Churchill's Iceman

by Henry Hemming

  They took on the second fence in a similar fashion, only to spot a third. As if caught up in an allegorical fable, this third and final fence was ‘the biggest we had yet come across. It was something worse than tall.’ The barbed wire ran along a series of brackets set on a cruel overhang. Again the Londoner presented himself as a climbing frame for the Yorkshireman who scrambled over ‘with a great deal of difficulty’, before it was Pyke’s turn. He sent himself shooting skywards, but on reaching the top was unable to hoist his leg over. For a moment he was suspended in the wire like a fly in a web, suit torn, legs akimbo, stuck in a no-man’s-land between detainee and fugitive. The summer before he had leapt out over Malmo harbour to catch the departing ferry and again, for an instant, it was unclear how this would end. This was becoming a refrain in his life. The thrill of a challenge often proved irresistible. He seemed to live without any fear of the future or indeed of failure; he was someone who jumped first and made calculations later. On this occasion gravity was against him and he came crashing down on the wrong side of the fence.

  With his heart thumping against his chest Pyke picked himself up and again clambered up to the barbed-wire overhang before falling back down. On the other side of the fence Falk looked on in despair, telling his friend how exposed they were and what an easy target they would make for a passing sentry. This last remark – like pepper under Pyke’s nose – seemed to power him up to the overhang. ‘I had got to the top; I had got over the strand of wire that leant back; I had not an ounce of strength left. I could do no more. I just held on, balancing myself. Below me was my friend; he was looking up at me and his face was singularly intense, and I saw that the boot blacking had left a smudge below his mouth. He must be saying something, for his lips were moving. It was odd, for I could hear nothing. Then suddenly his face grew larger, and I began to dream. I felt him catch me, and in a moment I had come to.’

  Shattered, full of adrenalin, the two men jogged away from the fence towards the banks of the canalised River Spree where they put on their boots and tried to walk along the towpath as if nothing had happened. Yet before they could relax they saw ahead the glow of what looked like a cigar. ‘Was it a constable?’ thought Falk. ‘It was too late to fly. To walk on was the only chance. I called out a cheery good evening as we passed a gentleman in white flannel trousers. He responded, stared, and vanished. Would he give the alarm?’

  They could not risk it. The two panicked fugitives slipped off the towpath and for several hours made their way through back gardens and allotments before reaching Charlottenburg Park, where Pyke had watched the troop trains ten months earlier. With dawn coming on they found a sheltered sandpit and settled down to rest. Falk said his prayers and fell asleep, yet Pyke remained awake.

  At the speed of an express train he began to process the events of the last few hours, until at last he lay down with his hands behind his head, ‘watching the stars fade away in the face of the first glimmering of the first day’. He later described those moments in his life when he had identified a problem, solved it and realised his solution as ‘rare beatitudes which nothing can excel’. Here was one of these. The confidence which had been leached out of him during four months in solitary confinement was flooding back, and in this new mood Pyke began to feel that anything was possible: he might even be able to slip out of Germany undetected.

  HOW TO BECOME INVISIBLE

  ONE OF THE first questions that Pyke had asked himself after making the decision to escape, in March 1915, was how to get out of Germany as fast as possible. But really this was the wrong question. For it was precisely what the German authorities would expect him to ask when pondering his first move. If he and Falk were to slip out of the country unnoticed they must confound expectations at every turn. The police would anticipate them taking the fastest train to nearby neutral territory – Holland, Switzerland or Denmark – which was why they had to do the opposite.

  They could travel away from London towards Romania, or aim for a non-neutral country, such as Austria-Hungary, and from there continue to Italy, which at that stage of the war was neutral.

  This was the first plan that Falk and Pyke agreed upon in Ruhleben, and with the aid of an out-of-date school atlas they had worked out a route to the Austro-Hungarian frontier, only to read in a German newspaper that several army units had been stationed nearby. The territory they had hoped to walk through would be saturated with soldiers, so the plan was abandoned.

