The Escape Artists

by Neal Bascomb

  After the bugle of evening roll call, the yard cleared. In the silence, buried in dirt, Tullis wanted nothing more than to wriggle free or, at the very least, roll onto his side, but he knew he had to remain motionless. The time passed slowly. Finally, a check of his watch showed it soon would be dark. Only a few minutes longer now. Just as he was about to begin his escape, he heard a muffled chuckle coming from above him, then felt the dirt being scooped away from around his head. A guard, triumphant in his discovery, was looming over him. He had either spotted the tube, or some slight involuntary shift from Tullis had alerted him to his hiding place.

  Blain and Kennard were just as bent on escape. Always on the lookout for opportunity, they had detected a vulnerability in Clausthal’s defenses. There were a number of gates leading into the camp, which the Germans, confident that nobody could pick their locks, did not post sentries beside. Blain and Kennard managed to briefly obtain a set of keys from an unsuspecting guard, and an impression was made in a bar of soap. Using the mold, they then cut their own set of keys out of a sardine can. While Blain hid in a nearby shed, Kennard had a go at one of the gate locks.

  But to no end. No matter his frustrated attempts, the keys didn’t fit, and the two men were almost caught in the act. Following this failed effort, they tried to impersonate a pair of camp workmen and simply walk through the gate. They dyed black some clothes received from their families, to resemble the outfits worn by the workers. They also forged papers, using a typewriter for the text and an “official” stamp made with the lid of a small tin, a two-mark silver piece, and the ink from a toy printing set sold in the canteen, of all places. They had only made it a few steps past the gate when the guards got wise to their scheme and hauled them back inside. Wolfe confiscated their escape kit and sentenced them to solitary once more.

  The punishment wielded at Clausthal for prisoners attempting escape was a far cry from the medieval practice of hacking off the feet of escapees or, during the American Civil War, branding with a T the foreheads of those caught tunneling out of captivity. The Hague Conventions offered sparse protection for escapees, since punishments were considered “subject to the military law of the host nation.” The German “War Book,” the handbook of the Imperial German General Staff, stated that prisoners could be sentenced to death for so much as plotting an escape, but allowed the commanding officer to decide if a “restriction of privileges” and “sharper supervision” was adequate punishment. Rumor had it that Hänisch had recently instituted a sentence of five months’ solitary confinement for any officer trying to escape. Such lengths in isolation could break a man. Whatever the truth, Wolfe did seem to have some discretion on how to respond to escape attempts. Tullis received forty days; Kennard and Blain, fourteen. As well as these individual punishments, Wolfe made life at Clausthal collectively harder for its prisoners. Parole walks were stopped, and room searches became ransacks.

  The commandant was aided by a host of willing lieutenants. Shooting Sam—as the prisoners called him—liked to pop off rifle shots to warn any inmate standing too near the fence. Whistling Rufus, a cross-eyed detective from Berlin, searched the camp for contraband with a dog he summoned with a piercing shriek. Then there was Windy Dick—Heinrich Niemeyer, by his Christian name—a boorish, bullet-headed figure with a square jaw who claimed he had learned to speak English while working for a time in America. He threw tantrums over the men’s failure to properly salute him or for any infraction of the rules—and he constantly suspected the prisoners of plotting escapes, for which he threatened the severest of punishments. “Because I say, you know. That is enough for you,” he would warn in one of his bedeviling English idioms.

  Some of the prisoners believed the escape fiends were the source of all their troubles at the camp and began to frown on any breakout attempt. General Hurdis Ravenshaw, the senior British officer at Clausthal, warned his charges that he would have any potential escapee “court-martialed on his return to England.” The War Office was as ambiguous about escape as the Germans were about punishment for same. According to its 1907 military manual, a British soldier faced court-martial if he failed “to rejoin His Majesty’s service when able to rejoin the same.” In law, the phrase “when able” was subject to interpretation.

  Blain felt no duty to abide by Ravenshaw’s dictate, nor did he feel compelled to escape because of what some military lawyers in London had written before the war. He simply wanted to be free and far away from his captors, whom he despised to his very core. Kennard felt the same.

