The Escape Artists

by Neal Bascomb

  Most horrific of all was the shelling. “I must say it is a devilish affair altogether,” wrote one soldier, who arrived at the front at the same time as Harvey. “You sit like rabbits in a burrow and just wait for something to come and blow you to hell.” Jack Johnsons, whizz bangs, woolly bears, Minnies—each type of shell had a name, each a distinctive sound, but there was little to do about any of them except tighten into a ball against the trench walls and hope. In spells of heavy shelling, the world erupted into flashing lights, mad screams, and concussive waves of sound that had an almost physical presence. The British lines alone suffered approximately seven thousand casualties daily. “Wastage” was how staff headquarters referred to the number of dead and wounded in their ledgers.

  Harvey managed to survive three months at Plug Street, then more in other nearby sectors. One trench looked the same as another. The battles were alike too. He preferred patrols to “waiting . . . passive” for shellfire in the trenches. Affectionately nicknamed the Little Man, Harvey was an expert scout. On August 3, 1915, he participated in a nighttime patrol led by his good friend Raymond Knight. They discovered a German listening post hidden in some bushes. Knight attacked first, Harvey followed. He shot two men with his revolver and then chased after a third. Near the German lines, he knocked down the fleeing man with his bludgeon and grabbed his collar to take him prisoner. At that moment, a spray of bullets from the enemy trenches whistled past Harvey. Appearing out of nowhere, Knight yanked his friend to safety. For the incident, Harvey and Knight were awarded the Distinguished Conduct Medal for “conspicuous gallantry,” recommended for a commission, and won a short leave home, where Harvey reunited with Anne.

  Throughout his time in the trenches, Harvey found comfort in the act of writing poetry in a small notebook he always kept on him. On trudging toward the lines:

  This route march is a blighted thing—God wot.

  The sun—

  How hot!

  No breeze!

  No pewter pot!

  On the death of the poet Rupert Brooke:

  Joy diadems thy death to all

  Who loving thee—loves beauty more,

  Since in thy death thou showest plain

  Though Songs must cease and Life must fall

  The things that made the songs remain.

  On Gloucestershire:

  I’m homesick for my hills again—

  My hills again!

  To see above the Severn plain

  Unscabbarded against the sky

  The blue high blade of Cotswold lie.

  With his poems, Harvey found a welcome audience, initially with his mates in the trenches, then in the 5th Gloucester Gazette. The first of its kind, the regimental journal aimed to entertain and raise morale in the battalion. Harvey contributed many poems and other writings to it, and they were reprinted in newspapers far and wide under his initials “F. W. H.” Their acclaim won him a publisher in Sidgwick & Jackson, which planned to release a collection entitled A Gloucestershire Lad, a couple of months after Harvey arrived at the front lines in Fauquissart.

  When Harvey failed to return from his daytime scouting mission, most in his battalion thought him dead. A grieving Ivor Gurney wrote home: “His desire for nobility and sacrifice was insatiable and was at last his doom, but his friends may be excused for desiring a better ending than that probably of a sniper’s bullet in No Man’s Lands.” Back in Gloucester, newsboys announced “Local Poet Missing.”

  “How did you get here?” one of the German soldiers asked Harvey, his hand forcing him against the trench wall.

  “Over no-man’s-land, of course,” he answered.

  “What were you doing?”

  “Patrolling.”

  “Where is the rest of your patrol?”

  “There wasn’t one.”

  Suddenly, Harvey began to laugh. It was a mad kind of chuckle, born from shock and the uncanny resemblance of one of his captors to a Redlands farmhand. The two enemy soldiers stared at their prisoner, confused, then took him away. Harvey’s reaction may have well saved him from a quick bullet to the head.

