He appears to have had a mild heart attack.
Falk was just behind. ‘He suddenly pitched forward on to his face and lay motionless. I believed him to be dead. What was I to do? In one brief hour dawn would be upon us, and with it detection was certain unless – I could conceal the corpse, remove all means of immediate identification, and march on.’ Elsewhere he wrote: ‘I shall never forget the terror of that moment. The deathly silence of the night, & the prostrate figure outstretched on the cart track.’
According to Pyke, the German-born Yorkshireman made the grim decision to abandon Pyke’s corpse and carry on to freedom but had not gone far when he remembered from his days as an Assistant District Commissioner in Nigeria that the jaws of those men he had seen executed always dropped. Pyke’s had not. Perhaps he was still alive. Falk raced back to see his friend’s eyelids twitching in the breeze.
Pyke came to, Falk helped him to his feet and together they carried on into the night. Yet the Gildehauser Venn seemed reluctant to give them up. At one point Pyke had to use his rope to haul Falk out of a quagmire. Finally, just before dawn, they escaped its clutches, and again the landscape changed.
With the night starting to run out, for it was the height of summer, the two Englishmen crossed an ornate wooden bridge which led into landscaped parkland. By their calculations they were less than three miles from the Dutch frontier. Any moment now, they told each other, they might encounter the initial cordon of sentries. They continued through the darkness of a wood with Pyke leading the way, ‘for my sight and ears were keener. Every ten paces we would stop and listen. We could never hear anything, but we always did stop nevertheless. I never knew whether my fingers would touch a sentry or if I might have the luck possibly to touch his rifle first. The idea came to me that I might touch it so gently that he would not notice it, and then I should stand still, trying not to complete the step I should be in the process of taking, trying not to breathe.’
The wood was interrupted by a railway line and, as there appeared to be no sentries, they crossed using a version of the crab-crawl before passing over a road on the other side in a similar fashion. Immediately they admonished themselves for their sloppy technique. When it came to the actual frontier, they told themselves, they must take more care.
Just then they saw that the trees were starting to show up against a pewter-coloured sky. Dawn was coming on. In a mad rush they looked for a suitable place to hide but could only find a dip marked by several low-hanging firs. It was not ideal, but it would do. As the sun broke the horizon they hunkered down in anticipation of what they told each other might be the last day of their lives. It was 23 July 1915. Fourteen days after leaving Ruhleben in the most scientific manner possible, Pyke and Falk had smuggled themselves theatrically and fortuitously to within half a mile of the Dutch frontier. They had saved one another’s lives on more than one occasion. Now, less than a day after Falk had almost drowned in a peat bog and Pyke’s heart attack, they faced their greatest challenge yet.
The two men spent much of the next day swimming in uncertainty. It was impossible to say precisely where the frontier was, whether the sentries on duty would be sleepy Landsturm or snipers with orders to shoot on sight, or if they should expect live wires, ditches, dogs, automatic alarms or bells on wires. Indeed, there was little they could do other than sit still and wait for the night.
Nearing sunset Pyke described his mood as ‘rather garrulous’. Both he and Falk laughed at the sight of a grim-looking reaper scything a nearby field – surely he had come for them. As darkness fell they heard the sound of German soldiers in the distance singing a marching chorus.
‘The new guard coming on duty,’ said one fugitive to the other.
‘There sounds enough of them. Looks cheerful for tonight.’
They agreed to set out in fifteen minutes. As the tension grew, Pyke chatted nervously about what he planned to do back in London. Not wanting to tempt fate like this, Falk changed the subject. He began to talk about his teeth, and how many days he had gone without brushing them, when Pyke heard the crack of a twig.
‘Instead of turning round, I put my hand up to my hat, which was fixed in the twigs, and holding it steady, turned my head round inside its brim . . . Behind me, so close that I noticed the texture of his trousers, was a soldier, who was holding aside the branches and stooping down over us . . .’