  Wolfe made sure the two inveterate breakout artists would not be teaming up together again. To their chagrin, the commandant removed Kennard to a different camp, breaking their partnership.

  Undaunted, Blain partnered with Captain Edward Leggatt, whom he had known since Osnabrück. An RFC pilot, Leggatt had won acclaim shooting down two German Albatros planes on one of his first missions in France. He and Blain managed to break into an attic storeroom in the former hotel, where they discovered a bounty that included two bottles of 1811 brandy, crates of sausages, bacon, and chocolate, and an arsenal of rifles, revolvers, and ammunition. The weapons they left alone; the brandy they drank; the food they kept for their hike to the border; and the storeroom they used to forge new documents and prepare a new plan of escape.

  Part II

  All Roads Lead to Hellminden

  Seven

  Swamp Camp was no place to dig a tunnel. Underneath Schwarmstedt’s top layer of black sand, the ground was crumbly peat. Any effort to dig sufficiently deep left one kneeling in a small pool of water. To the amazement of Will Harvey, the Pink Toes made the attempt, starting their sap under the floorboards of a utility shed. The peat gave way easily to digging. Within a couple of weeks the tunnel stretched beyond the fence, but never at a depth of more than a few feet underground. It was so shallow that anyone digging in the tunnel could feel the footsteps of the men walking above.

  Before dawn on June 27, they cleared away the last yard of dirt. The tunnel opened out into the main ditch that drained water from the camp. Mossy led the way out that same morning, followed by Captain William Morritt of the East Surrey Regiment. Four others were crawling down the tunnel when the first shot cracked out. Forewarned somehow about the escape, guards fired on Morritt at close range from the bridge, only five yards away. He tumbled into the ditch, a bullet through his lung.

  As Mossy sprinted off, two more rifle shots sounded. He fell, too, hit badly in the arm. Guards seized him as the other Pink Toes crept backward in their tunnel before they were caught. Morritt died soon after, drowned in his own blood. Harvey called the twenty-four-year-old infantry officer “one of the bravest and gentlest souls I ever knew.”

  Two days later, Harvey and eighty other officers marched behind a cart carrying Morritt’s coffin to a small church in a neighboring village. The Germans permitted a military burial, with a firing party and a bugler trumpeting out “The Last Post,” but there was no British flag to drape over the coffin. Every officer present considered Morritt’s death a murder, but there was little they could do about it. Their helplessness stung.

  Mossy was sent to a hospital for treatment, then on to another camp. Life at Schwarmstedt continued on as if the shootings had never occurred: the dreaded routine of roll calls, meals cooked in sandpits, and interminable conversations centering on how long the war would last. The summer heat was relentless, and the men spent their days in shorts, singlets, and bare feet. Many shaved their heads in an attempt to stay cool and clean. There was never enough soap for washing, and their water supply was filthy brown and polluted by leakage from the open latrines. They had to pay for drinking water, which was the same filthy water, only filtered. At night, fleas and mosquitoes attacked them with abandon under the glare of arc lamps.

  On July 9, Dr. Rudolf Römer visited the camp. Römer was the Dutch attaché assigned to inspect German camps for compliance with the Hague Conventions. Despite noting the need for netting on windows, better water,
fresh vegetables, and clean latrines, he reported back to British officials that “there has never been a case of ill-treatment by the Germans . . . The officers looked healthy and were in good spirits.” About Morritt’s shooting, only the briefest mention was made.

  After Römer left, the prisoners learned through the Poldhu that Germany and Britain had met in The Hague to review POW and civilian internment conditions. From what they could make out, officers from both countries who had been held for more than eighteen months would soon be sent to neutral Holland and Switzerland, where they would remain until the end of the war. In addition, the warring parties agreed that punishment for escape would be limited to a two-week maximum sentence in solitary—except in extreme cases. The timeline and numbers approved for transfer kept shifting, and Gray and the other officers in solitary confinement remained in their cells. The inmates who brought them meals made note of their poor condition.

