The Escape Artists

by Neal Bascomb

  They started with milk. Any schoolboy worth his salt knew that milk could be used as invisible ink. Take a milk-dipped fountain pen, scrawl a message on a blank sheet of paper, write a note on top of that in ink, then send. The recipient runs a hot iron over the paper and the fat in the milk below burns through, revealing the hidden words. Message delivered.

  On the inside of an envelope addressed to his mother, Blain wrote in milk that he needed a compass, which could be smuggled in to him in a parcel. He also wanted some warm clothes, but these could come in an ordinary package. To alert her to a hidden message, he included a simple code in his letter. It began: “My deaarest Mother, I am so sorry I am unable to account for the los of my letter home to you but I hop that this one will rive soon telling you that I am very fit and well. I ccannot tell you how I long to get ome again.” With the additional and missing letters, the code spelled out: “Search.” Gray and Kennard prepared similar messages.

  “Will they twig it?” Blain wondered to his coconspirators. Even if his letter cleared the censors, he feared that his mother might not decipher the code.

  At any other prison, a month or more might pass before they knew. But Osnabrück, they had learned, served as a main censoring depot for northwest Germany. Every package and letter sent throughout the surrounding area was routed through the city. Delivery came faster than they might expect from the Royal Mail.

  While they waited, the three men acted like they were settling into Osnabrück for the long haul. They befriended some Russian officers, and at night they would have tea together and listen to concerts by balalaika and guitar players. They even participated in a theater show with some fellow RFC pilots, twisting themselves together and acting the part of an automobile racing across the stage. The crowd roared with laughter.

  Not all was easy diversion, especially for Gray. As senior British officer at the camp, he needed to cajole Blankenstein at every turn into providing better conditions. The floor of the latrine was like an ice-skating rink in the cold, so Gray demanded coal for its stove. He also pushed for bigger exercise grounds. Blankenstein, who turned out to be a reasonable man, acceded to both requests. Gray also led a protest against a spike in canteen prices. When a French pilot, Captain Allouche, tried to stop it, saying the Germans were only passing off a rise in costs, Gray threatened him into silence. Always trying to curry favor with the Germans, Allouche had few friends. Even his own countrymen despised him, a martinet who dressed every day with his crowd of medals on his uniform. Some even thought him a German spy.

  When not handling such concerns, Gray labored over letters to the families of those who died on the Marcoing run. Writing to the mother of Lionel Morris, Gray praised her son for his “stout heart and steady nerve” and explained how he had been shot down after bravely circling back to protect another plane. Morris’s death weighed on Gray.

  Preparing for escape and the hope that came with it brought solace. Every day, Gray, Blain, and Kennard checked the parcel room for word from their families. Finally, Blain received a package from home. As required, a guard closely watched him open the box to make sure he did not slip something into his pocket before its contents were inspected. Inside was a handful of soft candies wrapped in wax paper and a sealed tin containing a nutcake flavored with crème de menthe. At first blush, Blain feared there must have been a mix-up with the parcels. His mother would never have sent such a dessert—she knew he hated mint. In the next moment, he realized what it might actually contain.

  He passed the tin to the guard, who shook it in his hand like a child rattling a present to guess what was inside. Blain had to remind himself to breathe so as not to give away his nervous expectation. If suspicious, the guard would surely pry open the lid and look more closely. If the contraband were discovered, Blain could face time in isolation or a beating—or both. Then the wait was over. The guard handed the tin back to Blain and waved him away.

  Sitting on his bed, Gray and Kennard hovering beside him, Blain removed the lid of the tin. Wafts of mint rose from the sugar-coated dessert. When he lifted the cake from the tin, he noticed that its weight was off. He dug his fingers into it and pulled out something wrapped in oilskin cloth. “Dear old Mum. God bless you,” he said, his hands trembling as he uncovered a compass. He was overcome with thoughts of his family, how much they supported him, how much they must miss him—as much as he did them. Tears pooled in his eyes. Leaving him to be alone, Gray and Kennard no doubt felt homesick as well.