‘My God,’ faltered Pyke. ‘It’s all up.’
The soldier continued to look down at Falk and Pyke. He was a large man, made to seem larger by his position above them. In one hand he held a rifle. In the other he steadied a bicycle. He stood very still and said nothing. For a moment the three men looked at each other, puzzled, curious and a little afraid to different degrees, before the soldier asked in a guttural German accent what they were doing.
For Pyke this was too much. His imagination spun away from the scene until he was back in his green-walled cell in Berlin. Falk, meanwhile, metamorphosed once again into Blumenthal, the bourgeois Jewish Berliner.
‘Well, Herr Doktor,’ he beamed at Pyke. ‘It’s about time we were going on.’ Turning to the soldier: ‘It’s a bit late, isn’t it?’
With Tiggerish confidence Falk bounced to his feet and made to leave.
‘What are you doing here?’ the soldier asked again, firmly.
Falk gave him everything he had – the Imperial Pedestrian Touring Club, their walking holiday, his friend’s exams, the exhaustion resulting in Pyke not being able to speak so much and the line about both men being unfit for active military service. The soldier looked unimpressed. Neither before the war, nor during it, had the German-Dutch frontier been a popular hiking destination. Even if it had been, these two looked like vagrants, not hikers. To Pyke, in his gloom, Falk’s story sounded like one of those improbable, rambling lies that you tell a teacher, in which you rattle along at great speed ‘until a full stop is reached in the middle of a sentence, and you wait for the verdict’.
Pyke could not wait. He knew all too well about being arrested in Germany and wanted to get the next part out of the way. ‘I ached with the thought that I was nothing but a fatuous dreamer after all; that it was impossible for anybody ever to escape the great arm of Prussian organisation; that I might have known they’d catch us here.’
‘That is no satisfactory explanation as to why you are in Holland,’ said the soldier.
Silence. Constellations of calculations exploded in each man’s mind.
Was this a trick?
‘I have no business in Holland of any sort,’ Falk wavered. ‘This is Germany.’
‘Not at all,’ the soldier replied. ‘What’s more, you will have to come with me to see the frontier section Commandant at Losser; you are probably smugglers.’
Losser was in Holland – the neutral territory they had been aiming for all along.
More stupefied silence and anxious looks between Falk and Pyke, Pyke and the soldier, the soldier and both of them, Falk and the soldier and back once more to Pyke.
‘If you don’t believe me,’ he said, ‘look at this.’ He removed his helmet to reveal the red cockade of the Dutch military.
At this Falk leapt up, grabbed him by the lapels and began to rock him back and forth, pleading, ‘Is this really Holland?’
Only when the soldier failed to push him away did both Englishmen realise that they were safe. ‘No German soldier can be shaken by a tramp,’ explained Falk.
‘You see that red-roofed cottage over there?’ The soldier pointed at a building some fifty yards away. ‘That cottage is in Holland. The rain from its roof drips off into Germany. We call this the three-posts corner.’ Now his expression became quizzical. ‘How did you get through the German sentries along the road and railway line? They shot a Russian officer who tried to get across last month’.
Their answer was simple and implausible: they had crawled over the German-Dutch frontier the night before without a moment’s thought. The railway line and road that they had crossed a
bsent-mindedly had been the actual frontier. The German cavalry unit which had almost ridden over them as they hid beneath their loden cloaks had probably been a border patrol.
Despite its bizarre conclusion, Falk and Pyke had pulled off the first escape from German captivity of the Great War. There would be seventy-two attempted getaways from Ruhleben in total, all of which except this and two others would fail.
