The Escape Artists

by Neal Bascomb

  After a couple of hours shivering in the snow, the men were allowed into the station restaurant, where the owner spread out some ham sandwiches and hearty soup. The British bought every bottle of wine behind the bar, reveling in particular in a fine prewar vintage. A raucous party broke out as the guards joined the festivities, effecting a temporary truce. At first light, feeling the worse for wear, the prisoners tramped two miles into the mountains, sometimes through heavy drifts that threatened to bury them. In the distance, they sighted the Brocken, the tallest peak in northern Germany. Finally, they arrived at Clausthal prison camp.

  Set amid mountain lakes, the building had formerly been the Kurhaus Pfauenteichen (Peacock Lake Hotel), an expansive four-story holiday retreat. With its bulky wings, steeply sloped roofs, and stunted belfry tower, the structure looked like a wedding cake gone awry. Surrounding the retreat now was a twelve-foot-tall fence made of iron-wire torpedo netting with a two-inch mesh. Arc lights stood at intervals; so too did sentries with dogs.

  Blain, Kennard, and the others involved in the revenge plot on Captain Allouche won only the briefest glimpse inside Clausthal before being shunted off to Hanover for court-martial. They passed the night before their trial in a garrison jail, each in a lone cell with a single, iron-barred window. There were so many rats that the prisoners sounded like a percussion band as they batted the vermin away with their boots.

  Come morning, guards ushered them across a yard and into a courtroom adorned with a large crucifix. They stood before their judges, an assembly of German colonels all dressed in their blue-grays, buttons and sword hilts burnished. By comparison, the twelve prisoners, unwashed and wearing what was left of their now-threadbare uniforms, looked like street vagrants. It was altogether an intimidating scene until the court interpreter introduced one of the defendants as from the “Middlesessex” Regiment. Blain and Kennard could not suppress their grins.

  The prosecutor read out the penal-code violations for the “cunning attack” against Captain Allouche. Of note, he detailed the tarring with treacle. The French major assigned to defend the twelve men tried to chalk up the whole affair to a petty squabble between prisoners of different nations. The judges would have none of it. After a brief adjournment, they sentenced the lot to fifty days in solitary or a five-hundred-mark fine.

  Unwilling to give the enemy money that might be used to prosecute the war, the British officers took the time. They spent it at Clausthal in huts built behind the old hotel. Their cells grew so cold at night that the rags they were given to wash with became stiff as boards. But never for a moment did Blain or Kennard regret taking their revenge on the despicable Allouche.

  Captain David Gray regarded himself in the mirror. Mustache trimmed. Suit fitted. Forged pass in jacket pocket. Wallet stuffed with marks. Folded map, secret report, and some provisions in his valise. Time to go. He stepped out of his room at Crefeld barracks. With its warm stove, real beds, and chintz-covered walls, Crefeld was a dream compared to Osnabrück. He shared the space with several captains, including Douglas Lyall Grant, of the London Scottish Regiment. A blueblood through and through, Grant was a sybarite of the highest order. On his capture, a day after leave back in Britain, the officer had simply remarked, “I wish I had gone to the dentist when I was at home.” His teeth were no doubt in need of attention, considering the endless flow of wine, fowl, pudding, candied almonds, and other sweets supplied by his well-heeled parents.

  Holding some eight hundred British officers and a scattering of other nationalities, Crefeld had hallways so wide you could throw a party in them, barracks blocks with views for miles, and a rectangular courtyard with tennis courts. Built in 1906, the expansive grounds originally housed a renowned Hussar regiment. Kaiser Wilhelm II spared no luxury for the young German cavalrymen, who were celebrated as much for their courtly dancing as for their horsemanship. Neither, however, were of much use after their dispatch to the Eastern Front. Crefeld itself was a prosperous town, enriched by the silk trade. Linden trees and stylish houses bordered its cobblestone streets. The prison’s Commandant Courth, a local, was a gentleman with the bulbous red nose of an imbiber, who allowed his charges long walks on parole in the surrounding woods.

