The Escape Artists

by Neal Bascomb

  After an intensive inspection, which failed to uncover the hatch, the Germans were at a loss as to how Thorn and Gaskell had got out undetected. A drain, sniffed out by the bloodhounds, was suspected as a possible route until its diameter was determined too small to fit a man. Still, it was cemented closed.

  Wilkins, who was by now feeling better, decided to use the attic hatch for himself the following night. Others aimed to follow. For all its rings of defenses, Holzminden was not yet the unbreakable fortress that Niemeyer boasted.

  Ströhen was its own busy warren of breakout artists. The commandant who replaced Karl Niemeyer when he was transferred to Holzminden cared more for maintaining military respect than preventing breakouts. At roll call, he made it his business to demand a proper salute from the senior British officers. He stood before them, one after the other, straightened his coat, snapped his heels together, and gave a sharp salute. The prisoners either ignored him or offered an exaggerated salute, a Japanese bow, or an Arabic salaam in return. Laughter usually crackled out afterward, but the commandant would always repeat the exercise the next day.

  The prisoners showed the same obstinacy in their plots to get out of Ströhen. Gerald Knight, who had built the false wall in the bathhouse outside the wire, was famous among the men. Days after his successful escape, his method undetected, six others had hid underneath the shower floorboards until after dark, then dashed away—only to be recaptured soon afterward.

  Another gang tried an altogether more straightforward manner of exit. After the guards stepped away for a duty changeover, the prisoners grabbed an iron bar they had hidden in the yard and, using it as a battering ram, rushed the main gate. Its lock and chain failed to give way, and the men dropped the bar and scattered, followed by a shout advising them to stop and the crack of a revolver.

  Another scheme, led by pilot Duncan Grinnell-Milne, relied on impersonation, namely of a German guard leading four orderlies out on work detail. The orderlies’ outfits—a yellow stripe down the trousers and a yellow armband—were easily obtained from a cooperative orderly. Making a German uniform was not a simple task, but it was manageable. One prisoner provided his dark, calf-high boots and another his gray trousers. The red piping down the legs was sewn on with some cloth. A blue service coat was created from an old blanket, and a tall, black-peaked cap was shaped out of brown packing paper.

  Finding a rifle, like those carried by guards when escorting prisoners, was another matter entirely. Such a weapon proved impossible to obtain, either by theft or bribery; left without a choice, they decided to make a fake: the stock was manufactured from scraps of wood, the barrel from an iron railing, the breech mechanism from bits of tin, and, finally, the sling from a worn leather belt. The assembly was sanded, polished, and painted to pass for a weapon in service.

  Pink passes were carried by orderlies outside the wire, and these were forged from the linen endpapers of a book sent from England. To match the violet shade of the ink, they used a copying pencil, whose dye turned the proper color when steamed with an iron.

  Once all was ready, Grinnell-Milne dressed in the German uniform and marched his “charges”—four of his fellow airmen—right through the gate. They were almost away when a guard recognized one of the men as a British officer and raised the alarm. Although their plot failed, the prisoners learned that just about any impersonation could be pulled off with some care and ingenuity.

  Although his previous gambit at Clausthal had earned him a long stay in isolation, Caspar Kennard was as bold as ever in his bid for freedom. One late afternoon, he unlocked the gate with a forged key and struck off alone. He was on the lam for a week. Finding himself lost outside a village, he spotted a signal box beside a rail line with a location name stamped on its side. He could not quite read it and began climbing up the pole for a closer look. A railway man found him in this unusual position, and a chase ensued. Kennard was tracked down soon afterward.

  After almost three weeks in solitary detention, Jim Bennett was in no fit state for an attempt of his own. His former accomplice Roy Fitzgerald had no such limitations, and he escaped Ströhen with another officer while Bennett served as lookout.

  David Gray did not involve himself in any of these schemes, even the one with his former partner Kennard. He was resolved to have a foolproof plan in place before any future attempt. However, he would not have another opportunity at Ströhen. The decision had been made to send the most troublesome Allied prisoners, including Gray, Kennard, and Bennett, to Holzminden.