  Over the course of the week, Gray received a map, hidden at the bottom of a box of chocolates, while Kennard uncovered a small flashlight and file in a parcel of his own. They also collected clothes and a week’s worth of tinned meat, chocolate, Oxo cubes, and milk tablets for the run to the Dutch border. Overjoyed at their bounty, the three almost danced a jig.

  But not everything they needed could come by mail. One day, the canteen had a manicure set on sale. The Germans must not have considered how sharp it was, nor how well made: the nail clippers sliced through wire like it was paper, perfect to cut a hole in the fence. From some scrap canvas, they sewed haversacks. From parcel string, they wove a rope to lower themselves from the window.

  In early December, their preparations complete, the men were set to go. First an unexpected snowfall stalled them. No matter how dark the night, guards would have easily spotted their figures in the light reflected off the snow. Then a rumor came that Blankenstein had got wind of an imminent escape attempt. According to the prison grapevine, which the British called the Poldhu (after the wireless station in Cornwall where Guglielmo Marconi sent the first transatlantic radio transmission), Blankenstein had placed six sharpshooters in the streets outside the barracks to pick off anyone who managed to make it outside the wall.

  At first, Gray, Blain, and Kennard did not believe it. There was always scuttlebutt of every sort passing through the prison. The men planned to keep careful watch for the next few nights on the movements to and from the barracks. When they spotted some figures with rifles stalking in the dark outside the walls, they decided to put the escape on brief hold. The Germans would surely not maintain such vigilance throughout the long winter. Then, on December 17, guards informed Gray that he was to be moved to another camp. Immediately. The three were shattered by the news. Their cabal was broken.

  Five

  Gütersloh was a Tower of Babel, holding prisoners from almost every Allied country, but the British associated mostly with the Russians. Will Harvey, a lover of music, savored the Russian songs and dances that echoed through the camp at night. They gave him a momentary lift away from the “pine-shadowed cage” in which he was being kept. Before Christmas, the Russians had been secretly engaged in constructing a balloon in the unused top rooms of their block. They somehow collected enough scraps of paper—everything from old envelopes to brown paper from parcels—to paste together to create an inflatable in which to escape. Extending like sausage links, it filled several rooms. Just before they sailed away—or at least made the attempt—the German guards discovered their plot. The balloon was deflated, folded in sacks, and burned in a furnace.

  Crushed by this failure, the would-be escapees had only a dreary dinner to look forward to on Christmas. Of all the POWs in the camp, the Russians received the least number of parcels from home and so had meager holiday fare. Wanting to do a good turn for their fellow captives, Harvey and his countrymen shared with them some of the cheese, meat, and desserts they’d collected for a Christmas feast. Together they sang carols and toasted to a better year ahead with a punch Harvey brewed from “bad German wine, tinned fruit, and smuggled cognac, raisins, cloves, cinnamon, and a spot or two of Worcester sauce—for bite.”

  A few days later, a newspaper was smuggled into camp. Woodrow Wilson, the American president, was asking the warring parties to make peace, but the prospects for a negotiated settlement appeared dim. The daily infliction of casualties across the Western Front promised to continue without end, both sides clearly believing
they would win the war of attrition. The mighty Russian bear had awakened, pushing back against the earlier Austrian and German advances, though at a steep price of over a million casualties. Retrenchment guaranteed a frigid winter on the Eastern Front.

  Also printed in the smuggled newspaper was King George V’s Christmas address. In it he extolled the continuing bravery of Britain’s soldiers and sailors and praised the men and women on the home front who labored to keep their country in the fight. Nowhere in his speech did he mention those who had been taken prisoner—not a word. Their struggles, their sacrifices, had seemingly been forgotten.

  When Harvey first arrived at Gütersloh, he imagined he would be welcomed by his British countrymen already in the camp. Instead, he felt abandoned by the veteran prisoners, who left him and the other arrivals to find their own place. Every day, alone, he walked the perimeter fence—a distance of about half a mile. On weekends, local civilians gathered outside the wire to gape at him and his fellow captives. The only inmates who paid him any mind were Russians, who were often looking for tutoring in English. He wrote a poem, “Gütersloh,” about the time, which concluded:

  Walking round our cages like the lions at the Zoo,

  We see the phantom faces of you, and you, and you,

  Faces of those we loved or loathed—oh, everyone we knew!