Realising what they had done, the two escapees turned to each other in shock. Had this scene played out today they might have embraced – perhaps there would have been tears. Instead, they shook hands. ‘To him I feel only as those who have been hunted for together, who have lain shuddering in hiding with a price upon their heads, can feel,’ wrote Pyke. They were bound together by a hard-won complicity and the knowledge that each one owed his freedom and his life to the other. The two ‘realists’ of Ruhleben had used science and detective fiction to find a way out of Germany, and in doing so had developed an acute understanding both of one another and the society which they had just left. Their escape was a monument to counter-intuition and the intellectual bravery it requires. As well as doing the opposite of what had been expected at every turn they had had the courage to contemplate escape in the first place, without which none of this would have been possible.
For Pyke the last two months had been the final test in a year-long, self-taught apprenticeship in the art of solving problems. He had learnt to set aside the fear of failure or ridicule and to endure what H. G. Wells had called the ‘daily agony’ of scrutinising accepted facts. He had come to appreciate the importance of asking the right question and ensuring that his wording was correct. He had also come to understand something about theft and the nature of disguise. Each lesson was rooted in the landscape of his mind for the rest of his life. Indeed, this adventure tells us more than any other about the man he would later become.
Olde Daalhuis, the Dutch soldier, led them away from the firs and when they reached the frontier post he asked cheekily if they wanted to meet the German sentries.
‘No,’ came the emphatic reply.
In Overdinkel they picked up beers and cigars for the journey to Losser.
‘Gott strafe England,’ teased the Dutch sergeant as they walked in – ‘May God punish England.’ Satisfied that they were not smugglers, he made them coffee and sandwiches before finding them a hotel for the night.
‘Oh, the joy of that first bath!’ exclaimed Falk. ‘Our host, Mr Smid, looked after us in a most exemplary manner, and we slept that night in feather beds, rising next day to find clean underwear in our rooms.’
That morning, with a pathetic fallacy that would almost certainly be edited out of a novel, the sun shone after a fortnight of heavy rain. Falk went to church to give thanks for their deliverance, Pyke began to write up their escape, and later that day they took the train to Amsterdam.
By now both men had run out of money so Pyke wired Ernest Perris at the Chronicle. No doubt he was astonished to hear from him and sent over ‘a generous cheque’. Before that arrived they persuaded the British Consul to lend them £10 to secure a room in the Hotel Doelen. Although this happened to be where most of Amsterdam’s German intelligence agents were based, the two fugitives would not be there long enough to arouse their interest.
That evening Pyke and Falk were picked up by a group of fellow Britons who took them out for a slap-up celebratory meal. The following day Pyke sent his cable to the Chronicle. At the start of the war, as Reuters’ Special Correspondent in Copenhagen, Pyke had dreamt of writing a dispatch for the front page of a national newspaper. Now he was in that rare position of being not only the author of front-page national news but also its subject.
There followed a strangely stilted report of his escape, including details he contradicted in later accounts, such as a line about Berlin being ‘mainly peopled by women’. The story published by the Chronicle was in fact a heavily edited version of Pyke’s 3,000-word telegram. It was the young journalist#8217;s first experience of news being shaped to fit an agenda, and it left a dent in his relationship with Perris.
Another problem was the consequence of the meal that Pyke had enjoyed on his first night in Amsterdam. The men who had taken him and Falk out were journalists working for the Chronicle’s rivals. Either they reneged on an agreement not to report the escape or Pyke had failed to lay down guidelines. In any event, what should have been a sensational scoop for the Chronicle was anything but, as Perris discovered to his dismay over the next few days.
The story of their escape went around the country like a rumour in Ruhleben, and two days after it broke Falk and Pyke took a mail packet from Holland back to England. Falk watched for the coastline and when it came into sight began to cry. Pyke, retracing the journey that his ancestor Moses Snoek had made in the eighteenth century, was below deck, being seasick. At Tilbury there was a telegram waiting for him, not from his mother or an overjoyed relative, but from Robert Donald, Editor of the Chronicle, who had written to congratulate him on his safe return. It was a gesture that Pyke never forgot, yet it would take more than this to repair his relationship with the newspaper.
