- 'The Flight from Captivity on'
- 'the Third Attempt'
- Told by Corporal John Southern
- and set down by A. E. Littler
How I Escaped from Germany
a British prisoner in Germany early in the war
The thrilling experiences of a British soldier who succeeded, at the third attempt, in escaping from imprisonment in Germany. Rendered desperate by the brutality of his jailers, he made up his mind to get away at all costs. Once he tunneled his way out of the camp, only to be recaptured and punished. A second time he tried, only to meet with the same fate and more severe punishment. But liberty still beckoned, and yet again, with two comrades, Southern essayed the feat — this time successfully — and eventually reached the dear homeland.
I — “What I Heard in Captivity"
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.
II — In a "Black Hole" on Wheels
I have no wish to paint the picture in lurid colors, yet I wish some of our pro-Germans and "pacifists" could have had a taste of that journey to Germany. Over seventy of us were packed together in one cattle-truck, occasionally kicked or prodded with bayonets by the gentle exponents of Kultur. Food? We were shown loaves of bread, we were asked to look at buckets of water — but these things were not for us; they were merely exhibited to torture us, a typical example of German spite. For three days and three nights we were huddled in that truck "Black Hole" on wheels. Not all of us reached Germany alive.
As for myself, I was too hard to kill, too full of hate and detestation of my captors to go under without a struggle, and during the seven-kilometre tramp from the station to the "Munster Laager" I registered a mental vow that "this child" was going to make a bid for freedom at the first opportunity. As we left the station the civil population, who were none too delicate in their attentions, sang "Deutschland itber Alles." And they seemed to think it was true, too.
This, however, was only on a par with the arrogance we encountered in the Laager. The guard told us how German hosts had invaded England — or were going to do it in two months; and of how the All-Highest War Lord, the Kaiser, was to have his Christmas dinner at Buckingham Palace. The ignorance of some of these "educated" Huns was colossal, and you will perhaps scarcely credit the fact that I have been asked by Germans whether it was possible to get all the way to England by train!
Soon after we got into camp we begged an officer to give us water, but with a contemptuous sneer he advised us to go to England for it. Battens of straw, laid on bare boards, were our beds, and there was no covering. With so many French, English, and Russians as prisoners, I can tell you it looked rather hopeless just then for the Allies' chances of victory. Those were the early days, remember, when the Germans seemed to be winning all along the line, and when every success made them all the more brutal.
Right through the winter of 1914-15 food was scarce and clothing scant, and punishment more liberal than either. For a paltry offence I was tied to a post, six hours at a stretch, for ten days, while for telling a brutal German what I thought of him I was put into a dark cell for nine days. This particular Hun had knocked down and kicked a Norfolker, who then went for him with his shovel. The Englishman was marched off — to what fate I am ignorant.
A piece of black bread and a cup of coffee was our customary breakfast, and for dinner we had each a pint of soup which got steadily worse as the winter advanced. Six pounds of bread served ten men for a day, and occasionally — it was like an angel's visit — we had a bit of beef or sausage. I spent the first twelve months of my imprisonment between Redbarn, Munster, and Sennelager, often going out in charge of working parties, for a non-commissioned officer doesn't actually labor except of his own free will. I cudgelled my brains until my head ached in trying to devise plans to escape, but so far had seen no opportunity.
At the Munster camp, where I again found myself permanently lodged in September, 1915, I slept in a big wooden shed which accommodated two hundred of us. Right round the camp, at a height of eight yards, ran a fence of "live" electric wire. To attempt to pass through this meant certain death. I had no wish to try electrocution as a means of suicide, although it would have been speedier and less irritating to the temper than the kicks and cuffs and manifestations of spitefulness to which we were all liable. On the outer side of the wire perambulated the sentries. What chance had a prisoner to escape?
My straw bed was placed in a far corner of the "little wooden hut" to which I have referred. At last a happy thought occurred to me. I would burrow my way from the hut to the outer world, or, in other words, beyond the deadly wire! This, however, was easier said than done, but after a time I commandeered a shovel and surreptitiously removed a piece of board from one of the rafters. Possessed of these implements, which I carefully hid, I waited until all was quiet and the tired sons of England, Russia, and France were fast asleep. Then, raising two or three boards beneath my heap of straw, I started upon a voyage of discovery.