  And deeds we wrought in carelessness for happiness or rue;

  And dreams we broke in folly, and seek to build anew—

  Walking round our cages like the lions at the Zoo.

  In his second month, Harvey dashed off lyrics set to the tune of an old drinking song and belted them out to the delight of his bunkmates. He started writing more songs, sharing his own poems, and lecturing on the arts. Notably, he delivered a lacerating critique of playwright George Bernard Shaw, whose theories on “life force” and “supermen” Harvey found “less important than a single sunset, less worthy of deep, thoughtful consideration than the scarlet cup of one poppy.” Soon prisoners were calling Harvey “the Poet”—an epithet reinforced by the success back home of his first book. Over time, he found a place for himself in the camp and felt less marooned.

  Despite all this, the gloom of captivity clung to him like a sickness. It was not the boredom, though, that was profound. Every day followed the same routine: it started with morning roll call, followed by black bread for breakfast, queues for the parcel room, yard time, lunch, yard time, tea, dinner, evening roll call, and lockdown for the night. It was not the hardship, either. Commandant Gröben, a grizzled veteran of the Franco-Prussian War, who shouted “Achtung!” as a standard greeting, brooked no compromise with the rules, but if prisoners abided by them he left them to themselves.

  Harvey missed the Redlands and his family. He also longed for Anne, penning a poem, “Loneliness,” in lament. But even their absence was not the source of his greatest despair. What plagued him most was a feeling of uselessness, one shared by many of the prisoners. Try as he did to throw himself into poetry and music, he could not help but think it was for nothing. While he sat in Gütersloh, his battalion mates, his friends, and his brothers were risking death. “He cannot help them,” Harvey blistered, regarding the circumstances of the prisoner of war. “He cannot join any more in the dreadful and glorious fight for England and her liberty. Yes, he is futile. There is no more terrible reflection for a man . . . Her enemies are still unbroken. He is idle. That is the essence of his trouble, the true agony of the prisoner-state.”

  If he would only seize it, Harvey had plenty of opportunity not to be idle. His bunkmates, and close friends, infantry captains Joseph Rogers and Frank Moysey, were leading an attempt to break out of the camp. A former coal-mine engineer, Rogers was well suited to the task. They nicknamed their band the Pink Toes, likely due to the state of their feet after burrowing through the ground underneath the camp. They accessed their sap, located in a disused cellar, through a shaft that opened up behind a stairway on the side of their barracks. Rogers had engineered the bottom step to slide on greased wooden runners, allowing an easy, albeit tight, entrance and exit.

  Throughout the winter, during the couple of hours the guards were at dinner, they scraped out a tunnel through the sandy ground, using tablespoons. At each session’s end, Moysey, Rogers, and their fellow Pink Toes scattered the excavated debris in the exercise yard from bags hidden under their Burberry trench coats and then returned to their room exhausted and dirty as chimney sweeps. Harvey nicknamed Moysey “Mossy” after the earthy smell emanating from him.

  By mid-March 1917 the tunnel’s mouth extended beyond the wire. Another ten yards and they would reach a slight hill shadowed by pine trees that would serve as the perfect exit. Then Gröben announced that all British prisoners were to be transferred to a camp in Crefeld. Rogers and Mossy made a last-ditch attempt to finish the tunnel but failed. Their tireless work, excavating an exact 2,553 bags of sand and earth for a thirty-five-yard stretch, had been for naught.

  In their months together in Room 65, Harvey never threw in his lot with the Pink Toes. A German guard had told him, when he first arrived at the camp, that many had tried to escape but had never made it. The Russians, the guard called “foolish.” The French, “occasionally so.” As for the British, “Ah, they are good—so—like sheep.” Harvey had shown himself almost recklessly courageous in the trenches, but at Gütersloh it was not sheepish fear that stopped him from joining the tunnel plan. Instead, prison was eating at his will to be free.

