Bretherton

by Morris, W. F. ;

  They set off at once with an escort of two men. Dusk was falling, and it was dark before they had gone far. Everywhere around them in the darkness men were digging and putting up wire.

  “Got the wind up badly!” said Bretherton maliciously to the intelligence officer.

  The officer took no notice of the remark. He had changed his tactics. He chatted pleasantly about England, in which country he had lived for some years, and about the war in general. Bretherton guessed that his object was to draw him, and, refusing to be drawn, he took refuge in silence. He was too tired to carry on a conversation had he wished to do so. His leg pained him not a little, and he was sick and faint from hunger and fatigue.

  They arrived at last at a large château surrounded by trees; but after nearly an hour had passed in fruitless efforts to get information from the prisoner, he was marched off to another headquarters. He began to suspect that this was a deliberate attempt to tire him into submission; a suspicion which was confirmed when he was made to wait two or three hours and was roughly awakened by his escort each time that he fell asleep.

  V

  Through the long night-hours he was marched from one headquarters to another, till he could scarcely drag his stumbling legs over the rough ground, and he became light-headed with fatigue and lack of sleep. And each time that his head nodded he was rudely awakened by one of his captors. One short respite he had, however, and one gleam of satisfaction. During the course of that endless night-march he picked up again as officer in charge of escort the middle-aged lieutenant whom he so much disliked; and whilst trudging along a narrow road bordered by a ditch, the party was heavily shelled by British guns. Escort and prisoner took refuge in the ditch, and there they lay for half an hour, till the shelling ceased. The escort and the little intelligence officer crouched shivering in the muddy, evil-smelling ditch, whilst Bretherton slept undisturbed.

  At midday on the following day they gave up the attempt to tire him into submission. He was locked into a room in a headquarters château, and a sentry was placed outside the window. The sentry was superfluous; Bretherton could not have run ten yards had his life depended upon it. He lay down upon the floor and slept like a log.

  At dusk he was put into a lorry and taken to a large town, which his escort said was Cambrai. He was handed over to the governor of the civil prison and locked in a cell furnished with a bed and blankets, table and chair. He was given a meal of thin soup and bread, and then he wrapped himself in his blankets and fell asleep.

  Five days later, together with a hundred other prisoners both English and French, he entrained for Germany. The men were in cattle-trucks, and the officers, seven in number, travelled in a second-class coach. On the second night Bretherton awoke from sleep and saw below him the stars reflected in water. Shadowy, uprearing girders slid past the window in endless succession, and the rumble of the train had a hollow ring. A full minute passed, but still the giant girders patterned the night sky; and when at last they ended, and black-wooded hills closed in round the train, he knew that he had crossed the Rhine.

  The party of seven officers detrained the following day at the little station of Ebenthal among wooded hills, and marched out to the prisoners-of-war camp that lay two miles beyond the village.

  CHAPTER XIV

  I

  There were some two hundred prisoners in the officers’ camp at Ebenthal. More than half that number were Russians, and the remainder were Belgian, French and British. The camp covered about fourteen acres, was rectangular in shape, and was enclosed by two separate fences of barbed wire. The prisoners, five to a room, were lodged in a large L-shaped building. The Russians were all together in one wing, and the British, French and Belgians occupied the other.

  On that first evening when Bretherton left the kommandantur or orderly-room, in which all new arrivals were searched and had their particulars taken, he found the British prisoners and many of the French waiting in the passage to greet him. Among them was a tall, fair-haired officer who, though dressed in a shabby khaki pull-over and an old pair of grey flannel trousers, had the unmistakable carriage and smartness of the Regular Army that no clothes, however old, can disguise. He wrung Bretherton’s hand and grinned.

  “So Brother Bosche has bagged you, G. B.,” he said in his familiar lazy drawl. “He got me up at Arras not a fortnight after I left the old company. How are the old bog-wheels going?”

  “Comme ci, comme ca,” answered Bretherton. “I expect Baron has got my company now; they nabbed me on the Somme.”

  Melford took him by the arm. “Bad luck! Come on; I’ll show you round the cantonment.”

  The camp bore a good reputation on the whole. The food, though inadequate, was better than in many German camps, and since every prisoner had parcels sent from home, no hardships were suffered except on the rare occasions when the post was interrupted. Every afternoon football, hockey, or tennis was played on the exercise-ground behind the house, and the evenings were spent in ways varying with one’s tastes. Several officers were learning Russian or French under native tutors; some played cards, others read books. Fancy-dress dances were organized periodically, and much ingenuity was expended upon designing and making costumes. And very jolly affairs they were.

  A pianoforte had been hired from the village, and Bretherton’s services were frequently in demand. Often he might have been seen surrounded by half a dozen officers bawling the old war-worn songs: “There’s a long, long trail,” “Après la guerre finie,” “Old soldiers never die”; and when alone he sometimes sang the little song that Helen had sung: “Just a song at twilight.”

