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Escaping Club

<hr style="width: 65%;" />[48] <h2>CHAPTER VI</h2> <h3>PAYING THE PIPER</h3> Next morning I was marched off with my two old guards, and during the march, by orders from the Company H.Q., a third was added. We went by train to Gladsbach, and I was locked up in a strong room in the citadel. There was a spy-hole in the door, and a number of people came and had a look at me through it. Several plates of vegetable soup and a large hunk of very satisfying brown army bread were given to me later. An exhaustive search of the cell disclosed a book hidden in the straw mattress (which was verminous, by the way) on deeds of valor in the German army, so I passed a peaceful and not unpleasant day. Next day I was given a ration of bread and cheese, and a pleasantly fat German, an Offizier Stellvertreter, with a humorous face, informed me that he had to conduct me to Clausthal, and then (in an aside) that he did not like the job a bit. There was a sentry with us, a tall, good looking man of fifty or so, who slung his rifle over his shoulder instead of carrying it at the "ready," as all my sentries had done for the last twenty-four hours. We got into a third-class reserved carriage at the station. The officer asked me some questions about my escape, and said that[49] he had been told I was a desperate character. "Are you going to try to escape again from me?" he said. I laughed, and said it depended on what sort of opportunity he gave me. "It will be a most uncomfortable journey," he said with a resigned sigh. Then he brightened up and said, "Why not give me your parole not to escape till Clausthal; it will be so much more comfortable?" "All right," I said, and we shook hands on it. The soldier immediately put his rifle, and the officer his revolver, on the rack. Then the latter got down a hand-bag, which was packed with food and a couple of bottles of wine, and we had a fine feed. We continued to have good feeds about every two hours all the way to Clausthal. During the lunch, I explained to him that if I had wanted to escape from him, he had given me several opportunities before I gave my parole. "Ah, what!" he said, "when you went to the lavatory?" "Yes," said I, "that was one of them; there was a door on the far side opening into the far carriage." "Ah, but that was guarded," he said, obviously rather startled. I knew that it had not been guarded, but it had not been worth my while attempting to escape, for many reasons. My clothes were badly torn and covered with blood, and it was broad daylight, so that I don't think I should have had any chance at all. My head was all bandaged up, and, if I had taken off the bandage to put my cap on, the wound would have started to bleed again. Also, I was beginning to feel the effects of my exertions, and had no map or compass, and very little idea of where I was. Consequently I was very glad to give my parole, and never regretted it. All my money had been taken[50] from me, but in the most generous way he insisted that I was his guest and bought literature, beer, and food for all three of us on all possible occasions. He said he could not understand how I managed to pass myself off as a German, as he would have known me by my accent for a foreigner immediately. Soon afterwards a pretty shop-girl got in (up to that time we had kept people out by saying it was a reserved carriage), and to my guard's surprise she had no suspicion of my accent. Eventually he told her that I was an Englishman, which she refused to believe till I owned that it was true, and then she edged away into the far corner and got out at the next station. We got into Clausthal late at night and had a very dark walk up to the camp. My old fat officer and I parted the best of friends. He was a vulgar fellow but a good sportsman, and I am very grateful to him for his kindness. The fact of the matter is that he had been nearly two years at the front, and it was most noticeable that any German who had been at the front for any length of time became quite a decent fellow. It is the swine who has never been near the front who is intolerable. Very much the same contrast is noticeable in peace time between those Germans who have lived abroad (especially in England) and those who have always stayed at home. I suppose that an Englishman who has never traveled is a pretty intolerable sort of person to a foreigner! The little lieutenant met me and showed me into a room in the German guardhouse, and told me to change into my uniform, and then to take any clothes I should[51] want for the night. I was put into a very nasty, bare, whitewashed brick room, next the pigsties. A Russian orderly brought me my food, and through him I had no difficulty in secretly exchanging notes with Nichol and others in the camp. I was allowed to have any food they sent me, so, being very hungry, I naturally overate myself. Exercise consisted of half an hour's walk morning and afternoon, and I found that quite insufficient. My cell was next the pigs on one side and next the motor for making electricity on the other, and was consequently both smelly and noisy, besides being dirty. I asked to be allowed to have a bath, but it was not granted me for some days—four, I think. There were no windows to the place, but there were two doors and one doorway; that is to say, when they shut me in, they first locked an iron cage in front of the doorway, and outside that a wooden door. The wooden door, however, did not quite come to the top of the doorway; there was a gap of about nine inches, and through this gap light and air were supposed to enter. There was a bed, a basin, and a horrible stove, which either got red hot or went out. Books and tobacco were sent in to me; but, even so, I spent a fairly uncomfortable fourteen days. After I had been in there for a week, Kicq was brought in and we shared the room, which