  At the rear of the trenches, a senior officer interrogated him on British artillery positions and the reasoning behind a recent attack by two divisions. “Oh, we have plenty of men,” Harvey said casually. With that, he was delivered to the barracks in nearby Douai. Alone in a small room, the spell of adrenaline broken, Harvey started to realize the truth of his situation, something he had never imagined possible: he was a prisoner. He feared his battalion would send out a search party and that his friends might die looking for him. He worried that Anne and his family might believe him lost forever. “By God,” he declared. “They’ve got me.”

  In his mind, he ran through the events leading to his capture, picking at what he could have done differently to avoid his ill fate. If only he had turned back after meeting his initial objective. Should he have assumed the dugout was occupied? Should he have fired his revolver and fled? He found no good answers, only a merry-go-round of more questions. Finally he ceased that line of thought. He was where he was, and that was the end of it.

  Hungry, harassed by lice, he opened his pocketbook Shakespeare and read several sonnets to pass the time. Soon the light grew too dim to read, but he continued to recite the lines from memory. When sleep eluded him, he took a small dose from the vial of morphine he always brought with him on patrols in case he was wounded in no-man’s-land. Soft dreams followed, but he awakened a prisoner all the same.

  In the morning, he wrote a poem called “Solitary Confinement” on the flyleaf of a dusty French book someone had left in the room. It began:

  No mortal comes to visit me to-day,

  Only the gay and early-rising Sun

  Who strolled in nonchalantly, just to say,

  “Good morrow, and despair not, foolish one!”

  For ten days Harvey remained in Douai, surviving by the motto: “Shakespeare for the light, morphia for the night.” Then he and several other prisoners were sent by train across the border into Germany. Left to sit on the floor of their fourth-class carriage, they endured cross looks from soldiers who occupied the single row of benches in the compartment. At station stops, some civilians on the platform shouted, “Nein! Engländer!” through the windows. For the most part though they were treated decently along the way. Harvey even befriended one of the guards, who spoke some pidgin English and had earned an Iron Cross on the Russian front. When he asked when the war might end, the guard said, “Krieg. Nix gut. Deutschland kaput. France kaput. Russia kaput. England kaput. Alles kaput.”

  Their journey concluded in the middle of the night, with a screeching halt, at Gütersloh, an industrial town in Westphalia, Germany. From the station, they trekked to the town’s outskirts, where a boot-shaped assembly of buildings stood ringed in light and pine trees. Built as an insane asylum a couple of years before the war, the Gütersloh facility was now a prison camp for twelve hundred officers.

  Harvey and the others were led into a building block painted with a big letter H. Guards searched them one by one, placing all their belongings on a long table—keeping whatever items suited them. Then each prisoner was interrogated and given a piece of black bread as compensation for the grilling. Afterward, they were stripped and their clothes taken away for fumigation. Once deloused and showered, the prisoners sat in an empty room until guards finally returned their clothes. Then came inoculations, injections into the chest and arm for a litany of diseases.

  They remained in quarantine in Block H for several days, removed from the hundreds of other British, Irish, French, Belgian, and Russian prisoners who gathered outside in the sandy grounds during the day. Harvey met a pair of RFC pilots, one of whom told him about being paraded naked through Ostend after he was shot down at sea. “Bad sportsmen,” the pilot said. He had informed his captors as much. When they were finally allowed into the main prison, Harvey and the pilots quickly came to learn what most prisoners knew about their German captors. �
��Front-line troops have some respect for each other,” noted one British officer. “But the farther from the front you get, the more bellicose and beastly the people become.”

  Three

  There is to be a big push shortly . . . Every bit of energy must be concentrated on the task.” General Hugh “Boom” Trenchard spoke in the thunderous voice—and with the hard-charging attitude—that had earned him his nickname. It was the second week of September, 1916, and he was traveling from aerodrome to aerodrome delivering his message to the RFC squadrons. The British were bringing a “new engine of war” to break through the lines: the tank. The RFC would be critical to the success of the offensive. “We must shoot all Huns on sight and give them no rest. Our bombers should make life a burden on the enemy lines . . . Reconnaissance jobs must be completed at all costs.” In essence, Trenchard repeated the simple tactical directive sent earlier by one of his squadron commanders: “Attack everything!”

