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Escaping Club

[87] <h2>CHAPTER IX</h2> <h3>CAPTORS AND CAPTIVES</h3> One morning just before Appell, a Frenchman came along the passage and announced in each room that Colonel Tardieu was not going out to Appell that morning, and would be obliged if other officers would remain in their rooms when the bell went. We did not know exactly what the reason was, and I don't know now, but I think the Colonel had some right on his side—as much right as we usually had in Fort 9. Soon after this announcement a deputation of Russians waited on Major Gaskell to find out what the English intended to do. I may as well say here that Gaskell and most of the other Englishmen (myself included) did not altogether approve of this rowdyism on Appell, as we thought it might lead to serious restriction of our exercise and consequently of our chances of escaping, which was of course the only thing worth considering. As the Russian colonel insisted on acting as interpreter for the deputation, the discussion lasted a quarter of an hour before we understood that the Russians thought it would be better to go out, as they considered it probable that the Germans would treat our refusal as an organized mutiny. But they were, they said, prepared to follow our lead.[88] Gaskell and I then went off to see Colonel Tardieu. The Colonel said that, though it was best for us to stick together, this case was a purely personal matter, and we could please ourselves—he could only say that he was not going out, and that the French would follow his lead. Gaskell and I determined to compromise by leaving the matter unsettled, but to go out ourselves to Appell very late. In this way it was quite impossible for the Germans to prove organized mutiny against us, and equally impossible to hold Appell outside—and the whole thing could easily be put down to mismanagement and the lack of clear orders on the part of the Germans. This was, in fact, just what happened. The Germans were furious, but we pointed out that they had given so many contradictory orders about Appell that no one knew what they wanted. They soon saw that there was no case against us for organized mutiny and let the matter drop. The real trouble was that the Commandant was a man who was simply made to be ragged. A more unfortunate choice for a C.O. of a strafe camp can scarcely be imagined. He was a short, thick-set, dark man, about fifty years old, with a large drooping moustache and an inclination to stoutness. His hair was rather long, and he wore pince-nez for reading. I think he had only been C.O. of Fort 9 for a few months when we first went there, but some of the prisoners had known him when he had been in command of another camp, and he then had the reputation for being a kindly and sympathetic commandant. But when we first knew him constant badgering had already soured his temper. He was rather like[89] a schoolmaster whose form has got quite out of control, uncertain whether his boys were intending to be insolent or not. He never pretended to stand on his dignity—his appearance and behavior stamped him as an amiable shopkeeper cursed with occasional fits of violent temper. Then he laid himself open to be ragged so dreadfully. Although he knew little about the business of the fort and had to appeal to his Feldwebel on almost every point, yet he insisted on attending personally to nearly every officer who came into the bureau. The Feldwebel and two extremely efficient N.C.O.'s, known as Abel and the "Blue Boy," really managed the fort. This reminds me of a most amusing caricature of the Feldwebel ordering the C.O. about, which was pinned up in a conspicuous place. I think a Reclamation or official letter was sent in to General Peters, protesting against this state of affairs, for which the author got a few days' "jug." A few days' "jug" was just a farce. The cells were always full, and when you got your Bestrafung you were put on a waiting list and did your period of solitary confinement from three to five months later. One angry Frenchman wrote a furious Reclamation talking of justice and favoritism because Oliphant had been allowed to do a "slice of four days' jug" out of his turn on the list. A sheaf of Reclamations (the word was pronounced in either German or French way) used to go in daily to General Peters on every conceivable subject, from serious grievances to humorous insults, from a protest against the filthy habits of Bavarian sentries to an accusation of poisoning a pet rabbit.[90] Some men used to spend a great deal of their time writing Reclamations conveying veiled insults to the Germans. It seemed to me rather a waste of time, but they caused a great deal of amusement. It was just like composing a sarcastically offensive letter to a Government department. Some of the results were really very humorous and witty, but I am afraid they were wasted on the Bosche, and I have no doubt they all went straight into Peters' wastepaper-basket—at any rate, I never heard of a Reclamation having any effect except three days' "jug" for the author of the most offensive ones. When we first came to the fort we were told that some of the French had sworn an oath to drive the Commandant off his head. He was pretty far gone. Some of the Englishmen, chiefly Oliphant, Medlicott, and Buckley, with these Frenchmen, used to get an enormous amount of amusement by baiting the old fool. I remember once a conversation something as follows:— Frenchman.—"The German food you give us is very bad." Commandant.—"Es tut mir sehr leid, aber——" Frenchman.