Part 19

I shall never forget the day that the papers announced the refusal of the English labor delegates to go to Stockholm. One excited miner struck me across the face with the open newspaper in his hand.

"Always, always the same!" he almost screamed. "The English block everything. They will not join and what good can come now of the conference? They will not be content and the war must go on!"

The food shortage reached a crisis about the time that I managed, after three futile attempts, to escape. Frequently, when the people took their bread tickets to the stores they found that supplies had been exhausted and that there was nothing to be obtained. Prices had gone sky-high. Bacon, for instance, $2.50 and more a pound. A cake of soap cost 85 cents. Cleanliness became a luxury. These prices are indicative of the whole range and it is not hard to see the struggle these poor mine people were having to keep alive at all.

At this time our parcels from England were coming along fairly regularly and we were better off for food than the Germans themselves. Owing to the long shift we were compelled to do in the mines we fell into the habit of "hoarding" our food parcels and carrying a small lunch to the mines each day. These lunches had to be carefully secreted or the Germans would steal them. They could not understand how it was that starving England could send food abroad to us. The sight of these lunches helped to undermine their faith in the truth of the official information they read in the newspapers.

Our lot at the mines was almost unendurable. We were supposed to receive four and a half marks (90 cents) a week for our labor, but there was continual "strafing" to reduce the amount. If we looked sideways at a "stagger," we were likely to receive a welt with a pick handle and a strafe of several marks. Sometimes we only received a mark or two for a week's work. Most of this we spent for soap. It was impossible to work in the mine and not become indescribably dirty, and soap became an absolute necessity.

We lived under conditions of great discomfort in the camp, 250 of us in 30 x 30 quarters. There were two stoves in the building in which coke was burned, but the place was terribly cold. The walls at all seasons were so damp that pictures tacked up on them mildewed in a short time. Our bunks contained straw which was never replenished and we all became infested with fleas. Some nights it was impossible to sleep on account of the activity of these pests. On account of the dampness and cold we always slept in our clothes.

Discipline was rigorous and cruel. We were knocked around and given terms of solitary confinement and made to stand at attention for hours at the least provocation. Many of the prisoners were killed--murdered by the cruelty. It became more than flesh and blood could stand. One day seven of us got together and made a solemn compact to escape. We would keep at it, we decided, no matter what happened, until we got away. Six of us are now safely at home. The seventh, my chum, J. W. Nicholson, is still a prisoner.

I made four attempts to escape before I finally succeeded. The first time a group of us made a tunnel out under the barricade, starting beneath the flooring of the barracks. We crawled out at night and had put fifteen miles between us and the camp before we were finally caught. I got seven days' "black" that time, solitary confinement in a narrow stone cell, without a ray of light, on black bread and water.

The second attempt was again by means of a tunnel. A chum of mine, William Raesides, who had come over with the 8th C. M. R.'s, was my companion that time. We were caught by bloodhounds after twenty miles and they gave us ten days' "black."

The third attempt was made in company with my chum Nicholson, and we planned it out very carefully. Friends in England sent through suits of civilian clothes to us.

The next day we dressed up for the attempt by putting on our "civies" first and then drawing our prisoner's uniform over them. When we got to the mine we took off the uniform and slipped the mining clothes on over the others. We worked all day. Coming up from work in the late afternoon, Nick and I held back until everyone else had gone. We went up alone in the hoist and tore off our mining clothes as we ascended, dropping each piece back into the pit as we discarded it.

It was fairly dark when we got out of the hoist and the guards did not pay much attention to us. There was a small building at the mine head where we prisoners washed and dressed after work and a separate exit for the civilians. Nick and I took the civilian exit and walked out into the street without any interference.

We could both speak enough German to pass, so we boldly struck out for the Dutch border, which was about 85 miles away, traveling only during the night. We had a map that a miner had sold to us for a cake of soap and we guided our course by that. We got to the border line without any trouble whatever, but were caught through overconfidence, due to a mistake in the map. Close to the line was a milepost indicating that a certain Dutch town was two miles west. The map indicated that this town was four miles within the Dutch border.

