The Escape Artists

by Neal Bascomb

  He hit the ground fast and hard. His knapsack followed, striking him in the back and spilling open. Stunned by the fall, he lay supine between the track and the embankment, forgetting for a brief second that he was a prisoner who had just jumped from a moving train crowded with armed German guards. In the next moment, wits returned, he collected his knapsack and scrambled away from the tracks as the last carriage left him behind. There were no shouts from the guards, nor any sudden braking of the train.

  Soon enough, however, Harvey heard cries of alarm coming from a nearby field. He turned to see a surge of men, women, children, and even a dog pursuing him and calling out in German. They must have spotted him leaping from the train. Harvey hurried off. In the distance he spied some woods in which he could hide, but he would first have to pass a small village. He slowed his pace as he rounded it, not wanting to arouse suspicion.

  In the meantime, his pursuers caught up to him, yet none of them attempted to detain him, perhaps fearing he posed a danger to them. Once beyond the village, he determined to run for the woods. But as he came to a crossroads, a teenage boy, no older than seventeen, grabbed him. Harvey tried to pull away, but the boy was all determination, and Harvey did not want to risk hurting him to free himself.

  Emboldened by the boy, several in the crowd seized the fugitive by his arms and collar. Harvey surrendered and was led to the local police station. There he was accused of being a saboteur who aimed to blow up the nearby train tunnel. As evidence, a police officer brandished his Canadian hardtack, believing the concrete-like biscuit to be an explosive. Knowing that this misconception could get him shot, Harvey pleaded, in his best pidgin German, that he was in fact an unarmed British prisoner attempting to escape. Only after the officer contacted Holzminden was he convinced that this was true. Commandant Habrecht ordered the police officer to escort Harvey to the camp on the next available transport.

  In the meantime, the other Schwarmstedt prisoners arrived at Holzminden. The train ran nearby the camp as they approached it in the late afternoon, and the men gathered at the carriage windows to look out. The two barracks gave the impression of a welcoming hotel, and they saw a number of prisoners waving from the rooms on the top floors.

  After a walk from the station, the newcomers entered through the main gate. Their hopes of better treatment were summarily crushed when their brethren shouted down from their barracks windows that this was the “worst camp” they had ever known—and to prepare for an intensive search. One prisoner, nearly hanging out on the sill, shouted down at them in an Irish lilt to hide their money: “Bury your notes! They strip ye mother naked!”

  Once in the parade ground, the prisoners sat down, some of them hastily burying compasses, money, maps, and other contraband in the dirt before the inspection began. It was intensive: the men were stripped naked, and their clothes and belongings were rifled through with great care. While this was under way, other guards unearthed the newly buried treasures in the yard. When they were finally allowed to get dressed, the prisoners were each issued a round metal tag stamped with a number. Their names were meaningless now. Then they were locked into their rooms for the night.

  Harvey arrived into Holzminden on the late train. He winked at Spit-Bubble as he passed, and was delivered straight into a solitary cell in the basement of Block B. The door clanged behind him and was bolted shut. He sat down on the floor. On the wall, he scrawled the letters D, A, M, and N, and tried to think of a four-line poem, each line starting with one of the letters. Nothing came.

  Nine

  Wire cutters in hand, Cecil Blain and Edward Leggatt crawled toward the northern end of the fence surrounding Clausthal. It was a misty September night. They were only a few yards from a watch post, and a light was shining on their position, but for whatever reason there were no guards in the area at that precise moment. The two aimed to take advantage of that fact.

  Blain was, as he wrote a family member, “mad keen” to make it home by his twenty-first birthday and return to the air with the RFC. Besides the news brought to the camp by recently captured prisoners, much of what Blain knew about the progress of the war came from the Continental Times, an English-language paper published in Germany—ostensibly a “Journal for Americans.” The officers rightly called it the “Confidential Liar,” but there was just enough hint of fact in the paper to cause them unease.

