HOW TO ESCAPE
TEDDY FALK WAS a lugubrious, full-lipped English civil servant who spoke excellent German and liked to say his prayers at night. He was reliable, precise and scrupulously honest, and in the hours after the outbreak of the First World War he made what he later described as ‘a terrible mistake’. Falk had been on holiday in Gutersloh, north-west Germany, when the news broke. Others might have made a dash for the frontier, yet Falk chose to surrender his passport to the local authorities for safe keeping. Days later, Britain was at war with Germany and Teddy Falk realised that he had effectively imprisoned himself.
He was arrested, accused of being a British spy – which he was not – and after a spell in solitary confinement was bundled off to Ruhleben Trabrennbahn, a former racecourse in the leafy outskirts of Berlin which had been converted into a camp for those British civilians who had been on German soil at the start of the war. By Christmas Day 1914 what the British press had taken to calling ‘Ruhleben Concentration Camp’ was home to 4,000 ‘specimens of Homo britannicus’, as Falk explained. ‘There were whites and coloured gentlemen, Boers, Canadians, Australians, and oddments from outlying corners of the Empire, mechanics, officials, merchants, music-hall artists, musicians, and members of every calling you could imagine, from the estate owner to the lion-tamer, or the person pointed out to me as being a notorious international thief, and the proprietor of a brothel.’
Ruhleben was ill-thought-out, cold, dirty and cramped: a muddy ten-acre enclosure in which there was no possibility of privacy. The food was foul and meagre, which had the curious effect of making the detainees want more of what they loathed. Yet most of the camp’s inhabitants threw themselves into their new life with purpose and endeavour. They organised clubs and societies, a prisoner police force, language classes, religious services, musical performances and a roster of sporting events. Later there would be a camp newspaper, a postage system and in time Ruhleben became a self-governing state, a Little Britain in which every inhabitant was determined to make the most of their unhappy situation. Teddy Falk was different; he kept apart.
Teddy Falk during his time in the Militia Battalion of the King’s Shropshire Light Infantry
Since the moment of his arrest Falk found himself stymied by a ‘sense of hopeless depression’. He was haunted by the thought that had he reacted to the outbreak of war with a little more nous he would now be fighting on the Western Front. He was also missing his wife, who had been seven months pregnant at the start of his detention. Falk made no effort to hide his gloom and soon became known around Ruhleben as the ‘Camp Pessimist’. His reaction to the gossip that flew around Ruhleben on a shivering night in January 1915 was therefore characteristic.
The story was that an Englishman who had sneaked into Germany soon after the outbreak of war had been caught, left in solitary confinement for sixteen weeks – an unheard-of stretch – and was now being transferred to Ruhleben. Falk was just amazed to hear that he was still alive. ‘Why the Germans did not shoot him offhand, which they would have been entitled to do, I ignore.’ By the end of the war this unhappy civil servant would be glad to know that this man’s life had been spared, indeed he would feel a bond of camaraderie with him that only war can produce.
On the night that Geoffrey Pyke was led into Ruhleben there was snow underfoot. The boots he had worn since London had holes in them from the hours he had spent pacing his prison cell, so with every step he would have felt the snow stinging the soles of his feet. This hardly mattered. After he was handed a bowl and a diaphanous, sodden towel Pyke was shown into a dormitory full of men. He found himself surrounded by people for the first time in months and it felt electric. News of his arrival spread fast and he was soon at the centre of a mob of detainees, all of them asking for the latest news from England.
There was a neat symmetry to this. Pyke had set out to report on life in Germany to the English in England; now he was relaying the news from England to the English in Germany. At least, this was what he wanted to do. Having spoken to only a handful of people over the previous four months, and rarely for more than a few seconds, Ruhleben’s newest arrival kept tripping over his words.
This did nothing to dull his excitement at being in the company of so many of his countrymen. After the crowd had dispersed even the angriest conversation in the distance was, for him, a lullaby. ‘I would lie on my back on my sack, and just listen to people borrowing spoons from each other, or cursing each other for mutual coffee slopping. A universal shout of laughter would make me warm with delight, and a continual cry to someone to shut up or to make peregrinations Hellwards would make me pause over every delectable syllable.’
