The Escape Artists

by Neal Bascomb

  Römer’s visit confirmed there was no recourse to compel Niemeyer to improve conditions. The whole inspection was a charade, and even though Bennett had put on a brave face for his mother on his arrival at Holzminden from Ströhen, writing that he was “not yet able to form an opinion of the change,” he knew from the start that his only option was to break out as soon as he was ready. Every day, he rounded the perimeter of the Spielplatz fifty times, clocking up roughly twelve miles in distance, to prepare his legs for the journey to the border. As he jogged, ignoring the curious looks of some of his fellow prisoners, he studied the shifts of the guards, the movements in and out of the main gate, the places outside the barracks where he might hide. No matter how hard he searched for a weakness in the camp’s security, he found none. He dismissed the possibility of a tunnel—unaware that there was already one in the works—because of limited access to the cellars.

  Ever optimistic that an opportunity would arise, Bennett wanted to be ready. His fitness plan was only the first step. The next was gathering together everything he would need once outside the walls. The number of failed escapes through the hatch proved to him that preparation was key. There were lots of men at Holzminden who had made a run for the border, and Bennett gleaned what he could from them in conversation.

  He made a mental checklist: “A considered plan of the route to be taken, type of country to be met, most suitable spots to hide, how to cross the rivers and canals, food and drink for the journey, best kind of disguise, and how to obtain it. Last, and most important, maps and compasses.” He intended to obtain his kit through coded messages to his family. Since his imprisonment at Ströhen he had lost many of his supplies, except for his naval uniform, which could easily be converted into a civilian outfit by stripping it of its brass buttons, rings, and badges.

  Bennett began by sending a letter to his half brother John in London. He asked him to call in on a photography shop owned by a man named Stanford near Covent Garden. He wanted a shot of the Rolls-Royce he had bought in 1915—to decorate his room, he said. Bennett had never owned such a car, nor did he have the funds for one. Stanford’s was actually a well-known London travel and map shop.

  He sent his next letter to his mother, thanking her for the recent parcel of food and clothes, though, he joked, “I have now enough peas to run a shop.” Rice and packets of Quaker Oats would be better, he wrote, before mentioning, in an almost off-hand manner, “By the way, I hear from Mrs. J. Fitzgerald they have moved and now live at 39 Royal Avenue, Chelsea. I should like for you to call and give her my kind regards.” He concluded, “Keeping in very good health + spirits and looking forward to seeing you in the ensuing year . . . I am your loving son.” Mrs. J. Fitzgerald was a thinly veiled code word for his former escape partner, Roy J. Fitzgerald, who had made the home run to England from Ströhen. Roy would know exactly what Bennett needed for his own attempt. Then he waited, continued his daily walks, and searched for a way out as the weather turned bitter cold.

  In late November, after six weeks in isolation at Clausthal, suffering almost daily harangues from Heinrich Niemeyer, Cecil Blain received the news that he was to be transferred to another camp. At the gate, Niemeyer gave him a smug look and said, “Good luck! Give my love to Piccadilly, Hyde Park, South Kensington, and all the rest of those places. Goodbye, Mr. Blain, goodbye.” Blain promised himself that the commandant would pay the consequences if he ever tread on English soil—or if he came across him anywhere else, for that matter.

  Guards escorted Blain by train to Ströhen. There, he was reunited with David Gray for the first time since their separation at Osnabrück almost a year before. They had many stories to tell about their individual attempts to reach Holland, many bitter lessons to share. Blain inspected his new camp for a way out and discovered, as Gray had since his arrival from Holzminden several weeks before, that the place was a “rabbit warren” of tunnels and hiding places. However, any possible openings the Germans had not discovered and blocked had a long line of prisoners waiting to use them.

  Neither Blain, nor Gray, would have the opportunity; Ströhen was being closed and its occupants scattered among several other camps in the 10th Army District. Blain was going to Neunkirchen, a mining and industrial town in the crosshairs of British bombers, and Gray quickly back to Hellminden.

  Thirteen

  The head of the Prisoner of War Department, Lord Newton, found himself at the cluttered nexus of foreign, domestic, and military affairs. Based at Downing Street, his job was to assist British POWs in Germany and oversee the treatment of enemy prisoners held in Britain. The fate of more than one hundred thousand men depended on his ability to maneuver his government as well as deal effectively with the impetuous decisions of Kaiser Wilhelm II.

  Throughout late 1917 Newton’s desk was littered with reports about the Holzminden camp.

  To start, he had the latest inspection report from the Dutch representative. According to Römer, who had visited Holzminden in November, there was little cause for concern. The officers’ complaints were minor in nature and “could be obviated with a little mutual goodwill.” After chronicling the need for modest improvements in the exercise grounds and sleeping arrangements, Römer concluded, “The general impression that I was able to gather was of a favourable nature. All the officers looked well and appeared to be in good spirits. . . . The Commandant, although maintaining strict discipline, appeared desirous of doing everything possible to render the life of the prisoners as bearable as circumstances could permit.”