  One recent headline read, “Utterly Hopeless Conditions Existing in Russia—Military, Economical and Civil Situation Has Come to Pass Where Collapse and Ruin Threaten.” Baron von Richthofen and other German aces ruled the skies, according to the paper, and on both major fronts the kaiser’s troops were crushing the Allies, including the devastation of the latest British offensive against the “Flanders Position” in August. Sweeping victory was close, especially as a “peace movement” in the U.S. government was working to remove America from the war before the nation joined in earnest.

  Blain could not know for certain what was true, but if the paper’s intention was to sap his will to escape—and make him, like every other British POW, according to one editorial, a “relentless critic of his own government”—then the propaganda rag failed. Blain’s time in Germany had only heightened his desire to return to the fight against the Huns.

  The fence was proving uncooperative. For fifteen minutes Blain hacked at the metal with his cutter, but he had yet to create a hole they could crawl through. They were running out of time. Leggatt kept a close eye out for the guards, who would likely return at any second. After one more clip of a link, Blain managed to create enough of a break in the fence to push through it. Leggatt followed with their two knapsacks. They wriggled their way forward until they were out of the glare of the arc lights, then dashed into the dark woods.

  Dressed in civilian clothes and carrying forged documents identifying them as Belgian laborers, they headed west. When it was daylight they hid out in woods and fields. At night they marched as fast as they could through the countryside. They aimed to cross the Dutch border outside Venlo, two hundred miles from Clausthal as the crow flies. With streams to navigate, farms to circumvent, and all-too-frequent mistaken turns, their trek was an arduous one. The steady rain, cold nights, rationed food, and constant fear of discovery made the journey all the more trying.

  By the fifth day, they had managed to cover only a quarter of the distance to the border and had started to snipe at one another—about the sluggish pace, or a turn down the wrong path—to vent frustration. They had been fast friends at Clausthal but they were both headstrong and hot-tempered, and the pressure of the escape was getting to them. As dusk fell on September 21, they mistakenly set their watches forward to account for daylight savings instead of back.

  The rain had stopped as they ventured off again from their hiding place in an abandoned barn. According to their map, after traveling across some fields, they would soon reach the river Weser. The sky, marvelously lit with color from the passing storm, had gone almost black by the time they neared a village. Believing the hour to be later than it was, they figured the road would be clear, allowing them to pass undetected. To their dismay, as they made their way down the road they saw a band of German farmers and their families coming out of the fields to head back into the village. Committed to their route, Blain and Leggatt continued ahead.

  The locals followed the men, but seemed unconcerned by their presence. When they came to a small lane, Blain and Leggatt turned onto it, and the farmers continued down the road into the village. The two Englishmen next found themselves in a field, lost, their shirts drenched with sweat from exertion, the warm evening, and not a little fear. Unsure of where they were, they circled back, only to be confronted in the village, this time by some youths carrying flashlights, who then drew the attention of their elders.

  Blain stopped and turned, commenting in rough German on what a beautiful sunset they had enjoyed that evening. A muddled conversation in French, then English, followed, with the officers identifying themselves as Belgian w
orkmen who had somehow gotten lost. The locals pointed them in the direction of the Weser, and off they went. Misfortune averted, they continued out of the village and through another stretch of countryside, finally reaching a well-built bridge over the river. On the opposite side was a large town. Short of swimming across the river farther downstream, they could not avoid it. With heavy beards and soiled clothes, they would surely arouse suspicion.

  Once they were over the bridge, they crossed paths with a group of German officers carousing in the streets. Blain and Leggatt tipped their hats at the officers and made off without event. They might not be so lucky next time. Soon after, a young prostitute approached them from a street corner and put her hands on Blain, who managed to extricate himself from her solicitations before drawing even more attention to their presence. The two men then veered south, straight out of town and down to the river. There they took a break. Wanting to wash away the dirt and grime of almost a week of travel, they undressed and took a cold dip in the Weser.