Later that night the sentries came round to turn out the lights. The hubbub of questions, jokes and stories was replaced by a chorus of snores that ‘made the whole loft vibrate’. ‘All night long the doors at the end banged, with people going out to the latrines, and every time great flakes of wind-borne snow would rush in, and swirl about, finally settling down evanescent and wet on some huddled form.’ It might have been cold and cramped but Pyke’s move to Ruhleben had removed from his mind a great weight: he was no longer living in fear of execution. The problem was that, like Teddy Falk, he was not sure how this had happened, or indeed why.
By recording troop movements in Charlottenburg Park and writing these up in a report that he hoped to send back to London, Pyke was guilty of espionage. Had this been established in court at any point after the execution in late October 1914 of Carl Lody, a German agent active in Britain, then he would have faced a firing squad. Pyke was arrested towards the end of September but was never tried.
When asked to explain his transfer to Ruhleben he reached for vague terms about the German Empire tossing him about and ‘finally vomiting me, in a fit of either weariness, mercy or disgust, to this day I know not which, into a concentration camp for interned civilians’. Weariness, mercy or disgust. ‘Disgust’ was there for effect, along with ‘weariness’, for letting a prisoner stew in a cell was never going to wear down the German Reich. Given Pyke’s fragile mental condition by January 1915 ‘mercy’ seems the most likely explanation.
By then this gregarious twenty-year-old had spent sixteen weeks in a room the size of a billiard table. It had space for little more than a bed and a latrine (made by George Jennings and Co., which became ‘my one and only connection with the United Kingdom’), and to begin with he was deprived of exercise as well as company; he had nothing to read, no writing material and was alone with his thoughts.
‘I swear to you that to think too much is a disease, a real, actual disease’, wrote Dostoyevsky. For Pyke, to think too much and be imprisoned with his thoughts was a kind of torture. ‘It is not the months that count in solitary confinement,’ he wrote, ‘but the quarters of an hour. Every ten minutes is eternity.’ Of one moment in that cell: ‘I could feel, and know that I was feeling, six hundred different things. I could think, and reverse my thoughts a dozen times before one half-second of time had passed.’ He took to reciting Kipling’s ‘If’ and Carroll’s ‘Jabberwocky’ over and over, adding words and syllables or delivering certain lines at the top of his voice – ‘ONE, TWO! ONE, TWO! AND THROUGH AND THROUGH . . .’ – before dropping to a mousy whisper as if performing some mad Futurist poem – ‘the vorpal blade went snicker-snack! / He left it dead, and with its head / He went galumphing back.’ He ran through half-remembered conversations with Cambridge friends until they were so real that ‘I could almost hear the voices, and could foresee the points where laughter, jibe, criticism, agreement, pause, uproar were to come.’ Alone in his cell he delivered barnstorming speeches to the Cambridge Union before taking on a different character to tear apart what had just been said ‘with all the sarcasm of a Voltaire’. Extending his arms before him, he imagined rowing down the Cam – he sat at number seven – and in his mind traced the journey along each bend, imagining the coach on a bicycle shouting instructions from the towpath and the echoing clatter of the oars
as they passed under a bridge. On finishing these imaginary rowing sessions he would resume his pacing only to find, to his amusement, that he moved ‘with that roll peculiar to after-rowing stiffness’.
Pyke was also very hungry. He described how ‘real hunger [. . .] has been known to make men think very seriously about the rights of property, and a few have become so unbalanced as to become socialists’. Only later would the gentle sarcasm of this remark become clear. It seems that during these four months of concentrated loneliness the seeds of a political epiphany were sown. It would be several decades before it bore fruit.
By Christmas Day 1914, ‘I no longer even had any rooted objection to insanity. I was fast getting to that point where the doubt arises as to whether after all madness is not the true sanity.’ By January he was ‘sinking fast’, ‘quickly becoming a broken-down creature’ and by the end of the month he was transferred to Ruhleben.
