Part 9

The call was pretty persistent for men in those first months of the war and, in spite of the shortage of all kinds of equipment, our training was rushed from the very beginning. Most of the boys in my regiment had seen service or had training--some had been in the South African War, and others had been members of the English Territorials or the Canadian Militia--already, and we made much better progress than the rawer contingents that came later. We had about three months in Canada, a little longer in England (where I had a touch of typhoid on Salisbury Plain), and by the early spring of 1915 we were in reserve in Flanders. By the time the Germans made their second attempt to drive through Ypres to Calais we had been pushed up into the first line. Until the big attack came, however, we had had no real fighting. The Germans--I had begun to call them Huns by this time instead of Dutchmen--made scattering raids on our trenches and we made scattering raids on theirs, but I never figured in any of this to the extent of mixing in hand-to-hand work. I had no chances to add any notches to the handle of my old monkey-wrench, but from my always carrying it around with me the English “Tommies” (who call a wrench a spanner) had dubbed me “Spanner Mike.” They pretended to believe I was a little “cracked” about my trusty old friend, but I found that they were never above borrowing it for everything, from opening boxes from home to tinkering the gear of broken-down automobile trucks--“motor lorries,” they call them. It’s really remarkable what a lot of things a man can use a monkey-wrench for if only he happens to have it handy when he needs it.

For some days the shell-fire against us had been getting heavier--at least they called it heavy then; it would be nothing now--and we knew that the Huns were getting ready for some kind of an attack. What kind it was going to be we little dreamed, for even our officers seem to have known nothing about the gas they had been experimenting with over in Germany. When it came--it rolled toward us in heavy clouds like the morning mists in the Dakota “Bad Lands”--the word went round that the Huns’ munitions had got afire, and we were telling each other that we ought to be sent across to take advantage of the confusion. It was only when we began to notice that it was bubbling up at fairly regular intervals--thick greasy yellow clouds of it--that it seemed they might be putting up a game on us, and by that time one of the advanced tongues of the stuff lapped over into our trench.

I shall never forget the horrible agony and surprise in the eyes of the men who got that first dose. It was the look of a dog being suddenly beaten for something it hadn’t done. They looked at each other with questioning eyes--I only recall hearing one man start cursing--then they began gulping and coughing, and then fell down with their faces in their hands. All the time the shrapnel was popping overhead and raining bullets about, and, just as the gas began to pour over my parapet, a bullet knocked my rifle out of my hand, and I slipped in the mud as I jumped back and went down in a heap. It must have been all of six weeks before I stood on my feet again.

My first sensation was of a smarting way up inside of my nose. This quickly extended to my throat, and then, as my lungs suddenly seemed filled with red-hot needles, I was seized with a spasm of coughing. Coughing up red-hot needles is not exactly a pleasant operation, and the pain was intense. Mercifully, it was only a few minutes before a sort of stupor seemed to come on, but even as I passed into half-consciousness I was aware of my outraged lungs revolting, in heaves that shook my frame, against the poison that had swamped the trench. With some of my comrades the fighting instinct was the last thing that died, and I have a sort of a recollection of two or three of them clutching at the parapet and firing from cough-shaken shoulders off into the depths of the rolling yellow gas clouds. One lad toppled over beside me and still kept pumping shots from the bottom of the trench. I remember hazily trying to kick his rifle out of his hand as he discharged it over my ear, and, failing to locate it with my foot, recall groping instinctively for my old wrench and trying to disarm him with that. My last recollection of this stage of things was the shock of feeling the wrench-handle swing backward harmlessly for lack of my two shrapnel-smashed fingers to steady it.

I had rolled and writhed, in the agony of the pain of the gas in my lungs, in a pool of slush in the bottom of the trench, and it must have been the lying with my face buried in the shoulder of my wet woollen tunic that saved my life. Most of my comrades were quite unconscious when the Huns, with their heads protected by baggy “snoots,” came pouring into the trench, but I had enough of my senses left unparalysed to be able to watch them in a hazy sort of way. The horrible quietness of the thing was positively uncanny. Always before the enemy had charged with yells (it is directed in their manual that they do so, though, of course, a man “gives tongue” naturally on such occasions from sheer excitement), but now they were hardly making a sound. Probably this was by orders, so that no more air than was necessary should be taken into the lungs, but even when some of them did try to speak the words were so muffled that it must have been very hard to make them out.