  As they started off again along the road, a flashlight suddenly shined in their faces and a German policeman approached, asking, “Wohin gehen sie? Wohen kommen sie?” Blain responded in his best French where they were going and where they had been—hoping their story of being Belgian laborers who had gotten lost would once again put them in the clear. The policeman examined their papers but remained unconvinced. Some thieves had been working the town lately, he said, and any strangers required investigation.

  Once at the local jail, having exhausted their attempts at subterfuge, the unfortunate airmen gave up their real identities and soon found themselves back at Clausthal. Heinrich “Windy Dick” Niemeyer proved worthy of his name, ranting at the top of his lungs that they would face a court-martial that most assuredly would see them shot by firing squad. “Shot, shot, shot!” he screamed.

  Over the course of its first month in operation, officers poured into Holzminden in the hundreds, many of them inveterate escape artists from camps across Germany, including Ingolstadt, Freiburg, Augustabad, Schwarmstedt, and the dreaded underground prison Fort Zorndorf. With every influx, Holzminden descended further into disarray. There was not enough food to eat and not enough fuel to heat the stoves; the shelves in the newly opened canteen were almost empty; the parcel room remained closed; British enlisted ranks who were to serve as orderlies were just arriving; and the German administration was a mess.

  The elderly commandant Colonel Habrecht was overwhelmed. Try as Karl Niemeyer might to set some order, he spent a good share of his efforts maneuvering his ineffectual boss out of the way or lambasting the Feldwebels (noncommissioned officers) and Landsturms (reserve militiamen), who served as the camp’s staff and guards, respectively.

  They were a motley bunch. A man called Gröner, who had been recruited from Schwarmstedt, ruled over Block A. Many of the prisoners knew him well—and despised him. One described him as “a saturnine, sallow, heavy-mustachioed fellow, reputed a schoolmaster in civil life.” He liked to rail at his charges almost as much as Niemeyer did. The man in charge of Block B, Ulrich, alternated between obsequiousness with respect to his superiors and a self-important authoritarianism in relation to the prisoners. The men had a feeling he would do anything to stay away from the front. Feldwebel Welman was head of the canteen. He had a whiny voice and a penchant for theft. Then there was Mandelbrot, a short, rigid figure, a walking rulebook on everything from what the officers were permitted to wear to how they should keep their rooms.

  Prisoners practiced in the art of escape knew that the best chance often came in a camp’s early life, before the chinks in its security had been discovered. The chaos at Holzminden added to this opportunity. Two of their number, recently arrived from Fort Zorndorf, were particularly keen to find a way out. Canadian infantry officer John Thorn, captured on the front in April 1915, had made several breakout attempts at previous camps, one of them dressed as a German war widow, black crepe veil and all. His partner was RFC pilot Wally Wilkins. In their first few days at Holzminden, Thorn and Wilkins scoured the camp for weaknesses and found a major one while inspecting Block A.

  Both of the barracks were constructed in the same way: each had a main block, fifty yards long, with wings at both ends that extended back and away from the Spielplatz. Each building had two entrances (one at either end) that faced the main grounds. Inside, stairs at both ends ran from the cellar up four floors to the low-ceilinged attic.

  An entire third of Block A—including the wing closest to the main gate, outside all the barriers apart from the surrounding wall—was reserved for the Kommandantur, the offices and sleeping quarters of the German staff. Interior wooden walls separated this section from the quarters of the British officers, and it had its own entrance.

  Thorn and Wilkins figured that if they could open up the wooden barricade on the attic level, they could enter the Kommandantur, proceed down the stairs, and exit Block A just beside the main gate. The gate was in the part of the camp occupied solely by Germans, so its lone guard was unlikely to be suspicious of individuals leaving through it, especially if they were dressed in German soldier’s fatigues.