III — "How I Tunneled to Liberty"
Fortunately for me, there was a hollow space beneath the whole expanse of flooring. Quietly I began to dig in the soft soil, pushing it beneath the floor as my hole grew bigger. The first night I kept at my task for two or three hours, and then, leaving my board and shovel in the cavity, I returned to my bed, carefully replacing the lengths of flooring which I had removed, and obliterating all traces of my pleasant evening's occupation.
It seemed a forlorn hope upon which I had entered — half a chance in ten million. Yet I was prepared to seize it, ready to risk imprisonment and punishment on discovery rather than not make the attempt.
For six weary weeks I worked at my tunnel, and so secretly was the job carried on that only one man in the hut shared the knowledge with myself. I often told this man off to keep watch and ward and give me the signal should any too-inquisitive sentry or guard take it into his head to depart from his wonted custom and visit the place at night. The sharer of my secret decided that when I had burrowed clear of the sentries he would escape with me, but at the last moment his nerve forsook him and he "cried off."
As I have said before, I was thoroughly "fed up"; I had reached that condition of mind when we believe the ills we are enduring cannot be equalled by anything that is to follow. Nothing save force, I decided, should deter me from pursuing my plan to the bitter end.
Thus, night after night, I dug and delved, distributing the debris as best I could. I took precautions with diabolical cunning, for I was not going to throw away my chances by any eleventh-hour recklessness. Six weeks — forty-two nights, to be exact — I played B'rer Fox in my "dug-out," six feet down, until my tunnel was fifteen or twenty yards long and big enough for me to crawl through. The sounds above and the distance that I knew the wire fence to be from the rear of the hut told me when my burrowing had gone far enough.
It was a fortnight before Christmas, 1915, that I broke out from my burrow. I timed my exit for the change of sentries, at seven-thirty in the evening. Of food I had virtually none, with the exception of an odd biscuit or so. I possessed, however, what I deemed to be more important than food — a compass, bought from a Frenchman, which I had guarded far more jealously than Hun ever guarded Englishman.
After the preparations I have described, the actual escape seemed as easy as falling off a log. I emerged from the hole, saw that the coast was clear, and made off towards the north-west. Walking throughout the night, keeping to the fields and the woods, and continually crossing ditches and other obstacles, I put as much distance between me and Minister Laager as was humanly possible. It was really very uneventful.
In the day-time I kept to the woods, sleeping and resting ; at night-time when compelled to cross a road I slung my boots across my shoulder and flitted by like a shadow. The weather was wet, my clothing was well-nigh soaked, hunger gripped me — and then came Nemesis.
As a matter of fact, I had met very few people. Three nights I tramped, three days I lay hid. It was during the third night that all my plans went wrong, all my fond visions were dissipated like a pricked bubble. And I believe it was my over-cautiousness in walking a road without boots that proved my undoing.
IV — Recaptured — "I Was Sentenced to Solitary Confinement"
A policeman challenged me and I replied — I hadn't much German — "Deutsch." All, I think, would have gone well had he not glanced at my feet. Then he promptly switched on an electric lamp, worn at his breast, and covered me with a revolver. The game was up; my race was run! I had to admit that I was an "Englander." To add to my mortification, I learned from the officer that I was only five or six kilometres from the Dutch frontier.
Well, to give the German his due, that policeman played the good Samaritan. He knocked up a cottager and got me some coffee and bread — and never did anything taste so sweet. I was utterly reckless as to my fate, for I had developed a devil-may-care frame of mind. I was disappointed — that was inevitable. Who wouldn't have been disappointed at seeing a scheme that had arrived so near fruition come toppling down like a house of cards? Punishment I knew I should get, and punishment I certainly received.
I was sentenced to ten days' solitary confinement in a cell, at first totally dark, to which the light was gradually admitted. Next I was paraded round the camp as a standing example of Germany's might, and a hideous warning to "evil-doers." A red and white band sewn to my sleeve gave notice to all and sundry that this was the ill-mannered churl who spurned Kultur and wanted to get back to that despicable England about which the Germans sang.
I should here explain that, in the intervals of contriving splenetic irritants for their prisoners, my captors often sang the notorious "Song of Hate." I have seen them march in all solemnity around the camp singing the "Vaterland" and "Gott Strafe England" — and the spectacle was too much even for my limited sense of humor.
