Churchill's Iceman

by Henry Hemming

  On the face of it, they made an odd couple. Falk was a married man in his late thirties who had spent his early years in Bradford; Pyke was a twenty-one-year-old bachelor who had grown up in a salubrious pocket of west London. Falk was a devout Christian, Pyke was an atheist raised by an observant Jewish mother. Falk was an ex-serviceman; Pyke had a mistrust of all military men. Yet Falk was someone who kept the full details of his past to himself. Though born in Bradford, his parents were both German and his mother was Jewish. It is unclear whether he was raised as a Christian or chose to convert to that religion, but this may shed some light on the affinity he felt for Pyke, a young man he later described as ‘essentially English, and at the same time essentially Jewish’. Falk was not only English and Jewish, but German as well and latterly Christian.

  Ruhleben was a place which lent itself to personal reinvention, a levelling environment in which much of one’s life until then could be made to feel peripheral. Pyke and Falk were drawn together mainly by their conversation. Both relished debate and were habitually sceptical. At the same time they complemented each other: Pyke was an optimist in material matters while Falk was more negative. In their discussions the younger man came to be the voice of fantasy while the older one represented reality, a duality which made their exchanges loud and lively. It was not long before Pyke realised that Falk would make the perfect co-escapee. Less clear was how he should bring this up. He simply could not tell whether Teddy Falk would ever countenance such a thing.

  If Pyke misread the signs and was rebuffed there was every chance that Falk might spread the word about what he was planning. Their relationship began to resemble a courtship. ‘We were both very careful, and approached the matter delicately. It was quite a month before I dared even get on to the subject,’ recalled Pyke. ‘At first we used to discuss the state of affairs prevailing outside; and then, when wandering round the camp, I pointed to a part of the fence and remarked, “That’s not very carefully guarded, is it? Look how slack that sentry is. One might be able to get out there if One was fairly sharp about it.” “Yes,” Falk would reply, “but what would One do when One had got out?”’

  That would be it for the day. The next morning the discussion might edge forward onto what One might do if One got onto, say, a train. Was One required to show a passport? Pyke tracked down an inmate who had recently been allowed to take a train into Berlin and who explained in the course of a long conversation that you were not required to show your papers on every German train. Pyke passed this on to Falk the next day.

  They carried on like this for some time, creeping forward in their imaginary escape, until at last Pyke crossed the Rubicon. He changed the ‘One’ in their conversations to ‘I’. Falk ‘made no sign of having observed the change.’

  This was remarkable. Here was a man whose response to the outbreak of war had been to hand in his passport, and who had at home a wife and a young child, a child whom he had never seen. Now it seemed that he was prepared to risk his life by attempting an escape.

  ‘The next morning we were both a little shy,’ wrote Pyke. ‘Both of us had experienced the effect of waking up in daylight immediately conscious of our last night’s plan as a new factor in life, and neither of us was quite certain as to whether in the other this feeling had not overswamped the determination of the preceding evening.’ In a testy mood, Falk ran through a list of objections to the scheme. ‘By admitting that he had been foolish the night before,’ felt Pyke, Falk was offering him a way out. He did not take it. Instead he demolished each of Falk’s objections. Their courtship was over. Bound together by the intimacy of conspiracy, the two inmates began to plot their route back to London.

  Several months later, at about seven o’clock one summer’s evening, with most detainees out on the exercise ground, Geoffrey Pyke and Teddy Falk met as agreed in front of Ruhleben’s main grandstand. Both wore suits cut in a German style. Neither one said very much. In silence they scanned the horizon with nervous intent. It was a clear, warm evening and the sky was blank and blue. Beyond the fences they could see poplars by the riverbank, and from time to time a train mumbled by on its way to Berlin. The conditions were perfect. Their escape would begin in less than thirty minutes.