"We're over!" we shouted when we saw that welcome milepost. Throwing caution aside, we marched boldly forward, right into a couple of sentries with fixed bayonets!

It was two weeks' "black" they meted out to us that time. The Kommandant's eyes snapped as he passed sentence. I knew he would have been much more strict on me as the three-time offender had it not been that the need for coal was so dire that labor, even the labor of a recalcitrant prisoner, was valuable.

"No prisoner has yet escaped from this Kommando!" he shouted, "and none shall. Any further attempts will be punished with the utmost severity."

Nevertheless they took the precaution to break up my partnership with Nicholson, putting him on the night shift. I immediately went into partnership with Private W. M. Masters, of Toronto, and we planned to make our getaway by an entirely new method.

The building at the mine where we changed clothes before and after work was equipped with a bathroom in one corner, with a window with one iron bar intersecting. Outside the window was a bush and beyond that open country. A sentry was always posted outside the building, but he had three sides to watch and we knew that, if we could only move that bar, we could manage to elude the sentry. So we started to work on the bar.

I had found a bit of wire which I kept secreted about me and every night, after washing up, we would dig for a few minutes at the brickwork around the bar. It was slow, tedious and disappointing work. Gradually, however, we scooped the brick out around the bar and after nearly four months' application we had it so loosened that a tug would pull it out.

The next day Masters and I were the last in the bathroom, and when the sentry's round had taken him to the other side of the building, we wrenched out the bar, raised the window and wriggled through head first, breaking our fall in the bush outside. We got through without attracting attention and ran across the country into a swamp, where we soon lost our way and wallowed around all night up to our knees in the bog, suffering severely from the cold and damp. Early in our flight the report of a gun from the camp warned us that our absence had been discovered. Our adventure in the swamp saved us from capture, for the roads were patrolled by cavalry that night.

We found our way out of the swamp near morning, emerging on the western side. By the sale of more soap to miners we had acquired another map and a compass, so we had little difficulty in determining our whereabouts and settling our course for the border. For food we had each brought along ten biscuits, the result of several weeks' hoarding.

That day we stayed on the edge of the swamp, never stirring for a moment from the shelter of a clump of bushes. One slept while the other watched. No one came near us and we heard no signs of our pursuers. Night came on most mercifully dark and we struck out along the roads at a smart clip.

We traveled all night, making probably twenty-five miles. It was necessary, we knew, to make the most of our strength in the earlier stages of the dash. As our food gave out we would be less capable of covering the ground. So we spurred ourselves on to renewed effort and ate the miles up in a sort of frenzy.

This kept up for four days and nights. We kept going as hard as our waning strength would permit and we were cautious in the extreme. Even at that we had many narrow escapes.

Our greatest difficulty was when we struck the Lippe River. Our first plan was to swim across, but we found that we had not the strength left for this feat. We lost a day as a result. The second night we found a scow tied up along the bank and got across that way.

By this time we were slowly starving on our feet, we were wet through continuously, and such sleep as we got was broken and fitful. Before we had been four days out we were reduced to gaunt, tattered, dirty scarecrows. We staggered as we walked and sometimes one of us would drop on the road through sheer weakness. Through it all we kept up our frenzy for speed and it was surprising how much ground we forced ourselves to cover in a night. And, no matter how much the pangs of hunger gnawed at us, we conserved our fast dwindling supply of biscuit. Less than two biscuits a day was our limit!

Finally we reached a point that I recognized from my previous attempt to escape. It was about four miles from the border. We had two biscuits left between us. The next day we feasted royally and extravagantly on those two biscuits. No longer did we need to hoard our supplies, for the next night would tell the tale.

By the greatest good fortune night came on dark and cloudy. Not a star showed in the sky. We crawled cautiously and painfully toward the border. At every sound we stopped and flattened out. Twice we saw sentries close at hand, but both times we got by safely. Finally we reached what we judged must be the last line of sentries. We had crawled across a ploughed field and reached a road lined on both sides with trees where sentries were passing up and down.