—"And it is impossible for any one but a Bavarian to eat it without wine." "Was meinen Sie, das dürfen Sie nicht sagen," answered the Commandant furiously. "Why won't you give us wine?" shouted the Frenchman. "You have got no right to speak to me like that." "And you don't know how to speak to a French officer; it's disgusting that when you give," etc.[91] "Sofort aus dem Bureau gehen?" (Will you go out of the bureau?) Both start shouting simultaneously: "Why won't you give us wine?" "Aus dem Bureau ... I will report you to General Peters." "Je m'en fous de General Peters—I won't go out till you speak politely to a French officer." "Go out of this bureau immediately when I tell you to." "I won't go till you learn to speak politely to me." The Commandant then rushed at the telephone and pretended to wind the handle violently, but without really calling up at all. He put the instrument to his ear and said: "Herr General Peters. Are you there? I am Hauptmann L'Hirsch. There is a Frenchman in the office who won't go away. What shall I do?" Slight pause for Peter's reply. Then to the Frenchman in French: "The General says that you must leave the bureau immediately." "Did the General speak politely?" "Yes." "Eh bien je sors." I have already given a description of a scene which took place the first time I ever entered the bureau—and these sort of scenes used to happen daily and hourly. Whenever the Commandant lost his temper, which he did without fail every time, he threw his arms about, clenched his fists, gesticulated furiously, and shouted at the top of[92] his voice. Soon after the Bojah affair, which I will describe later, when rows of this sort multiplied exceedingly, he was removed from the fort nothing less than a raving maniac with occasional sane intervals. In the court-martial which followed the Bojah case, the witnesses for the defense attempted to prove that the insane behavior of Hauptmann L'Hirsch was the main cause of all trouble in Fort 9. In an impartial court of justice, which this court-martial was not, I have not the smallest doubt that they would have succeeded in proving this, owing to L'Hirsch's behavior during the trial. The food given us by the Germans was not only very nasty, but there was not enough of it to keep a man alive. Perhaps this is an exaggeration, as I know that a man can keep alive, though weak, with very little food. But lack of food to this extent, combined with the hardships of a winter at Fort 9, would, I am sure, be enough to kill most strong men. Every day each man received a loaf of bread, shaped like a bun, about 4-1/2 inches across the bottom and 2 inches in depth. It was of a dirty brown color and, though unpleasant, it was eatable. Some even said they liked it. I don't know what it was made of, but I should think from the taste that rye, sawdust, and potatoes formed the ingredients, the latter predominating. It was sometimes very stodgy, and sometimes sour, but on the whole was better bread than we received either at Gütersloh or Clausthal. Later on, the size of the loaf was reduced by more than a third and the quality deteriorated very much, the percentage of sawdust and other unpleasant ingredients being much increased. We never ate[93] it unless we were very hard up, but, if left for a few days, it became as hard as a brick and was most useful as a firelighter. I remember an officer telling us that when he was a prisoner at Magdeburg in the early days of the war, the English prisoners had started playing rugger in the exercise yard with a piece of bread that had dropped in the mud. There was a terrible scene of indignation and excitement among the Germans. The guard turned out—fixed bayonets—charged—rescued the loaf—arrested every one, and I don't remember what happened after that, but all the criminals were severely punished. It must have been terrible to have been a prisoner in those early days. I heard hundreds of stories from the poor devils who were caught in 1914. Some of these stories were funny, some were filthy, that is to say, funny to a German mind, and some were enough to make a man swear, as many have sworn, never to speak to a German in peace time and never to show mercy to one in war.[2] Besides this ration of bread, we were given a small basin of soup daily—it was just greasy hot water with some vegetable, nearly always cabbage, in it. The amount of meat we received used to provide each of us with one helping of meat once every ten days. Two or three times during my stay at Ingolstadt I remember the meat was quite good, and, if it was eatable at all, we enjoyed it [94]enormously, as fresh meat was such a welcome change after the tinned food which we ate continually. Usually, however, it was impossibly tough, and sometimes merely a piece of bone and gristle. We tried keeping it for several days, but it always got high before it got tender. At the end of my time there, when Moretti had been elected chef of Room 42, we always used to make soup from it. Moretti used it five times for soup before he would throw it away, and announced, as he put the soup on the table, "La première," or "La troisième séance," or "La cinquième et dernière séance," whichever it was. The Germans also gave us a certain amount of perfectly undrinkable acorn coffee, and sugar at the rate of about two lumps per man per day. Sometimes they gave us some very nasty beans and sometimes some really horrible dried fish—I think it was haddock. It was very salt, and stank so that we used always to throw it away immediately—we simply could not stand it in the room. Room 39 used to hang all their fish outside the window during the cold weather—a revolting sight. It was their reserve rations, they said. Some of the Russians managed to