In the days that followed, Pyke and Falk were received by the Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith, and for an instant they became celebrities. Yet for those working in a secret government department, one that did not officially exist, the story of their escape jarred.
Like most well-informed Britons, the staff of what would soon become MI5 were certain that escape from Ruhleben camp was more or less out of the question. The idea that two bedraggled Englishmen, including one who did not speak fluent German, had travelled incognito from Ruhleben into the centre of Berlin seemed to be impossible. To then make it all the way to the Dutch frontier was inconceivable, and subsequently to crawl into Holland, as these two claimed to have done, was truly beyond belief. Their escape did not add up, unless, that was, they had been helped along the way.
PYKE HUNT, PART 1
BY THE SUMMER of 1915 Major Vernon Kell was on the lookout for a different kind of German spy. Kell was a lantern-jawed asthmatic who kept a parrot at home and, since its inception, had been Director of MO5(g), the War Office department later renamed MI5. He had started the war on a high after the dramatic arrest of twenty-two suspected German agents, many of them employed by Nachrichten-Abteilung, or ‘N’, the German Admiralty’s intelligence service.
Since then the landscape had changed. Kell’s department was now up against both ‘N’ and its military counterpart, Sektion IIIb, an adjustment reflected in the new wave of German spies being sent over to Britain. With the war no more than a year old, the latest agents tended to be non-Germans who had spent time inside a German jail, travelled on an American passport and posed as salesmen. When Geoffrey Pyke returned to England in July 1915 he was a non-German who had spent time in a German jail and had posed as a salesman while travelling on an American passport. It was not long before Kell’s department made the connection.
The Department of Prisoners of War was the first to ask MO5(g) about Pyke after he had failed to appear at a routine Home Office appointment. ‘We do not appear to have any papers about “Pike”,’ came the reply.
Had the Security Service checked the spelling they would have found a bulging Personal File devoted to this young man. It contained copies of telegrams he had sent from Copenhagen the previous year, evidence of his illegal entry into Germany disguised as Raymund Eggleton, and an account of an MO5(g) investigation into Pyke’s uncle, who had cabled his nephew about his grandmother’s health – a telegram which was thought to be a coded message.
Instead his Personal File went unopened and, while there were those in Kell’s department with grave suspicions about the nature of Pyke’s so-called ‘escape’, there were no grounds on which to have him arrested or to ask for his letters to be opened. As well as being medically unfit for military service, Pyke could not be called up now that he had been imprisoned by the enemy. Instead, he was left to finish his university degree �
�� at least for now.
Cambridge felt like a very different city to the one Pyke remembered from before the war. By September 1915 its undergraduate population was a quarter of what it had been; his college, Pembroke, was dominated by an Officer Training School, and the streets were filled with convalescent soldiers, many of them missing limbs or suffering from the effects of poison gas. It was impossible to escape the war, and rather than lose himself in his law degree Pyke found his mind wandering back at the slightest provocation to Ruhleben. In his spare time he wrote about his experiences. He sent food parcels to his fellow detainees, including one with a false bottom that contained a detailed account of his escape; unfortunately the recipients were so excited by the food that they failed to look for any hidden compartment.
Keeping an eye on him at Pembroke was his tutor, W. S. Hadley, who recognised a change in Pyke. It worried him. Towards the end of that Michaelmas term Hadley took an unusual step. He contacted the local Chief Constable about Pyke, explaining that he was ‘not a desirable person to have here’ and that the police should keep an eye on him.
This is strange, largely because Hadley mentioned nothing specific about Pyke’s behaviour. Nor did he attempt to have him sent down. Clearly the university rules and the laws of the land had not, to his knowledge, been broken. Instead we are left the outline of a vague animus. For this patrician figure of authority there was something about Geoffrey Pyke – and he was either unwilling or unable to put his finger on precisely what – that made him suspicious. Perhaps it had its roots in his intelligence combined with the unusual nature of his escape, or maybe his Jewishness changed the way Hadley thought about him.
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