The Huns were pretty excited at first, and started right down the trench bayoneting one body after another. But before they got to me an officer stopped them for a minute and evidently gave them to understand that they were to confine their butchery only to those that tried to resist. Two or three of our boys, who had not gone under entirely but had not sense enough to understand the uselessness of putting up a fight, made a few groggy passes at the Huns and paid the penalty. I lay quiet and played “possum,” but got a nasty prod in the groin when one of them turned me over with his bayonet to see where I was wounded. There was still a good deal of gas in the bottom of the trench, and between that and loss of blood I must have lost consciousness entirely about this time.

My recollections covering the next day or two are very dim and confused, but one thing was photographed so clearly on my mind that the image of it has never faded; I even grow hot as I think of it now, over a year later. This was the last thing I saw before I “went to sleep” in the trenches--two Huns using my monkey-wrench (the tool I had been “strafing” “Dutchmen” with for the last ten years, and which I had brought along to continue that good work with) to tinker up one of our own smashed machine-guns to use against our own men. I never saw it again, and its loss rankled in my mind during the whole year that I was doomed to spend in German hospitals and prison camps.

I have some memory of being carried in a stretcher, and of passing through one or two dressing-stations where my wounds were washed and bandaged. My connected recollections begin after my waking up in a hospital--well back from the Front, but still not out of the sound of the guns--that was evidently devoted entirely to “gas” cases. The ward I was in was filled with men from my own regiment, but what interested me specially--as soon as I was able to take any interest in anything beyond my own suffering--was to observe that a great many Germans were also being treated in the same hospital. I never did find out just how these happened to be “gassed,” but presume it was either through accidents to their apparatus or from their “snoots” being faulty.

At any rate, the Germans had evidently prepared in advance for “gas” cases, and the chances are that they pulled through a good many of us who might have died had we been taken back to our own hospitals, where they had, at that time, small facilities for handling that kind of trouble. The ward was kept as hot as a Turkish bath, and some of our chaps thought this was done with the idea of making our agony worse. One of them, who jumped out of bed, threw up a window, got a lungful of cold air, and died the same night, gave us a proper object-lesson in why the air had to be kept at close to blood heat. Some of them also thought that a kind of stuff they gave us to inhale made us worse rather than better, but that was only their imagination. If there was any real ground for complaint it might have been on the score that the doctors tried a good many experiments on us because this was the first chance they had had to study gas poisoning on a large scale, but that was no more than we could have expected. Probably our own doctors would have been glad of some “dogs,” in the shape of Huns, to “try it on” when they first began to study “gassing.”

But the doctors were always attentive, and the nurses always kind--more than kind, most of them. But I already had learned that a nurse’s best stock-in-trade is her “sympathy,” and those I met in Germany were no exception to the rule. I think it was the way that those plump blonde _fräuleins_ looked after us poor devils in that steaming-hot ward that kept me from trying to run amuck and commit murder as soon as I was well enough to be sure that my memory of those two Huns tinkering at our machine-gun with my old monkey-wrench was no “fevered vision.”

I have been told often since returning to England that it will be just as well not to say too much about my hardships in the German prison camps, as it might be the way of making things all the worse for those still doomed to remain there. So I shall touch lightly on this side of my experiences, and, to be on the safe side, will try not to mention any camps or other German localities by name. I was sent to what, had I but known it, was the most liberally run prison camp in Germany after my discharge from the hospital, but even at that the treatment was so abominable in comparison with what I had been receiving and had a right to expect that it undid at once the “soothing” effect the kind nurses and doctors had had on me. I don’t mean that I went back physically a great deal--my constitution was too strong for that--but only that my old hate of the Hun redoubled. This would have been all very well if I had only been back in the trenches, but in a prison camp it could only have one end. I dropped in his tracks with my fist--mighty hard it was his shaved head felt to my half-healed “right”--the first guard that tried to hustle me into line with the toe of his boot. Then I used up what strength I had left in a rough and-tumble with three or four others, until one of them finally put me to sleep with the butt of his rifle. In at least three other camps I could name I would have been shot then and there (it has happened to many a lad whose pride made him turn loose on a brutal guard), and I can count myself very lucky that I got off with no more than a bit more of a beating up and two weeks’ solitary confinement on black bread and water. Perhaps the worst consequence of my action was my transfer, a few weeks later, to a camp that has since become notorious for both its unhealthfulness and its inhumanity.

The first glimmerings of sense (regarding the situation that I was going to have to face as a prisoner of war in Germany) was let into my rather thick head by the blow it got from that rifle-butt; the rest--enough to start me on the right course, at least--filtered in during my two weeks of solitary confinement on bread and water. I was of no use to myself or any one else in a German prison camp, I told myself. I had no chance there either to kill Huns or destroy Hun property. Once outside I might well be able to do both--perhaps even get back to England and join my regiment if any of it was left. How to get out?--that was the question. From that time on I turned my every thought and act to that one end.