Their brutalities were beyond the belief of any commonplace civilized beings. At the Sennelager camp, for instance, there were many civilian prisoners, and they were treated far worse than we soldiers were — and that's saying something. One especial form of amusement (for the Huns) was the shaving of civilians. Whether it was as punishment or as sheer deviltry I don't know, but I have seen many civilians shaved on one side of the head and face, with half their hair, half their whiskers, and half their moustaches gone. Fit game for a Nero, wasn't it?
Neither that ten days' confinement, nor yet the beautiful red and white band, and my exhibition before my compatriots, broke my spirit, and I was still determined to see England or die. The Germans talked of their glorious deeds. Goodness knows how many times they sent our navy to the bottom of the sea, and I have forgotten how often they told me their Zepps were "sending England to H------." They were very full of their Zepps, by the way, but we didn't swallow all their stories either of their ships in the air, their ships on the sea, or their victorious armies on land.
Now and again, you see, authentic news reached us, and an occasional smuggled newspaper told us that the tide had turned and gave us heart of grace to bear our burdens, if not with patience, yet with some degree of fortitude.
V — "My Second Attempt — and Penalty"
My second attempt to escape was even a greater fiasco than the first; I had scarcely a run for my money. A cart daily conveyed swill from the camp to a large piggery, this work being delegated to a French prisoner. A man named Grantham and myself resolved that, whether we went to the dogs or not, we would at least go to the pigs. With the cognizance of the French driver, we hid ourselves between the swill barrels, which were usually left in the cart on its arrival at the piggery overnight. We were not missed from the camp, and remaining in our unsavory quarters until dusk fell over the land; we then slunk away like Arabs.
I have omitted to tell you that once again I had a compass. The other one had been taken from me on my recapture, but I had purchased a second from a Russian for the sum of seven shillings. We were without food, and a dark night seemed to favor us, but before morning — we had covered only six or seven kilometres — a couple of sentries simply ran into us, and we were haled back to camp. It was ignominious, but inevitable.
If one escape merited ten days' solitary confinement, a second justified twenty-one. At any rate, that was my portion, and Grantham got ten days. Once again I was trotted round the camp as an object lesson on ingratitude for favors already received. It was after this that the monotony of prison camp life was relieved by a gentle jaunt to Russia. I am not surprised that people should imagine that I am romancing when I speak of going from Germany to Russia. Yet I am stating nothing but the bare truth. Eighty-nine men from the Minister camp were told that they were to join a party destined for "unknown regions," and as one of the officers put it to me, he considered I had "better go, or I should go somewhere worse."
How that would have been possible none but a German mind can conceive. At a railway station two thousand of us, sad-looking fellows most of them, were assembled from different camps. We were in the train for seven days, plus two days at Frankfort, before we reached our destination. At Frankfort martial law was read, and we were politely informed that we were to be asked three times whether we would work, and if we refused we were to be bayoneted! It was to Windau, in Russian Poland, that we were eventually taken, and the life there was a hell upon earth.
The re-laying of railway metals torn up by the retreating Russians and a certain amount of farm work were the duties imposed upon us. The sights I have seen! I hate the very thought of them! Men were continually being felled to the ground and kicked and bayoneted. I have even heard captives, worn out and dispirited, beg the sentries to shoot them and thus end their misery, and the poor wretches meant it, for it would be better to die than to endure such slavery. One poor chap, goaded into retaliation, was kicked viciously, had a bayonet thrust through his leg, and was then flung, half dead and bleeding, into the guard-room.
After this there was a wholesale refusal to work and much bludgeoning, and general mutiny threatened. The Germans saw they had gone too far, and they capitulated. They told us that if we behaved fair to them they would be fair to us. All the time we were under martial law, and the orders that were read out to us were signed by Hindenburg.
Escape now seemed farther off then ever, so I played 'possum, pretended to have rheumatism and other ailments, and was sent back to Miinster. I was still wearing the red and white signal of my attempts to escape, and one of the first things that I did on my return was to commandeer a fresh coat, otherwise I should have been a marked man.