  Lord Newton doubted the official report. He had received troubling secret intelligence about Römer from contacts in the Foreign Office. Informants suspected that he had compromising connections with German high officials, and according to Römer’s former colleagues, he was “professionally incapable,” “amenable to bribery,” and “a pathological liar.” Further, he had issued similarly positive reports of other camps controlled by Hänisch that were contradicted by a binder full of interviews from escaped prisoners.

  Similar testimonies were now coming in to London about Holzminden, one by an RFC captain who smuggled a coded letter out of the camp. He recounted a string of brutalities, including the time when four guards cleared his room to make way for newly arrived prisoners. “The first officer was seized by the throat and shaken; the second was struck with a rifle, and the third chased down the passage, his pursuer jabbing at him with his bayonet.” Other prisoners, who had been sent away from Holzminden only to escape from their next camp to Holland, recounted much the same. One asserted that Hänisch ran his camps with “organized malevolence.” Another that “Holzminden was an inferno.” Something needed to be done, Lord Newton knew, but he had few good options on the table.

  In the past, he had tried the diplomatic route, submitting letters of complaint. These had little effect. He had also sat down with the Germans and negotiated to improve conditions, most recently in the summer of 1917. Both parties had agreed to reduce punishment lengths and to begin exchanging some prisoners, but Newton’s trust in this process had been eroded by reports indicating the Germans were continuing indefinite detentions and had only just begun returning POWs—and in limited numbers, at that. The other tool available to Lord Newton was instituting reprisals against German POWs until things got better for the British. But this only provoked countermeasures by the enemy, a tit-for-tat “special treatment” that worsened conditions for all.

  When it came to Holzminden, Lord Newton and his staff decided that the best way forward was to push for another inspector to visit the camp and to demand that Hänisch be immediately removed from command. Before they could move forward, however, the British War Office and the Foreign Office needed to weigh in on the matter. Reports and handwritten memos were exchanged between the various departments, but any action, low though its chance of success may have been, proceeded at the glacial pace of bureaucracy. And so the men at Holzminden remained there—at the mercy of faithless agreements, without protection, notwithsta
nding the best intentions of those charged to provide it.

  Like most veteran prisoners, Gray knew that help from the outside was not coming any time soon. Returned to Holzminden from Ströhen in mid-December, he immediately resumed the tunneling work started by Colquhoun and Ellis. On one of his first days back, Gray met with two officers at 11:00 a.m. in Room 24, on the ground floor of Block B’s officers’ quarters. From under a false bottom in a wooden box the men withdrew several sets of uniforms worn by prison orderlies. After donning this garb, they smudged their faces with dirt, the better to look like common-rank prisoners who had just finished a work detail. Then they waited to get the call from their team of lookouts.

  One orderly stood watch at the entrance to his quarters, making sure there were no guards lingering in the stairwell or cellars. Once he counted the last guard to leave for his midday meal, he walked onto the Spielplatz and scratched the top of his head. Colquhoun, who was loitering outside the officer entrance, ostensibly reading a book, received the signal. Advancing to the door, he glanced toward the Kommandantur to ensure no guards were on their way to Block B, then hurried inside and straight to Room 24. “All clear,” he said.

  With that, Gray and the two other officers put on their black caps banded in yellow, stuffed some struts of wood under their shirts, and emerged from Block B.

  Other officers in their cabal kept a keen eye on the guard stationed in no-man’s-land twelve yards opposite the orderlies’ door. If there was any indication the guard sensed something amiss, the men were to mount a distraction.

  The tunnelers figured this was unlikely. Roughly two platoons of thirty guards each patrolled the camp grounds. They rotated beats and hourly shifts frequently to maintain sharpness. By circumstance, and to the benefit of the tunnelers, this routine resulted in the same guard occupying the same spot only once every other week. With 550 officers and over a hundred orderlies, the chances of a guard detecting an unfamiliar face entering the quarters were slim.

  Gray and his digging partners arrived at the orderlies’ door without trouble. On closing it behind them, they waited for another lookout to confirm that all was clear. Only then did the three move down the steps. At the panel wall, they were met by another orderly. He reached into the narrow hole at the top of the secret door and unlatched the bolt. The eighteen-inch-wide door swung open, and the three officers stepped sideways into the dark chamber behind. The orderly closed and bolted the door behind them. He would return in two and a half hours so the officers could get back to their quarters, change, and make the afternoon roll call.

  Thin lines of light between the planks were all that illuminated the space until Gray struck his lighter and the shadows of the three men danced upon the low walls. After unburdening themselves of the wooden struts they had smuggled inside their shirts, they lit a few lamps. These were made from empty shaving-cream tins with holes punched through the top from which extended wicks made from twisted cloth soaked in alcohol. They could now see well enough to change out of the orderly uniforms into the plain work outfits they would wear while digging. For Gray, these damp, streaked clothes used by all the tunnelers were anathema, as even in captivity he strove to keep himself spotless and his shirt and pants pressed to within an inch of their lives. The work clothes smelled too, as did the whole chamber—a mix of mud, rot, sweat, dead mice, and stale air. Stifling his disgust, Gray put on the clothing.