  Next Pyke had turned his attention to the Baltic coast and developed what became known between Falk and him as ‘The Baltic Scheme’. His idea was to move to the coast as slowly as possible – preferably on foot – before stealing a boat and sailing to Falster Island in Denmark. This idea also had to be scrapped after they read in a newspaper that for security reasons it was no longer permitted to moor small boats off the Baltic coast. Pyke, however, found it hard to let go of the scheme.

  Some of the options Pyke and Falk considered as they planned their escape

  ‘I repeated to myself countless times, “Well, if we can’t get boats there, we must take boats with us,” without quite grasping the meaning of the phrase. [. . .] How to take boats with us? Then I saw it – portable canoes.’

  He had seen an advertisement for portable canoes in a magazine that was lying around the camp. Rather than attempt to sneak out of Germany undetected, he and Falk, perhaps with some other escapees, could leave in broad daylight posing as friends on a canoeing holiday. Indeed, the more of them in the canoe, the better. With half a dozen canoeists they could pretend to be a Gesangverein, or singers’ club, and paddle out of the country singing patriotic German songs. Pyke even put his mind to choosing a name for this club, one so German that it would make even the most patriotic German baulk. By then it was late May 1915, and earlier that month a German U-boat had torpedoed the SS Lusitania off the coast of Ireland, sparking outrage around the world at the loss of more than 1,000 civilian lives. He would call their club the Lusitania Verein – the Lusitania Singing Club.

  All he needed now were fellow canoeists. Wallace Ellison, an economics lecturer at Frankfurt University, doubled up with laughter when he heard the plan, as did Falk, before telling Pyke to grow up. Yet over the following days Falk and Ellison both fell in love with the idea and in early June they agreed to go ahead with it.

  Again, there was a catch. The advertisement for portable canoes had disappeared. Though Pyke searched through every bin in Ruhleben, he did so in vain. The Lusitania Verein was dissolved before it could sing its first song.

  In the days that followed a crippling sense of doubt set in. They had spent two months trying to find a route out of Germany but had failed so far. Pyke’s response was to instil in himself a new steeliness. He urged himself to ‘go forward from one discouragement to another automatically as if by instinct’, to become emotionally less attached to his ideas. He also questioned the level of his ambition. Perhaps their plans were too modest; it was time to be more brazen and consider ‘something utterly and hopelessly mad and impossible’.

  At this point Pyke turned to his great boyhood passion: detective fiction. It was no good coming at the question of how to get out of Germany with the mentality of a Sherlock Holmes, that icon of enlightened Victorian rationality, who, in Pyke’s opinion, would last no more than a few minutes in wartime Germany. They needed to adopt the approach of that suave chameleon Arsène Lupin, the literary creation of Conan Doyle’s contemporary Maurice Leblanc.

  Lupin was a very different detective from Holmes. He was dashing, duplicitous and reckless: a gentleman-thief and trickster. ‘The great charm about Arsène is you never know quite who or where he is. It is just the opposite with Holmes. Arsène hardly ever is so puerile, so banal as to think of the idea of disguising himself. He simply becomes two people at once. He is simply the prince of criminals and the chief of police at the same time, and nobody can say whether the chief of police took to crime, or the prince of crooks to guarding the property of the public
. And the whole thing works beautifully.’

  The key to solving this problem, Pyke realised, was to reformulate his original question. Rather than ask which disguise would allow him and Falk to travel unnoticed from Ruhleben to neutral territory, the question should be: how would we like to appear in the eyes of those who meet us? The difficulty was that they needed different characters for different situations. Pyke asked himself what Lupin would do. That was easy. He would invent a string of characters and in the eyes of his beholders be each of them at the same time. There was no need for costume changes; instead they would simply alter their accounts of who they were.

  It would be an extreme test of their ability to play certain parts and improvise. Neither man was an actor, but both agreed to the plan. If escaping from Ruhleben had been a scientific exercise, then extricating themselves from Germany looked set to be theatrical. Pyke was about to be given a crash course in being two different people at the same time, or how to lead a double life.

  On the morning after breaking out of Ruhleben the two fugitives woke up in a sandpit in Charlottenburg Park feeling hungry and sore. Having brushed each other down, they stepped out of the undergrowth onto Spandauer Strasse and began to walk towards the centre of Berlin. The performance had begun.