  Ten

  On October 1, 1917, General Hänisch, head of the 10th Army Corps Division, visited Holzminden for the first time. Now numbering over five hundred, including British officers and enlisted ranks (the orderlies), the prisoners paraded into the Spielplatz and drew together in straight lines, under the close watch of Captain Niemeyer. The men showed proper form and answered their names promptly when called. They had only just started to receive food parcels to supplement their diet, and they intended to give the general no reason to stop deliveries or make their lives any more difficult.

  From Commandant Habrecht down, the staff were all dressed in their finest uniforms, their boots polished to a shine. Niemeyer was first among them to bring his hand to his peaked cap in sharp salute whenever the general addressed a question to him about the camp or what additional security measures could be put in place. Another handful of prisoners had gotten away only the night before, their method unknown, and Niemeyer intended to use the escapes to get himself promoted over his superior.

  The general was quiet throughout roll call, but as he toured the barracks and other facilities, he made no secret of his feelings toward the prisoners. They were “barbarians” and “Schweinhunds,” and, in his opinion, “they did not deserve to be allowed to live, let alone receive letters.” Niemeyer agreed. No treatment was too harsh for the enemy. Near the end of his short visit, Hänisch allowed Major John Wyndham, who had replaced Rathborne as senior British officer at the camp, to address him. Rather than showing him the respect of a sit-down in the Kommandantur, the general held the meeting in front of the cookhouse. Forty-six years old, an army lifer and veteran of several campaigns, Wyndham was uncowed. In German, he first demanded better accommodations for his men. “There are no public rooms, no library, one solitary cookhouse, and no bathroom,” he said.

  Hänisch turned to Habrecht and Niemeyer. They spoke quietly, then the general responded that a proper bathroom and another cookhouse would be provided. The rest were luxuries. “Is it to be understood that this is a strafe [punishment] camp?” Wyndham asked.

  “If it may please the English officers to understand that. It is deserved though.” Hänisch looked at his watch. “Next please?”

  Wyndham asked for the Spielplatz’s security fences to be moved back to allow for more expansive exercise grounds.

  “Later, perhaps, we will see, but now impossible.”

  Then Wyndham looked at Niemeyer directly and demanded that the camp officer be removed immediately as a result of his conduct at Ströhen—notably the bayoneting of prisoners. Hänisch looked from Wyndham to Niemeyer then back again. No. Niemeyer would remain. Wyndham maintained his calm, difficult though it was. He had one more demand. The prisoners deserved parole walks in the countryside but not under the pledges they had been required to sign at Holzminden. Specifically, two clauses on the parole cards printed by the Germans were unacceptable. First, the men should not have to accept that “the penalty for breach of parole is death.” Second, the officers should not have to promise to “obey all orders of the non-commissioned officers conducting parties on walks.” Both clauses were beyond the pale, Wyndham said. There was the men’s honor to consider.

  Hänisch chortled. Such was the men’s honor that they had violated parole at Schwarmstedt by hiding tins of food to be used in escape while on their walks. Wyndham, who had been at the camp, denied this vehemently. The general responded that the recent breakouts at Holzminden might well have been per
petrated during parole walks; there could be no other explanation. Knowing better, Wyndham labeled this a slanderous lie.

  “Baralong!” Hänisch shouted, referring to the British decoy ship that had sunk a U-boat and executed its survivors more than two years before.

  “Lusitania!” Wyndham returned, losing his reserve.

  “If every Englishman in this command got his deserts, he would be shot,” the general said, and with that dismissed Wyndham and marched off to the Kommandantur. Niemeyer followed close on his heels, like a dog cleaving to its master.

  In his office, Habrecht gently suggested to Hänisch that the British major, and the prisoners overall, deserved some modicum of respect. Niemeyer interjected that respect was something they were given too much of. Within forty-eight hours of the general’s departure, Habrecht was ordered to pack up his office. Niemeyer was now in charge.