  In the time he’d been at Ströhen, Colquhoun and the Pink Toes had burned through the iron rods in the southern foundation wall—just up from the cellar floor—by pouring sulfuric acid on them from cups made from molded clay. From there, they had started the tunnel proper. Using spoons, kitchen knives, and the legs of their iron bedsteads, they created an oval sap, almost one and a half feet in diameter and supported by the wood struts. Initially, they extended the tunnel three yards straight out from underneath the orderlies’ entrance. The depth was minimal, and the men could hear the voices of the guards and prisoners walking above. Then they veered the sap sharply to the left (eastward) toward the camp wall. To increase its depth, they dug at a forty-five-degree downward slope for roughly six yards before leveling out.

  The ground, a compacted blend of yellow clay, dirt, and loose rock, was tough to burrow through, but they still managed to cut about a foot a day. By the time Gray returned to Holzminden, the tunnel was approaching the eastern wall. Their excavated debris nearly filled the entire space underneath the stairs. They had made remarkable progress, and now it was his turn to do his bit, no matter his reluctance to enter the dark hole.

  Gray knelt down by the tunnel entrance, pushing into the chasm the shallow washbasin the men used to collect the dirt they tunneled through. Then he followed it, lamp in hand. The earth crowded around him like a tomb.

  Since being released after a monthlong stay in solitary, Will Harvey had bunked with several of the Pink Toes in a small attic-floor room. The place was a funhouse of compartments hidden behind wall panels, sliding windowsills, and loose plank floors, all to hide the contraband Mossy, Rogers, and a few other Pink Toes had collected for their latest bid for freedom. Although he had been informed about their newest tunnel, Harvey did not push to be a part of it. His failed escape, then the long punishment that followed, had put him off further breakout attempts.

  As winter deepened at Holzminden, his mood only darkened further. There was never enough food, what they did have was almost exclusively tinned, and some of the men were suffering from malnutrition. There was scarce fuel for the stoves, leaving the barracks frigid. Many had already stripped their rooms of any available wood to burn—bedboards, locker doors, even whole pieces of furniture.

  Niemeyer continued to harass them at every turn. He shut down access to the bathhouse and the parcel room on a whim. He promised the new senior British officer that he would reopen negotiations with respect to parole walks only to rescind the promise soon afterward. He gave his consent to concerts and theatricals, then retracted it just before a scheduled performance. Then there were his rages, rising from out of nowhere. On the evening of December 14 Private Turner, an orderly, was running across the Spielplatz to the latrine when Niemeyer stopped him in the yard. He asked the young private where he was headed in such a hurry. “The latrine, sir,” Turner said. “You may shit yourself,” Niemeyer screamed, “or you may shit in your bloody hand. You may shit where you like, but you are not going to the latrine tonight.”

  In response to such treatment, some of the prisoners fought back. Some engaged in small acts of resistance. A Scottish officer marched out to the bathing trough in the Spielplatz every day, no matter the lack of hot water or how much snow was on the ground, and washed himself while bellowing, “The Scots are a hardy race!” Others crafted an effigy and dangled it from an attic-floor window, a noose around its neck. Niemeyer went berserk, firing at the dummy as the prisoners bobbed it up and down. The glass shattered in several windows before the prank ended. Another officer dumped a sack of potatoes from a window as Niemeyer passed underneath.

  The greatest resistance of all would be to escape. Two prisoners tried to hide in the bottom of the trash cart that was emptied outside the camp each day, but were unable to endure the malodorous heap long enough to make their break. Another madcap plan was put together by RFC pilot Robert Capon and Royal Newfoundland Regiment lieutenant Andrew Clouston.

  Using dining room shelves, the men constructed a chute, and Capon, formerly an astronomer at the Greenwich Observatory, engineered a seat running on tracks. Shortly after Niemeyer shamed Private Turner simply for trying to answer nature’s call, the pair executed their plan. On a foggy night, they extended their cobbled-together chute out the first-floor window of Block B’s officer wing. The chute stretched far enough to sit on the barbwire that topped the camp’s northern wall. After settling onto the sliding seat with their kit bags secure in front of them, Clouston and Capon were off. They made it halfway down the chute before the seat jumped its track. They pitched off the side and la
nded almost at the feet of a guard. As well as sending the two officers to the jug (solitary), Niemeyer instituted a collective punishment for the entire camp: both barracks were shut for twenty-four hours and the dining rooms locked. The men could neither exercise nor cook their meals.

  Every time Niemeyer foiled a plot, he would smugly gloat. “Gentlemen, you have taught me a lesson,” he boasted after stopping a trio of prisoners attempting to escape, one of whom was shot in the wrist by a guard. “I shall not forget it. You need not trouble any more. Good morning.”

  Harvey weathered Niemeyer’s punishments and buffoonery, but because he was uninterested in revenge or escape he had little to occupy his time. The “moldiness” of prison was settling over him again. He rarely took walks in the yard anymore. He did not have the will to shave. He did not write.

  Then, one December evening, he lay down on his bed and discovered that his friend Mossy had sketched in chalk on his ceiling some ducks frolicking in a pond. They reminded Harvey of the ducks in the pond beside the Redlands, his Gloucestershire home. For a long time, by the flickering light of a lamp, he stared at the ducks.