  But the chief diversion of a certain section of the camp was the concoction of plans of escape. Several officers had already made unsuccessful attempts, and two of them had got within a hundred yards of the Dutch frontier before being recaptured. Their valuable knowledge and experience was at the disposal of all who asked for it; and preparations for escaping were being made simultaneously by several officers. After the eight-thirty p.m. appel, when the prisoners were locked in the house and were left to themselves for the night, there were strange comings and goings in the passages; and in many rooms articles of escaping kit were being manufactured out of the most unlikely materials.

  Ebenthal was not an easy camp from which to escape. The main impediment was the double barbed-wire fence surrounding it. The two fences were about twelve feet apart, and sentries patrolled the narrow strip of ground between them. The wire itself was not an impenetrable obstacle, for there were several pairs of home-made wire-cutters in the camp; but since a prisoner had cut his way out a month or two previously, the sentries had orders to fire at anyone loitering near the wire. And even if one succeeded in getting through the first fence, there remained the second fence, twelve feet beyond it, to be negotiated under the eyes of the sentry.

  Therefore the prison-breaker’s thoughts had turned to other methods of escape. One man had hidden in a large linen-basket and had been carried out of camp by the French and British orderlies; but the escort had noticed the unusual heaviness of the basket and had investigated the cause of it. Another man had hidden under the rubbish in the rubbish-box, and had been tipped on to the refuse-heap outside the camp. Unfortunately, the sole of one of his boots had become uncovered, and a thrifty member of the escort had tried to pick it off the heap. Two men who spoke German had bluffed their way out of the main gate disguised as German officers. The Russian greatcoat with certain alterations is not unlike the German article. These two men had spent weeks in manufacturing German military caps and other articles of uniform; and then by great presence of mind and superb audacity they had persuaded the sentry to open the main gate for them, had marched right past the guard-house, and got away. They had been recaptured five days later by German Sunday sportsmen whose dogs had discovered their hiding place in a wood.

  Popular taste had now turned in favour of tunnels. The L-shaped building stood towards one corner of the compound, and one wing of it was within twent
y yards of the wire fence. A syndicate of six, including Melford, was actually engaged in such a tunnel; and when one of the number dropped out, Bretherton was invited to join.

  Work could be carried on only at night when no Germans were within the building. A small section of the flooring of a room facing the fence had been cut out and replaced so neatly that the join was invisible from a distance of even a few inches, and below this a hole had been dug through the concrete to a depth of eight feet. The shaft had been sunk deeper than the tunnel in order to carry off any water that might filter in. The tunnel itself led off at right-angles at a depth of about five feet, and it had been necessary to cut through the thick foundation wall of the house before reaching the softer material beyond. When Bretherton joined the syndicate, it was calculated that the tunnel extended underground to about half-way between the house and the inner fence.

  The six members worked in shifts; one in the tunnel scooping out the earth with an old table-knife, one filling the excavated earth into little bags made for the purpose, two carrying away the bags and hiding the earth under the flooring of the rooms, and the remaining two resting. It had been found that a quarter of an hour was as long as a man could stay in the tunnel. It was only just large enough to allow a man to worm his way along it, and working in these cramped conditions was very tiring. Also the air was very foul, so that the worker was in considerable danger of suffocation; and as the tunnel increased in length, it became necessary to rig a pumping apparatus to supply air to the sapper.

  II

  Meanwhile escaping kit was being collected and manufactured. The six members of the syndicate had agreed to separate outside the camp and to make their way to the frontier in pairs. Each pair was to collect its own escaping kit, plan its own route to the frontier, and, apart from the common work upon the tunnel, conduct its operations independently. Bretherton and Melford were paired together, and all their spare time was employed in completing their kit.

  Clothes were the first consideration. A large number of British officers in the camp wore grey flannel trousers, and the camp authorities had been persuaded that these were part of the British uniform. This particular garment, therefore, presented no difficulties. Melford’s military tunic had become unserviceable, and he had been permitted to purchase a German coat. The garment was brown in colour and rather like a Norfolk jacket in pattern. The Germans had sewed braid upon the shoulders, but this could easily be removed. Bretherton bought an old tunic from another officer and set about converting it into a civilian garment. He removed the four large, flap-covered, outside pockets and sewed on two side-pockets of civilian pattern; he exchanged the regimental buttons for bone ones; and finally he dipped the garment into a dye composed of ink and boot-polish dissolved in water. The result was a shabby coat of nondescript colour; but it would have needed a very keen eye to have recognized it as a British service frock.

  Soft collars had been made from a flannel shirt, and there remained only hats to be found. The German civilian usually wore one of the Homburg variety, but this shape proved to be most difficult to make. Bretherton was compelled to abandon the attempt after much time had been wasted, and he made a passable cap out of some cloth from an old British-warm. Melford stole a shabby trilby from a civilian workman who was doing some repairs in the camp. The Germans raised a great fuss over its disappearance and searched the camp, but Melford had taken care to hide it where it could not be found.