  Although physically fine, Harvey had fallen deeper into a desperate mental state that prisoners of the time referred to as barbwire disease. “The wearisome sameness of the days, the monotony of the faces, the unchanged landscape, the intolerable talk about the war, all these tended to produce the effect of complete and utter depression,” one prisoner wrote. “This was far and away our worst enemy: whole days were drenched in incurable melancholia.” Harvey likened the effect of barbwire disease to a green mold that grew thick on his mind, leaving him stale and incapable of joy. His poem “Prisoners” gave voice to this state:

  Laugh, O laugh loud! All yet who long ago

  Adventure sought in gallant company

  Safe in stagnation, laugh! Laugh heartily!

  While on this filthiest backwater of Time’s flow

  Drift we and rot till something set us free.

  Laugh like old men with senses atrophied,

  Heeding no Present, to the Future dead,

  Nodding quite foolish by the warm fireside,

  And seeing no flame, but only I the red

  And flickering embers pictures of the Past—

  Life like a cinder fading black at last.

  Determined to be rid of the feeling, Harvey was finally spurred to escape. He copied a map onto some paper from a biscuit tin, acquired a homemade compass, and sewed a knapsack to hold food. His idea, hatched on a visit to the parcel room outside the wire one day, was simple. He would sneak into the second floor of the building, hide out until after dark, then leap from its lone window onto an adjacent telegraph pole. A quick slide down to the ground and he would be off. He was almost ready to go when a friend alerted him to the fact that the guards had recently wrapped the base of the pole with barbwire. Looking for another opportunity to escape but growing moldier by the day, the Poet found himself struggling to write anything other than letters home. In these, he lamented his loss of ability to craft the work that gave meaning to his life.

  There was a new commandant at Ströhen, Captain Karl Niemeyer. He was the twin brother of Heinrich “Windy Dick,” stationed at Clausthal, and of similar bent. Karl Niemeyer intended to show the roughly four hundred prisoners in his charge that order and obedience would be paramount under his watch. In his previous role as camp adjutant, he’d been loathed by his charges, Kennard and Bennett among them. His elevation to commandant only deepened the men’s contempt for him.

  Tall and stout, Niemeyer was built like an upright rectangle. Except for his muttonchops and bushy eyebrows, his bowling ball of a head was pasty-white and cleanly shaved. Typically he wore a military cap perched at a rakish angle. A bully of the first order, he had a rash temper and a thin skin. He often skulked bowlegged about the camp in his starched uniform and high cavalry boots, chomping on a cigar while looking for trouble like a dog would a bone. No slight from a prisoner—a weak salute, a roll of the eyes, an impertinent remark—went unnoticed or unpunished.

  Such was his character that there were few pejoratives not cast his way by the prisoners in their diaries and other accounts. He was a “cad,” “a low-bred ruffian,” “the personification of hate,” “a bloated, pompous, crawling individual,” “a man of unbridled ferocity and bravado,” “a cheat,” “a plausible rogue,” and “a coward with all the attributes of one: he deceives, he is cruel, he blusters, he is dishonest, he cringes.” Prone to apoplectic fits of rage, typically while brandishing a large revolver or his knobbed walking cane, Niemeyer scolded and threatened prisoners with a zeal that left him red-faced and panting for breath.

  The root of his grievances was unclear, and given his propensity to tell lies, his background was in question. Although born in Germany, he and his twin brother spent seventeen years living in the United States. He might have tended bar in Milwaukee. He might have built billiard tables in New York. He might have done both. His stories changed as often as he told them. He had learned enough English to slaughter the language wholesale.

  After President Wilson declared war—or before, if one cared about logical timelines—Niemeyer fled across the Atlantic. Such was his perilous escape that he was awarded the Iron Cross, though there was no proof of this, nor of his claim that he had worked undercover in England as a spy for the kaiser. Despite being in his sixties, he had also fought at the Somme—for one week, he said, which “had been enough for him.” There was no doubt, however, that the Niemeyer twins were exactly what Hänisch was looking for, and he elevated them both to key positions in his network of prison camps. They followed his instructions assiduously when it came to the treatment of POWs.