eat their fish, and I believe there was a French room which had a special method of treating it, but it was generally voted uneatable throughout the fort. About one moderate sized potato per day per head concluded the food rations. This may seem a fairly generous allowance of food, even if it was not of very high quality, but in reality it was very little indeed. A day's rations would work out something as follows: one potato, one small plateful of hot-water soup, one cup acorn coffee, one lump of sugar,[95] two mouthfuls of fish, one mouthful of meat, four or five beans, and the loaf of bread. If any one thinks he can live on that, I should like him to try for a few months in cold weather. We had not many luxuries and comforts in Fort 9, and we did look forward to and enjoy the good things to eat that came from home. It is only people who have never been hungry who can pretend to be indifferent about food—that is to say, if they are well and in hard training as we were. The arrival of the parcel cart was hailed with enormous enthusiasm. I think our people at home would have been well repaid for all the trouble they took in packing the parcels if they could have seen the pleasure it gave us receiving them. Excitement reached a high pitch when we knew that a map or compass was hidden in one of the parcels. All the work of the fort—cleaning, cooking, emptying dust-bins, etc.—was done by French and Russian orderlies under the orders of German N.C.O.'s, and when our parcels came they were taken out of the cart and wheeled in on a hand-cart from the outside courtyard to the packet office. There they were sorted by Abel, a German N.C.O., with the help of a French orderly. When this had been done, usually the day after the arrival of the parcels, a list was put up of those who had received any, just inside the main gateway, on the official notice board. The giving out of the paquets was a pretty lengthy process, as each was opened by Abel or an assistant Hun and carefully searched. Each wing alternately was served first, and an orderly warned each room when the parcels for that room would be given out. This prevented there being a[96] long queue of officers waiting outside the paquet office. A sentry stood outside the door and admitted three officers at a time. A couple of yards inside the door there was a counter right across the room, and on the far side two German N.C.O.'s stood, each armed with a knife and a skewer—the first for opening the parcels, the latter for probing the contents for forbidden articles. You signed for your parcels and paid 5 Pf. or 10 Pf. for the cost of carting them up. The Germans, after showing you the address on the outside, cut them open and examined the contents, sometimes minutely and sometimes carelessly. Abel was an oily little brute, very efficient; we hated him and he hated us with a bitter hatred—not without reason on both sides. I think he hated the French more than he did the English, but he hated Medlicott more than all the rest put together. About two months before I left Fort 9 a rumor went round, to the intense joy of every one, that Abel was under orders for the West Front, and we all wished him luck, and he knew what we meant. Abel was just a bit too clever, and consequently got done in the eye sometimes; but I must own that he had a tremendous amount of work to do and did it very quickly and efficiently. His very capable assistant was the "Blue Boy," whose chief job was to lurk about the fort and try and catch us out. He was always standing in dark corners and turning up unexpectedly. It was his job to tap the bars of our windows with a sledge hammer every three days, and he took an active part in the pursuit if any one escaped. He was not so clever as Abel, but he had more time for[97] spying and was more persistent. It always seemed to me to be worth keeping on fairly decent terms with these two. It was only necessary to refrain from being offensive to be on better terms than most people in the fort. It was very different with that swine of a Feldwebel. He never walked about without a revolver in his pocket, and he never came alone down any dark passage; "et il avait raison," as the French said, as he had several pretty narrow shaves with brickbats as it was. At one time those tins and jars, such as butter, jam, quaker-oats, which had been packed and sealed in a shop, were passed over to us unopened, and only home-made and home-packed articles were examined. Later on, however, everything had to be turned out on a plate and the Germans kept the tin. Although very nearly all our parcels arrived eventually, they used to come rather irregularly, and several times as many as twenty to thirty parcels would arrive for the six of us who were in one room. Consequently, if all the food had been opened immediately, much of it would have gone bad before we could eat it. To obviate this difficulty, the Germans made shelves in the parcel office, and each room or mess could leave there the food which it did not need for the moment. At first sight it would seem that this arrangement would make the smuggling through of forbidden goods almost impossible, or at any rate that our difficulties would be greatly increased. In reality the business was simplified. As long as we knew in which tin or small package the map, compass, or what-not was coming, we could make[98] fairly certain, by methods which I shall describe later, of getting it without it ever being opened by the Germans. After Appell all the fort except the English had dinner. This was the hour when the potato, wood, oil, and coal stealing fatigues did their duty. For some weeks our French orderly used