  At Le Hameau aerodrome in northern France, Captain David Gray accepted these orders with his usual aplomb. A flight leader in the No. 11 Squadron—the RFC’s first fighter group and home of several of its finest aces—aggression in the sky was his specialty. Trimly built, with an erect posture and a neatly pressed uniform, he was every inch the military man. His stern glance, accentuated by a ruler-straight part in his hair, high forehead, trim mustache, and hatchet nose, marked an officer who brooked no compromise with himself or his command.

  On September 15, after a half hour of heavy-artillery bombardment of the German lines that one pilot likened to a “solid grey wool carpet of shell bursts,” British soldiers rose from their trenches in a major offensive. Aided by tanks clearing a path and providing gunfire cover through no-man’s-land, the troops overran a nine-thousand-yard stretch of the first line of German trenches and some of the second.

  Gray, his observer, Leonard Helder, and scores of other RFC aircrews flew day and night, both before and after the initial ground attack. Beyond the threats of Archie and mechanical failure, they also faced reinvigorated attacks from German fighter squadrons—who brought a new type of plane into the fray. One British pilot later described in his diary the speed of this new German aircraft: “The next moment I saw a Fokker biplane coming toward us. It gained on us so quick and was so infinitely superior that I made for a cloud and got to it just in time.”

  Since the war began, there had been a back-and-forth struggle between the Allies and the Germans over who ruled the skies over western Europe. Part depended on the quality of aircrews, their tactics, and the latest aeronautical developments. Part hung on the combatants’ sheer force of will.

  At the start of 1916 Trenchard made clear that he wanted to overwhelm the Germans, best planes or not, with nonstop patrols and deep penetration behind enemy lines. Throughout late spring and summer, he largely had his way, but at the severe cost of exhausting his men—and of losing many of them. The RFC was increasingly seen as a “suicide club,” and a pilot who lasted a few weeks on the front was considered an “absolute master.” Air crews were not issued parachutes, and when they prepared emergency kits, with rations, maps, and other gear to allow them to survive if shot down, their commanders castigated them for showing an unwillingness to fight to the bitter end.

  With the big September push and increased German resistance, the butcher’s bill steepened rapidly. The RFC now approached the most gruesome wastage rate of the entire war, when pilots and observers could expect to survive only seventeen and a half hours in the air before becoming casualty statistics. It was “bloody murder,” one fighter leader said. New pilots arrived almost daily to take the place of crews who did not return.

  What the British command did not yet know was that Oswald Böelcke, the fearsome German ace, was back on the Western Front. An aggressive, practiced pilot, the twenty-five-year-old Böelcke was also a keen tactical thinker. In the first half of the year, he shot down thirteen planes. The German air force had sent him to the East for the summer, but in late August, with the RFC again holding supremacy in the skies, they ordered him back in an effort to turn the tide.

  Böelcke started a new squadron, the Jagdstaffel, whose purpose was to hunt British planes. He recruited the best pilots, including the young Baron Manfred von Richthofen (the future Red Baron). Böelcke demanded that his squadron be fully supplied with the new Albatros D.III, a fast, easily handled biplane with two fixed guns. He had already experienced its effectiveness over the Somme. With the imminent arrival of these planes and his soon-to-be-tested tactic of coordinated assault, his Jagdstaffel promised to be a vicious force.

  Back at their aerodromes in France, Allied pilots chronicled the rising threat in flight logs, diaries, and letters home. However, they mostly tried to relax between their flying missions. They took walks, rode horses, drank French port, played bridge, listened to music on the gramophone, and sang songs. There was comfort in the farmhouses and chateaus they inhabited, where they tried to forget the wouft, wouft, wouft of antiartillery and the sight of friends plummeting in corkscrews to the earth, their planes on fire or split in two.