  In some of his first acts as commandant, Niemeyer ordered a guard to fire at a group of prisoners in the barracks building who were mocking the Germans during their morning drill marches; he made the sick and invalid stand in the parade ground for hours in the cold; he shut all the prisoners in their barracks for a day; and he ordered any officer caught in the act of a breakout to be shot on sight.

  Still, the escapes continued.

  “Three more out last night, sir,” an orderly told Harvey. “And the commandant is hopping mad!” Harvey was glad for the news—and for the meal the orderly had brought with him. But then the door to his cell closed, leaving him alone again but for a single skittish mouse that peeked out from behind the coke stove when all was quiet.

  For almost two weeks, Harvey had been held in a sliver of space in the cellar of Block B, provided only with a straw mattress, a rickety table, a stool, and a jug of water. He was allowed out at set times to use the toilet—and then always on his own, aside from the guard charged to accompany him. Otherwise he had to use a foul pail in his cell. Unable to bathe or shave, he grew a Rasputin-like beard. There was a narrow window high on the eight-foot wall of his cell through which he could see the boots of those passing in the yard. His underground quarters felt like a tomb. I am half sick of shadows, he thought, reciting the words of Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott.”

  There were others in the adjoining cells, but the walls were thick, and one could only shout so loud for so long before growing hoarse. Harvey suffered from the chill—his stove lacked fuel, and the cement floor and walls retained the cold of the surrounding earth. At night, the rats came out in numbers that rivaled those in the trenches along the front. His fellow inmates ran competitions on who could kill the most vermin in a night.

  Many of the Pink Toes were at Holzminden, having all come on the same train, and through the help of an orderly who served in the cells, Mossy and friends sent books down to Harvey to occupy his time. He devoured War and Peace and several other classics. However, Tolstoy did little to inspire, and although Harvey tried to write poetry, nothing of any value emerged.

  His loneliness was finally broken by the arrival of an Irish roommate. The cells were beginning to fill up with prisoners caught on the run after the rash of breakout attempts utilizing the attic hatch, including the originators of the hatch, Thorn, Gaskell, and Wilkins. Happy for the company, Harvey and his new companion debated history and shared books. Harvey even gave lessons on writing ballades and triolets in exchange for cigarettes. Even so, the “moldiness” he had first experienced at Schwarmstedt set deeper within him. “It is not the physical hardship,” he wrote of his time in solitary. “It is the purposelessness of it, and the awful monotony, that sickens the heart . . . Nothing could prevent the creeping paralysis of prisondom from gradually overtaking me, and the time came to me as to other men when I was too hopeless even to fight against it.”

  In Cell 5 at Clausthal, Cecil Blain was also in solitary confinement. By October 12, barely over a fortnight since his capture and Heinrich Niemeyer’s ultimately empty threats to have him shot, he was already set on his next attempt. Rather than cowing Blain, his past failures had made him even bolder and more impetuous.

  His partner this time was John Parker, an RFC pilot and son of a civil magistrate in South Africa, who was also in solitary. A bribed guard, who despised the commandant almost as much as the prisoners did, had provided them with civilian suits, flashlights, maps, a train timetable, and instruction in the German phrases that would enable them to buy a one-way ticket to Düsseldorf. All they needed now was a metal saw and wire cutters, neither of which the guard dared risk smuggling in to them. Blain expected these items would be coming soon, though, thanks to a note he had secured to the lid of a teapot and smuggled out to an accomplice.

  Outside in the snowbound yard Harold Medlicott rolled a cigarette as the morning roll call began. If Blain had a twin in terms of age, looks, and daredevil’s joie de vivre, then Medlicott was it. An ace of the No. 2 Squadron, he had been known in the RFC for having never seen a German aircraft he did not attempt to attack. With five kills to his name, and the honors to match, he was finally shot down in late 1915. In the two years since, he had become legend in another way: as a real-life Harry Houdini with almost a dozen breakouts under his belt, several carried out in broad daylight. One time, he slid down a bell-shaped castle tower—his cell at its top was so high the Germans did not believe it needed bars. Another time he extended a rickety plank of wood straight out from a second-floor window to cross a deep moat surrounding an old prison fortress.