  Food was being collected: packets of chocolate, meat tablets, malted milk tablets, tinned food of various kinds, and solidified alcohol for cooking purposes. And they had collected a supply of pepper which, the veteran escapers said, would be very useful for putting dogs off the scent.

  But the most important items of the kit were compass and maps. A French flying officer had a genius for manufacturing compasses, and both Bretherton and Melford obtained one from him. Maps were more difficult to get. There were several in the camp, but they were only rough copies of other maps, and even the originals had been taken from railway time-tables and were of no great value for a long march across country.

  Melford undertook to get some from home. He had arranged a code with his people, and so was able to tell them both what he wanted and how the articles were to be concealed. The prisoners’ parcels were put in the parcel-room when they arrived. A prisoner was informed that there was a parcel for him, and he went to the parcel-room to see it opened by the German N.C.O. detailed for that duty. Tinned food was opened and turned out on a plate, and things like cakes and puddings were probed with a skewer. Watching a parcel being opened was always an exciting and sometimes a nerve-racking experience.

  Melford’s maps arrived wrapped round a series of home-made cakes. The maps had been baked with the cake, so that the back of the paper was brown like that round an ordinary cake. The German N.C.O. probed the cakes with his skewer and allowed Melford to take them away.

  It was then discovered that every German civilian was in possession of a pass. The syndicate discussed the question at some length and came to the conclusion that although a pass was not absolutely necessary, the risk of recapture was very much greater without one than with one. They were confident, however, that they could forge a pass if they had one to copy, but none of them had ever seen one. Finally, it was decided to try to steal one from the next civilian that came into the camp and return it after it had been photographed. Cameras were of course forbidden, but two had been smuggled into the camp, and arrangements were made with the owners for the loan of one of them.

  Their chance came when a civilian carpenter was mending a cupboard in one of the rooms. The man had hung his coat on a nail in the wall; but a sentry had been placed at the door, and only the regular occupants of the room were allowed in. The syndicate held a hurried meeting and concocted a plan. Willing helpers were to be had on all sides. A number of these started a row at the end of the passage and lured the sentry from his post. Immediately Bretherton and Melford slipped into the room and searched the workman’s coat, which was cleverly blanketed from view of the man himself by the regular occupants of the room. One of the syndicate kept guard at the door.

  The pass was found in an inner pocket, and was quickly taken into the next room, where the camera experts were awaiting it. Three photographs were taken while all six members of the syndicate waited with their shoulders to the door to keep it closed should a German chance to try to enter the room; for the discovery of the cameras would have been a serious loss to the camp, apart from the failure of the attempt and the disciplinary action that would follow. No German appeared, however; the noise, which had now increased to an uproar, was monopolizing their attention. Bretherton slipped back and replaced the pass; then he sauntered down the passage towards the uproar. His appearance had a magical effect. The noise ceased as suddenly as it had begun, and in a few seconds the passage was empty except for the sentry and a feld-webel and two guards who had been rushed to the scene of strife. The whole affair had taken less than five minutes.

  The pass proved to be easier to forge than had been anticipated. It was a small typewritten document containing the workman’s name in ink, his photograph stamped with a rubber stamp, and the signature of the officer issuing the pass. That night the skeleton-key expert of the camp opened the door of the kommandantur, and the typewriter was borrowed. Before morning a dozen blank passes had been typed. The name chosen by each of the syndicate was then filled in in ink and the signature forged. Each member was photographed in his escaping clothes, and his photograph affixed to his pass. Finally, the passes were stamped with a home-made stamp cut out of cork by a clever Belgian officer.

  III

  Preparations for escaping were now complete. The tunnel was estimated to reach a foot or two beyond the outer fence and only needed to be extended to the copse. The building of the tunnel, however, was a great strain. It took more than five minutes to reach the place of working, and more than a quarter of an hour to get out again; there was no room to turn, and
after working in this cramped position it was very tiring having to worm one’s way out backwards. The whole syndicate loathed the work, and only their nearness to success kept them going. But the strain was beginning to tell upon them physically, and it was decided to rest for a week and go into strict training, as absolute physical fitness would be necessary for their long march to the frontier.

  It was now almost on the eve of success that disaster occurred. There had been heavy rains for some days, and the ground was very soft, and, as luck would have it, a lorry drove round that side of the camp on which the tunnel had been dug. Such a thing had never happened before, and the possibility of its occurrence had not been considered. Part of the tunnel collapsed under the weight, leaving a shallow trench about six feet long. The Germans’ suspicions were aroused. A party was set to dig, and the tunnel was discovered.

  The disappointment of the syndicate was great. But Bretherton, who was the first to recover, pointed out that there were redeeming features. Nobody was in the tunnel at the time of the disaster; the Germans had no idea who was responsible for the attempt and therefore no disciplinary action could be taken, although the vigilance of the camp guards was increased; and finally, their laboriously collected escaping kit was intact and ready for another attempt. He suggested that they should continue their physical training, and in the meantime look out for fresh methods of escape.