  Despite the camp’s relative comforts, Gray remained desperate to escape. He wanted to get back to the fight, of course, but he was also eager to right a wrong, having collected testimonies of abuse that had been witnessed—or suffered—by his fellow officers before they arrived at Crefeld. Particularly concerning were the accounts involving those in the infantry who were captured earlier in the war. Gray planned to travel to London personally to deliver his report. His government needed to know the extent of the German crimes against his countrymen, including dreadful beatings and the cold-blooded mowing-down by machine-gun fire of soldiers surrendering on the front line.

  With Crefeld only eighteen miles from the Dutch border, Gray knew there was a good chance he could reach the frontier—and freedom—once he got outside its high walls. Disguised as a German businessman, he intended to stroll past the suite of guards at the double-arched front gate. His impeccable German and forged pass indicating he had met with the commandant should do the trick. He was undeterred by the signs posted around Crefeld warning prisoners against “evading your fate by escaping” on account that “the guards are earnest men, knowing their duty.”

  Gray left the barracks entrance and paid no mind to the prisoners eyeing him in his civilian clothes. Civvies were strictly forbidden among the inmates, and he had made his from a stripped-down uniform and several smuggled items. Acting like he had not a care in the world, he timed his walk to arrive at the gate just as a truck pulled up. The “earnest” guards, accustomed to the traffic in and out of the facility and busy checking the driver’s credentials, barely gave the suited Gray a look. In a perfect accent, he offered a few words of greeting to them and flashed his mocked-up stamped pass. They waved him on. With a Danke schön, Gray walked straight out of the prison. Crossing Bissingstrasse, he glanced sideways to see if there was any sign of pursuit or any need for alarm. He detected neither. He was just another local on the sidewalk, going about his afternoon with what leisure the war allowed. He reached a tram stop and waited for the next streetcar.

  In the months since separating from Blain and Kennard and arriving at Crefeld, Gray had been devising a way out. Two Russian prisoners had tried to hide in a rubbish cart, but they were caught before it was taken away. A Frenchman tried to get past the guards by mimicking the skittering, hunched gait of one of Courth’s lieutenants (a man known as the Crab). The guards almost let him past, but when they asked in German for his papers, he did not understand their request and thus could not comply. Another scheme saw a dozen RFC officers building a glider plane to fly over the walls. Ultimately, the makeshift craft did not prove airworthy. Most escape efforts, though, were focused on tunneling under the barracks. So numerous were these attempts that the ground beneath Crefeld resembled a busy ant colony. The discovery of each burrow seemed only to embolden others to try. Commandant Courth and his guards had shown themselves effective in rooting out the honeycomb of tunnels by knocking on every wall and floor in the prison, listening for the sound of a hollow space behind.

  Of late, Gray had become acquainted with recent arrivals from Gütersloh, the Pink Toes. No doubt they would have liked Gray to join in their new tunneling effort at Crefeld, particularly given his Woolwich education and experience with the 48th Pioneers. But Gray did not much care for the dirty business of sapping; he wanted to try another way.

  After a long wait, Gray boarded Tram 88 and paid his fare. He took one of the wooden seats hidden from the street by curtained windows. Though the drumbeat in his chest had yet to subside, he folded one leg over the other in an attempt to look every bit the casual passenger. The tram delivered him to Crefeld train station. There were trains headed due west toward Venlo, the closest Dutch town. But given that he had experienced no trouble as of yet, he figured that he was safe
to journey farther to the north, to Nordhorn, where the border guards might be more lax.

  He arrived at the small German textile town well after dark and left the station on foot, heading north over a series of small canals. Then he followed a road toward Neuenhaus, seven miles away. By his map, once the road intersected with a railway line, he would be a mile from the zigzagged border. A heavy rain was falling, which gave him the advantage of having the road to himself but made the going miserable. At the railway line, he turned west and started through some soggy fields. He did not have a compass, but he hoped there was little chance he would get turned around over such a short distance.

  Half an hour into his hike, trousers muddy up to his knees, he reckoned he had reached the border. If there had been a demarcation, he had missed it.

