Tunnelling to Freedom and Other Escape Narratives from World War I by Hugh Durnford

Author:Hugh Durnford
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780486122175
Publisher: Dover Publications
Published: 2012-10-13T00:00:00+00:00

IX

THROUGH THE BATHROOM FLOOR

By M. C. C. HARRISON

THROUGH THE BATHROOM FLOOR

By M. C. C. HARRISON

I WILL now describe how I did eventually get away from Germany in August 1017.

Planning an escape was often far more difficult than its subsequent execution, and before making the actual attempt we had to consider three distinct phases ; first, the actual break away from the camp, secondly the walk through Germany in order to get to a frontier, and thirdly the actual crossing of the frontier. I am going to deal with each of these separately, and then you can see which of the three problems gave us the most trouble.

My previous failures had led to prolonged terms of imprisonment, and after thirteen months in jail, I was, on 2nd August, 1917, moved to the reprisal camp of Strohen, in the province of Hanover. The camp was a bleak spot situated on an immense bog, and was several miles from any other form of habitation. It consisted of about thirty wooden huts surrounded by two barbed wire fences four or five yards apart. Each was about ten feet high. Sentries were posted at intervals of sixty or seventy yards on either side of these fences, and there was a machine-gun turret at each of the four corners. The whole place was brilliantly lit up at night by arc lamps. Outside the camp and about twenty yards from the outer barbed wire fence there were two more huts. One was used as a guard-room and the other as a bath house. The bath hut was connected to the camp by a wired-in passage, but the gate at the camp end of this was kept locked except between eight and nine in the morning, when the prisoners were allowed to wash themselves in the presence of the entire guard.

The point to remember is that the bath hut was outside all the camp defences, that is, both wire fences, both lines of sentries, and all the arc lamps.

When I arrived in the camp for the first time on the 2nd August, 1917, I took a strong dislike to the place at sight. I never liked camps surrounded by nothing but barbed wire. The sentries on either side of the fence can see what you are doing as you approach the edge of the camp. Tunnelling from this camp was out of the question, as the Germans took the utmost pains to guard against it, and inspected the floors of all the huts at least twice a day. There were about 450 prisoners in the camp, and with the exception of fifteen or twenty Indian officers, they were all British. In the eyes of the Germans they were all of bad character, and most of them had made at least one attempt to escape. It was a great relief to feel that anyone in the camp could be trusted. When prisoners of different nationalities were mixed up in a camp the Germans used frequently to employ spies dressed up as Russian or Belgian orderlies.

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