What makes it almost hopeless for a prisoner of war to get out of Germany is not so much the actual escape from his prison--that is comparatively easy, especially if he is on outside work--as the lack of clothes and money, and the difficulty of avoiding giving himself away by being unable to speak the language. These things make the odds a thousand to one against the average prisoner having more than twenty-four hours’ freedom at the outside. The chances against success are so big that few attempt it. Luckily, I had one advantage over the general run of the prisoners in my ability to speak fairly good German. I must have had a lot of accent, of course, but I still understood all that was said to me in German, and was also able to say all that I wanted to. This would be good enough, I told myself, to run a bluff with the ordinary run of people I might meet about my being a returned German-American come back to work for my Fatherland; that is to say, I ought to be able to prevent such people from being suspicious of me, where they would have attacked or reported a man who could not speak German at once. Anything in the way of police or officials I should have to fight shy of, and, as I foresaw there must be all kinds of checks on strangers and travellers, I knew I should have to steer clear of trains and hotels. I felt sure of myself on the score of language, therefore; clothes and money were things to be provided as opportunity offered. Fortunately, Fate was very kind to me in this respect.

One little incident I must mention before I go on with my story. In the prison I was transferred to most of the English prisoners, after a while, began to receive parcels from home, even some of the Canadians coming in on the deal. I, having no friends either in Canada or England, got nothing direct, but all sorts of nice little odds and ends of dainties came my way in the final “divvy.” One lad from the south of England, who was dying with a sort of slow blood-poisoning and lack of care of a never-healed wound at the back of his neck, was especially generous to me with the things he got from home, and when he finally went under I managed to get permission to write a few words to his family, telling them, among other things, how kind he had been to me with his parcels. And what should they do--his brokenhearted mother and sisters in Devonshire--but “adopt” me in his place and keep right on sending the chocolate and cigarettes and other “goodies” just as regularly as before. And now they’ve been to see me here, and tell me they are going to keep sending me things when I return to the Front just the same as though I was the boy they had lost.

As soon as I had fully made up my mind what I wanted to do, I went on my good behaviour, got into the “trusty” class, and was one of the first picked for outside work when the call came for English prisoners to help in harvesting and road-making. I had a good chance to practise my German during the harvest work, but the prospects for making good after a “get-away” were not very promising, and I had sense enough to bide my time. But when I got switched on to road work, and when almost the first thing I saw was a bunch of Huns clustered round an old Holt “Caterpillar” tractor that had got stalled on them, I felt that time was drawing near.

Now a “Caterpillar” is just about the finest tractor in the world for general purposes, provided it is run by a man that has had plenty of experience with its funny little ways; in the hands of any one else--even a first-class engineer that is quite at home with a wheel tractor--it is the original fount of trouble. To me the machine was an old friend, however, for I had run one for two or three seasons in the West and worked for a winter in one of the company’s factories in Illinois. I took the first opportunity to let the Huns know my qualifications, and when they saw me start in to true up the wobbly “track,” they just about fell on my neck then and there. They had seized the machine in a Belgian sugar-beet field a few days after the outbreak of the war, they explained, and it had been used for a while to haul heavy artillery in the drive into France. After a time the hard usage had begun to tell on the “track,” and--as they had no new parts to replace worn ones with--it had been giving about as much trouble as it was worth ever since. When I told them that it was adjustment rather than replacement that was needed, and that in a few days I could have the machine as good as new, they fairly tumbled over themselves to “borrow” me for the job.

As a matter of fact, the old “crawler” was just about on its last legs, but I knew in any case that I could tinker it into some kind of running shape, and the comparative freedom of the job was what I wanted. This worked out even better than I expected, for after the first day or two, in order to save the time taken up by returning me to the prison camp at night and bringing me back in the morning, they arranged for me to bunk in in the road camp. They were too much occupied in hustling the job along to think about asking me for my parole--a lucky thing, for I should have had a hard time to keep from breaking it.

With two men to help me, I took the tractor all down, “babbitted” up the bearings, readjusted the gears, and had it up and running at the end of a week. With a string back to the seat to open up the throttle for the sharp pulls, I had it snaking a string of ten waggon-loads of crushed rock where it had been stalling down on three before the overhauling. During that week I had also managed to pick up--no matter how--several marks in money, and had succeeded in concealing so effectually the greasy jacket of one of my assistants that he gave up hunting for it and got a new one. A machinist’s cap had already been given me, and the evening that the other helper washed out his overalls and flung them over his tent to dry, I--seeing a chance to complete my wardrobe--decided promptly that the time had come to make a move. They had offered me a steady job running the old “Caterpillar,” and at something better than ordinary “prisoner’s pay,” but as it would have kept me in the same neighbourhood, I could not figure how it would help my chances in the least to “linger on.”