  For both men, moving freely down a pavement like this felt exquisite and doubtless they would have preferred to say nothing and merely marvel at the sensation of being unencumbered by the sight of wire fences and sentries, but to do so might have marked them out. Instead they started to play the parts of two friends discussing last night’s beery antics. As they came within earshot of several passing pedestrians, Pyke exclaimed hammily in German, ‘And what happened then?!’

  ‘Oh,’ Falk replied, ‘she got furiously angry and . . .’

  He carried on like this until the passers-by were out of earshot, before starting up again as the next set of Berliners approached.

  But then what?

  Well, let me tell you, she . . .

  This staggered conversation became gradually more absurd until both men were creased up with genuine laughter, which of course made their performance all the more plausible. Feeling confident, they agreed to take a tram into the centre of Berlin rather than walk. It was only when the tram had set off that they realised their mistake.

  Next to them was a clutch of men in military uniform, including one who stared at Pyke’s clothes with myopic intent. He glanced at the soldier’s shoulder strap and saw a red ‘E’ on a yellow background: the insignia of the ‘Elisabeth Regiment’. The two escapees were standing next to a group of Ruhleben sentries whose job it had been the night before to prevent their escape.

  The sentry continued to stare. Pyke looked away. The passengers swayed this way and that like wheat in the breeze as sunlight flooded into the carriage, until at last the sentry appeared to lose interest. Pyke and Falk had agreed beforehand that they must never take an unnecessary risk, and at the next stop they got off to board the following tram.

  In the city centre, Falk led Pyke at a brisk march to a smart-looking restaurant, whereupon, as they crossed the threshold, both men transformed themselves again.

  ‘My dear sir,’ began Falk in a bullying tone, ‘to tell you the truth, I did not enjoy inspecting your unfinished jerry-built houses at such a ridiculous hour.’

  Pyke did his best to look embarrassed and accommodating.

  ‘We both look like low-lifes,’ Falk steamed on, ‘and besides, a 5 per cent mortgage in wartime is a poor investment.’

  Having previously been two old friends they were now property developers back from an early-morning inspection of one of Pyke’s building sites.

  ‘Waiter,’ Falk bellowed with the disdain of a pompous Junker. A man appeared. ‘Show us the lavatory, and then we’ll have breakfast.’

  And what would they like for breakfast?

  ‘Omelette?’ Falk enquired. The waiter nodded. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Omelette for two then.’

  Pyke might have been surprised by just how well Falk was playing this part, but in truth this was a character he knew well. His wife, Helena von Recklinghausen, came from a high-born German family, and no doubt this character was a composite of the various relatives he had got to know.

  In the washroom they kept up the act with Falk doing most of the talking. Yet back at the table Pyke felt his lack of sleep starting to catch up with him. He found it hard to think of anything other than the strange, and at times hallucinatory, quality of the scene unfolding before him. ‘Everything looked different, even when it was but half consumed, and I felt perplexed that I saw nothing in the faces of others to show that they too recognised the change that had come over the world. It was our first real meal for the greater part of a year; our first meal with a tablecloth. This was our first waiter for that time. One wanted to hit him on the shirt front to see if it was real.’

  Before he could do this, the waiter came over with a basket of bread. Pyke’s eyes lit up, and at once Falk saw what was about to happen. ‘Before Pyke could stretch out his eager hand to grasp the tempting rolls I abruptly told the waiter to remove them. “I never eat bread before noon now that the country is short of it, nor shall you in my company,” I said. We had narrowly escaped a pitfall. Neither of us had the police-stamped bread-ticket to produce which the waiter would have demanded.’

  In silence the two fugitives tore through their ham omelette, followed by two cafés au lait, before Falk paid, using some of the money he had amassed in Ruhleben. Over the last few months he had set himself up as the camp’s unofficial money-transfer agent without arousing any suspicion. Detainees would give him small sums to transfer to their wives back in England. Falk kept the money and sent a postcard to his banker, instructing him to transfer the amount from his account to the inmate’s wife. ‘Before long,’ he wrote, ‘my pocket-book was well lined with notes.’