What new plan of campaign could I evolve? Two had been tried and failed; yet I was just as keen and just as ready as ever to stake even life itself on a desperate throw. It was now that I met with a bit of luck, for I happened to fall in with Private Leonard Walker, of Oldham, and Private Fussell, of Taunton, one a Welsh Fusilier and the other a Somerset. They were bent on escape even as I was, and Walker had also tried the game before, having spent five days and five nights in the open with a chum, living on biscuits and a rabbit which they picked up and steering a course by map and compass. They, like me, had been caught, when crossing a railway line. A woman signalled to the sentry ; they were captured, and had undergone solitary confinement. Walker, Fussell, and myself were a pretty good trio, with none of the turning-back spirit in our composition. Lot's wife turned back, you'll remember, but her fate was a shorter shrift than ours, and far less uncomfortable. A grand chap for the job was Walker, and his experience stood us in good stead. He studied the situation, weighed matters carefully, was resourceful and cute, but nevertheless had that touch of recklessness so necessary for such a venture.
VI — "My Third Attempt — The Flight"
We fixed up our arrangements and bided our time. We stuffed our pockets — "stuffed" is a good word — with twenty-one biscuits saved from our parcels — twenty-one for three of us. We also had two tins of sardines, and, better than all, a map and compass. One thing that we determined to do was to get rid of a conspicuous stripe sewn down the sleeves of our coats and the legs of our trousers. It was a bit of a puzzle at first, but Walker got over the difficulty by cutting up his waistcoat and inserting strips under the light stripes, which, when we got clear, were torn away, leaving us to all intents and purposes clothed like ordinary citizens and not like wicked "Englanders."
It was on September 27th — fateful, happy day! — that our opportunity came. We were at work in a barn on a farm four or five miles from the Laager, for which work I had volunteered with a view to escape, feeding a threshing machine. It was a job that was supposed to last four days, but while the guard was out of the way we quietly put the machine out of action with a crowbar.
Then we went off to dinner and ate as hearty a meal as we could in case of emergencies. Two sentries stood guard over about twenty of us, and one of them showed signs of sleepiness.
"Why, Colonel," said I to the other, "aren't you going to have a nap with your friend?" He grinned and walked away to lie down at the far end of the barn. Thereupon we three conspirators passed the tip to each other, and off we went. There were some thick bushes growing outside the barn, and we had placed our coats containing the food near the door. I was wearing a cap, a cardigan jacket, a black scarf, and an old coat. I won't deny that my heart beat pretty briskly as we made for the bushes as quickly and as noiselessly as we could.
There was good cover of this sort for a mile or so, and it was pretty certain we weren't missed, at any rate until we had got quite a respectable start. We had some open country to negotiate before we found the friendly shelter of a wood, and lay there until night closed in.
As a ruse we first turned eastwards and then cautiously worked our way round until we had our heads in the direction of liberty. During the night we heard sounds which led us to believe we were being searched for. We had resumed our flight from the wood about seven o'clock, and we kept going until day broke. Another wood sheltered us during the day, and for the time being we dared not leave it, for our furtive observations showed us a considerable tract of open country which it would have been madness to face in broad daylight. We were taking no undue risks this time, and we husbanded our resources and our strength, even as we husbanded our food supply, taking it turn and turn about to watch and sleep.
Water in the ditches supplied us with drink, and the rain saw to it that we had plenty of water both without and within! When darkness returned we set off once again, often starting at our own shadows and slinking back into the blackness whenever we heard a sound. There was safety as well as weakness in numbers — safety in our lookout, and weakness in the inability of three men to give a reasonable explanation if we were tackled. Whenever we had to take to the road we carried our boots and trod as warily as panthers. Three or four times we had to pass through towns and villages, but our luck was in, and we were not challenged. Our heads were turned aside and as much distance imposed as possible whenever we heard anyone walking on the thoroughfares.
Bootless and footsore, we also traversed four miles of railway, and it seems miraculous, looking back as I now do, that we were never seen or stopped by sentries. Three times, too, we had, willy-nilly, to cross rivers. We "did" our first river in boats which we found secured to the bank of the stream. There were two boats, and in the darkness we paddled them as silently as Red Indians to the other side, and then turned them adrift. I suppose it was what you might have called a theft, but stern necessity knows no law, and a German boat more or less was neither here nor there.