There was supposed to be a sentry watching the road machinery, and also keeping a wary eye on the tent where I bunked with a half-dozen of the engineers, but he did not take his job very seriously, and I knew I would have no difficulty avoiding him. We had had a hard day of it, and my tent mates were in bed by dark--about 8 o’clock--and asleep, by their deep breathing, a few minutes later. They all slept in their working clothes, else I could have made up my outfit then and there. But it did not matter, for within half a minute of the time I had slipped noiselessly under the loosened tent-flap, I was making off down the road with a full suit of German machinist’s togs under my arm. Five minutes later I stopped in the darker darkness under a tree by the roadside and slipped them on over my prison suit, rightly anticipating that the extra warmth of the latter might be very welcome if I had much sleeping out to do.

It was partly bravado, probably, and partly because I felt that, if missed, I would be searched for in the opposite direction, that caused me to head for the two-mile-distant town of X----. And it was probably the same combination which led me, after passing unchallenged down the long main street, to march up to the wicket of a “movie” show, pay my twenty-five pfennig and pass inside. Had there been a “hue and cry” that night (which there was not), this was undoubtedly the last place they would have looked for me in.

The films were mostly war views--cracking fine things from both the Russian and French fronts--and other patriotic subjects, but among them was one of those “blood-and-thunder thrillers” from California. I don’t recall exactly how the story went, but the thing that set me thinking was the way the heroine pinched the lights off the automobile they had kidnapped her in, and afterwards pawned them for enough to get a ticket home with. What was to prevent my going back and getting busy on my old “Caterpillar”? I asked myself. The magneto was worth something like a hundred dollars, and even if I had no chance to sell it, it was a pity to overlook so easy a bit of “strafing.” I concluded that my steps had been guided to that “movie” show by my lucky star, and promptly got up and started back for the road-making camp. On the way some tipsy villagers passed me singing the “Hymn of Hate,” the air and most of the words of which I had already picked up, and, out of sheer happiness at being again (if only for a few hours) at liberty, I joined in the explosive bursts of the chorus, booming out louder than any of them on “England!” Evidently, unconsciously, I had done quite the proper thing, for they raised their voices to match mine, gave a “Hoch” or two, and passed on without stopping. That also gave me an idea. During the whole following two weeks of my wanderings in Germany every man, woman or child that I passed upon the road, in light or in darkness, might have heard me humming “The Hymn of Hate,” “Die Wacht am Rhein,” or, after I had mastered it toward the end, “Deutschland über Alles.”

It was plain that my flight had not been discovered, for I found the camp as quiet as when I left it three hours before. I could just make out the figure of the sentry pacing along down the line of tractors and dump-waggons, but the canvas which had been thrown over the “Caterpillar” to protect it from possible rain made it easy for me to escape attracting his attention. Of light I had no need; I knew the old “65” well enough to work on it in my sleep. A wrench and pair of nippers, located just where I had left them in their loops in the cover of the tool-box over the right “track,” were all I needed. First I cut the insulated copper wires running to the magneto with the nippers, and then (placing my double-folded handkerchief over them to prevent noise) unscrewed with the wrench the nuts from the bolts which held the costly electrical contrivance to the steel frame of the tractor. Then I cut off with a knife a good-sized square of the canvas paulin that covered the machine, wrapped the magneto in it, and tied up the bundle with a piece of the insulated copper wire, leaving a doubled loop for a handle. Then I threw out some of the more delicate adjustments, dropped some odds and ends of small tools and bits of metal down among the gears where they would do the most “good,” pocketed the knife and nippers, and, with the magneto in one hand and the biggest wrench I could find in the other, set off for X---- again. The wrench was my last and greatest inspiration; it was to take the place of the one the Huns had robbed me of in the trenches. I am glad to be able to write that I have it by me at the present moment, and that it is slated to go back to the Front with me--, I hope to do a bit of the “strafing” that Fate denied the other.

Probably no prisoner of war was ever loose in the interior of Germany with a clearer idea of what he wanted to do, and how he intended to do it, than I had at this moment. I knew that my only chance of escaping capture within the next twenty-four hours was in putting a long way--a hundred miles or more--between myself and that place by daylight, when the “alarm” would go out. I knew the only way this could be done was by train; but I also knew that the quickest way to instant arrest was to try to enter a station and take a train in the ordinary way. To any but one who had “hoboed” back and forth across the North American Continent as I had the game would have seemed a hopeless one.