  He took out his map. Rain pelted his face and soaked his collar. Cold, wet, and potentially lost, he dared lighting a match to divine his location. If a German frontier post was nearby, the guards would see the flicker of light and converge on his position. After several attempts to strike a match in the downpour, one remained alight long enough for him to read the squiggles of lines. He had veered a little northward in his slog, but if he made his way due south he should reach the Dutch border village of Breklenkamp.

  Minutes later, trekking through another field, he spotted the dim glow of a village. Then he came onto a road. He followed it a short distance before seeing a wooden signpost that read BREKLENKAMP. Elated, he headed down the road until he sighted an illuminated military post. A pair of soldiers in dark greatcoats sought shelter from the rain under its awning. Gray moved forward.

  The two guards drew their rifles, but he figured they were simply startled by his emergence from the dark. In English, he explained that he was an RFC officer who had escaped from a prison camp. Saying nothing, the guards led him inside. Rising from a desk to meet Gray was a German officer. From behind Gray, the guards seized his arms.

  There was not one, but two Breklenkamps, separated by the border, the officer explained later. Gray had the bad luck of having a map that showed only the Dutch town, which he had missed by a short walk. The knowledge of having come so close to freedom was crushing for Gray. The next morning, the soldiers returned him to Crefeld, his secret report still hidden in his valise.

  Something was afoot. In mid-May, a hundred active-service soldiers in heavy helmets marched through the gate at Crefeld, doubling its regular guard of older reservists. They mounted two machine guns outside the high walls, and two atop the barracks buildings. The slightest congregation of prisoners after lights-out resulted in shouts to disperse, often at the prodding of bayonets. In one such incident, Douglas Lyall Grant stuck a hunk of ham upon the tip of an offending blade and was nearly run through for the gag.

  Neither Harvey, in the general barracks, nor Gray, in solitary after his escape attempt, knew the cause of the increased presence of the guards. The Poldhu had it that the citizens of Crefeld, fed up by war rationing, intended to overrun the prison and steal the food supplies sent to the British. There was also a rumor of a mass escape planned from the camp, precipitated by an imminent Allied bombing of the town. Whatever the reason, all the prisoners and guards were on edge.

  Finally, on May 20, Commandant Courth announced that the prisoners were being separated and sent off to four different camps. They would be allowed to carry only one piece of hand luggage each. He offered no explanation for the move, and said he was sorry to lose them. Then his lieutenant, the Crab, started calling out names, assigning the men to one of four groups. Harvey and the Pink Toes were selected for Group B, as was Gray, although he was not there to hear his name called.

  Early the next morning, the prisoners started preparing their bags. Many had spent several months at Crefeld; some had spent years there. In that time, they had accumulated a household of goods—and menageries of pet rabbits, canaries, and even spiders. They had built private cardboard rooms in the wide barracks hallways. Few wanted to abandon everything to start anew, and tempers flared as guards began eyeing what they wanted to take afterward—or steal there and then. The mood tensed even more when two of the prisoners attempted to smuggle themselves out in a van.

  At the evening roll call, a riot was in the making, especially as the head count was off and the Crab needed to repeat the call of eight hundred names not once, not twice, but three times. Harvey and some others were throwing off the count on purpose, moving about to various positions in the assembly and answering to other prisoners’ names. Mossy planned on hiding in a sap the Pink Toes had dug but not finished after their transfer from Gütersloh, and escaping from Crefeld once the camp had been emptied. The guards could not be allowed to know he was missing.

  When the roll call finally ended, near midnight, some prisoners started tossing chairs, benches, tennis rackets, cardboard boxes, and other items out of their windows. One prisoner lit the bristles of an old broom and used it as a torch to start fires in the yard. More furniture and belongings followed. The blazes grew. As soon as guards snuffed out one, another flickered to life. Their shouts in the square had little effect. Finally, the guards announced that anyone left in the square in five minutes’ time would be shot. Then they rushed the barracks in numbers. A British colonel received a rifle butt to his back. Others were shoved away from the windows. Miraculously, in quieting the bedlam not a shot was fired.