Another river was spanned by a bridge, and you can imagine how we slipped across, as noiselessly as ghosts. Neither bridge nor boat offered itself as a solution of stream number three, but it did not prove a particularly formidable obstacle, and we walked through it, the water rising to our waists.
From dusk to the time the first streak of light began to gild the eastern sky we "padded the hoof." On the fourth night we reckoned that we must be nearing the frontier. Tired and weary, footsore and very hungry, our vigilance was never relaxed. That last night we approached a town of considerable size. We did not dare to walk through it, and made a long detour in order to pass wide of the outskirts. Though we knew it not, we were nearing the last lap of our journey.
It was dark, with a velvety blackness, and neither moon nor stars were showing. Suddenly the stillness of the night was broken by the challenge of a sentry. Evidently he had seen three silhouttes, or imagined he had.
Were we to have had all our toil in vain? Were we to be shut out even as the gates of Paradise seemed to be opening to us?
Without a sound we dropped prone upon the ground and waited, waited, listening to the beating of our hearts.
For twenty minutes or more we lay there, each thinking his own thoughts, and listening to the silence. At last, with a whispered word, we rose and moved on, our boots in our hands, to the north-west. Soon we saw the white stones which told us that the frontier was in sight, and I rolled down a steep bank and walked right into a man. It was a soldier. Hazy in mind, scarcely realizing that I had crossed the Rubicon, I stood speech- less. Then the sentry spoke.
It was a Dutchman!
VII — "Saved — We Reached Dutch Soil"
I called out joyfully, and my comrades, the men who had proved themselves true and staunch, having joined me. The soldier made himself understood, and tumbled to the fact that we had escaped from the land of captivity.
"France, Russia, or Englander?" he asked.
"Englander!" I replied, with pride. Out came his hand, and I clasped it. He greeted all three of us warmly, muttering his congratulations the while. To a house close by he took us, fed us, and warmed us. It was like a foretaste of heaven, and we could hardly believe that our troubles were at an end.
We had struck the frontier, it appeared, in the State of Overyssel, thirty to forty kilometres from the Munster camp, and we could not have made a luckier strike. It was not long before we were put in touch with the British Consul and were sent to the Sailors' Home at Rotterdam. Everybody was kindness itself, and I shall never forget the good old Dutch pastor who prayed with us that we might reach home in safety.
To each of us he gave a Testament, in which he wrote our names and his own, together with the words, "Take God's gift, the gift of Eternal Life, by believing in the Lord Jesus." Passports were soon obtained; we were photographed just as we were, and at last we landed at Hull, thankful with a big thankfulness.
Need I describe my home-coming? I had had no chance to prepare my people, and I dropped down upon them like a visitor from Mars. It was a brief visit to begin with, for my first duty was to report myself at headquarters, and by the next train I was on my way to Chester, where I was immediately granted a month's leave. What is to be done with me it is for others to say, but I am hoping I shall get some of my own back upon the Huns.
With scarcely an exception, you can say that the British in captivity are in good heart and are not cowed or browbeaten. I am told that I am one of the very few Britishers who have escaped, and I am not surprised at that, for we are more strictly guarded than the French or Russians, who are often permitted to work on farms from Monday to Saturday without any guard whatever.
My impressions of Germany are of no value, for I saw little of the civil population. But it was evident from the yarns spun us by the soldiers that they are fed on lies and that a day of awakening will come. To my mind, they are certainly suffering from the effects of the blockade. When we first arrived in Germany food seemed plentiful, but latterly the soldiers often asked us for biscuits and other things sent us in the parcels which kept us alive.
Working parties on the farms were fed decently in 1914 and 1915, but during these last months the farmers would give them a few potatoes and a scrap of bacon, and excuse themselves on the ground that it was all they had, and there was no food in the country. For what it is worth, it is my opinion that Germany is kept going largely by the work of prisoners of war. They labor on farms, they are sent into coal mines, chemical works, and munition factories, they make and repair railways. They work hard — from six in the morning till six at night — and their wages are threepence a day. Whether the Germans still believe they are winning I cannot say, but their treatment of prisoners has lately improved, and this seems significant. Winning, the German is a bully and a cad; beaten, he whines, and his temperament is reflected in his conduct towards those who are in his power.