  They began work immediately. Late that night, they snuck out of their rooms in Block A and made their way to the attic. In two hours, using a makeshift saw, Wilkins managed to cut a small panel out of the barricade wall, which was constructed from wooden planks, two inches thick and bound with wire. When they removed the panel, they found another wall of boards, thicker than the ones on their side and secured with six-inch nails bent at the ends. Wilkins was unfazed. He needed only to straighten the nails and sever their exposed ends. Then he could push the boards free. Their makeshift saw, however, would not do for the job.

  Informed of the need for wire cutters, several of their friends searched the camp, and not half a day later a pair was nicked from a German soldier charged with fixing the fence. After lights-out, Thorn and Wilkins returned to the attic and finished their escape hatch. A quick inspection of the German side confirmed their theory that they could access the stairs to get to the door by the main gate. Then they replaced the two panels, hoping they would not be discovered before the planned getaway.

  Next, they prepared to go. Another of the prisoners had smuggled a sewing kit into Holzminden. He proved to be an expert tailor. Within a couple of days he whipped up two pairs of gray trousers with red stripes down the sides and jackets dyed with ink and coffee bought at the canteen. Food for their border run was donated by their fellow prisoners. On September 28, the day they were set to go, Wilkins came down with a high fever. Knowing that the hatch could be discovered at any minute or that a new security measure might sink their plan, he gave up his place to Reginald Gaskell, a British Indian Army captain and fellow veteran of Fort Zorndorf.

  After answering to their names at the final roll call of the day, Thorn and Gaskell returned to the barracks, donned their disguises, and placed their civilian clothes and knapsacks into plain sacks the guards often used during work detail. An hour later, they crawled through the barricade wall in the attic, replaced the panels behind them, and descended the stairs into the Kommandantur. Just before they reached the door they spotted Habrecht and several other Germans moving into the stairwell. They continued ahead, not saying a word, and nobody stopped them. Once outside, they made a beeline for the main gate and did not so much as slow their pace as they crossed past the guard. They were out, and easily away. The Dutch border was 150 miles to the west, and they planned to average 15 miles a day getting there.

  Back at the camp, when lights-out was ordered, Rathborne rolled up some clothes and stuffed them underneath the blankets on his roommate Gaskell’s bed, hoping that if a guard glanced into the room, he would mistake the shape for the missing officer. By the morning roll call, no alarm had been raised. When a guard called the names of Thorn and Gaskell, their fellow prisoners answered for them. Then Niemeyer took to the Spielplatz and called for Thorn—on account of some contraband found on him when he first a
rrived at Holzminden. Not wishing to risk further subterfuge, a British officer who had helped prepare the escape stepped forward. In a calm voice, he announced that Thorn “had left the evening before on a journey to Holland.” A great cheer rose up among the prisoners, sending Niemeyer into a steam. He demanded the roll call again, and Thorn and Gaskell were found missing.

  Commandant Habrecht, a man predisposed to inaction, left the matter for Niemeyer to handle. He ordered the prisoners to return to the barracks, and a search was initiated to determine how the two officers had escaped. A pair of bloodhounds was brought in. Freshly arrived from Clausthal and thinking quickly, Shorty Colquhoun, who shared a room with Thorn, sprinkled some cayenne pepper into his fellow Canadian’s old shoes in an effort to put the dogs off the track. Then he took Thorn’s socks and replaced them with his own. The same was done for Gaskell. Soon enough, the guards gathered up the escapees’ remaining clothes and shoes and brought them out onto the Spielplatz. The bloodhounds, first taking the scent of the socks, began racing around the camp as if they were chasing ghosts. Watching from the windows, Colquhoun and the others could barely contain their laughter. Then the dogs buried their noses in the boots laden with pepper. After a good whiff, they went mad, leaping about, hurling themselves back and forth, their handlers barely able to keep a grip on their leashes. Shouts and hollers followed from the windows. Enraged by the scene, Niemeyer drew his revolver and brandished it at the barracks. He held himself sufficiently in check not to shoot.