  When Windy Dick came out to oversee the roll call, Medlicott lit his cigarette and took a long drag. Smoking was prohibited during roll call, and if this were not transgression enough, he sent a cloud of smoke straight into the path of Niemeyer, who halted abruptly in front of him. This prompted Medlicott to draw yet again on his cigarette, casually exhaling another cloud of smoke. “For this”—Niemeyer ripped away the cigarette—“I give you three days and no messing.”

  Medlicott was sent into the block of isolation cells beside the pigsty at the northern end of Clausthal—just as he had planned. On his person were hidden the metal saw and wire cutters requested by Blain. The bribed guard who worked the block delivered him into Cell 10, the one nearest the wire fence that surrounded the camp. Medlicott sawed almost completely through the iron bars on the window before being moved to another cell by the same guard. In this way, he would not be implicated in Blain and Parker’s plot. He preferred to escape on his own.

  At 8:00 p.m. that night, Blain pushed open his cell door. Earlier he had fixed a thin piece of wood from a cigar box into the latch so that it did not lock properly when closed. He crept in his socks to the cell where Medlicott was held, to obtain the wire cutters. He thanked his doppelgänger, and the two promised to meet again—in free Holland. Then Blain let Parker out, and they went into the now-empty Cell 10 to finish the cutting of the bars with a file.

  Medlicott and the others in the block kept watch from their cell windows, tracking the movements of the patrolling guards. Once the path to the wire was clear, they shined their flashlights at their doors. On this signal, Blain and Parker pulled the severed bars away and climbed through the window. At the wire, they made quick work of cutting a hole; they buried the cutters in the yard to be retrieved later by Medlicott, then hurried out and away from Clausthal through the slushy snow.

  They needed to be in Goslar, fifteen miles away, by 2:00 a.m. to catch the night train to Düsseldorf. From there, it was only a couple of nights’ hike to the Dutch border—a far better solution, they figured, than making the whole two-hundred-mile journey on foot. Torrential rain and some mistakes in reading their map caused them to arrive in Goslar just as their train was leaving. They found the station crowded with a company of German soldiers, singing boisterous songs and playing harmonicas as they awaited their own train. Undaunted, in their now-drenched civilian suits, Blain and Parker entered the station and looked up the next train headed to Düsseldorf: it was not until 5:45 a.m. They took seats in a quiet corner and acted like the
y were sleeping, no easy task when every movement and word from the soldiers had them thinking they were about to pounce.

  The night passed without incident. When the ticket booth opened at 5:00 a.m., they asked the clerk in German for two “third-class single tickets to Düsseldorf.” She did not understand their much-rehearsed line, nor did they understand her response. Frustrated, she waved them away, but not without first drawing the attention of the railway official manning the turnstiles. He approached Blain and Parker and asked for their passports. “I think we had better bolt,” Parker said to Blain in the Cape Dutch familiar to both men from their time in South Africa.

  They ran from the station through the carriage yard, dodging their pursuer, and took refuge in a stand of woods. With their supply of only four days’ food, there was no way they could tramp the distance to Holland. The town of Langelsheim, which had a railway station, was five miles away. They decided to walk there. The timetable indicated that the train to Giessen, where they could take another straight to Düsseldorf, would soon be arriving. This time they had no trouble obtaining tickets.

  At Giessen, they hid away from the station until the train to Düsseldorf was about to depart. The railway officials barely gave them a second look, and they hurried onto the train.

  The third-class carriages were packed, and Blain had to stand in the corridor, his knapsack in his hand. A conductor passed through checking tickets, and when he saw Blain in the corridor, he began shouting in German. Unable to understand him, the young pilot cupped his ear and feigned deafness. Feeling chastened, perhaps, the conductor led Blain into a carriage and asked another passenger to give up his seat for him. Blain found himself sitting next to Parker, who kept his cap drawn over his face. A young German woman across the aisle kept staring at Blain, and he thought she might be suspicious of his boots, which were decidedly English by manufacture. Parker was sure she only had a crush on the handsome young man.