  ‘I felt artificially calm about the whole matter,’ wrote Pyke, ever the optimist, ‘and more of a captive than ever. The sun was getting low, though it would be another two hours before it set. Something very terrible was going to happen to me, and quite soon. In half an hour’s time Falk and I would either be shaking in the grip of a couple of German soldiers, or the possibility of a totally new life without horizon would extend before us. It was like waiting for reincarnation, with the alternative of death.’

  Falk, the pessimist, was coping less well. ‘In view of the danger of the undertaking, I confess that I felt qualms when the date fixed came nearer and nearer.’ Indeed Falk ‘loathed’ the idea of escape, given that the likelihood of being tripped up by ‘some unlucky coincidence’ was in his mind, ‘infinitely greater than the possibility of success’.

  ‘Far more courage was needed from him,’ agreed Pyke, ‘than from me, for he thought he was going to his death, whereas I was by then so confident that I should be in London in three weeks, that I arranged the whole thing so as to be home in time for the school holidays of my younger brother and sister.’

  For Wallace Ellison, a Ruhlebenite who had agreed to join their escape party, the fear of capture had proved too much. ‘I had a strong presentiment – I can give it no more definite name, that three were one too many for such an enterprise.’ He had pulled out the day before, which had only compounded Falk’s anxiety. A much greater concern was how many German sentries would be trying to stop them.

  In March, when Pyke had first resolved to escape, the idea of doing this was outlandish mainly because up to that point nobody had tried to escape from Ruhleben. Things had changed since then. A fifty-two-year-old engineer from Dumfries had spent fourteen days on the run before being picked up near the Dutch frontier and hauled off to Berlin’s Stadt-Vogtei Prison (where Pyke had spent a few days). None of the detainees had heard of him since. During the past ten days there had been a further five attempts to get out of Ruhleben, each of which had failed. Not only did this confirm the prevailing belief that escape was impossible, it had led to fifteen extra sentries being posted to the outer fence just before Pyke and Falk hoped to break out.

  Pyke did not share this news with Falk. Instead he ‘behaved extremely caddishly’, as he put it, by keeping it to himself. He was convinced that his friend would pull out, given his concern for his wife and child. This strikes a different note in our understanding of Pyke. Even as it suggests a certain ruthlessness, it is a reminder of just how desperate he was to get out. His body had not fully recovered from his pneumonia, a situation that he might have kept from Falk, and he was increasingly uncertain that his lungs and heart could withstand much longer in Ruhleben. So he kept this information from Falk and instead assured him that he would be able to spirit them both out of camp.

  ‘You make it safe first,’ Falk had said long ago, ‘and I’ll come.’ It had always been Pyke’s responsibility to find a way out of Ruhleben, whereupon Falk would take over. During the past few weeks Pyke had finalised his plan. It involved just one implement – a piece of stiff wire – which was now in his pocket, along with money and as much food as he could easily conceal.

  Half an hour had elapsed, and it was time to set the plan in motion. Slowly, neither too fast nor too slow, the two men entered the exercise ground between the two fences. The barriers on either side of them were eight feet tall and topped with barbed wire. Armed sentries patrolled 250-yard-long beats and beyond the outer fence was a stretch of open ground watched over by further sentries armed with rifles and equipped with searchlights. It was an impressive set-up, well thought out and meticulous. But there were flaws.

  Pyke had noticed that during the day the sentries’ attention was focused on the outer fence – the o
nly barrier between the exercising detainees and the world beyond – while at night, with everyone back in their barracks, the guards concentrated on the inner fence. So to escape one would ideally cross the inner fence by day and the outer fence by night. This was an elegant solution: it had the pleasing symmetry of a pared-down mathematical equation and the advantage of taking you over the open ground by night when it was poorly lit. It was also totally impractical.

  You would need to hide in no-man’s-land while day turned to night and, naturally, the camp authorities had done their best to make that impossible. Not only was the area between the fences patrolled at all times, but the solitary building in this interstitial zone was regularly checked by passing sentries.

  That building was a tiny wooden kiosk, six feet across at its widest point, which was used to store athletics equipment. Even if a detainee did manage to hide in there one night he could not escape because it was locked from dusk until dawn. Or so it seemed.