  On his first day in command, August 4, 1917, Niemeyer proved how capable he was of malevolence. Newcomers were frequent at Ströhen, and the prisoners typically congregated by the fences to watch them arrive and welcome them. These arrivals were boisterous affairs, complete with shouting and festive reunions. Niemeyer declared that such gatherings would no longer take place, effective immediately. In the early evening, guards brought fifteen British officers to the eastern gate, and they were made to enter one at a time. Ignoring Niemeyer’s order, a group of prisoners approached the fence to cheer those arriving and warn them to expect an intensive search.

  The new commandant watched the scene unfold through his office window, as the number of men forming a semicircle by the gate continued to increase. He stamped from his office to the nearest sentry box, waving his cap at his guards and screaming for them to “make use of their arms” to drive the men away. Bayonets fixed, four guards moved toward the prisoners. “Los! Los!” Niemeyer yelled for them to charge.

  The prisoners began to back away from the fence, but not quickly enough for the guards. Lieutenant Downes, a former medical student who had come out of his hut to see what the commotion was about, received a bayonet in his back for his curiosity. In shock, he turned toward the guard, who then plunged the blade into his side, narrowly missing his kidney. Two other prisoners were also stabbed, one of them deflecting with his arm what might have been a mortal blow. As Downes staggered and fell to the ground, blood pouring through his singlet, mayhem was unleashed in the camp. More guards moved forward, and those stationed in the sentry boxes readied their machine guns. With roughly a hundred guards and four hundred prisoners, there would likely have been a massacre were it not for the coolheaded thinking of one British officer, who began singing “God Save the King” at the top of his voice. Other prisoners added their voices to his, and soon the whole camp was standing to attention and belting out the song. The guards backed off.

  When the yard quieted down, the prisoners carried Downes and the other two wounded officers to the camp hospital. They survived, even though they were without medical attention for almost three hours. When the senior British officer went to see Niemeyer about the attack, the commandant had already departed for the day. Later, when asked to account for his order, he declared, “I had nothing to do with it all. I was not in the camp. I did not give the order.” Such was the men’s introduction to the leadership of Karl Niemeyer.

  After Niemeyer became commandant, prisoners could not
beat a quick enough path from Ströhen. Bennett was chief among those determined to escape. By his third month in captivity he was back in shape, involved in a tunneling scheme and collecting an escape kit from parcels sent by his mother. Beyond sentiments of “making the best of a bad job,” his letters home always included a list of items he needed, ostensibly for his life as a POW but especially intended for a run to the border. These included “easy to pack” dried fruits, hard biscuits, a traveling rug, strong boots, warm clothes, and a canvas kit bag. Since arriving at Ströhen, Bennett had made his intention to escape clear to his fellow officers. After only a few weeks there, some veteran prisoners asked him and his New Zealander bunkmate Roy Fitzgerald if they would be interested in digging a tunnel with them. Started by some Russians who had since been moved to another camp, its entrance was underneath the barracks hut that Bennett, Fitzgerald, and twenty-six other recent arrivals now occupied.

  It was a risky proposition. The moorland meant any sap would be a shallow affair, with walls that collapsed easily. Niemeyer knew well the allure of the border, only seventy miles away, and he pressed his guards to remain vigilant to any breakout attempt. He offered a twenty-mark reward and fourteen days’ leave for thwarting any such escape, as well as the threat of transfer to the front should his subordinates fail to do so. The heightened alert did not dull the feverish digging efforts of Bennett and his fellow tunnelers, nor the handful of other schemes in the works.

  Bennett carefully observed and learned from all their methods, most notably those of Lieutenant Gerald Knight. Knight had been part of the gang at Osnabrück that carried out the revenge attack on Captain Allouche. At Ströhen, he’d concocted a plan to build, and eventually hide behind, a false wall in an alcove in the bathhouse that stood outside the wire. To match the color of his cardboard wall to the real one, he made a paste of cornstarch mixed with dirt and cobwebs. His deception worked, and Knight made a successful lone run to Holland.