The Escaping Club

The night after we had left the German mess, both Lee and Austin were so ill from stomach trouble that it was impossible for them to think of escaping. It was, however, in all p...

When we had been a few days at the fort, and had had time for a good look round, Room 45 formed themselves into an escaping club. That is to say, our ideas and discoveries would...

In the early days of the war Fort 9, Ingolstadt, had been, according to the oldest inmates of the prison-house, a quiet, well-behaved sort of place, but for the past six months...

_Twelfth night._--Owing to a village in front of us, we had to make a late start. It was nearly 10.30 before we marched through without incident. Later on that night, between 1...

The interval between my escape from Germany, June 8th, 1917 and March 1918, when I had been for a couple of months in command of a squadron of bombing aeroplanes on the Palestin...

Towards midnight, after we had shut our eyes for an hour to try and induce the sentry to go to sleep, I hit on a plan, which I believe now to have been the only possible solutio...

From this point onwards I don't intend to attempt to give a day-to-day account of my sojourn in Turkey. I will try to recall only those few events which seem to me of special in...

One morning just before _Appell_, a Frenchman came along the passage and announced in each room that Colonel Tardieu was not going out to _Appell_ that morning, and would be obl...

There is one incident in our otherwise uneventful journey to Smyrna which seems to me worthy of record. We were passing through a particularly wild and uninhabited stretch of co...

In the earlier chapters of this book I have mentioned the fact that some months previous to my capture my people at home and I had invented a simple code which would enable us,...

When we got to Crefeld I saw that the station was on the east side of the town, but after my experience at Duesseldorf I thought it would be much safer to walk boldly right thro...

_Sixth night._--The walk across the plain took us nearly two hours. Much of it was very marshy, and it was all sopping wet with dew, so that, before reaching the railway, we wer...

For the next six weeks life was rather hard. It froze continuously, even in the day time, in spite of the sun, which showed itself frequently, and at night the thermometer regis...

About this time I wrote home for the first time in code. The last time I had been home on leave from France before being taken, I had made up, with the help of the rest of my fa...

The weather became colder and colder, and for the next month we seldom had less than 27 deg. of frost at night, and in the day time anything up to 20 deg. in spite of the fairly...

One day at the beginning of May 1917 an incident occurred in the fort which ultimately led to the removal of the English and Russian prisoners to other camps and to our escape _...

We now felt pretty safe from immediate pursuit, and turning off to the right we made a semicircle round the camp and crossed the causeway between the two lakes. There was a good...

For over three months No. 3 Squadron had been occupied daily in ranging the heavy guns which night after night crept into their allotted positions in front of Albert. On July 1s...

Soon after the failure of our tunnel scheme several Englishmen, among whom were Gilliland, Unett, and Batty Smith, who had not been convicted by the Germans of any evil deeds du...

Next morning I was marched off with my two old guards, and during the march, by orders from the Company H.Q., a third was added. We went by train to Gladsbach, and I was locked...

I believe the camp at Guetersloh had formerly been a lunatic asylum. It was composed of six or seven large independent barrack-like buildings. One of these buildings was a civil...

The moon had risen by now, and a walk of two or three hundred yards brought us into the village, which we entered without seeing any one. It was quite a small place, and though...

A brief study of the plan of the camp and its defenses will make our plan of escape quite clear. The sentries are represented by x, the arc lights by (.), and the dogs in kennel...