  Some thirty miles north of where Harvey languished at Gütersloh, Cecil Blain and Caspar Kennard were eager and ready to implement their own breakout plan. Two months had passed since their partner Gray had been transferred from Osnabrück. Suspicion over an escape attempt had abated, and sharpshooters no longer patrolled outside the prison wall. The two men decided upon February 22, 1917, as their getaway night. They both acknowledged that they would be better off with Gray still on their team, but they had resolved to make do.

  When the designated time had at last come, Blain and Kennard slung their haversacks over their shoulders. Peering out of their room, they surveyed the hallway and, assured it was empty, began to make their way down the corridor. Before they could reach the broken window, though, they heard the whine of a door closing at the corridor’s end. Someone had seen them—perhaps the French pilot Allouche, whom Gray had threatened months before. His room was located in that direction. Both Blain and Kennard knew that the Frenchman was not to be trusted.

  The two men turned back to their room. To be safe, they would delay another day. But before they awoke the next morning, six guards roused them from their beds, and Commandant Blankenstein stood in the doorway as a search of the room began. The guards found their rope, their haversacks, every tool of their escape. They shoved the two Englishmen into the hallway, then down to the solitary cells in the basement. The airmen’s dreams of getting back to England were dashed.

  Neither had any doubt that it was Allouche who had given them up. Doing his punishment in solitary for two weeks, Blain had only plots of vengeance against the Frenchman to keep him warm. Upon his release, he found that Kennard had been consumed by the same thoughts.

  At the first roll call after their emergence, Blankenstein announced that the Germans were instituting a new policy of separating prisoners of different nationalities into different camps. Accordingly, the British would be moved. Blain and Kennard welcomed the transfer—a new prison might offer better opportunities for escape—but they had no intention of leaving Osnabrück without first exacting retribution on the “evil swine,” Allouche. Several of their fellow British officers wanted to participate as well.

  After lights-out on March 7, a dozen men tiptoed to the end of the second-floor corridor. They carried chamber pots that sloshed with the most vile concoctions of ash, urine, excrement, water, jam, and rotting food. Blain was proudest of all about his preparation: a one-pound tin of Morton’s Black Treacle, courtesy of his mother. Allouche would be tasting molasses and scr
ubbing it from his skin for weeks.

  At the door, Kennard turned to the others. “Ready?”

  “Not half,” Blain whispered back.

  The two burst into the room, followed by the rest of the men. They pinned Allouche to his bunk and stuffed a blanket into his mouth to cut off his protests. Then they poured their awful brews over the traitor as he thrashed about with fright. At one point, Allouche freed the gag from his mouth and howled “Au secours!” Seizing the moment, Blain dumped a fair measure of the treacle into his mouth. Revenge exacted, the British ran from the room. Allouche staggered down the hallway. “Help! The English have tried to murder me,” he shouted. “Strike a match quickly. I am covered with blood!” Awakened by the ruckus, other prisoners emerged from their rooms. One lit a match beside Allouche, and the hallway erupted in guffaws at the sight of him.

  The next day, the French officer identified the perpetrators. When one of Blankenstein’s lieutenants asked Blain and Kennard if they had indeed participated in the attack, the men, flashing proud smiles, admitted they had. Blankenstein decided to leave their punishment to the commandant at Clausthal, the new camp for which the British prisoners were now bound. The dozen culprits walked into the yard to cheers from all but the Germans. Shortly after, the rest of the British POWs were assembled to go, almost a hundred men with suitcases, mandolins, gramophones, bags of food, and even pots and kettles strung over their shoulders. They aimed to leave nothing behind.

  A train carried them into the snowbound Harz Mountains, 150 miles due east, deeper into Germany. Blain and Kennard watched from their carriage as they passed high into the shadowed hills. The lights in the train flickered from the jarring movement on the rails. After midnight, the train halted at Clausthal station, and the guards shouted “Raus!” Snow was falling as they stepped down onto the platform with their belongings. They were told they would have to wait until morning to head up to their new camp.