  Having finished their breakfast, the Englishmen lit up cigars and in a cloud of smoke strolled out of the restaurant into a balmy Berlin morning. It was time for another change of character. As they continued away from the restaurant, unknown to any of the passers-by, they metamorphosed again. This time it was into a pair of well-heeled friends about to embark on a walking tour – for which they would need camping gear.

  Their shopping spree began with two umbrellas – ‘great big fat things, that looked as if a boy of twelve had tried to roll them, in deference to parental orders, and had done it as badly as possible on purpose’ – before they moved on to Wertheim’s, Berlin’s palatial answer to Selfridge’s and Bloomingdales. Here they ordered rucksacks, felt-covered aluminium water bottles, dark green Loden cloaks, a collapsible cooker (Pyke spent forever deliberating over which one to buy), an aluminium knife, a clothes brush, a spoon and fork, an electric flashlight, handkerchiefs, several hunks of chocolate and, most important of all, a luminous compass.

  As well as being the most valuable item on their list the compass was the most suspicious. Anticipating this, Falk had prepared a letter from an imaginary brother at the front asking him to find one. In Wertheim’s optical department the British civil servant produced his fake letter and asked the assistant in a befuddled tone ‘whether he had any notion what kind of a thing a luminous compass was, as I had no idea what they looked like’. He was duly given one.

  The two Englishmen then began an anxious wait while their purchases were packed up. It was, for Falk, ‘like sitting on hot coals’. The cashier announced the total and Falk paid. At which the girl looked up and said, ‘Name and address, please?’

  Pyke’s heart almost stopped.

  Without missing a beat, Falk conjured up both.

  ‘Blumenthal, Luetzow Strasse, 21.’

  Pyke was astonished by the speed with which his companion had done this.

  The two men staggered out of Wertheim’s laden with gear before making their way across Potsdamer Platz. Yet before they had crossed the square they noticed in the distance a familiar-looking figure. It was the Ruhl
eben Camp Commandant, Baron Von Taube. Whether or not he noticed the two men weighed down with camping gear on the morning after two of his detainees had broken out, he did not make the connection.

  Eager to get out of Berlin as soon as possible, Pyke and Falk continued to Potsdamer Bahnhof where they did not buy tickets for the frontier – that was too predictable – but for the Harz Mountains in central Germany.

  The carriage was full, and to deflect attention from Pyke, whose deficient German remained their Achilles heel, Falk chatted enthusiastically to his fellow passengers while his companion did his best to look absorbed by a book he had bought in the station. Its jacket illustration showed a team of German soldiers cheerfully bayoneting a huddle of pathetic-looking British Tommies. Arsène Lupin would have been proud.

  Goslar lies at the foot of the Harz Mountains and remains to this day a popular hiking destination, so there was nothing unusual on the afternoon of Saturday, 10 July 1915 about the sight of two Berliners struggling under the weight of their brand-new camping gear. Both were whey-faced and whip-thin. One was apparently ‘a compact bourgeois Jew – by name Blumenthal’ while his younger friend, much taller, was a bespectacled Gentile dubbed ‘Herr Referendar – a kind of assistant under-magistrate’ who suffered from a weak heart and had worked himself into such a frenzy over the last few weeks preparing for his exams that he was often too exhausted to talk. In case the Ruhleben authorities had told the police to look out for two men travelling together, one of them tall and Jewish, the other short and Christian, Pyke and Falk had swapped religions.

  Having stocked up on supplies – ham, cheese, cocoa, chocolate, sausages, eggs, dried soups, matches, string and soap – they went for dinner in Brusttuch, which was, and still is, the grandest hotel in Goslar. There followed a feast which began to wash away some of the depressing memories of their months in Ruhleben, a meal which they were both enjoying until the proprietor came over to ask politely about the food and whether they planned to stay for long in Goslar. Blumenthal explained that, with regret, they had to leave before sunset. Confused by this desire to hike after consuming an enormous meal, the proprietor suggested that they should spend the night in the hotel. Blumenthal thanked him but explained that their holiday was so short and they were so keen to sleep under the stars that they must refuse.