to steal potatoes for us as we needed them. He knew the ropes very well, as he had been in the fort for more than a year. One day, however, he said that this stealing in small quantities was a mistake, and that it would be safer to have one big steal once a month or so. Four of us, under the leadership of Carpentier, stole eight small sacks without much difficulty. It was just a matter of knowing the habits of our jailers and timing it accurately. The Germans were not so suspicious in those days as they became later. There was a small trap-door 6 feet up the wall in the central passage, which Carpentier knew how to open. He got in, filled the bags, and passed them out to us. To carry the full bags back to our rooms we had to pass under the eyes of a sentry. But that is just the best of a German sentry. He had had no orders to spot prisoners carrying bags, and he had also no imagination, so he took no notice. Between the hours of twelve and two we did our lessons. From two till four we played hockey or tennis. Tea was at four, when some Frenchmen usually came in to see us. Appell took place and the doors of the courtyards were shut about half an hour before sunset. After this Appell, till the evening Appell at nine o'clock, a sentry was left in our passage; but we could still communicate with the other wing. Bridge, reading, lessons, lectures, and preparation[99] for dinner took place during this period. The great amusement was lamp-stealing. During the winter the Germans allowed us, as we thought, a totally insufficient supply of oil, which only enabled us to burn our lamps for four hours out of the twenty-four. This meant going to bed at nine, which was of course ridiculous. The gloomy passages of the fort were mainly lit by oil lamps, and from these we used to steal the oil systematically. After a month or two the Germans realized that this was going on and reduced the number of lamps, and in the long passage where it was obviously impossible to stop us stealing oil they put acetylene lamps. Two lamps to a passage 70 yards long was not a generous allowance. Between 5 and 9 p.m. the sentry in the passage had special orders, a loaded rifle, and a fixed bayonet, to see that these lamps were not stolen. As all the sentries had been stuffed up by the Feldwebel with horrible stories about the murderous and criminal characters of the prisoners, it is not surprising that each sentry showed the greatest keenness in preventing us from stealing the lamps and leaving him, an isolated Hun, in total darkness and at the mercy of the prisoners. As any man came out of his room and passed one of the lamps, which were on brackets about 7 feet from the ground, the sentry would eye him anxiously and hold himself in readiness to yell "Halt!" and charge up the passage. The lamps were about 30 yards apart, and someone would come up, walk up to a lamp, and stop beneath it—the sentry would advance on him, and when he was sufficiently attracted, the officer would take out his watch and look at it by the light of[100] the lamp. Meanwhile a second officer would come quickly out of his room and take down the other lamp. As soon as the sentry perceived this he would immediately charge, with loud yells of "Halt! Halt!" but as he turned both lamps would be blown out simultaneously, and the officers would disappear into their respective rooms, leaving the passage in total darkness. The amusing part was that this used to happen every night, and the sentries knew it was going to happen; but against tactics of this sort, varied occasionally, of course, but always ending with the lights being blown out simultaneously, they were quite powerless! The evening, after the sentry had been withdrawn at 9 p.m., was spent in the ordinary occupations of gambling, reading, tracing maps, making German uniforms and pork-pie caps, with occasional fancy-dress balls or impromptu concerts. Sometimes mysterious lights would be seen in odd corners of the passage, where someone was industriously working at making a hole through the wall, removing the blocks of stone noiselessly one by one; and sometimes one would run up against a few men round a wonderful structure of tables and chairs in the middle of the passage, where someone was climbing up the skylight to inspect the sentries on their beats on the top parapet, but usually all was peace and quiet till about 11 p.m. At that hour the sentries were supposed to make us put out the lights in our rooms, but when they found that we paid little or no attention to repeated cries of "Licht ausmachen," and as there was no method, short of firing through the bars into a lighted bedroom, to make[101] us put them out, they eventually gave up these attempts, and, except for an occasional very offensive or conscientious sentry, we put out our lamps or candles when we wished. <div class="figcenter"> [102] <ANTIMG src="images/i110.jpg" width-obs="600" height-obs="438" alt="SKETCH MAP OF FORT 9 INGOLSTADT" title="" /> SKETCH MAP OF FORT 9 INGOLSTADT</div> <div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3> <div class="footnote">[2] The Germans varied their treatment of their prisoners inversely with their prospects of victory. When things were going badly with them—during most of 1916, for instance—much unnecessary harshness towards their prisoners was relaxed. When once more their hopes of final victory were raised by the invasion of Roumania and the checking of the Somme offensive, the poor prisoners had a rough time. Such is the way with bullies. </div> </div> <hr style="width: 65%;" /> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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