Modern studies have shown that just ten days in solitary confinement will cause most prisoners to experience some kind of mental deterioration. Two months is often enough to induce a severe collapse. Pyke had lasted four months. It is not surprising that he was showing ‘signs of mental breakdown’.
On the face of it, then, his transfer was an act of clemency. But there was more to it than that.
In 1916, an MI5 officer was told that Pyke had been transferred to Ruhleben after ‘various highly placed persons’ campaigned for his release. We know that before the war Pyke had spent ‘jolly evenings’ in the rooms of Bertrand Russell, the philosopher, and those of Charles Ogden, co-founder of the Heretics and editor of the Cambridge Magazine. But none of his English friends petitioned the German government for they had no idea of his whereabouts. Instead, according to MI5, his life had been spared after the American Ambassador in Berlin, James W. Gerard, a moustachioed New Yorker, ‘moved in the matter’.
Gerard certainly had form when it came to extricating Britons from solitary confinement. Before being taken to Ruhleben Teddy Falk had discovered, on his release from isolation, ‘that I owed my liberation to the steps taken by Mr Gerard, the USA Ambassador’. In Pyke’s case, however, it seems that Gerard not only played a part in securing his release but had also been instrumental in his arrest.
Pyke was addressed by the detective as ‘Herr Pyke’, so we know that the German police had been tipped off. But by whom? Maurice Ettinghausen, an English bookseller who would get to know Pyke in Ruhleben, explained in his memoirs that this Cambridge undergraduate was ‘given away by the American representative in Berlin’ – namely Gerard.
How could Gerard have known about Pyke? From Edward Lyell Fox. He was, after all, the only person in Berlin with full knowledge of Pyke’s plan. He was also working undercover for the German government.
It turns out that Edward Lyell Fox was both a paid propagandist for the Germans and a government courier, which is perhaps why he was so expert in moving material across borders. The unsuspecting Englishman had inadvertently asked a German secret agent to smuggle intelligence out of the country.
Either Fox tipped off the police or mentioned to Gerard what Pyke was up to. Once it had emerged that Pyke was not an agent provocateur but a harmless adventurer now in danger of being shot, the American ambassador intervened to save his life.
Pyke knew parts of this narrative but not all of it, and certainly had no inkling that Fox was working for Germany. In those first few weeks in Ruhleben he tried to forget about his time in Berlin and concentrate instead on his new surroundings and the forgotten pleasures of conversation – which led to an encounter with a depressed civil servant named Falk.
Teddy Falk described Pyke as ‘overgrown, tending to stoop, short-sighted, but extremely observant’. He was unlike anyone he had ever met, ‘a pessimist and a cynic in affairs which concerned the heart and the soul, but in things material he was the most imaginative optimist I have ever come across.’ Pyke had also shown himself to be remarkably resisilient.
Though Pyke had described himself as an atheist since the age of thirteen, either he looked Jewish in the eyes of the camp staff or it emerged that his parents were, for on his first night he was taken to Ruhleben’s only Jewish barrack, ‘the oldest and dirtiest stable in the compound’. As there was no room on the ground floor he was given a mattress in the loft. When Gerard, the US Ambassador, was taken on a tour of Ruhleben and shown this makeshift dormitory he ‘recoiled with a shudder’. The beams were so low that Pyke was unable to walk around upright. ‘The atmosphere was as thick as cheese,’ he wrote. ‘The whole place stank, and you could take the air, and cut it into chunks, throw it about and stamp on it, and yet it seemed about the same viscidity as mud.’ For journalist Israel Cohen, one of the lucky ones on the ground floor, the loft with ‘its little windows, its stifling atmosphere, its dismal light and its fetid smells, gave the impression of a veritable “Black Hole of Calcutta.”’ Two weeks after his arrival in the freezing, stinking loft of Ruhleben’s Jewish barrack, Pyke contracted what was described by a fellow detainee as ‘double pneumonia’.
In the days before antibiotics pneumonia was a far more deadly disease than it is today, and had contributed to the death of Pyke’s father Lionel fifteen years earlier. His son was up against both pneumonia and the apathy of the camp’s medical staff.