  Harvey spent what little time he had left packing his bags. He would not miss Crefeld. Despite its relative comfort, the prisoners kept to their individual fiefdoms, and the camp lacked the camaraderie of Gütersloh. To his mind, Crefeld had the “mouldy atmosphere of a club—a bad one.” Courth was its only saving grace. He had allowed Harvey to send a manuscript of the poems he had written in captivity to England for publication, a kindness he suspected most commandants would have denied.

  At 3:30 a.m. bonfires continued to dot the yard as Group B was led four abreast from Crefeld by almost as many guards as there were prisoners. Weakened by his time in solitary, Gray was slow along the path to the train station. At one point he dropped his bag, and a guard booted him to the ground from behind. He got up again, picked up his bag and, resisting the urge to start a fight, continued on.

  Guards herded them into third-class carriages, shut the windows, and posted themselves at either end of the cars before the train clattered down the track.

  When the sun came up, the carriages became hot as stoves. The train was headed east, over an iron bridge that spanned the Rhine; the men were uncertain of their destination. To pass the time, they played poker and bridge. There were whispers that they should try to rush the guards and jump from the train, but nobody risked the effort, especially since their watchers were keen to any movement.

  Along the route, they passed a long line of factories, their blast furnaces roaring bright orange, no doubt producing weapons of war. They also saw massive assemblies of soldiers waiting at stations to be sent toward the front. “Cannon fodder,” the prisoners remarked, loud enough for their guards to hear. Late that night, the train stopped at Hademstorf. Few had heard of the small town between Bremen and Hanover in northern Germany. They remained there for the night, the guards pitching a cordon around the train.

  At dawn, the guards ordered the prisoners out of the car and marched them away from the station. Dehydrated from the train ride, hauling heavy bags, the prisoners tramped through a pine forest. The air was thick with heat. After they crossed over a swiftly moving river, the path leveled and the trees grew more stunted. They reached a broad, barren heath that stretched as far as the eye could see. Their guards led them down a sandy cart track that made a straight line into a swamp.

  For a couple of hours they struggled to continue on this track, bordered by peat hags and water dark and viscous as oil. When one man who was walking beside Gray and Grant asked a guard where they were being sent, the German replied only that he “thanked his God” he would not have to join them there.

  Finally they came to the
end of their eight-mile march. Located on a four-and-a-half-acre patch of dirt in the middle of the swamp, Schwarmstedt camp was nothing but four long wooden barracks with tarred felt roofs, a scattering of single-room huts, and an oblong ring of barbwire. Guard towers stocked with machine guns loomed over the starkly empty grounds, which were crisscrossed with open ditches that drained the constant seeping of swamp water. The exhausted prisoners cursed their bad fortune as they dragged themselves inside. Then the gate closed behind, and they were silent with worry.

  Six

  May 25, 1917. Jim Bennett scanned the rolling gray seas for any sign of an enemy U-boat breaking to the surface. Twenty-five years old and an observer in the Royal Naval Air Service, he was perched in a Sunbeam seaplane flying alongside the Belgian coastline. They were near Zeebrugge, the German-controlled port, and almost finished with their patrol, when Bennett spotted a conning tower break through the waves. His pilot swooped down for a closer look, but the U-boat submerged again. Bennett believed it was headed toward the English Channel to lay mines, and on his return to the Dunkirk sea base informed his commanding officer about it.

  At midday, their plane loaded with bombs, another crew left to hunt the U-boat. It returned without having made a sighting. Bennett convinced his commanding officer to let him go up again, even though he was beyond his scheduled hours in the air for the day. He wrangled Lieutenant Colin Laurence for the mission, and off they went in another Sunbeam to scour the sea.

  Bennett had every reason to be charged to action. Three months before, the Germans had returned to an unrestricted campaign of sinking merchant fleets supplying the Allies. Each month, U-boats were sending almost six hundred thousand tons of precious resources for the war to the bottom of the sea. On land, the French had suffered a string of defeats on the Western Front that now embroiled their armies in near mutiny, and uprisings in Russia had seen Czar Nicholas II toppled from his throne, leaving a power vacuum that threatened the country’s will to continue the fight against Germany.