was only about 10 feet by 6 feet. We had to put one bed on top of the other to fit the beds in at all. I was beginning to feel the disappointment of failure very bitterly, and should really have preferred to have been left alone to brood over it in peace. Kicq, however, did his best to make an exchange[52] of Spanish and English lessons a regular occupation, and we eventually spent a good deal of our time like that. It was a disgusting sort of existence, and for several days it was extremely dirty and uncomfortable. Eventually, after repeated complaints, some improvements were made. We were not allowed to have a bath in the main building, as we would have been liable to come in contact with the other prisoners; so Nichol sent us in a tin hip-bath. We also got leave from the lieutenant to have our outside door open for half an hour in the morning and half an hour in the afternoon. As the sentries changed every two hours, it was a simple matter to tell each sentry that we had not yet had it open for half an hour that morning, so by this ruse de guerre we got a certain amount of light and air into the place. One morning about 9.30, whilst we were in the middle of washing and shaving and having breakfast all at once, a General, an A.D.C., the Camp Commandant, and the lieutenant all suddenly appeared outside our "grill" and were admitted by the sentry. I was in pyjamas and a tunic, and Kicq even more undressed, with his face covered with shaving soap, but we gave the General as military a "stand to attention" as we could under the circumstances. He answered our salute very politely, taking no notice of our undress uniform, and turning to the Commandant, said, "Sie waren in dem Tunnel gefangen?" "Nein, nein," said the lieutenant, saluting violently, and Kicq and I grinned, whilst the lieutenant and the Commandant showed obvious signs of anger! For a long time we had believed that the Germans knew of our tunnel and were trying to[53] catch us red-handed in it, and this of course confirmed our suspicions. The General was told that we both spoke German, and asked us if we had any complaints. We objected to the place in which we were imprisoned, but otherwise had not much of which to complain. I then said that we should like to receive our punishment, since at present we were just under arrest "pending investigation." The General turned to his A.D.C., who, saluting between each sentence, said that the General had signed our punishment the day before and that we were sentenced to fourteen days' Stubenarrest, and that our punishment started from the day he had signed it. We thanked him, and said that was just the thing we were particularly anxious to know, and felt delighted that we had got off so lightly. Two days later we went over into the old room in which Long, Nichol, and I had originally lived in No. 3 Barracks. The windows of the room were whitewashed, and there was a sentry in front of our door, the idea being, of course, to prevent us communicating with the other prisoners. This was quite absurd and nothing but red tape, as we were allowed to have the top part of the window open and we were separated only by thin wooden walls from the rooms on either side of us. It was only necessary to bang on the wall and shout anything you might wish to say. If we wanted anything, such as books, some one just threw them through the window to us. One day when the lieutenant was in the room, a book came hurtling through the window and hit him full in the chest. The German kept his temper very well and merely remonstrated with us,[54] saying that it was unnecessary to break the rules when we could have anything we wanted by asking him. He was quite right, and I put it down to his credit that he kept his temper, but the amusement of disobeying rules slightly relieved our very monotonous existence. I have already explained that the whole camp was divided into two by torpedo netting. For the rest of our imprisonment at Clausthal, we used to take our exercise in this lower or southern section, all the other prisoners being cleared out of it for half an hour in the morning and half an hour in the afternoon for that purpose. The weather was beautifully fine, and, as the tennis-court was in this section, we decided we had better play tennis during our half an hour's exercise. We just banged on the wall and asked the people next door to leave two racquets and some balls outside our door. This was a great success. Kicq was not much of a player, but he improved fast. The sentries were on the whole quite friendly. They were ostentatiously officious when another sentry was near, and did not care that an officer of any nationality other than English should see them talking to us. Most of them were physically unfit or badly wounded, and, though all seemed to be sick of the war, they did their duty in as inoffensive a way as possible. The old chap whom I had bribed was several times our sentry, and when he was on at night he would allow us to go into the room next door and see Nichol and Long. We in return gave him some good things to eat and hot chocolate and coffee when the nights were cold. When I was alone in the pigsty we had had a long talk in which he said that the N.C.O. of the guard had[55] told him that I was actually over the frontier when I was caught. I am sure that this was not the case, however. A few days before we expected to be released, the lieutenant came in and told us that the General had made a mistake and that our Stubenarrest, as opposed to our Untersuchungschaft, did not start when the General signed our Bestrafung, but when the warrant was received by the Camp Commandant. Consequently, we should not get out till November 12th. I was extremely angry, as I was weary of the confinement, but Kicq took it very philosophically. <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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