
acknowledged defeat.
It was a striking tribute to the skilful nature of this escape that the
hole in the wire was not discovered, in spite of the most elaborate
search, till several hours later.
Many other attempts were made, but they were still-born in disaster
before the wire was reached: they were made usually at night, and we
would be awakened out of our beauty sleep by shouts and tramplings,
alarums and excursions, a mild barrage of rifle shots, the flash of a
torchlight on to our beds by a harassed Feldwebel conducting an
emergency _appel_, and general vituperation after the manner of the best
disciplined army in the world.
One bright spirit conceived the idea of parachuting himself on a windy
night with an improvised umbrella from the top floor; but either the
wind never reached the required velocity, or else his courage—very
excusably—ebbed before the sticking point.
Two others tried to be conveyed out of the camp gates in the muck cart
which cleared the camp refuse once in every week. The British orderlies
on this fatigue were let into the secret, and as soon as the two
officers had crept unperceived by the German sentry into the well of the
cart, they were engaged to shovel on to and over them the whole of the
unsavoury contents of the refuse bin. It was a sporting venture. To sit
possibly for hours at the bottom of a heap of decayed food, lees of tea,
used tins, and discarded dish-cloths, on the off-chance of being able to
get away when the cart was finally unloaded at the town refuse heaps—the
ordinary man blenched at the very proposition. Nevertheless it was only
bad generalship which prevented them at least from getting clear of the
camp. One officer successfully negotiated his part of the programme and
was well hidden away in the cart which was clearing the A Kaserne bin.
His partner, however, was noticed by the sentry and the alarm was given;
with the result that after much prodding and mild comedy each
unfortunate was finally unearthed from his malodorous retreat and the
pair were marched off to the cells, taking the bathroom en route as a
necessary preliminary.
The star of Niemeyer was in the ascendant. Every fruitless attempt
increased his arrogance and intensified his bar-tender style of
buffoonery. The devil himself when the alarm was on, he could afford to
jest and be merry at our expense as soon as the damage had been put
right and the tally of his charges agreed once again with the official
register.
“Yentlemen,” he would say, strutting up to a group of us as we were
discussing the Strover episode, “you have taught me a lesson. I shall
not forget it. You need not trouble any more. Good morning.”
Or some officer of field rank, but just out from five weeks’ cells for
his last attempt, would be lolling listlessly about, gazing blankly on
the horizon and freedom. To him Niemeyer suddenly appearing would
proffer unsought advice:
“It is no good, Colonel, you cannot do it: I see to it, you know!”
And pass on, before the other had time to reply.
Or he would stroll up to a knot of officers and discuss bootshops in
Bond Street, and express his regret that he should in all probability
never visit London again ... he had been very fond of London. What a
pity it all was. But then he was only a poor captain and had to carry
out his orders; if only the British would give their “honour word” not
to escape he would order the wire to be removed immediately.
The best man to deal with him in these moods was one “Broncho.” Broncho,
indeed, never failed to tell the Commandant exactly what he thought of
him, and was a privileged person to that extent.
“It’s no good talking like that, Commandant,” he would say. “This camp’s
a disgrace even to the Xth Army Corps, and you know it.”
And Niemeyer would strut away, hugely pleased.
But these moods were few and far between, and made him the unreliable
blackguard that he was. For weeks at a time we would be denied the
privilege of seeing his bulky figure in the inevitable blue greatcoat,
swaggering along, hands in pockets, cigar in mouth, and cap well on the
back of his head; during these periods he sat tight in the recesses of
the Kommandantur and put out the tentacles of his power through his
various minions. He was reputed to have bouts of drink and drugging and
to hold wild orgies in his comfortable apartments. Rumour credited him
with having been seen vomiting on to the courtyard from an upper window,
supported on either side by Welman and Ulrich. Certain it is that his
eight o’clock outbursts above related were confined almost entirely to
these periods of segregation and suggested forcibly the morning after
the night before.
He had, moreover, succeeded in ridding himself of successive leaders of
the opposition. Wyndham, who as senior officer had fought him tooth and
nail, week in, week out, ever since the Hänisch interview, had been at
length transferred to Freiburg, and was recuperating in the milder Baden
atmosphere. The breezy Bingham, who succeeded Wyndham in office, fought
him at the rate of about three pitched battles a week for a month, and
was then transported at two hours’ notice to distant Schweidnitz in
Silesia. Bingham, who belonged to a Service which does not mince its
words, endeavoured to force the issue on the canteen question, and
accused Niemeyer openly of countenancing—if not of fixing—unfairly high
prices. The Commandant, almost speechless, challenged him to produce
concrete evidence within twenty-four hours, or be court-martialled.
Bingham the same day was prepared with chapter and verse, evidence sworn
threefold, and damning price lists from other camps. Niemeyer then
characteristically refused an interview, and Bingham went the next day.
It happened to be one of the days on which B House were locked into
their barrack in expiation of some microscopic or imaginary offence; and
they gave vent to their feelings by cheering their late senior officer,
as he left the camp, loud enough and long enough for the citizens of
Holzminden to suspect either that Niemeyer had been assassinated or that
we had won the war.
That was the end of Bingham. His successor was of a less militant stamp
and things were allowed to drift on in their existing unsatisfactory
state. There was one brighter spot. Von Hänisch was induced to make a
grudging semi-official recantation about the parole business and we went
out for walks again.
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