  As Pyke and Falk milled about with other prisoners on the exercise ground they heard a bell. It was 7:45 p.m.: time to return to their barracks. The two men joined a column of inmates trudging back to their huts – but at the last moment broke away towards the kiosk.

  It had begun.

  Having pulled away both men expected to hear the shout of a sentry or the crack of a rifle, as thunder follows lightning. But there was nothing.

  Reaching the kiosk, they nipped inside and pulled the door shut.

  Still nothing.

  ‘I felt a natural calm,’ wrote Pyke, ‘as if I was observing the workings of fate through a telescope.’ Any moment now the sentry would open the door for his final inspection of the kiosk before bolting it shut for the night. According to Pyke’s plan not only would he and Falk be able to deal with the bolt, but when the sentry opened the door they would be invisible.

  Pyke had noticed that the sentries were lackadaisical in the way they bolted the door. Rather than push the bolt right along and pull it down they merely threw it halfway across. He had also noticed a hollow knot in one of the door’s timbers. Using a piece of stiff wire he had found that one could open the bolt from inside the kiosk. But Pyke’s greatest discovery was to do with the position of the window in relation to the entrance.

  The small building shook as the door swung open. Standing in the doorway was a uniformed German sentry, so close that Pyke could see the colour of his eyes. They were pale blue and flecked with gold. For a moment nothing happened. The evening sun cast the sentry’s face in a sickly, jaundiced light. The smell of athletics equipment filled the air like a reminder of childhood and each of the three men in that tiny hut was still like a statue. The sentry’s gaze registered nothing – it was as if he could not see Pyke and Falk.

  In the weeks following his recovery from pneumonia Pyke had been reminded – we do not know how – of the optical effect of a bright light behind a solid. He realised that if you were to look into this kiosk late on a summer’s evening, given that the only window was on its western side and the door was on the east, it would be very hard to make out what was beneath the windowsill, in the way that when the sun breaks the horizon it is difficult to focus on the landscape immediately below. This was not to say that you would be invisible if you crouched beneath the window, as Pyke and Falk now did, but you would be hard to see. The more pertinent question, and the one on which their escape now hinged, was whether a German sentry might expect to find two detainees hiding there.

  ‘If you are going to turn your hand to out-manoeuvring or out-cheating a person or persons, you should have very definite ideas as to their mentality,’ wrote Pyke. Rather than study the bars to your cell, consider the mind that made them. To the best of his knowledge, the sentries at Ruhleben were the kind of men for whom the idea of trying to hide out in this hut was so idiotic as to be beyond even the eccentric Englishmen they were required to guard.

  Trusting in all this, Falk and Pyke remained stock-still beneath the window. Their bodies were partly covered by scraps of netting and anything else that had been to hand. They were not obscured, but the combination of the sun and the sentries’ habitual lethargy might be enough to make them invisible.

  The German withdrew. The door closed with a whoomph. The bolt was dragged roughly across and the two detainees listened to the sound of the sentry’s boots crunching over the gravel.

  The first part of Pyke’s plan had worked. It had been utterly audacious, simple and brave. Now the two men remained motionless on the floor of the kiosk while a band of sunlight moved sleepily up the wall, the colour becoming fuller and more golden, until it reddened and began to fade. At 9:30 the camp’s electric arc-lights came on with a wide-awake hum and a bugle sounded for the change of sentries.

  Time to move.

  The next stage of Pyke’s plan was clumsier. They had to get from the kiosk over the outer fence and across the open ground beyond. He had been unable to find an ingenious way under or around this fence and instead had taken to conducting experiments along its perimeter to find the least noisy place to climb over. To do this he had disturbed the fence, as if by accident, to see how the sentries reacted.

  The results had been strange. Rattles of about the same intensity in the same place elicited different responses at different times. He concluded that some of the sentries were more switched-on than others. Since then Pyke had worked out which sentries were less attentive, when they were on duty and where. Based on this he was confident that the sentry now operating the searchlight over the area by the kiosk was either lazy, sleepy or hard of hearing.