Known as ‘Dr Von Aspirin’, for his habit of prescribing patients two aspirins regardless of the symptoms, the Ruhleben camp doctor refused initially to see Pyke. Instead he told the men nursing him that his office was open every morning between nine and ten, and that the patient was welcome to visit him then. The patient, of course, could not move. Only when the camp commandant heard about Pyke’s condition was Dr Von Aspirin ordered to see him.
‘The doctor’s mentality as regards myself when he arrived was, Is he dead? If not, why not? He gave me two aspirins, and remarked that I was too ill to be moved, remarking a little later in the week that I wasn’t ill enough. He had me both ways. He never came to see me again.’
After ten days Pyke’s fever fell away. He had survived, but at a price. For the next two weeks he convalesced in the loft, gazing up at the low-slung beams, and as he considered his predicament he became overwhelmed by what he called a sense of ‘misery and futility’. It was unlike anything he had experienced before. This feeling was unrelenting, suffocating, and soon he was desperate ‘to do something – anything – to avoid more of it’. His friends in the loft tried to lift his spirits: they ‘did everything that human kindness and superhuman ingenuity could devise, but nevertheless I felt stifled, crushed, comatose’. Yet it was hard to see what Pyke could do.
Escape was out of the question; indeed, by the time of his arrival in Ruhleben this belief was so entrenched that even the subject of getting out of the camp had become taboo. As most detainees agreed, Ruhleben was exceptionally well guarded and its location hundreds of miles from neutral territory made it impossible to get home. The era of daring getaways, they told each other, had finished with the Napoleonic Wars. This was a new kind of war, they went on, a more scientific war in which escape was no longer technically possible.
The population of Ruhleben included men like James Chadwick, the physicist who would later win a Nobel Prize, and John Masterman, who went on to direct the Double Cross operation during the Second World War: intelligent, reasonable men who were full of imagination. There was no good reason to doubt their collective wisdom. But as he lay in the cold and stinking loft, Pyke himself dared to think that these people were wrong. Perhaps escape from Ruhleben was merely a problem, and as such there was bound to be a solution.
‘Before a problem can be solved it must be detected,’ he later wrote, and ‘it is easier to solve a problem than it is to spot what is the problem (as the whole history of science and technology shows). Almost any fool can solve a problem and quite a number do. To detect the right problem – at least so I have found – requires what [H. G.] Wells calls the daily agony of scrutinising accepted facts.’ This attitude had spirited hi
m into Germany. Now he hoped it might get him out. His motivation this time was altogether different: he was drawn not by the intellectual thrill of confounding expectations, though this remained satisfying, but the fear he had that his body could not survive a full winter in Ruhleben.
His fellow detainees were right, he told himself, insofar as it was a scientific war. This called for a scientific escape. If he approached the question in a suitably scientific manner, scrutinising every assumption within the camp and testing his theories by gathering evidence and conducting experiments, he was confident of being able to find a way out.
To almost any other Ruhleben detainee the case against such a fantasy was overwhelming. By March 1915 not one Briton had escaped from Germany. Pyke’s idea was radical to the point of being absurd. Indeed, it was so daring that he resolved not to mention it to anyone. ‘When men have nothing to do all day long but talk, they become so garrulous that it becomes impossible to keep even the slightest and least important bit of news locked up inside one.’ If his fellow inmates learnt that he was plotting an escape it would be only a matter of hours before the authorities overheard the gossip. Yet for all this, Pyke began to toy with the idea of taking on a co-conspirator: preferably one who spoke German.
Soon after Pyke’s arrival the camp authorities gave the detainees permission to take their daily constitutional in the grassy no-man’s-land between the two fences that surrounded the camp. Pyke described the scene out there as ‘like a bank holiday crowd on Hampstead Heath, only more crowd and less holiday and no Heath’, and it was in this area one morning that Pyke bumped into Falk. The civil servant looked ‘very gloomy about something’. Pyke, also feeling down, unburdened himself. As he did so he noticed Falk’s eyes light up.
Churchill's Iceman_The True Story of Geoffrey Pyke_Genius, Fugitive, Spy Page 5