  Even so, at breakfast on September 17, Gray could not help but notice the pair of empty seats and the dark mood around the tables in the Le Hameau mess hall. The men drank their tea and drew heavily on cigarettes. Their hands shook, their eyes glazed over in a thousand-yard stare, and their faces were fixed in a rictus of tension from the constant cold, wind, and threat of death in the sky. Two members of their squadron had been shot down the day before. With dawn approaching, it was soon time to go back into the deathly fray.

  Gray reviewed his morning mission, pinned to the noticeboard: lead a six-plane fighter escort on a bombing run to the Marcoing rail junction to disrupt the German resupply of men and ammunition at the Somme. He suited up in preparation for the attack ahead. At thirty years of age, Gray was the “old man” in his squadron. Few, if any, had his military experience, including action under fire. His fighters, and the bomber crews they were protecting, would need every bit of it.

  David Gray spent the first seven years of his life on a tea plantation hewed out of the dense Indian jungles of Upper Assam. It was a land both beautiful and perilous—of misted rivers and dense canopies of palm trees; of insufferable heat, monsoons, malaria, cobras, and leopards that preyed in the dark.

  In the late eighteenth century, explorers for the East India Company discovered tea trees growing in the jungle, and an industry was born to rival Chinese tea production. In 1874 newlyweds Dr. Edward and Helen Gray took a six-month sea voyage from England, then journeyed by paddle steamer up the swirling brown currents of the Brahmaputra River to Assam. Edward had been recruited by the Jorehaut Tea Company to run a medical clinic for the British staff and the hundreds of locals who worked the estates. In addition to his doctor’s salary, he was paid a percentage of the company’s profits.

  In a bamboo-framed thatched bungalow, set amid fifteen acres of hillside tea garden and surrounded by jungle, Edward and Helen started their family. David was born in 1884, the seventh of nine children. Two of his siblings died from the many fevers that plagued the area. When David was almost eight, the family returned to England. Dr. Gray opened a surgical practice in London, and they lived in a townhouse in the well-heeled neighborhood bordering Regent’s Park. The culture shock was profound, but David adapted quickly. Instead of hide-and-seek in the jungle, he now played cricket and polo with great élan.

  He settled early on an army career—perhaps in rebellion against his father, who had a penchant for practical jokes, business schemes, and too much sherry—and attended the Royal Military Academy in Woolwich, in the southeast of London. Founded by King George II and known as the Shop, the academy’s students were destined to be sappers—combat engineers who built roads and bridges and laid and cleared mines—and artillery officers. A shrill trumpet called reveille daily at 6:15 a.m. After a parade, cadets attended lectures in the ivy-clad redbrick buildings on everything from history and mathematics to electrici
ty, fortifications, and explosives. They built wooden mountings for eighty-ton artillery guns and soldered shell casings. They surveyed hills using three-legged plane tables and dug long tunnels with pickaxes and shovels across the campus grounds. Upon graduation, Gray was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Royal Garrison Artillery and stationed in a fort on the Red Sea. He was nineteen.

  Two years later, wishing to return to the country of his birth, Gray joined the 48th Pioneers of the British Indian Army and was based first in Bareilly, then Allahabad, in the northern reaches of the British raj. Although an infantry regiment, the Pioneers specialized in constructing bridges, fortifications, and roads in the often impassable Indian landscape. Gray was well liked both by his soldiers and by the officers above him, and was promoted to lieutenant. His record read: “A capable and efficient officer. Good eye for country. Has tact and judgment. Energetic and self-reliant.” Positions as quartermaster and adjutant followed, then a promotion to captain.

  Despite his quick advancement and military bearing, Gray also had the understated air of an adventurer. He sank himself into the varied cultures in which he lived. Languages came to him as easily as bad habits did to others; his nickname in India was Munshi, “teacher of tongues.” Besides English, he spoke serviceable French, German, Russian, Bengali, Hindi, and Arabic, as well as a healthy smattering of several others.