  He had also established that during the sentry changeover the no-man’s-land between the fences was unguarded for approximately one minute. Pyke and Falk picked themselves up and took off their boots so that they could move more quietly over the gravel. Pyke produced his piece of stiff wire and slipped it through the knot in the door before working the bolt back towards the hinge. The door swung open.

  In front of them the exercise ground was whitish and empty. Wide-eyed, strung out, the two detainees bolted the door behind them and padded over the gravel towards the outer fence before clawing their way to the top of the wire. For Falk ‘the rattling wires seemed loud as cracking whipstocks to my ears, but it was only my bad conscience’.

  Still no shots, no shouts.

  They had both made it over the outer fence when they saw the spike of a sentry’s helmet heading towards them. Again it was time to put their faith in elementary optics. Trusting that at night the eye is better at picking out movement than familiar shapes, they lay very still near the fence. Falk watched as the new sentry ‘walked on, for we were already in the shadow, and the glare of the lamps in his eyes rendered it impossible to see far into the outer gloom, as Pyke had discovered previously’. Again their escape depended on one of his small-scale experiments.

  Now they had to reach the safety of the woods beyond, which required crossing the open ground without being picked up by the sentry’s searchlight. The trick was to move without flailing your limbs. To do this, Pyke had developed two bespoke crawls: the ‘crab-crawl’, which allowed you to ‘proceed in one direction, and yet keep one’s eyes fixed on a sentry in any other’; and the ‘caterpillar’, which, despite its name, was the faster of the two, and ‘depended on lifting the knee at a certain point in the movement.’

  Both were fine in theory but difficult to practise in Ruhleben where privacy was impossible and even the latrines lacked dividing walls. Pyke’s solution was characteristically simple. He practised his crawls in full view of the guards and his fellow detainees. When asked why he was writhing about on the floor he explained that these were exercises for a weak heart which had been suggested to him by Dr SÖrgersund, a Danish doctor whom he had invented.

  Once the relief sentry had moved on a little, the two suited escapees began to crab-crawl across the open ground. Soon their elbows were aching and their brows wet with sweat. A searchlight beam swung lazily across the open ground. It would be on
them in a moment. With a spurt both men propelled themselves over the last stretch, reaching the woods just before the beam moved harmlessly past.

  Pyke and Falk had escaped from Ruhleben, and had done so scientifically. Every detail of this escape was rooted in Pyke’s refusal to take any assumptions for granted, whether it was the idea that the kiosk was too small to be used as a hiding place or that it was impossible to crawl across the open ground without being seen. This scepticism had led to hypotheses, experiments and proofs and now both men appeared to be free. If the lesson of Pyke’s journey into Germany was to think without fear of failure, then getting out of Ruhleben underlined the importance of challenging what you were told. Falk was in awe of how Pyke had done this, praising his ‘positive genius’ for an escape based on ‘sheer hard thinking and acute observation’. But they were not yet out of the woods – in every sense.

  As the two men caught their breath, Pyke noticed in the near-distance the flickering dart of a flashlight. It was a little man and his dog. Too old to fight, this patriotic Berliner and his companion would do their bit for the Vaterland each night by patrolling the woods beyond the camp, never taking the same route twice. This unpredictability placed them outside Pyke’s meticulous plans.

  Keeping low, the two Englishmen hurtled through the undergrowth. ‘How the twigs underfoot cracked! It was as though a thousand squibs had been let off.’ Having made it to the other side of the trees and away from the flashlight they saw to their horror a fresh set of fences.

  There seemed to be nothing to do except try to scramble over. At the first fence Falk used Pyke as a step, yet this left the younger man stuck. The problem, according to Falk, was the size of Pyke’s feet. They were ‘exceptionally large’ so he was unable to scale the wire mesh. ‘Seeing him in difficulty,’ wrote Falk, ‘I put my hands through the netting and clenched them. Pyke stepped on to my knuckles and climbed over.’